Outside, the warm, late-summer twilight was smudged with soft thumbprints of light from the illuminations strung along the promenade. High season was coming to an end, but for now the screams and squeals of excitement from the funfair still carried on the wind; soprano notes duetting with the baritone of the waves booming onto the beach and rattling the pebbles as they slunk back into the sea. Madame Burova – Tarot Reader, Palmist and Clairvoyant – proclaimed the painted sign on the front of the booth where she had been dukkering, as her Romany mother always called it, for over fifty years. Today had been her swansong. Madame Burova was retiring: reluctantly, sadly, but inevitably. Her mind was still sharp and her gift as infallible as ever. But she was weary of other people’s lives – their questions, their problems and their secrets. She needed rest and a little piece of life for herself while she still had the chance. She sat down in a chair beside a small round gypsy table covered with a velvet cloth, where her crystal ball stood next to a silver-framed photograph of her long-dead, beloved borzoi, Grisha. The rings on her fingers flashed and sparkled as she picked up two brown envelopes. She had been entrusted as their guardian and had kept their secrets safe and silent for all these years. She turned them over in her hands. The hands that had held countless others and read the future in their palms. The envelopes held a secret that had troubled Madame Burova more than most, and now the time had come for her to open them and fulfil a promise made long ago.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

1972