As they wound up the lane, Hazel tried to imagine what this place would have seemed like to Stephen, all those years ago. It didn’t look as if things would have changed much around here since then. Had he liked this landscape, that looked as if it was covered all over in green baize? Had he been apprehensive, arriving here to spend a summer with these strangers? She found that tears had started to her eyes, at the thought of him here, so far from home. He had seemed so grown-up to her, at the time, but with hindsight she pictured him as just a boy. He’d been years younger than her son was, now.

‘I’ve gone into overwhelm,’ she told Dawn, when the two of them were alone, driving back to the B&B after an introductory tea with Cass and Adam.

‘I noticed you’d lost the power of speech, there,’ Dawn said.

‘You’re right, I had. I think I’d been thinking of my brother so much that I’d forgotten that I’m kin to these people too. Everywhere else we’ve been, even to the Eyres’ house and to Cheltenham, they’re places that my family came from. But here, these are actual, living people who share the same ancestry as me. They’re my relatives.’

‘Do you notice any similarities?’

Hazel smiled at this. ‘Not a lot,’ she admitted. ‘Not yet, anyways.’

Adam cleared up the tea things while Cass went to the station to collect Georgie.

‘What’s she like?’ Georgie asked, as soon as she got into the car.

‘Not like you’d expect. I thought she’d be tall, like him. She’s quite short actually.’

‘But does she look like him?’

‘Not remotely. But I suppose we don’t know what he’d have looked like, by now. She’s got a friend she’s travelling with who looks a bit like Judi Dench. That one seems to do most of the talking. They’ve both got short grey hair and those shoes that are between trainers and walking boots. And lots of zips and Velcro on everything, so it sounds as if something is being torn, when they come in and take their things off. And those ugly sort of bags that tourists wear around their waists.’

‘Like marsupial pouches,’ said Georgie.

‘Exactly,’ said Cass.