Penelope Eyres decided there and then that she liked Hazel. Her smile was really most engaging, with an intelligence – one might almost say a trace of mischief – behind it.

‘You mustn’t let me go on, I’m afraid I can be a snowdrop bore,’ she told her, as they fell into step together, Ian and Dawn lagging a few paces behind them. ‘There are so many kinds, you see. Plicatus originates from the lands around the Black Sea, whereas the snowdrops that were already planted in England from the early 1600s were Galanthus nivalis, from southern Europe. Not nearly so nice as the Crimean ones. Once you get the bug … well. Rare ones have been known to change hands for literally thousands.’

They came to the side of the house. ‘Ian was saying, I think, that our son-in-law believes that cedar would’ve been put in in about the 1860s or thereabouts. Does that fit with your Mr Gale?’

Hazel thought of correcting her, telling her that he was in fact a Captain, not a Mister; but she decided it wouldn’t be good manners to do so, especially as she’d invited herself.

‘Yes, I think that’s exactly right. He’d have been home by then. OK if we go over?’

‘Of course,’ said Penelope.

In truth it wasn’t in homage to William Gale that she had come here to The Grange. When she pictured The Grange, it was Alice that she imagined there. Alice as a young bride; Alice alone, reading and writing at a desk framed by a long window; Alice becoming a mother. If she thought of William at all, it was as an old man, obdurate, unsmiling, with heavy moustaches. She had found a photograph of him on a website about the Victoria Cross, which showed him so. Somehow this version of him had stuck, even though it contradicted the little portrait miniature in her possession, of young William, clean-cheeked and bright-eyed. And the early letters she had of his, his letters to Alice from the battlefront, spoke of kindness and wit. Nevertheless the later image had superimposed itself over the younger man’s traits. After she’d read all the correspondence and the notebooks, Hazel had felt, like all children of divorce, that she had to choose whose side she was on. And she had chosen Alice.