But Clara disliked Malachy Campbell, and she didn’t approve of keeping dogs in cages. And also, there was the light on the water, the mist, the peacefulness … To Clara’s eyes, in that moment, the children and dogs on the boat seemed to belong to a different world, an enchanted place like a fairy tale, or poetry.

Tomorrow, maybe, if they were still here, she would return and introduce herself. But right now Clara tiptoed away, carefully, so as not to disturb the feeling she’d not had for a very long time, that anything was possible.

Chapter Three

If you could hug yourself while you run, Lotti would be doing it as she ran home through the woods up Barton Lane.

After the awful loneliness of school, two new friends!

In one day!

Granted, neither had had any choice in the matter. She had stolen one and broken into the home of the other. Nonetheless, she felt giddy with the joy of it.

The lane began to climb. Lotti stopped running to catch her breath and felt a stab of panic as Federico raced ahead.

What if he carried on running and didn’t come back?

What if he wasn’t her friend at all? What if …

Yip! Yip! Yip!

Federico hurtled back down the lane, straight into her arms.

“I’ll never leave you!” he seemed to tell her with his ecstatic, wriggling body.

“Never, never, never!” Lotti replied, hugging him close.

The woods gave way to open hillside. This had been a favorite walk when Lotti’s parents were alive. Together, Lotti, Théophile and Isobel had crunched through winter snow, lingered in spring’s flowering gorse, lain in the summer grass to listen to the skylarks sing. On the way home, if Lotti was tired, Papa had carried her on his back, snorting and pawing the ground like a pony. Lotti loved every tree, every stone, every curve of the hills surrounding Barton Lacey, but there was no time to stop and look at them. If she was to be back in time for supper, neat and tidy as her aunt liked, she would have to hurry.

And yet her footsteps dragged.

“They can’t stop me keeping him,” she had said to Ben, and for as long as she was planning to rescue Federico, Lotti had pretended to herself that this was true because she wanted very much to save him. But the closer she got to home, the less realistic this seemed. Papa would have celebrated Federico’s rescue. He loved animals. And Mama would have been pleased too, because she hated any form of cruelty. But Uncle Hubert and Aunt Vera?