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About the Author

Cressida Connolly is the author of After the Party, which was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was a Waterstones Book of the Month, as well as three other books: The Rare and the Beautiful, My Former Heart and The Happiest Days, which won the MacMillan/PEN Award. Cressida is a reviewer and journalist who has written for Vogue, the Telegraph, the Guardian and numerous other publications. She lives in Worcestershire.

Dedication

To

Nicky Shulman

who thought of the magic bean

and to

Tom Phipps

with love

Part 1

1.

Spring 1855

After he had sat for a time with his dead brother, William Gale composed himself and took out his small silver pocket knife and with it began to cut. Close to the neck the hair was darkened with mud or blood or some mixture of the two, so William cut several pieces from around the crown, where the hair remained bright. It was soon done. He could have sworn that Algie’s body was yet warm, sure he discerned the heat of life through the thick stuff of his coat. But in the while he had attended his brother, the fingertips, the nose and cheeks had with stealth assumed the pallor of death, yellow and somewhat waxen, like a stale candle. As William cut, the head lolled suddenly forward, but William was able to keep possession of his fright at this and did not recoil.

He had seen before what death did. He was familiar, now, with the sudden weight of a human head, cradled in the crook of his own arm, as a man took his leave of this life. This was something he had never hoped to learn. These past months had brought terrible lessons, sights and sensations which could not be unknown, much less forgotten. There was little difference between the weight of a head and that of a 12-pound round shot, for all that one carried all the dreams, memories and most tightly cherished hopes of a man within itself, while the other brought only carnage.

William summoned the presence of mind to judge that their mother would require sufficient of his brother’s hair to mount in the glass behind a brooch, and perhaps extra for a locket. He considered too their sister, Caroline. She would be sure to wish to commemorate their brother in like fashion. Then there was Algernon’s fiancée, poor Emily Norris. Would their mother begrudge her a lock of Algie’s hair, as she had already begrudged her the boy’s love? Even as he cut he was sensible of the fact that there could not be more of that hair: what was needed must be now obtained, for there could never be a further supply of it.