She found the key safe on the wall by the garden gate, opened the cover and realized that she’d forgotten to ask Finn for the combination. Damn, she really didn’t want to have to walk all the way up to the cottage again and disturb him. If he was a gardener, he’d probably been hard at work since first light and wouldn’t welcome another interruption to his evening.

She turned on the torch on her phone and squinted at the keypad. She’d try the obvious first: 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot. Verity had always been convinced that there was a link between the name of the cottage and the Plot although she hadn’t been able to discover anything definite to confirm it. But the name had been one of the reasons Verity had bought the house, saying that she felt an affinity with the plotters as a result of her own career in explosives engineering. This had always struck Lucy as funny, though when she pointed out that terrorism rather than engineering had been the prime concern of Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and the rest of them, Verity had got a bit huffy with her.

There was a pleasing click as the compartment opened and a shiny silver key fell into Lucy’s hand. She opened the door, hoicked the suitcase over the threshold and turned on the lights, flooding the barn so brightly that she blinked. Everything outside immediately melted into blackness. Inside, though, it was spectacular, an entirely open space with a kitchen, dining area and sitting room downstairs framed by a two-story double-arched window. An open-tread wooden staircase led upward to a balcony landing and through an open bedroom door, Lucy glimpsed a modern four-poster bed hung with opulent draperies.

She stood for a moment staring at the space until a moth bumbled past her ear and reminded her to close the door. It shut behind her with the softest of clicks, leaving her with the oddest sensation of being trapped in a goldfish bowl. There was silence. She was entirely alone.

She’d lived alone before. She preferred it because she had always been so single-mindedly focused on her music career, which seemed to leave no time to invest in anything else important. It wasn’t the quiet that had sent the trickle of ice down her spine, though. It was the sudden knowledge that this silence was the future: Never again would she live in the enchanted world of the orchestra. There would be no preperformance excitement, no alchemy as the music came together, no swoop of elation when the last note had faded away. Instead there would be silence and she had to find another way to fill it. She looked down at the violin case. She didn’t really know why she had brought the instrument with her except that she had not been able to cut herself off from the past so completely. Not yet. She felt horribly lonely and afraid.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was within me an invincible summer...” She repeated the quote over in her mind; it had helped her not to give in to despair when the grief for her lost career had swamped her. She would be strong and she would find a way. Even so, the fact that it was high summer and everything was glowing and golden when inside she felt nothing but cold made her feel cut off from reality, depressed and alone. The bright lights flickered and for a second it seemed to Lucy that the shiny modern surroundings of the barn shimmered and disappeared, leaving the old sarsen and chalk walls bare and the cobbled floor dusted with hay. Then she blinked and the white walls and chrome fittings came into focus again. She felt light-headed and dizzy but told herself it was just tiredness. She wasn’t hallucinating. Both the anxiety and the vertigo were just products of a long and emotional day.