Now in middle age, she is still looking for a fresh mould into which to pour her energies. Giving the wooden club a thoughtful twirl, she is struck by an idea – but what starts as a brilliantly idealistic plan is derailed by a connection with Mattie’s militant past, one which begins to threaten every principle that she stands for.

‘Essential . . . Evans is a brilliant storyteller’ Stylist

READ ON FOR THE OPENING CHAPTERS . . .

PART 1

1928

MATTIE ALWAYS CARRIED a club in her handbag – just a small one, of polished ash. That was the most infuriating aspect of the whole episode: she’d actually been armed when it happened.

The New Year’s Day fair had been audible from the moment she’d left the house – a formless roar that receded as soon as she turned off the track and took the path through the woods. The quickest route to the Underground station was along the narrow lane to Hampstead, but there was (as she’d pointed out to The Flea only this morning, apropos of their neighbour’s new motor-car) very little point in living with the Heath absolutely on one’s doorstep if one didn’t take every opportunity to tramp across it. Besides the exercise, it was a rare walk that didn’t provide one with at least a nugget or two of brain-food, as evinced by Mattie’s December column in the Hampstead & Highgate Express in which she’d compared a dead duck, frozen into the pond, with the Prime Minister’s current position. She’d been bucked by the news that the paper had already received thirteen letters in reply, several of them furious.

Last year’s beech-mast crunched pleasingly underfoot. It was a day of splendour, the air still, the sky cloudless between bare branches, every vista possessing the hard-edged brilliance of cut glass: all was ruled lines, crisp sounds, sunbeams like polished stair-rods – a marvellously true, sharp world.

Lately, Mattie’s view of it had been becoming increasingly impressionistic. ‘I find I am living in a perpetual Pissarro,’ she had remarked to the optician. ‘Aesthetically pleasing, perhaps, but I miss the detail.’

‘I’m afraid that a deterioration in eyesight is inevitable as we get older, Mrs Simpkin.’

‘Miss Simpkin. And I am not yet sixty; I’d really rather you didn’t speak as if I were creaking along in a bath-chair.’

Her new eye-glasses had restored clarity; she might now be walking through one of the landscapes of that tiresome moralist Holman Hunt.

In a tree above her there was a vicious chuckle, and she looked up to see a magpie sidling along a branch, the crown of its head marked with an anomalous white patch, like a tonsure.

‘Afternoon, Abbot, not seen you in the garden for a day or two. Busy dismembering blue tits, no doubt.’

It cocked its head, its wicked gaze fixed upon her. Had she been responsible for naming the species, she would have chosen vigilans rather than pica as its suffix; thieves, they might be, but their watchfulness was paramount. The Abbot glanced over Mattie’s shoulder and she turned, automatically, to check behind her.