The last visitors have finally left, and it is nighttime in the museum. As she closes the door behind the last visitor to leave, he turns and waves at her, smiling. She returns his smile – it is warm and genuinely happy. She is pleased that he has been, but is even more pleased that he and all the others are gone. She likes the museum’s guests well enough, certainly, but having the museum to herself at night is blissful. She locks the door firmly, and rattles the handle as a reassurance that yes, finally, the door is shut and locked and she is all alone again. Throughout the house the silence is punctuated by the faint sound of state-of-the-art clockwork and highlighted by the smell of cherished leather.

She has worked in the museum for years, and knows its secrets well. She knows the stories of how the museum’s founder, Dr Bolton, spent countless hours and huge sums of money acquiring the treasures his former home now exhibits (weekdays from 10 am to 7 pm; noon to five on weekends). With no wife or children to hold back his obsession or expenditure, they both spiralled out of control. He died a beloved pauper in the home of the son of a good friend. The man’s children had called him Poppa and loved his stories of adventure. His death was noted in the Times; he was thoroughly eulogised in the Royal Society’s bar; and he was sorely missed.

As she walks through the house, scanning for injury to the displays or errant tourists, she knows that walking different parts of the museum calls for different footsteps. In the room where the English china is housed, there sits row on row of white-and-blue teacups and mawkish, doe-eyed spaniels (and one very ribald plate wherein man asks a thoroughly rhetorical question about whether he’s got something on his face). In this room, an honest, forthright footfall is called for. These objects graced homes: real homes where children ran, Christmases were celebrated and life was well lived.

Through and away down the hall, past the Bronze Age display of coins and armour. Here, she treads proudly, her head held high. She must be a warrior among the remains of these people, and not skulk like a thief among the belongings they sought to protect. They guard their treasure still and she can hear their whispers as they eye her suspiciously, their murdered faces turned to stiff brown hide from centuries spent hidden in peaty marshlands.

As she climbs the stairs to the first floor, a clock on the landing announces the time with a whirr and a click and a long-forgotten tune picked out on tinny bells. The ticking carries up the stairs, as strong as the day it was set in motion by a maker as forgotten as the song.

On the first floor sits the room of Egyptian curios. Here no footfall is too much or too little: the collection is guarded by a bust of Akhenaten, the mad pharaoh who would lie on his back and stare into the sun for an hour each day at its zenith. By the time he was killed by his own staff – driven to act on their gnawing worry at the behaviour of their wild-eyed ruler and his crazed rambling about one God above all others – he was completely mad, beyond the touch of the here and now. His bust stares at her, unseeing, wearing the blue crown of war, his broken mind still reaching desperately out to his one god and his beautiful wife.

She winds her way up the stair through the Georgian townhouse, feeling the lives of those who came before her. She rattles the door marked ‘staff only’ that leads to the stairs up to the loft: once this was the threshold between worlds: that of master and servant. Here, at the end of long days, the household staff would slip happily, closing the door behind them and becoming people again, real people with free will.

Nowadays, any interloper would find the rooms of the attic full of grant forms and tea cups and the trappings of modern servitude. But it is still a cosy space, well-loved and with a charming view out a cherished window onto the street below.

All three rooms on the topmost floor have been knocked through to create one large space: a haven of curios that fit nowhere else, either because they were gifts to the good doctor or because he’d flirted with starting a collection, only to find the items were too rare, too expensive, or too common. Here and there were knickknacks of all descriptions: an elephant-foot umbrella stand (donated because poor preservation work meant it smelled of rot and the savannah when wet), pieces of 7^th century Samurai armour (an 18^th century fake, but a good one, and too popular with visitors to get rid of) and the mummified body of a child, sacrificed to a long-dead god. She is too sweet to hide, too unique to sell on and too insignificant for her country to seek her return.

At the end of the room stands a tall case, empty but for a small, neatly-lettered sign indicating that the exhibit intended for this case would be moved around the museum on a daily basis for the enjoyment of visitors. With a practiced hand, she opens the case and picks up the small sign. The reverse of the sign bears the full details of the artefact that resides therein: a late seventeenth century automaton, built to entertain the court of a French king who found its almost-humanity unnerving. The object was to be destroyed on his orders, but was smuggled out of the country by an English diplomat to the French king’s court. Of course, these details are not entirely correct, but the inaccuracy doesn’t bother her – the real story is much less exciting.

Using the most delicate footsteps she owns, she steps lightly into the case. As she closes the door behind her, the world becomes very small, and she is cocooned in the four glass walls. She turns on the spot to face forward, keeping one eye firmly on the sleeping child and the other on the door. The sound of ticking and gentle whirring begins to wind down as she gently leans against the rear wall of the case, unwinds her springs and dreams of Versailles.