Then it suddenly came to Franny why Rose’s face seemed to have an echo of familiarity. The locket! She had found it perhaps two or three years before. She hadn’t known it was a locket then—had thought it was just a pendant on a chain. She had glimpsed it on the verge of the main drive up to the palace. It was quite early in the morning, that time just before dawn, when the land seems to sleep. Every dewdrop on every blade of grass and flower suddenly becomes a prism, splitting the light into half a dozen colors. She spied a radiance turning the gray fuzz of a dandelion gone by into bright gold. When she walked over for a closer look, she saw that a small link chain was snagged in the bracken behind the dandelion head. On the chain she found a lovely pendant in the shape of a rose. It was a fine piece of jewelry, and certainly she could not be accused of stealing since she had found it by the roadside. Nevertheless, she felt she must tuck it away. A girl like her, from a family like hers—her mum worked in the laundry of Hatfield, her father was a simple yeoman farmer with a small plot of land, with one-tenth of his crop taken by the palace—there was not a spare farthing for such extravagances as pendants.

So for two years she had kept it hidden away. However, it was only a few months ago that she discovered that the rose was not simply a pendant but a locket too. The petals at the center of the rose were a paler gold than those around the edge. Beneath one of those petals was a tiny pin that if pushed in just the right way could open the rose. In each half there was a picture—a picture like none she had ever seen. Not painted, nor etched in pen and ink, but so real it seemed like a kind of magic. The surface was glossy, and the face that stared out at her was of a girl of perhaps six years. She was wearing the oddest clothing, and so was her mother. She supposed it was her mother, as they looked so much alike. But the two of them were half-naked. More than half-naked!

And that nearly half-naked girl looked very much like Rose! Not exactly. It was hard to tell, as the little girl’s face had that chubby roundness to it of a six-year-old and her hair seemed much lighter. But there were resemblances. A Rose in a rose! The other picture was that of a handsome man with a close-clipped beard and a flat velvet cap, the kind artisans often wore. There was something about their eyes and the way they all smiled. It was almost as if they each had a secret. But how could this be?