“I know the stone you mean now,” Finn said, striding across the neatly cut grass, “but it doesn’t have an inscription.”

“Yes, it does!” Lucy said. “I saw it! It says ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’” She remembered Catherine’s presence that day in the graveyard, the brush of her skirt, her words: “I’m so glad you came.”

“There’s no inscription,” Finn repeated, drawing aside the trailing branches of the yew so that she could see the sarsen beneath. “There was once...” He ran his fingers over the rough stone. “I can tell there was lettering here, but it’s worn away.”

Lucy stared. She knew she had seen it. “I think it would be good to ask an expert to take a look and see if they can decipher it,” she said. “And at the same time, maybe they could look beneath. I think they might find something.”

Finn laughed. “The mantle? Well, it looks as though the badgers have already started an excavation.” He ran a handful of chalky soil through his fingers. “I’ll ask the vicar for permission to dig.” He sighed.

“What?” Lucy asked.

“I’m just wondering,” Finn said, “whether all my future work will be predicated on your premonitions rather than on good old-fashioned scholarship?”

“I doubt it,” Lucy said. She took his hand and drew him out from under the curtain of yew. “I think all the premonitions are gone now, all stories told, all secrets revealed. And don’t forget—” she moved into his arms “—that you are the one creating the best memorial to Catherine Catesby. You are rebuilding her garden.”

And they kissed there in the shadow of the yew and it felt like a new beginning.

Epilogue

November 5th

“This looks amazing!” Cleo said. She wandered out onto the terrace at Gunpowder Cottage, glass of champagne in hand. “A fire pit!” She laughed. “How appropriate!”

“There are marshmallows to be roasted,” Lucy said, “but only after we’ve eaten the traditional sausages and jacket potatoes. We wanted a bonfire and lights to celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, but no fireworks to scare Geoffrey and no risk that we might set anything alight by accident. Not after what happened to the first Tudor garden on the site.”

Cleo shuddered. “Finn would never forgive himself if all his work went up in flames. But the lanterns are a gorgeous touch, and much safer.” She pirouetted to take in the reconstructed loggia with multicolored lights strung along its length, and the neat low hedges of the knot garden. “It looks stunning, Lucy.”

“Thanks,” Lucy said. She felt incredibly proud of what Finn, Johnny and their small team were achieving with the garden reconstruction. So far they had rebuilt the terrace and the loggia and the gardens near the house. Winter, she had learned, was a good time for landscaping the valley where they would be concentrating on the spiral mounds and the pond. Verity, not surprisingly, had refused to dismantle the barn so that they could recreate a labyrinth there but she had agreed to surround it with a moat and Finn was designing a new, smaller maze that would be created in part of Clarabelle’s field. Verity had also opened up the chalk chamber below the building, just to make sure that there was nothing significant in there. It had proved much older than they had suspected, and was thought to be contemporary with the original garden rather than a Victorian farm addition. They had all pondered long and hard over why there would be an empty chalk pit in the center of the Tudor labyrinth until Johnny had suggested that it might have been a priest’s hole. “Or a treasure hole,” he had added with a wicked grin, and everyone had groaned.