‘Good morning, my love,’ Rosalind said in a low voice. ‘It’s Christmas Eve and we’ve moved Alex over to the château. I hope it won’t be too long before you wake up and the doctors allow you to come home, too. We’re all waiting for you.’ She hesitated, hoping to see a flicker of his eyelids or the slightest movement of his fingers, but he remained motionless. She tried again, describing the meal that they were preparing and all the people who were going to share the festivities with them. In the end she found herself babbling about anything that came into her head. After what seemed like an eternity she rose to her feet and kissed him on the cheek. It was heart-breaking to see the man she had married turned to a living statue by a tragic accident. She felt guilty for recoiling from him when perhaps she should have taken him in her arms and attempted to breathe life into his inert body. The contrast between Piers and Alex, who despite his injury was bubbling over with life and warmth, was so marked that she was suddenly angry.

‘This is all your fault, Piers Blanchard,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Perhaps if you’d stayed at home more, instead of devoting all your time to business, you wouldn’t have ended up like a dead fish on a marble slab.’ She backed away from the bed. ‘If you’d shown me more consideration I wouldn’t find my old feelings for Alex coming back to haunt me.’

She left the room and hurried past Sister Dominique. One word of sympathy from anyone would be enough to make her break down the iron reserve she had built up since finding Piers in such a dire state. She crossed the street and entered the garden but she was still struggling with a maelstrom of emotions, and instead of letting herself into the château she fought her way through the undergrowth to what must once have been a pleasure garden. Patches of snow remained beneath the shrubs and the paths were overgrown with weeds and the trailing fronds of ivy. Thorny shoots of brambles clutched at her skirts, but Rosalind shook free of them and kept walking with no particular aim other than to get away from a situation where she was virtually helpless. She crossed what must once have been a lawn fit for a game of croquet but was now hummocky with coarse tufts of couch grass, and she headed blindly for a hawthorn hedge. She could hear the waves beating on the shore at the foot of the cliffs, and she had a sudden longing to climb down to the beach, as she had done so many times at home.