Lily swatted the hand away. ‘Don’t touch me. And don’t you dare threaten me.’ She swallowed the lump in her throat and tried to make herself look bigger, more imposing. ‘The last person in Alder Vale that you should be threatening is the person with the power not only to unleash the secrets of your…’ Lily snarled, ‘problems, but who also has the power to make them a whole lot worse.’

Jemima stumbled backwards. ‘How dare you!’

‘No, how dare you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have somewhere to be.’ Lily shouldered past Jemima and marched towards the waiting stagecoach. Fury was burning in her veins.

Through the anger, Lily felt a strange gratefulness for the cantankerous woman and her unpleasant, judgemental ways. Jemima Darroch had just made leaving Alder Vale so much easier.

She wiped her face of tears and handed her heavy bag up to the driver, before taking a seat inside the shady, wooden coach that would take her onwards.

Towards Alice.

Chapter Six

The stagecoach rolled into the sleepy village of Ardnaroch just as the sun was awakening. It stopped with an unexpected, forceful jolt and the driver climbed down from his seat at the front. The next thing Lily saw was her large travelling bag flying past the window, thrown carelessly by the driver with a complete disregard for its contents. It landed in a crumpled heap on the dusty cobbled village square. He yanked open the door and demanded that the lone traveller remove herself from the coach and be on her way. ‘This is as far as I’ll go, lass. There’s no point complainin’. Out you get, c’mon.’ He silenced her objections before climbing back up to his perch.

Lily clambered out, confused, dejected, but too tired to hold onto any anger. Her courage had left her for the hundredth time since she left home, somewhere on a nauseatingly winding road in the middle of the night. She had woken from an awkward sleeping position to find herself trapped between a plump man and a withered old woman clutching a grumpy-looking hen. It had been an uncomfortable journey to say the least. The last thing she needed was the driver to refuse to take her where she had paid to go: Kelseth.

She looked up at him with tired eyes, attempting to appeal to his sympathetic side and began, ‘Why won’t you take me? And why didn’t you tell me yesterday morning, when I paid you?’

He turned to her slowly from his position high above her, impatience clearly marked on his lined face. ‘I just don’t go there anymore lass. A lot of us don’t. The entire place is accursed, if you ask me. I’m sorry, but I’d really best be on my way. Best o’ luck with the rest o’ your journey.’ With that, he whipped his horses and turned the stagecoach around, disappearing like a ghost into the fog, back down the road in the direction from which they had come.