Agnes squeezed out a cloth in warm water, to which had been added a drop of lavender oil, and bathed her uncle’s face and wrists.

‘Uncle John…’ she whispered, but longed to say ‘Father’. ‘Thank you for everything. Thank you for looking after me all those years.’

He turned his head towards her. ‘You were my daughter,’ he said simply.

He shut his eyes and fell into one of his lightning dozes. Outside, in the dark winter world, the wind rattled frozen branches. It was grief-stricken weather: wild, moody and battering, which was only fitting. Slowly the sun abandoned the short day, leaving Flagge House and the water-meadow to the gloom. Complete and turned into itself, the house and the land settled for the night.

‘Are you frightened?’ she asked, when he woke with a start. She thought she saw that his features had sharpened.

He stirred and grimaced. ‘I lost God a long time ago.’

Agnes did not bother him any more but sat, quiet and watchful. Slowly, infinitesimally slowly, John Campion raised his hand and traced the shape of the books he could no longer read.

Are they there, Agnes?

When she woke the next morning, still exhausted from her late-night watch, Maud appeared in her bedroom and told Agnes abruptly that her uncle was dead.


*

The phone rang. ‘Julian,’ said the clever, faithful Angela, who was today dressed in purple Spandex, ‘it’s a Mrs Maud Campion. She says she lives near Lymouth and she met you at the Huntingdons’ cocktail party.’

Julian was in his office at the Portcullis Property headquarters in London which, as chief executive, he had occupied for the past seven years, worrying over the figures which, for the first time in those seven years, were behaving unpredictably. ‘Put her off.’

‘She’s been sitting on the phone for ages. And Kitty has also rung asking if you would call her back about arrangements for the weekend. She says…’ Angela’s pause was wicked ‘… she says that if you’re not home in good time tonight there will be trouble. She did not specify what.’

There were many strands to knit into a day, strategic, financial, Kitty, the staff, the figures, but early on Julian, who had been born with an unquenchable curiosity and a capacity for risk-taking that had both pushed him to the top of his profession and, from time to time, got him into trouble, decided never to pass by on the wrong side of the road. Also, and this was an intellectual discipline, he refused to downgrade his experiences, especially the bad ones. Each one was useful and added a layer, another facet, polished up the idea of what he wished to be.

Sometimes this philosophy was tested to its limits. There was only so much that could be crowded into a day. He sighed but said therefore, ‘Put her through and, Angela, could you ring Kitty and tell her I promise to be home on time?’

He turned his attention to the phone. ‘Mr Knox, we met briefly at Vita Huntingdon’s at the Conservative do, and since your work is well known in the area I thought I would get in touch. My husband died last week…’

The voice was both confident and strangely muffled, as if the speaker did not wish to be overheard. Julian searched his memory for a Mrs Maud Campion. The call did not surprise him for he was used to approaches such as he assumed this one to be. Profit was a great dismantler of barriers and, because he lived there and knew it, Portcullis had quite a few projects under way in the Lymouth area. ‘Is it to do with a property?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’d be delighted to discuss it and then I think it would be better if I put you through to the office that deals with the properties. I occupy a less important role. I merely run the company.’ He spoke with his customary lightness, laced with irony, which made the less confident take fright. The word ‘run’ resonated in his head. Phone hunched on his shoulder, he tapped another key on his laptop.

‘That’s quite all right, Mr Knox. I prefer to deal directly with the top.’

The tone was old-fashioned. Julian raised an eyebrow at the hovering Angela, who had embarked on the grim task of getting him to a meeting on time. ‘Perhaps you would like to tell me what you had in mind.’


*

Agnes felt in her dressing-gown pocket for her handkerchief which, not surprisingly, was damp, because she had done nothing but weep since John’s death – secret tears that convulsed her between making the arrangements and seeing people, and which left her exhausted.

It’s because I’m so tired, she told herself. Fatigue flays you open, and bullies you into thinking that you cannot survive such a loss. But I can. She thought of John’s key hanging on the hook and his empty place at the table. She remembered looking up at him as he had taken her round the house, and the manner in which he had placed his arm around her shoulders and told her that her bad times were over. She had found her refuge and a place in which to grow up.

It was dawn, the day after the funeral, and Agnes, run ragged by the demands of her aunt and the organization of the details, had abandoned her efforts to sleep. In the frozen moment before dawn, she had pulled herself out of bed and crossed over to the window. Her feet left smudges on the floor and the darkness was as thick as velvet.

Out there in the meadow, the river clattered icily over the stones.

During the past four years, she had grown used to sleepless nights – nuits blanches, as Pierre called them – and to rising in the morning with a body racked with tiredness and stretched nerves. Nothing helped. They came with the job and with love affairs and, now, with bereavement. She had given up fighting them, for, in a curious way, Agnes felt her experience of them made her truly alive.

The cold knifed into her flesh and hurt her bare feet, and she tucked her arms across her chest, a defensive posture that she noticed she had adopted lately. Correction: that she had taken to since Pierre.

Happiness and unhappiness were so close that they were joined at the hip, except that unhappiness was longer lasting. But she had no intention of letting it become a life habit. Occasionally, Agnes dreamed of warm kitchens where she did feel happy – which surprised her as her interest in cooking was minimal – but put it down to some residual message to do with contentment lurking deep in her psyche. Perhaps there was a programme to be made that investigated the meaning of the kitchen?

Above all, Agnes wanted to live as completely as she could manage, for the ambitions that drove her were deep-seated. She had been battered and hurt, and now she was grieving bitterly for the end of a loving era and worried by the prospect of the new, but she wanted to understand what she was and how best to be that person.

Outside, the waxing light threw a transparent wash over the meadow. My land. With a tremor of delight and dread she said it aloud: ‘My land.’

With a grand sweep that made the rings rattle, she pulled the curtain fully back and stared at the shapes massing across her vision: the land, the trees, the perimeter wall snaking its way towards the village.

Silence. Except for the sound of the river running over those stones as it had since human memory began.

Agnes shivered and hugged herself for warmth. Her land and house. Flagge House had acquired its name because of the river and wild irises for which the area was famous. No longer did they grow in their masses but, if the year was propitious, the irises ran up a display of colour that aped the white and smoky-yellow carpet of previous glories.

It was good soil, whose mixture of clay and chalk produced a mix of vegetation, and where the river had thrown an ox-bow and slowed its pace, it was carpeted with moss and lush grass.

In the past, figures had moved over this landscape, purposeful, occupied figures, who understood and lived by the land. Her Agnes, the dead Agnes of the portrait, would have been among them. Silk skirts swishing, lace pouting at her breast, earrings jangling.

Sleepless and wrung out, Agnes felt the weight of those past lives. Something had ended. Something was beginning.

2

Maud had acquired the habit of inserting French words into her conversation on the annual holidays to Deauville with John. She did so whenever the mood took her, chiefly to indulge her desire to be noticed, but she maintained that it was to do with her inner ear, which was particularly sensitive to languages.

It was mid-morning, the day after the funeral. A post-mortem of the ceremony had been held and the conversation had turned to the next move. Not surprisingly, Maud was prickly.

Comment?’ she challenged Bea, her widowed sister, who had lived at Flagge House since the death of her husband seven years previously.

‘I don’t think you should have said what you did.’ A pale, shrunken-looking Bea poured out cups of tea and handed them round.

Maud was sufficiently surprised by her sister’s attack to snap back, in English, ‘What did you say?’ It was rare for Bea to criticize Maud: when she did, it was usually in the presence of a witness.

‘I didn’t like what you said to him that morning… just before… you know…’

Maud’s still large, lustrous eyes – she had been an exceptionally pretty woman – were sullen. ‘I thought you were supposed to be comforting me.’

Maud was wearing one of her home-knitted jumpers, a professional-looking creation in mourning-black angora with a turtle neck, but she looked frozen. The diamond-paste ring that she habitually wore with her wedding band gave off a blackish sparkle that never fooled anyone who knew about diamonds. ‘Aren’t you?’ she reiterated.