I recoiled as he stepped forward and grabbed my arm. “No,” he said. “Listen to me.” He fumbled in the leather satchel that he wore across one shoulder. “Remember this,” he said. “You gave it to me when I was a child.”

He held out to me a little ornament; an angel carved from stone. It was a pretty piece, head bent, wings folded, hands outstretched as though in supplication. It did look familiar to me but I could not place it. I looked at him in bafflement. Poor boy, not only was he a beggar but surely his mind was turned. The thought prompted me to speak gently to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember. But tell me how I can help you.”

He laughed a little wildly at that. “It is I who have come to help you,” he said. He stepped so close I felt his breath on my cheek. He smelled of sweat and chalk dust from the roads, and I tried not to shrink from him.

“Your husband plans to murder you in secret,” he whispered. “He will send a man to push you down the stairs, here at Cumnor Hall. You are to fall and break your neck. You must save yourself! Get away from this place!”

The shock was absolute. This time I was the one who grabbed him, my nails digging into his arm.

“Do not speak of this,” I hissed. I could see at once what had happened: one of Robert’s retainers had spoken loosely during a drunken night in the brothels or stews, and this foolish boy thought to profit by it. Or perhaps he truly believed he could help me. I knew not. All I knew was that if a word of the plan, garbled or not, was to escape ahead of time, everything would be ruined.

“Go!” I said. I pushed him towards the door. “Go and never mention a word of this again or I will see to it that my husband’s retainers will hunt you down and kill you.”

He scrambled back from me, his white face a mask of horror.

“You do not understand—” he started to say, but I gave him no time. The wind caught the oaken door again and it yawned wide, and I pushed him hard, out into the porch. He fell sprawling on the cobbles. He was there one moment—I saw the shock and despair in his face—and then, what seemed like a mere second later, he had vanished.

23

Lizzie: Present Day

Lizzie sat in the garden at The High, her tablet in her hand. The afternoon was mildly melancholy; there was the imprint of autumn in the way that the bars of low sun striped the grass and in the little breeze that chased the already fallen leaves. She was wearing a pair of her grandmother’s trousers and a big wool jumper that had belonged to her grandfather. Her own bags, which Jules had so kindly dragged all the way from London, remained largely unopened. Over the crumbling drystone wall, she could hear Avery exhorting her gardener to chop down the Leylandii hedge “because dearest Elizabeth would never sue us.” It was odd but comfortable to be in a place where she could hear the lives of other people unfolding around her, the sounds from the high street, the church bells and the snatches of conversation. She realised that everything about her flat had been designed to cut out this sort of interaction. It was isolation masquerading as privacy and luxury. She had appreciated that sometimes when life had been so manic but now, she realised how apart she had become, how divorced from reality. Her life was opening up again and it felt good.