The housekeeper nodded, but the praise for the church – always her pride and joy – wasn’t met with the usual warm response, and Hilaria realised how much Nora Pendean must be missing her daughter, especially at Christmas. ‘How is Jenna?’ she asked, more gently this time. ‘I can’t believe she’s been gone from us for nearly a year.’

‘She’s all right, thank you, Miss,’ Nora said. ‘At least I suppose she must be. We’re only allowed one letter a month, and lately we haven’t always had that.’

‘She must be getting ready to take her final vows.’

‘That’s right. In February.’

‘She’s a credit to the island, Mrs Pendean, and to you and your husband. You must both be very proud of her.’ 24

For the briefest of moments the housekeeper forgot herself, and the expression on her face hovered somewhere between scorn and resentment. There was something else there, too, something like pity, and Hilaria felt the accusation as surely as if the words had been spoken aloud: that she would never know the power of a mother’s love for her child, nor its grief. She said nothing more, and it was left to Mrs Pendean to restore the natural order between them. ‘I’d best get on, if there’s nothing else?’

She left the room, and Hilaria went back to the window, unsettled by their brief conversation. It was high tide and the waves were crashing against the rocks below, hitting the foundations of the castle with the hollow sound that she had always found strangely comforting; there was something reassuring, something safe, about the hours when the sea covered the causeway and the island was less accessible – like being at sea without the danger – but today it only stirred up the doubts she was beginning to have about her plans, and she found herself craving the familiar. Christmas was the time to hold tight to everything you loved, not to bring in strangers. She began to wish heartily that she hadn’t allowed her good intentions to get the better of her, but it was far too late to change her mind now. They would just have to make the best of it.

25

3

Nora Pendean crossed the south terrace to the tiny medieval church that sat at the highest point of the island, the spiritual heart around which the rest of the castle was built. The nativity stood in its customary place just inside the north door – the same solid wooden statues, carved by a forgotten Victorian hand, that had been there when she was a child. Their features were as familiar to her as some of her friends and she soon identified the damaged figure, one of the three kings whose painted crown was chipped and split, revealing the bare wood beneath. She removed the carving from its place, then paused to look at Mary by her makeshift crib in the centre of the scene, just an ordinary woman with her child. Had she felt cheated at the end, she wondered? Had she looked back on those years of love and questioned what it had all been for?