Contents ( 57)
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Acknowledgements
- About the Author
- Also by Sharon Gosling
‘Maybe MacDonald didn’t want anyone to know he could spy on his neighbours?’ Rachel suggested. ‘If he was awful enough to conspire to have someone transported on a false charge and then take credit for that person’s work, who knows what else he was up to.’
Toby shut the laptop. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Do you think that means we’ve found the answers you wanted? Do you think you’ve got enough information to pass on to what’s his name – Crosswick?’
Rachel drummed her fingernails on the chess table, quiet for another minute. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t help feeling that there’s something else. That we must be missing a bigger part of the picture.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said with a sigh. ‘We’ve been at this non-stop, though, and this is the closest we’ve come to any sort of answer at all. I’ll call Alan in the morning, let him know what we’ve found and see what he says. I’d like an update on this hunt for an heir anyway – I’ve not heard from him for a while.’
Twenty-Two
Her hands were hurting today, perhaps because it was raining again. The wet weather tended to make her joints worse, though it had never been quite this bad before. Edie thought it might be because of the amount of time she was spending on this block. The boxwood was hard and the print she was trying to create had a lot of intricate details. It was an aerial view of the hill that imagined what it would look like if one were looking down from the clouds. The lighthouse tower was in the centre and around it spun the hill, the forest and the village, including Edie’s own house where she sat trying to bring this idea into the world. She was using the wood’s own contours to influence the piece, and had asked her timber merchant to leave the bark on the sliced-through trunk. When it was complete, the block would be as much a piece of the artwork as the resulting print. The artist was thinking of making this a four-season project, given how popular her previous set of prints doing the same had proven. At the moment, however, she was struggling to finish even this current block. Progress was slow. The leaves on the trees took a long time to carve and working so intricately put pressure on her fingers. After a long session with the millimetre V-gouge, she often found them unwilling to release from the tense position in which she had been holding them.
Edie put down her carving blade and reached for her glass of wine instead, taking a generous slug. It was after eight, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Gilly was still sitting at her workbench, working on transferring her first image onto an oblong of Japanese vinyl, she might have called it a night.
‘You okay?’ the girl asked, her attention still on tracing the lines she had drawn through the carbon sheet Edie had given her.