“What are those?” she asked, recognizing that the panels in the salon and the tree in the negative they’d looked at that morning were of the same type.

“Les Faux de Verzy,” Josh replied. “Part of a forest of dwarf beech trees. Nobody really knows why they’ve grown like that. Some people say it’s witchcraft or magic.” He shrugged as if he didn’t believe it.

D’Arcy found she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the tree. She had that same sense that it was beckoning her closer, as if it had a secret to tell her, should she chance to seek shelter beneath its draped and elegant boughs. What was happening to her? Her imagination was soaring more spectacularly than the hawk above, conjuring spells and fairytales and hexed trees when all there was before her was a chateau with a magical name, a man with a picnic basket, an old woman with photographs and her mother with—what? Lies?

D’Arcy talked on as if her words might break the enchantment she felt encircling her. “It’s my mother’s fault I’m not shy,” she said. “She taught me to question everything, to say what I thought because sometimes, if you didn’t, people died. I know that sounds like a brutal lesson for a child but she’d talk about the way the Germans and even some of the French people had never said anything about what was happening during the war but that if every voice had spoken aloud, perhaps it would have ended sooner, or with a lower body count. She believed holding back was a dangerous thing that could end in sadness. Which obviously doesn’t tally with your personal code of conduct,” she finished lightly.

“Hey, I invited you to a picnic. That was daring.”

“My God, what might you do by the end of the day? Hold my hand?”

She felt the brush of warm skin against her fingers as he threaded his hand into hers.

“I’m living dangerously,” he grinned, no longer inscrutable but exceptionally charming.

D’Arcy’s insides flipped with joy at making him both laugh and smile in the space of two minutes.

When they reached the waterside and he let go of her hand to lay out the food, she found that she missed his touch. She wandered over to the canal, stopping at a cluster of deliciously cool and viridescent ferns beneath the regiment of plane trees lining the banks. It was hot, the sun burning down, but the shade beneath the foliage was lovely. She realized she was standing beside another of those strange dwarf trees but that this time, rather than coaxing her, its graceful arms were merely extending an invitation that she could ignore should she wish.

So she shucked off her shoes, lifted her skirts a little and waded into the water, reveling in the chill against her legs. She stood still for a few minutes, before tossing her hat onto the bank and turning her face up to the sun, her body softening in the warmth, as if she could so easily bleed into this place and never leave.