“Lucy?” Cleo was waving the coffee pot at her inquiringly. Lucy pushed her mug across with a word of thanks and Cleo poured, adding milk and stirring. “Verity has done a beautiful job on the barn, hasn’t she? I haven’t seen it since it was finished. It’s amazing.”

“It’s incredibly luxurious, but I haven’t really had the chance to explore it all yet,” Lucy said. “I fell asleep almost as soon as I’d arrived.” She felt confused that the woman in the red dress had disappeared, and that together with some lingering memory from the previous night made her shiver a little. “The place didn’t feel quite so warm and welcoming when I arrived last night,” she said, “but that was probably just my imagination and the fact I was exhausted.”

Cleo looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Oh, only that it was unnervingly dark and quiet, and it felt a bit...” Lucy paused. “A bit eerie.” She finished her second tart and scooped up the pastry crumbs. “Plus I had a weird dream. It’s not surprising, I suppose. The medication plus all the stuff going on in my head is going to take a toll.”

Cleo nodded. She topped up Lucy’s coffee mug. “What happened?”

“In the dream?” Lucy pulled a face. “First it felt as though I’d fallen into a snow globe. I was freezing cold, numb with it and totally lost. Then when I came round, I was wearing a Tudor gown and a pair of shoes that didn’t fit me and I felt as though I was occupying someone else’s personality.”

“That sounds to me as though everything you’re going through has left you questioning who you really are,” Cleo said, applying whipped cream lavishly to her French toast and sprinkling cinnamon sugar over the top. “You don’t recognize your outer self and it feels unfamiliar.”

“You can say that again,” Lucy said. Cleo loved dream analysis, her own and everyone else’s. Lucy wasn’t convinced by many of her sister’s interpretations but this one sounded plausible. Her whole identity was tied up with her career as a violinist and it had been thrown into confusion when she was taken ill so suddenly. Now she wasn’t at all sure who she was or what she was going to do.

“There was a man, a woman and a child in the dream as well,” she said. “It almost felt as though I knew him. It was very odd.”

“Dreaming about a stranger can symbolize how you feel about yourself,” Cleo said. “And a child could symbolize your creative energies springing forth and giving birth to new ideas and identities.”

“Well that would make sense of why the child was tottering along and falling over,” Lucy said. “I’m stumbling along a bit right now.”