“Robert...” I said, but before I could continue a small child flew like an arrow across the floor, burrowing into my skirts, gripping my legs as though his life depended on it, which perhaps it did.

I knelt down and gathered him into my arms. “Robbie,” I said. I stroked his hair and felt him shaking. “I am here. You are safe.” I wanted to do the same to my son, yet I could not tell him that all would be well for unlike a child he would know I lied and that nothing could ever be the same again. I picked Robbie up and held him in my arms, feeling the solid warmth of his little body against me and the hot burn of his tears through my gown.

And then Robert turned to me and his eyes were full of grief and pain.

“I killed her,” he said. “I killed Catherine. It was my fault.”

Thirteen

Lucy

Lucy enjoyed the drive up to Chastleton. Once she had crossed the river at the old bridge in Lechlade the towns and villages started to show their Cotswold character and golden stone. It was a softer look than the chalk and sarsen of Knightstone as though the countryside around here was less remote and more friendly. The bright sun conspired to make everything glow—houses and fields all lit as though by warm candlelight. And when she parked the Mini in the car park and crossed the road to walk down to the house, the first sight of it took her breath away.

She bought a timed ticket, which left her an hour to kill before she could go in so she wandered over to the church, which was close by. Here there was more about the Catesby family—Lucy discovered that they had owned Chastleton for a number of generations and that Robert had inherited it from his grandmother. Both his sons had been baptized there.

Just before the allocated time, she walked back over to the house, which, she discovered when she had bought a guide book, had been built in 1607 by Walter Jones on the site of Robert Catesby’s previous house. Nothing of the original remained, although there was a nod to the Gunpowder plotters in an engraved fire screen in the drawing room. Lucy tried to see if she could sense anything of Catherine’s presence in the house but there was nothing. Perhaps all connections to her had been swept away when the previous manor had been demolished. Or perhaps Catherine had preferred Knightstone, where her presence was so very strong.

Lucy bought some gifts in the shop and then popped her head around the door of the secondhand bookshop. A sign was propped behind the till stating that someone would be back soon, but until then visitors could pay for any items in the shop. As she so often did in Cleo’s bookshop, Lucy marveled at the eclectic mix on the shelves, from bestselling fiction to fifty-year-old cookery books, sporting biographies to obscure history. And that was when she saw the book, on a pile beside the till: The Gunpowder Plot and life of Robert Catesby, also an account of Chastleton House. There was a date of 1909 on the spine.