A Half Forgotten Song

CHAPTER SEVEN

Dimity waited. She waited for Charles Aubrey and his family to come back, and waiting made the winter longer than ever. Dimity spent it alone. Wilf spent more and more time working with his father and brothers, and only rarely came to meet her. When he did, he was warm and eager, as ever; but Dimity was distracted, only half present, and he often went away frustrated. Dimity roamed the cliffs, the hedgerows, and the beach. She picked baskets full of smooth white field mushrooms and sold them door-to-door for a few pennies. She loitered in the village, missing the company of other people more than ever before, and seeming to notice more than ever how people’s eyes brushed over her, cold and dismissive. Nobody noticed her the way Charles did.

They came later than usual, not until the beginning of July. In the last two weeks of June, Dimity checked at Littlecombe four times a day, and carried around a weight of dread and worry in her stomach that made it hard for her to eat, or to think. Valentina swore at her. Gave her a shove that cracked her head against the wall one day when she let the potatoes boil dry; shook her; made her drink a tonic of oak bark to improve her appetite, because her collarbones were standing proud above her ribs and her cheeks had lost their fullness and bloom.

“You looked younger than your years till this winter, Mitzy. Better by far to keep that than to lose it. No man’ll want you if you’re old before your time.” Valentina scowled as she pressed the cup of bitter tonic to her daughter’s reluctant lips. “Marty Coulson’s been asking after you lately. What do you say to that?” she said curtly, and had the good grace to look away when the implication of this hit home, and her daughter’s eyes widened with horror. Dimity made a choking noise in her throat, and could not speak. Valentina said abruptly: “We all must pay our way in this world, Mitzy. You weren’t born with that face for nothing, and if that artist of yours don’t show this year… Well, you’ll have to find some other way to make it pay, won’t you?”

It was warm and bright, the morning they finally came. Dimity was sitting on a field gate to the west of Littlecombe when she spotted the chalky sheep wash billowing above the lane-the rising cloud of dust that told of an approach. When the blue car pulled up, she went so boneless with relief that she slithered forwards from the gate and knelt on the dusty ground in front of it. She was crippled by joy, unsurprised to feel tears running down her cheeks. She wiped them away with gritty hands as she made her way down towards the house. She saw Élodie and Delphine run off, together with another girl she didn’t know, through the garden gate and down towards the path to the beach. Élodie had grown much taller, and Delphine’s hair was much longer. Their appearances spoke of the wealth of life they had seen and experienced since their last visit, while Dimity had remained the same, static. She watched their slender figures vanish, and walked up to the open kitchen door with her blood crowding her head so that she could hardly hear a thing.

At that moment Celeste stepped out, saw her, and stopped. The Moroccan woman pressed her lips together and for a moment Dimity thought she saw irritation flash across her face, before a sort of resignation, and then a smile.

“Mitzy. And before the kettle has even boiled,” she said, taking Dimity by her upper arms and kissing her on both cheeks. “How are you? How is your mother?”

“You’re so late,” Dimity mumbled in response, and Celeste shot her a quizzical look.

“Well, we did think about not coming this year. We thought about taking a house in Italy instead, or perhaps Scotland. But the girls wanted the beach, and Charles has been working very hard, and left it too late to organize anything else, so… here we are.” She did not invite Dimity in, did not offer her tea. “We probably won’t stay the whole summer. It depends on the weather.” Just then, Charles appeared from the car with a bag in each hand, and Dimity whirled around to face him.

“Mitzy! How are you, dear girl? Come to see Delphine already, have you?” He bustled past her, pausing to brush her cheek with a fleeting kiss as he carried on up the stairs with the luggage. Dimity shut her eyes and pressed her hand to the place on her face where his lips had touched. The kiss sent a bolt of sheer pleasure to the pit of her stomach. When she opened her eyes, Celeste was watching her carefully, and something measuring, something vaguely like suspicion, crossed her face. Dimity blushed, and though she tried to think of something to say, her mouth and her head remained empty.

“Well,” Celeste said eventually. “The girls have gone straight down to the beach. Delphine has a friend to stay this first week. Why don’t you run down and see them?”

Dimity did as she was bid, but it was obvious at once that things wouldn’t be the same, not with Delphine’s friend to make their trio a foursome. The girl’s name was Mary. She had pale blond hair set in a very grown-up wave, and blue eyes that sparkled with amusement as they took in Dimity’s ragged clothes and bare feet. Mary looked at her in the same way as the other youngsters in the village, and in spite of Delphine’s warm greeting, Dimity felt at once that she was not wanted. Mary had on a blouse of soft raspberry silk, which fluttered in the breeze. Mary had jewelry that sparkled, and a touch of paint on her lips.

“Hello, Mitzy!” Élodie called, as she cartwheeled around them on the sand. “Look at Mary’s bracelet-isn’t it just the prettiest thing?” Smiling haughtily, Mary held out her wrist, and Dimity agreed that it was a pretty bracelet. She caught Delphine’s eye, and saw her friend’s cheeks coloring, saw her fidget uncomfortably. In front of Mary, Delphine did not want to be the kind of girl who picked from hedgerows or learned the Dorset names for things. In front of Mary, she wanted to be the kind of girl who might marry a film star. Inventing some errand, Dimity backed away, and as she turned she heard the blond girl say, in a supercilious tone:

“Oh dear, do you think I frightened her? Do you think she’s ever seen a charm bracelet before?”

“Don’t be unkind,” Delphine chided her, but without much heat.

“Daddy said she’s never left this village in her whole life. Can you imagine how boring that must be?” said Élodie.

“Élodie, stop showing off,” Delphine snapped at her sister. Dimity fled, and heard no more.

The girls gave each other a wide berth that week, and though Dimity burned with impatience, and longed to visit Littlecombe, she felt too cowed and angry after Celeste’s cool welcome and without Delphine to visit. But she spotted the three girls on the beach and in the village, and more than once down at Southern Farm, flirting with Christopher Brock, the farmer’s son. Mary twirled her hair around her fingertips and postured and simpered at him like an idiot, but it was Delphine who seemed to be able to flummox him with a word, or a glance. Whenever she spoke to him, he hung his head, smiling shyly, and once Dimity was close enough to see the blush infusing his cheeks. Delphine’s friend laughed like a jay when she saw, and tried not to show how much she minded, but Dimity smiled secretly to see her swallow her pride over it.

When eight days had passed, Dimity began to consider visiting again, since Mary ought to have left. She was in the privy one afternoon, surrounded by the sweet, pungent stink of the pit and the buzzing of insects, tearing up squares of newspaper to hang on the hook and arranging branches of elder to discourage the flies, when she heard Valentina shout through the back door. She had been dreaming about the indoor plumbing at Littlecombe, with the cistern high up on the wall and a brass chain to flush it by, and soft rolls of toilet paper. No rough wooden seat or festering slurry underneath. No checking under the lid for the fat brown spiders that hid there to startle the unwary. Valentina shouted again.

“What, Ma?” Dimity called, letting the privy door slam shut behind her as she crossed the cluttered backyard. To her surprise, Élodie and Delphine appeared around the side of the cottage, looking around curiously. Dimity stopped in her tracks. “What are you doing here?” she said, horrified. The girls stopped; Delphine smiled uncertainly.

“We came to find you…” she said. “I… we… hadn’t seen you for a while. Up at the house, I mean. I thought you might go foraging with me again?” Dimity was puzzled by this, since they both knew why she had not visited-it had turned out that Dimity was a fall-back friend, a friend to be had when no better alternative was around. She felt a flare of resentment towards Delphine.

“I’m too busy. I’m not on a summer holiday, you know-I must help my mother and do my work, same as I ever did.”

“Yes, of course. But-”

“I suppose it’s a bit boring for you, now Mary’s gone,” she said.

“Oh, yes. It really is,” said Élodie. Dimity looked at the youngest girl, with her pretty, petulant face. But there was no rancor in it, no sneer. It was a simple statement of fact, laden with misunderstanding. Delphine blushed and looked stricken.

“I didn’t mean to throw you over! Honestly not. It was just a bit difficult with Mary here-I had to entertain her, you see. I was the hostess, and she rather wanted us all to herself. You do understand, don’t you?” she said. Dimity felt her heart soften, but she wasn’t quite ready to forgive her. “It was only a week,” Delphine went on. “She’s gone off home now, and we have the whole rest of the summer.”

Dimity considered this apology, and wasn’t sure how to respond. It was one of the first she had ever had, from anybody. Élodie sighed and put her hands in her pockets, swinging her hips side to side impatiently.

“Can’t we go inside for tea?” she asked. “Will your mother have made any? She seemed in rather a bad mood.”

“That’s just how she is,” Dimity told her shortly. Sometime during the past two years the pretense of Valentina being a warm and caring mother had evaporated. She didn’t bother to explain how absurd an idea it was that she could invite them in, have them sit down inside The Watch to a tea that Valentina had prepared. It was pure fiction.

“Is that your loo?” said Delphine, after the silence had begun to stretch. Delphine sounded cheerful and curious, and Dimity felt a wave of heat rise through her. The heat of humiliation, and anger.

“Yes, it is.” Her voice was half choked. It stinks in the summer and it’s freezing in the winter, and there are spiders and flies, and the newsprint leaves ink on your skin when you wipe, and there is no neat flush and splash of clean water to whisk away your foul doings-they sit there beneath you in a heap, steaming, for you and all who come after you to see. This is the bloody privy. This is my bloody life. This is no summer holiday. But she did not say any of that.

“Oh, I didn’t mean…” Delphine’s cheeks turned pink again; she looked around with a vague smile and seemed at a loss. “Well,” she said at last. “Obviously you’re very busy today. Perhaps we could go tomorrow? Foraging, I mean?”

“You don’t need me to do that with you anymore. You know your plants well enough.”

“Yes, but it’s far more fun when all three of us go.”

“I don’t think it’s more fun,” Élodie pointed out.

“Yes, you do.” Delphine nudged her sister and frowned at her. Élodie rolled her eyes slightly.

“Oh, do come with us, Mitzy,” Élodie said obediently. “Really. We should love to have you.”

“Perhaps. If I can get away,” said Dimity.

“I’ll wait for you up at the house, then, shall I? Come on, Élodie.” The sisters walked away across the yard.

By morning Dimity’s anger had melted away, and she was glad to escape from Valentina to visit the Aubreys. She and Delphine were awkward with each other for a minute longer, and then, with smiles, everything was all right again. They swam in the sea, though it was colder than usual, and foraged, and walked into the village to buy licorice allsorts from the shop. It was during that week that two things began to make Dimity uneasy. First, she saw Charles and Celeste talking to the tourist couple in the village. Saw them talking, and saw the way the strange woman wore her regard for Charles like a bright red ribbon, for the whole world to see. And second, she realized that Charles had seen her several times that summer, but had not yet asked to draw her once. Valentina had asked about the money, but Dimity longed for more than that. She longed for his concentrated attention, for the feeling she got when he studied her, when he sketched her. She felt more real, more alive at those times than at any other, and the thought that he might not want to, for any reason, made panic scramble in her gut. Yet somehow she knew she could not ask. She should not ask.

So each time she was in the same room as Charles Aubrey, Dimity followed him with her eyes, and put herself in his way, and tried to stand prettily. She scuffed her fingers through her hair to make it huge and wild, bit her lips and pinched her cheeks the way Valentina did before a guest arrived. And though Charles did not seem to notice, she found Celeste watching her more than once, with that same measuring look, and she was forced to turn away hastily for fear of giving herself away. But more often than not, Charles had gone out, by himself, before Dimity even arrived at Littlecombe. In desperation, she roused herself before dawn one day and was outside on the driveway, waiting to catch him as he left the house. In the dewy grass she waited, with damp chilly toes and her heart beating only for him. He came out, dressed to paint, before the sun was an inch above the horizon, and Dimity stepped out in front of him, smiling.

“Mitzy!” There was a smile in his hushed voice, a joyous note, and happiness roared in her ears. “Dear girl. Are you all right?”

“I am,” she said, nodding breathlessly.

“Well, well. They’re not even awake yet, in the house. Fast asleep, the lot of them. I’d give Delphine another good hour before you knock, if I were you. She told me you were taking her foraging again soon, is that right?” Dimity could only nod, tongue-tied. “Splendid. Well, have fun, won’t you. À bientôt.” He carried on along the driveway, lighting up a cigarette, taking long, languid strides.

Behind her, she heard the latch click and the door creak softly as it opened, and she turned to see Celeste coming along the path. She was still in her nightgown, with her long dark hair hanging over an emerald-green shawl that was wrapped around her shoulders. No makeup on her face, just the kiss of the early morning light to make her as beautiful and terrible as any fairy queen. Her face was set and sad, but her loveliness made Dimity’s heart wither a little, hopelessly. Dimity took a step backwards, and Celeste raised her hands to reassure her.

“Wait, please, Mitzy. I would like to speak to you,” she said in a soft voice.

“I was just…” Dimity didn’t finish the sentence. It did not matter what excuse she gave. Celeste could see right through her.

“Dimity, listen to me… I know how you are feeling, believe me, I do. When his attention is on you, it feels as though the sun is shining, does it not? And when that attention moves on… well, it feels as though the sun has gone out. Cold and dark. For two years he drew and painted me just as he did you. And I fell in love with him, and never fell out of love. And I believe he still loves me, and still wants to be with me, and he loves our girls very much. We are a family, Dimity; that is a sacred thing. Do you hear what I am telling you? He has moved on from you-in his art, in his mind. You must move on from him, too, because you cannot get it back, once it has gone. I mean only to be kind in telling you this. Your life… your life lies with another, not with Charles. Do you understand?” Celeste held the shawl tightly around her shoulders, and Dimity saw goose pimples rising along her forearms. She said nothing in reply, and Celeste shook her head slightly. “You’re still so young, Mitzy, still just a child…”

“I am not a child!” said Dimity, looking down at her feet as her blood raced and she rejected every word the Moroccan woman was saying.

“Then let me speak to you as a woman, and listen to me as a woman, and hear the truth in what I say. Life and love are like this. There are times when they will break your heart and kill the spirit of you, kill it right inside you.” She bunched her hand into a fist and held it tight against her chest. “But these times do pass, and you will be whole again. But only once you look the truth in the face, and see it for what it is. You must forget what you cannot have. I know you don’t want to hear any of this, but you must. Come back later and be with my girls-with my Delphine, who loves you. But go now, if you want to. I am sorry for you, Mitzy. Truly. You were not prepared for any of this, I see that now.” Celeste turned, letting her gaze linger on Dimity for a moment longer, stern and sad.

But Dimity could not go back to see Delphine; not that day, or the day after. She could not, in case what Celeste said was true, and Charles would never want to draw her again. She felt a peculiar teetering sensation when she considered it, as though she was on the cliff top on a windy day, and the turf by her toes had started to crumble. They could slip away, she suddenly saw. Slip away out of her life as easily as they had slipped into it, and leave her with no hope of rescue. They were like a bright light, shining, which cast shadows over everything else, and Charles was the brightest of all.

On the third day, she was taking in the washing when her eyes fell on a blouse of Valentina’s. It was one of her favorites, one she often wore when meeting a new guest for the first time. It was made of a slightly diaphanous pale blue cheesecloth that was gathered into smocking at the waist and sleeves, and was fitted over the bust. It had a wide, low neckline with a ruffle to it, and only one of the wooden buttons was missing from the front. When Valentina wore it, she had to wrestle her bosoms into the bodice, where they perched precariously and jiggled when she moved. Dimity rolled the blouse up carefully and tucked it inside the waistband of her skirt. It would not do to be caught borrowing it; she couldn’t even guess what the consequences of that might be. Before leaving the house she combed her hair savagely, eyes watering as each knot was pulled through, then piled it all up on top of her head and secured it with pins, so that a few stray tresses fell to brush her neck. Safely behind a hedge away from The Watch, Dimity put on Valentina’s blouse. She was smaller than her mother, her waist narrower and her bust less voluminous, but the blouse fitted nicely. She had no mirror to check her appearance, but when she looked down at her own chest in the wide neckline, she knew she was no longer looking at the body of a child.

Dimity seated herself in a patch of clover flowers near the cliff path, with a basket of beans to shell, and set to work. It was a guess, but she had often seen Charles walk that way, and soon she saw his long-striding figure approaching. Her heart careened wildly behind her ribs, and she sat up straight, pushing her shoulders back and tweaking the blouse so that it sat wide across them, exposing the straight line of her collarbones, the soft curve downwards where her arms began. The sun was warm on her skin. She tried to keep her expression relaxed, but it was hard not to narrow her eyes in the bright sunshine. In the end she had to blink, and lower her brows; squint a little. She pursed her lips at the onslaught, fretting because she couldn’t look up again without giving away her plan to be found, caught unawares. The breeze stirred the wisps of hair against her neck and made her shudder. And then she heard the words she had longed to hear for almost a year, and she shut her eyes in bliss.

“Mitzy, don’t move. Stay exactly as you are,” said Charles. So she didn’t move, even though inside she was smiling and had a tremulous feeling, like she might laugh. Mitzy, don’t move.

It was a rapid drawing, one of open-ended lines and suggested space; sparse, hazy. But somehow the glow of the sunlight was captured, and even in Dimity’s scowl the ghost of her delight was hiding, right there on the page. Charles finished it without a flourish, just that slow ceasing of movement through his hand, his pencil; a frown of his own and a quick, hard exhalation of air through the nose. Then he looked up and smiled, and flipped the sketchbook around to show to her. What she saw made her catch her breath, and a rosy blush spread up from her neck. As she had hoped, the drawing was indeed of a woman, not a child, but she was unprepared for how lovely that young woman would be, with her smooth, sunlit skin and her face full of her own private thoughts. Dimity looked up at Charles in amazement.

There was a mirror at The Watch, in the hallway; an ancient one with silvery glass and the mottled spots of age all over it. It was four inches across, and in it Dimity knew her own face of old. Filling the round glass, somewhat shapeless and dim. Like some slave in the belly of a ship, peering out through a porthole. She knew the whites of her own eyes well. Here in this drawing was a different creature entirely. He hadn’t drawn her with blood under her nails, hunched to avoid being noticed, a child who hid along hedgerows. He had seen past all that, and drawn what had been hiding underneath. She gaped at it, at him. As if puzzled by her reaction, Charles took the drawing back.

“You don’t approve?” he said, studying it with a frown. But then, as if he also realized what had changed, his mouth thinned into a thoughtful line and curled up at one side. “The poor ugly duckling, who was bitten and pushed and laughed at,” he said softly. He smiled. Dimity didn’t understand. She heard only the words ugly, poor; she felt crushed. “Oh, no, no! My dear Mitzy! What I meant was… the story then goes on to say: ‘It does not matter that one has been born in the hen yard as long as one has lain in a swan’s egg…’ That’s what I meant, Mitzy. That the new swan turned out to be the most beautiful of them all.”

“Will you teach me that story?” she said breathlessly.

“Oh, it’s just a silly children’s story. Élodie will read it to you-it’s one of her favorites.” Charles waved a hand dismissively. “Come on. This sketch is a good start, but only a start.”

“A start for what, Mr. Aubrey?” Dimity asked as he stood up, gathered his bag and his folding stool, and strode away towards the stream.

“My next piece, of course. I know exactly what I want to do now. You have inspired me, Mitzy!” Dimity hurried after him, tugging her blouse higher over her shoulders; bewildered, alight, joyful.

She spent the following afternoon on the beach with Élodie and Delphine, and as Élodie hopped in and out of the waves, squealing at the chilly water, she told Dimity snatches of the story of the ugly duckling, and it made Dimity smile all the way through to think that this was how Charles thought of her.

“Everybody knows that story, Mitzy,” Élodie pointed out patiently, studying the bubbling waves that foamed around her angular knees. Delphine was swimming slowly to and fro just offshore, and she laughed, and winked at Dimity, who had rolled up her trousers and was wading around the rocks in the shallows, dropping mussels and edible weed into a bucket.

“And now I know it, too, Élodie. Thanks to you,” Dimity said, happiness making her generous.

“Why do you ask about it now?” the youngest girl asked.

“Oh, no reason. I heard it mentioned, that was all,” Dimity lied easily. She was calm, and felt like she might be glowing. That is how you love a woman, Charles-you draw her face.

When they returned to Littlecombe late in the afternoon, they found the tea things only half laid out on the kitchen table, and Celeste sitting rigidly on the bench with a paper in her hand, which she was studying with a strained expression.

“What is it, Mummy? Are you all right?” said Delphine, going over to sit beside her.

Celeste swallowed, and frowned as she looked up as if she didn’t recognize them. But then she smiled a little and put the paper down on the table. It was Charles’s latest sketch of Dimity. Dimity’s heart gave one loud, exaggerated beat, like a bell sounding.

“Yes, dearest. I’m fine. I was just tidying up before tea when I found this drawing your father has done. Look at our Dimity, look how lovely she is!” Celeste exclaimed, and though the words were generous, they sounded brittle.

“Gosh-look, Mitzy! You do look very pretty,” said Delphine.

“So he is planning another piece with you in it? Did he say so?” Celeste asked.

“He said something like that, I think,” Dimity said, and though she felt bashful about saying it, a part of her wanted to shout it out-that Celeste had been wrong and Charles did still want to draw her; that he had not moved on and lost interest in her. Celeste took a deep breath and got up from the bench.

“Strange, this turnaround. I had thought it would be that tourist woman next, with her milksop English skin.”

“What tourist woman, Mummy?” said Élodie, opening a packet of biscuits and tipping them out onto a plate. Celeste put her hand to her forehead for a moment, then ran it down to cover her mouth. There were furrows in her brow. “Mummy?”

“Nothing, Élodie. It doesn’t matter.” Celeste put her hands on her hips and surveyed the three of them. “Well! What a gaggle of messy creatures! You’ve been swimming, I see, so you will be hungry. Alors-go and get changed and I will finish the tea. Allez, allez!” She herded them from the room, her cheeriness keeping those same sharp edges as before, and Dimity noticed that she kept her eyes askance, and would not look her in the face.

Dimity tried to keep the pale blue blouse, but Valentina flew into such a storm when Dimity suggested that it might have blown away that she had to pretend to find it in one of the trees behind the backyard. She got no thanks for returning it, just a scowl and an admonition to peg things more securely.

“You’ve no idea how many meals this blouse has fed you, over the years,” Valentina said. With a pang, Dimity handed it over. She had far more to thank the garment for. It had brought Charles back to her; brought her back from the cliff edge. For the next few days she ran her errands with a springing step, swinging her basket and singing to herself. In the village, one afternoon, she saw Charles sitting outside the pub with the tourist man, the one whose hair was blacker than tar. They were drinking dark ale and talking, and Dimity, giving the pub its usual wide berth, wondered what kind of things men talked about. She wondered if he would tell the man about her-about his muse, and the picture he was planning.

As she walked past the post box across the village green, a hand on her arm startled her out of her thoughts. Celeste’s elegant fingers were clasped tightly around her wrist. The Moroccan woman was hunkered down behind the pillar box as though playing hide-and-seek, her lovely face dangerous with anxiety and temper. Instinctively, Dimity recoiled from her.

“Mitzy, wait. Do you see that man-the one Charles is talking to?” Celeste whispered. She pulled on Dimity’s arm so that they could talk closely without Celeste having to leave her hiding place.

“Yes, Celeste. Yes, I see him,” said Dimity nervously.

“That’s the milksop’s husband. Have you seen her, too? You know who I mean?”

“Yes.” The large-chested woman who looked like a bitch in heat in spite of her prim outfits, she thought.

“Have you ever seen her with Charles? Just the two of them, I mean. Maybe out for a walk, or talking… Have you seen them?”

“No, I don’t think so…”

“You don’t think so, or you have not?” Celeste pressed. Her fingernails were cutting into Dimity’s skin, but just like with Valentina, suddenly Dimity didn’t dare pull away.

“I haven’t. I haven’t seen them together, I’m sure,” she said. Celeste stared at the two men for a second longer, then fixed her eyes on Dimity. Her grip vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

“Good. That’s good. If you do see them together, you must tell me,” said Celeste. Dimity’s mouth was dry at the strangeness of the encounter, and she was about to refuse when the look in Celeste’s eyes stopped her. There was something like panic, underneath her anger. Something hunted, and frantic. Dimity nodded hurriedly. “Good girl. Good girl, Mitzy.” Celeste turned, and was about to walk away when she paused, and added: “Say nothing of this to the girls. I beg of you.”

The next time she was at Littlecombe, with her hair piled up again in the hope of meeting Charles, Dimity was disappointed to find him out. Since it was a gray day, she agreed to stay indoors and teach Delphine and Élodie how to make strawberry jam. Delphine saw her searching the room as she entered, since the car was parked outside, and gave her a mildly censorious look.

“Daddy’s gone out. Were you supposed to sit for him today?” she asked carefully.

“Oh, no,” Dimity said hurriedly. “I was just hoping for… My mother was asking, you see. About the… extra money.” She lowered her voice to tell this lie, and was ashamed to see sympathy replace consternation on her friend’s face.

“Yes of course. How silly of me to forget,” Delphine murmured. “Perhaps you can have one or two jars of jam instead, once we’ve made it. Would that help?”

“Yes, thank you.” They smiled at each other, and set about hulling the vibrant red fruit. Delphine asked about Wilf, and Dimity answered at mischievous length, even though in truth she had scarcely thought of him, let alone met with him, since the Aubreys’ return. Soon the kitchen was rich with the scent of strawberries, and when Celeste came downstairs she took a deep breath and smiled. She looked tired, and there were stern lines at the corners of her mouth that Dimity couldn’t recall seeing there before.

“What a glorious perfume, girls!” she said. “Something to remind us it is summer, in spite of the dark weather.” It had indeed been a bleak sort of summer until then, but Dimity had hardly cared to notice. “Well, sunshine or no sunshine, I must have some air. I’ll be in the garden, if you need me.”

Two hours later, when the jam was potted up and Élodie was up to her elbows in soap suds at the sink, scrubbing the pans, Dimity walked carefully to the back door with a brimming cup of tea for Celeste. Through the crack by the jamb she saw a flash of blue, and she paused, recognizing Charles’s peculiar linen tunic, the one dotted and smeared with fingerprints in paint. His voice was soft and measured, as if by speaking too robustly he might damage Celeste, inflict a wound.

“But it’s impossible right now, Celeste, you know that… I’ve just started a new piece. I need Mitzy to pose for it, and we need the money…”

“You can work over there just as well, I know you can. Think how much work you did the first time you went!”

“Well, I had you to inspire me then,” said Charles. Through the narrow gap, Dimity saw the white gleam of his smile.

“And do you not have me to inspire you now?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“We can leave the children with your parents. I’m sure they would look after them, if you explained to them…”

“You know they wouldn’t. You know how my mother feels, about our… situation.”

“But if you told her… if you explained that we need to go away. That I need to go away. And we need to be together, Charles. Mon cher. Together like man and wife, like it was in the beginning. To remember the light and the love and the life between us, when right now all has grown dim…”

“Delphine and Élodie are the greatest expressions of that love, Celeste, why leave them behind? They love it there, you know they do…”

“Or we could leave them with Mitzy! She is a sensible girl. How old is she now? Sixteen? She could look after them, I know she could. She could come and stay here in the house…” Hope flared in Celeste’s voice.

“It’s out of the question.” The words were flat, adamant. “That mother of hers would surely involve herself in some way, and really Dimity is still only a child herself.” No, thought Dimity, holding her breath, poised on tiptoes. I am a swan. He did not want to go away with Celeste. He wanted to stay in Blacknowle, with her. Joy flared up like fire.

“Please, Charles. I feel like something is dying inside me. I just can’t stay here anymore. And I feel something dying between us, too… this distance between us, always growing. I need to go home. I need to be where I belong. And I need to be with you, like it was on our honeymoon, like it was when we first met and we were the center of the whole universe. Just you and me, and nobody else… No suspicion, no betrayal.” She reached out, grasping Charles’s hand so tightly that her fingers went white. There was a long, hung moment.

“If you’d met Dimity’s mother… there would be no question of you wanting to leave our children with her…”

“But Dimity can stay here with them-we can pay her well for it! That at least always pleases the mother, no?”

“Pay her well for that, and pay for us to travel again, and all the while earn nothing, for without Mitzy I cannot keep working…”

“Mon dieu!” Celeste spat in sudden rage. “There was a time when there were more things under the sun for you to paint than Mitzy Hatcher!”

“All right, Celeste, calm down-”

“I will not! Always we go where you say, always we live our lives around you, and your work. I gave up everything to be with you, Charles, and I ask very little of you, and yet this one thing you could grant me, to make me happy… Must I fight and beg, always?” She shook her head in disbelief, and then her eyes blazed. “It is that woman, isn’t it? It’s her that keeps you here!”

“What woman? What are you talking about?”

“The one staying at the pub. The tourist woman with the fiancé she barely looks at… the one who has to touch herself each time she sees you… Don’t pretend you don’t know!”

“But… I hardly know the woman! I’ve met her only twice! You’re imagining things, Celeste-”

“I am not! And I tell you now, Charles Aubrey, either we go to Morocco and away from this damp and dreary place, or I will go alone with the girls and you will see us no more!”

There was a long, uneasy silence, and Dimity didn’t dare to breathe.

“All right,” Charles said at last, and Dimity went cold. “We’ll all go,” he said.

“What? No…” Celeste protested. “Just us, Charles. We need some time alone…”

“Well, that’s not possible. So we’ll all go.” Dimity couldn’t hold herself still any longer. She crossed the rest of the hallway in steps as loud as she could make them without spilling the tea, to announce her arrival, and smiled frantically as she stepped out into the light.

“Here, Celeste. I fetched your tea,” she said, fighting to keep her voice from shaking.

“Mitzy! How about it-a trip to Morocco! All five of us. Celeste can visit her family, and I can paint you as a harem girl, or perhaps a Berber princess… It’ll be like nowhere you’ve ever seen, trust me. You’ll love it. What do you say?” Charles stood with his hands on his hips, squinting at her with a kind of desperate fixation, as if he could feel Celeste’s baleful eyes upon him and didn’t dare to look.

“You… want me to go to Morocco with you? Truly?” Dimity breathed, glancing from him to Celeste and back. “I… I should love to go…” she said. “You’ll take me with you? You promise?”

“Of course. You’d be a great help to us on the journey, I’m sure. You can help look after the girls, and give Celeste and me some time to rest and be together.” Charles set his smile bravely, and finally found the courage to look across at Celeste. She was watching him, her mouth open in shock, but she did not speak.

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much!” said Dimity, scarcely able to believe it was true. Her smile stretched from ear to ear, her face ached from it. They would go, but this time she would stay with them, with him. She would leave Blacknowle, and travel farther than she had ever thought it possible to travel. She did not care if Celeste did not want her there. She cared only that Charles did; and in that moment, she loved him completely.

“There now,” Charles said awkwardly. “Go on inside and tell the girls. And is there any tea for me in the pot?”

“I’ll fetch you some.” Dimity stepped back into the strawberry-scented house, and just before she moved out of earshot, she heard Celeste say, in a voice made frigid with rage:

“Charles. How could you?”

There was straw prickling Zach’s back and the sharp smell of sheep shit in his nostrils, filtering through the thick mass of Hannah’s hair. Her head was resting in the crook where his neck met his shoulder, and for a while he shut his eyes and enjoyed the discomfort of her nose and chin digging into him. Her breath was warm and growing steadily slower, returning to normal. From behind the bale of straw on which he was leaning came the sudden deep, loud bleat of a sheep; Hannah’s head came up in an instant, her eyes fighting into focus.

“Is she all right?” said Zach. Hannah sat up straighter to look and Zach felt their bodies disconnect, the sudden touch of cool air on damp and delicate skin.

“Yes, I think so. Just getting a bit uncomfortable now, poor girl. I should check on her, though.” She climbed off Zach and got to her feet, wrestling her trousers back over her hips and zipping them up. There was sheep shit on one of her knees. She went around the bale and crouched by the laboring ewe, whose quick breathing was flaring her nostrils and making her whole body rock. Hannah peered beneath her tail, put gentle fingers there to feel the shape of what was beginning to protrude. “I can feel feet and nostrils.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes, that’s good. Nostrils means a straightforward, headfirst birth. Breech is trickier.”

“Oh, good. Well… I’ve never done that before. Had sex in a barn full of sheep, I mean,” Zach said, dressing and brushing the sharp bits of chaff from his skin. Hannah looked up with a brief smile.

“It certainly helps liven up the long hours of a lambing vigil. Chuck me that rag, would you?” She caught it deftly and wiped the muck from her hands as she sat back down on the bale beside him. Zach took her hand and meshed their fingers, pressing the pads of their thumbs together and feeling the hard scar running across hers.

The small cappuccino-colored ewes were dotted around all over the barn, some with tiny lambs curled sleepily beside them, others prostrate and panting like the one Hannah had just checked, others eating hay as though none of it was anything to do with them. It was three o’clock in the morning and an immaculate full moon had risen outside, casting silvery shadows over everything. Zach peered out through the door, up the hill to where the low shape of The Watch crouched against the horizon. There was a single light on in the kitchen downstairs, and he wondered if Dimity was still up, or had forgotten to turn it off.

“Don’t you need to put a blob of that green paint on them? Or number them or something, so you know whose is whose?” He gestured to the sheep that already had lambs. All the ewes had large blobs of emerald green paint on their rumps.

“I’m sure the sheep know. And they’ll all get their ear tags, soon enough. That green paint is tenacious stuff-you can’t get it off you, once it’s on. Not ideal for organic fleeces. It goes on the ram’s chest, so we can see who he’s covered.”

“Is lambing always this easy?” he asked. Hannah shrugged.

“This is my first season with this flock, remember. Hopefully they’ll all keep popping out easy-peasy, because I can’t afford to call the vet right now.”

Zach thought about this for a moment. “What about… what about your pictures? I mean, no offense, but you hardly get a lot of foot traffic in that shop of yours. Couldn’t you find some local gallery or gift shop to stock them? They’d sell really well, I’m sure they would.”

“I could, I suppose. I just… I don’t know. The idea doesn’t appeal to me.”

“What idea? The idea of being a talented artist and making some extra income through the sale of your work? What’s not to like?”

“I don’t want to be an artist. I want to be an organic shepherd.”

“The one doesn’t necessarily preclude the other, does it?”

“Sort of. If the pictures sell really well I’ll only have to do more of them… it’s a slippery slope. Soon I’ll be painting daisies on watering cans and running a gift shop rather than farming.” She shuddered, and Zach laughed softly.

“But you draw already. The pictures are there; I’m sure no harm would come of putting them somewhere they’re more likely to sell. I could look into it, if you like?” he said. Hannah gave him a steady look.

“No, it’s okay. I’ll think about it,” she said. “What about you? I bet you wanted to be an artist, right? What made you open a gallery?”

“The fact that nobody bought my art and I had a wife and child to feed. Actually, Ali fed herself, and me and Elise. She’s a lawyer, a very good one.”

“Bet that did wonders for your ego.”

“It was my own stupid fault-the fact that I didn’t make it. I had my chance and I blew it.” Zach smiled ruefully and shook his head at the memory. He’d been so full of himself at the time, so bloody cocksure.

It was the year he graduated from Goldsmiths, and his final show was being showered with praise from staff and classmates alike, and from a journalist who wrote in a piece in her magazine about young artists to keep an eye on. Zach Gilchrist, the article said, combines a classical eye with a challenging, almost surrealist approach to subject and meaning. It was rumored that Simon d’Angelico, one of the most influential collectors of British contemporary art, might be coming to the exhibition to look at his pieces. A real, genuine rumor, not one that Zach had cooked up himself. All that promise, all that potential. Zach entirely lost sight of the fact that it was all just possibility and suggestion, nothing more concrete than that. That he was still just a new graduate, unproven-a maybe, that was all. He felt like he had made it already, so that when a woman called Lauren Holt, who ran a small gallery near Vyner Street in the City and was building up a stable of new artists, came and spoke to him and asked about hanging his final piece and two others, he barely listened to her. He’d never heard of her or her gallery, and that told him everything he thought he needed to know. She had bright scarlet hair, even though she looked over fifty, and it clashed with her green eye shadow. Zach supposed she thought it made her look avant-garde; he wrote her off as an eccentric amateur. Her gallery had been open for only six months, and for all he knew it was the kind of place that sold postcards of the art in a rotating wire rack. So he turned her down flat and thought no more about it, safe in the knowledge that big things were coming his way.

Nine months later, Lauren Holt hosted a private viewing at her gallery that caused a buzz of excitement in the press and in the art-world circles that Zach was trying desperately to gain access to. Simon d’Angelico never did come to his final show; there were no more articles mentioning Zach in any magazines or newspaper reviews. Zach paid Lauren’s gallery a visit, and walked around in increasing dismay as he absorbed the quality of the pieces on display, the perfect lighting, the buzz of conversation. Startling pieces by people he had heard of, being discussed by people who mattered. Lauren Holt came in through a back door in the white wall, dressed all in black with her red hair shining. Zach tried to hide behind a piece of wire sculpture, but she caught his eye and gave him a lopsided little smile, more wistful than gloating. Zach slunk away, too ashamed to ask her if she might still be interested in him. And that had been the closest he had ever come to having his work picked up by an influential gallery. In terms of his career as an artist, it was all downhill from there.

Why didn’t you ask her there and then if she’d still have you? The gallery was still quite new… if you’d groveled she might have been flattered enough to agree, even if it was just one piece-that final-year piece you did that she liked,” said Hannah as they trod through the straw to another ewe who had the front legs of her lamb protruding from her back end, sheathed in a gray and shiny membrane.

“I couldn’t. It was too humiliating…”

“You mean you were still too proud, even at that point?”

“I guess so.”

“Men!” Hannah rolled her eyes. “You never will stop to ask for directions.”

“I was still hoping for a miracle from elsewhere, I suppose. But that was it. My big chance, and I blew it.”

“Come on, I don’t buy that.” She wrapped her hands around the lamb’s slippery legs and when she saw the ewe heave, pulled steadily until its whole body slithered free with a rush of fluid and a grunt from the ewe. “Yes! Good sheep,” she said as she cleared the mucus from the lamb’s mouth and nose, then swung it gently a few times until it sneezed and snuffled and shook its head weakly. She laid it in the straw beside its astonished mother and wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans. Zach grimaced. Lambing was gorier than he’d imagined it would be.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s for you won’t go by you, as my old granddad used to say. Talent will out. If you were meant to make it as a professional artist, you would have made it,” she said. “It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Hmm. I’m not sure if that’s a better or worse thought, actually. Don’t we make our own luck, our own opportunities in life?”

“So, what are you telling me-that you just haven’t been trying all these years? That that’s why you aren’t a famous artist, and your gallery’s about to close, and now you can’t finish your book?”

“No, I suppose not. It’s certainly… felt like I’ve been trying. Makes me tired just thinking about it, actually.”

“Well, there you are, then. Don’t beat yourself up about one missed chance of an exhibition.”

“So you’re saying I was doomed to failure from the start?”

“Exactly. There now-doesn’t that make you feel better?” She grinned at him, punching him lightly on the shoulder.

“Oh yes. Much,” he said with a smile. Hannah sighed slightly and stepped forwards, grabbed him by his shirt and tipped up her chin to kiss him.

“Cheer up. I still fancy you, in spite of you being such a towering loser,” she said.

Zach slept until lunchtime the day after his long night in the lambing barns, and woke up ravenous. At two in the afternoon, he sat down to a plate of ham, eggs, and chips amid the drinkers and dog walkers sheltering from a steady, drenching downpour outside. Zach turned to stare out of the window at the rain, and saw Hannah. She was waiting at the bus stop, wearing her outsize checked shirt but nothing waterproof; jeans stuffed into her wellies, an old waxed hat pulled down low over her hair. Zach sat up and reached out to knock on the glass to get her attention, but he realized that she was too far away and wouldn’t hear him over the rain. He leaned back and started to wonder why on earth she would wait at a bus stop in the rain, when she could drive wherever she wanted to go. And if her jeep was out of action for some reason, he was sure she’d feel no compunction about asking him for a lift. So he frowned, and rested his chin on the back of the seat to watch her. She had her hands thrust deeply into her pockets, and her back fearfully straight. Her shoulders were high and set, and the more Zach studied her the more he realized that she looked extremely tense, even uneasy. Before long, the bus pulled up, wipers flailing, and two elderly ladies got out, wrapped up in clear plastic macintoshes. Hannah did not get in.

About two minutes later Hannah glanced at her watch, but even as she did so, a filthy white Toyota pickup swung to a halt in front of the bus stop, splashing muddy water from the gutter over Hannah’s boots. She stepped forwards and leaned down at the open window. Zach stared. There were two men inside the car, but he couldn’t make them out. They spoke for no more than ten seconds, then Hannah reached into her back pocket and handed over a crumpled, letter-size envelope. Through the windscreen, Zach could see the white of the envelope as the man in the passenger seat opened it and rummaged inside with his fingertips. Money, thought Zach. It had to be. Hannah gave a nod and stepped back, and the pickup pulled away. With her hands back in her pockets, she watched it go, and as it pulled around the corner near the pub, Zach saw the sleeve of the man in the passenger seat, resting against the window. A scruffy lilac sweatshirt sleeve. He saw the huge bulk of the man, and a rough, bearded neck. James Horne. Hannah stood for a moment longer, looking down at her feet with the tension still rigid in her frame. Then she walked across the road towards the pub.

Hannah crossed straight to the bar, and held up her debit card to Pete Murray with a wide smile.

“What, all of it?” the landlord said, sounding quite surprised.

“Oh ye of little faith. I told you I only needed a few more days.”

“I know. I just… figured it’d be a few more.” Pete shrugged.

“Hit me with it. And I’ll be in to start a new tab later this evening.” She waited, leaning on the bar and not looking around, while Pete processed her payment. Zach drew breath to call out to her, but something stopped him. Perhaps it was the way she did not turn to see if he was there, the way she kept her eyes fixed on the drip tray, tapping the brass impatiently with a beer mat. Perhaps it was the wealth of questions that mushroomed up inside his mind. He knew she wouldn’t answer them, and so he didn’t want to ask, but there was no way he could speak to her right then without asking. Why she was giving money to somebody like James Horne, and where that money had come from all of a sudden. But when she turned to leave, he was on his feet and after her before he knew he was going to move. Her expression when he caught her arm told him everything he needed to know. Her eyes were set and guarded, her mouth a resolute line, and over all of it, a fragile coloring of regret. All of his questions died on his lips, and he felt something almost like fear. He suddenly saw himself losing her.

“Hannah,” he said, taking a deep breath. “Whatever it is… you can trust me with it. I hope you know that.” Her eyes widened, and for a second she looked lonely, and afraid. But then the resolve returned, and she shook her head.

“Not with this, I can’t. I’m sorry, Zach.”

The following day was Thursday, and Zach headed away from the coast to pick up the motorway to Surrey. It was the day of his visit to Annie Langton, the lady who’d bought one of the recently reappeared Dennis portraits. He had slept little the night before, preoccupied with thoughts of Hannah and the trouble he imagined her to be in. Perhaps she had just been desperate enough to take a cash loan from James Horne, and the argument had been about her paying it back, which Zach had then seen her do. But somehow he couldn’t quite make this version of events stick. You didn’t pay off a legitimate loan at the roadside, with a wad of cash in an envelope. You didn’t borrow from somebody like James Horne in the first place. Zach could not for one second imagine Hannah going to him for help. But if the money was for something else, then Zach didn’t want to think about what it might be. And he could not think how she had suddenly come up with the cash to put into that envelope.

He’d been so tired and caught up in it all that the only reason he remembered his appointment with Mrs. Langton was that his phone beeped to remind him. Startled, he realized that for over a week he’d barely even thought about the book he was supposed to be writing. He had copious notes, and a stack of index cards on which he had begun trying to shape chapters, cross-referencing which notes would be needed where. But suddenly there was a very real possibility that the book would never be written. The book he’d started to write was no longer the book he wanted to write. He knew it had been flawed, now he saw that it was worse than that. It was pointless.

He wanted to write about the man, not the artist. He wanted to write about Blacknowle, and the people who lived there, and how they reacted to the great man in their midst. He wanted to write about Dimity Hatcher, and about the recent works that had been sold from the secret collection in Dorset. He wanted to find out who Dennis was, and where Delphine had lived out her life, after her father died in the war. He wanted to know what Celeste did with the rest of her life. But the only person who could fill in all the blanks was Dimity, and he could hardly force her to tell him these things if she didn’t want to. The stories she’d already told him were fantastical, kept bright and fresh by her love for Charles Aubrey. But they would not fill a book. He pictured himself going back to the gallery, either to close it officially and move out, or to reopen it and try to make it work. The thought caused a wave of sickening dread to wash through him. He pictured the wire rack full of postcards, gathering dust while the sun bleached the colors from the ink. And that’s what would happen to him if he went back, he realized with sudden clarity. He would gather dust, and his colors would fade to nothing, and he would never see Hannah again.

Annie Langton lived in a rambling redbrick cottage on the edges of Guildford. There were climbing roses all over the front wall, shedding the last of their yellow petals onto the gravel driveway. It looked quaint enough, but Zach knew that, in that area, the cottage represented serious money. A black-and-white cat wound around his ankles as he knocked at the front door, and waited. Mrs. Langton herself, when she answered the door, was tiny and brisk, wearing tailored corduroy trousers and a fawn-colored shirt. She had iron-gray hair cut into a smooth bob, and a hooked nose beneath shrewd blue eyes.

“Mr. Gilchrist, I presume,” she greeted him, with a businesslike shake of the hand.

“Mrs. Langton. Thanks so much for agreeing to let me see your picture.”

“Come on in. I’ll make some coffee, shall I?” She led him through to an immaculate living room full of overstuffed sofas and heavy, luxurious fabrics. “Do sit down. Back in a jiffy.”

She strode back out of the room and Zach looked around at the art on the walls. She had some other lovely twentieth-century pieces, including what looked like a Henry Moore sketch, a design for one of his sensuous bronzes. Then another drawing caught his eye, because, even from across the spacious living room, he could see it was an Aubrey. He crossed to look closer, and smiled with delight. Mitzy, 1939. Zach remembered it-a glorious sketch of Mitzy, bare-shouldered and bathed in sunshine; it had come up for auction about eleven years ago, and Zach hadn’t even bothered to bid. He’d known he wouldn’t be able to afford it, because it was the loveliest drawing of her that existed, even though it was only loosely done. She was dressed in a low-cut peasant blouse, the tops of her breasts curving proudly, a sun-kissed moment from over seventy years ago; a beautiful young girl with light dancing in her eyes. It would be a hard-hearted person who could look at that young face and not want to cup their hands around it and cover it with kisses. Her top lip protruded slightly, budding out like an invitation.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” said Annie Langton, appearing behind him with a French press and coffee cups on a tray. She smiled proudly at the drawing. “I paid far too much for that one. My husband, John, was alive then, and he nearly had a heart attack. But I had to have it. She just sings, does she not?”

“Yes, she does. I was at the auction, that day. I couldn’t help myself, even though I knew it would be torture watching someone else buy it, and knowing I’d never see it again.”

“Which just goes to show we can never know anything in this life, not for certain. Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk, thank you.” The desire to tell Mrs. Langton that he’d found Dimity, that she was alive and he’d got to know her, was immense, but he held his tongue. Let that revelation come in the book, if he ever finished it.

“Well, as I told John at the time, money is only money. Whereas, as I believe has been said before, a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” She gazed across at the picture of Mitzy with such peculiar longing that Zach almost recognized the expression.

“Were you one of… Aubrey’s women, by any chance?” he said, smiling.

Annie Langton fixed him with a very stern gaze. “Young man, I wasn’t even a twinkle in my father’s eye when Charles Aubrey went off to the war.”

“Of course not. I’m so sorry.”

“Never mind.” She waved a hand briskly. “To someone as young as you, everyone over the age of fifty looks the same, I suppose.”

“I’m not that young,” said Zach.

“Just clumsy, then?” Her face remained serious, but her eyes sparkled, and Zach smiled sheepishly. With the ghost of a smile, she changed the subject. “I understand from Paul Gibbons that you have a particular interest in the portraits of Dennis that Aubrey did? Do you know who he was, then?”

“No. I was half hoping you might be able to tell me that.”

“Ah, then the mystery prevails. No, I’m afraid I have no idea who he was. I’ve done a bit of research, although I don’t claim to know as much about Aubrey as an expert like you. I’ve found no reference to him anywhere.”

“No, neither have I.”

“Oh dear-I hope you didn’t come all this way to see if I knew?”

“No, no. I have something of a… theory about the Dennis pictures. I was hoping seeing yours in the flesh might help me clear something up.”

“Oh, yes?” She sipped her coffee, never once breaking off her piercing gaze. Zach saw that there was no point in trying to dissemble.

“It worries me a great deal that there’s no mention of Dennis anywhere. I find it almost impossible to believe, given the dates the portraits were supposedly drawn. If the dates are correct, Dennis would almost certainly have had to be in Blacknowle at some point. But I have been to Blacknowle, and spoken to some of the people who lived there at that time. And still nobody has ever heard of him.”

“Supposedly drawn, you say? Am I to understand that you don’t think the portraits are genuine?”

“I know that’s… not something anybody wants to hear. But don’t you think it’s odd that these portraits, the only ones of Dennis we know of, all came up for sale in recent years? Apparently from the same vendor? And that they are all so similar, and yet not quite the same?”

“I agree. It is very odd. But you have only to see the draftsmanship to know that they are indeed by Charles Aubrey. Perhaps he fell out with Dennis, whoever he was. Perhaps Aubrey himself expunged the young man from his life before he died. And perhaps he himself was dissatisfied with the pictures and hid them away. Perhaps that’s why they were never sold. Until now.”

“It’s possible, I suppose. But I just can’t quite believe it.”

“Well, let me take you to meet my Dennis. Perhaps he will help you make up your mind.”

She led him across the hallway to a large study dominated by a gleaming walnut desk. The walls were lined with bookcases, and wherever there was space, a picture had been hung. Zach caught sight of Dennis and was already walking towards the picture when Mrs. Langton pointed it out. He knew the piece already, of course, having studied it repeatedly in the auction catalog. He studied it again now, and felt his disappointment rising with each second that ticked past. Seeing the real piece brought him no greater clarity whatsoever. He was aware of Mrs. Langton watching him closely, and decided that for the sake of appearances, he had better show more interest than he felt.

“Would you mind if I took it over to the window to look at it?” he asked.

“Of course not. Help yourself.” The picture was in a heavy wooden frame, and Zach held it tightly as he took it down from the wall. At the window, he turned it until the light shone full onto the paper. He stared at the pencil strokes, at the signature, at the young man’s ambiguous expression. He stared, and wished for something to surface, but nothing did. Yet he still could not shake the feeling that the picture was not entirely what it purported to be.

“He’s no great masterpiece, I know, but a nice enough drawing, I’ve always thought. And he was a bargain,” said Annie Langton, when the silence had grown prolonged. “Shall I leave you alone for a while?” she added.

“No, there’s no need,” said Zach.

“You’ve got what you came for? Already?”

“Not as such, no. Did you ever find out who the vendor was, by any chance?”

“No, and I did ask-I was as curious as anyone as to where these new works were suddenly springing from. Usually the buyer can be told, but not this time. Strict anonymity.” She tipped her eyebrows ruefully.

“And it was in this frame, when you bought it?”

“Oh, no. It wasn’t framed at all when it arrived at the auction house. Just rolled up inside some grubby sheets of newspaper, if you can believe that-not the best thing for it at all. Luckily the newsprint had only transferred a little onto the back of the portrait, not the front.”

“In newspaper? So whoever sold it wasn’t exactly reverent, then. Do you remember what newspaper it was?”

“The Times, I think, but I can’t remember for sure. Nothing revelatory-dated about a month before the sale. I still have it, if you’d like to see it?”

“You kept it? Yes, please.” Inwardly, Zach prayed that the pages would be from a local newspaper, not a national one.

“Well, as far as I am concerned, things like that become part of the provenance of a piece, however inappropriate they may be.” Mrs. Langton crossed to a large chest of drawers and bent to open the bottom drawer, withdrawing a slightly squashed cylinder of broadsheet. “Here you go, though I don’t think it’ll help you much, I fear.”

The pages were from the Times. Disappointed, Zach unrolled the cylinder and scanned the date and a few of the headlines. He wasn’t sure what he thought he would find, but there was a chance that, somehow, the picture’s former owner might have left some clue to their identity. He turned the sheets over and examined the other side, and then something in the bottom right-hand corner made him stop. There were a few colorful smudges on the paper; inky smears in a vibrant, emerald green. They looked like fingermarks, and as Zach frowned at them, trying to place where he had seen that color recently, he saw something that made him go cold.

“Are you all right, Mr. Gilchrist? You’ve gone rather pale.” Annie Langton’s hand was on his arm, but her voice seemed to come from far away. Zach could hardly hear her above the thumping of blood in his ears, and in his hands, the newspaper began to shake uncontrollably. In the corner of the paper, right on the edge, was a thumbprint the exact same emerald green that marked the covered ewes in Hannah’s flock. A thumbprint with the sharp diagonal line of a scar running across it, clear and unmistakable.