Chapter 1

Charlotte Duran Lowe wheeled her bicycle out of the bright blue front door of her cottage and down the path of her untidy garden, to the cobbled street beyond.

The village of Stoneford, on England’s southern coast, was as much as the passing centuries had organized it: a jumble of cottages gathered around a handful of cobbled lanes, leaded windows and front gardens filled with rockery and wildflowers. Some of the little houses still boasted thatched roofs. Others had surrendered to the necessity of waterproof tiles. But all retained their memories of the past, and if a restoration needed to be undertaken, the work required utmost care, inside and out.

Charlie’s route to work took her along the village’s main thoroughfare, past the storybook houses, and past The Dog’s Watch, a venerable coaching inn that, centuries before, had serviced carriages, horses, drivers and passengers. Past St. Eligius Church, with its clock-faced steeple and tumblestoned graveyard. Past a row of shops: newsagent, bakery, hardware, Indian takeaway, greengrocer and chemist. And past the Village Green, with its massive 300-year-old oak shading early morning walkers from the misty seacoast sun.

She paused to study the tree from the road. Some of its branches were bare. Others still bravely held onto their greenery. But there was a fresh carpet of brown leaves scattered onto the grass below.

The Village Oak was the symbol of the village, the mainstay of the green. The Village Oak was Stoneford.

The Village Oak, Charlie thought sadly, was dying.

And Stoneford itself was under a threat of its own. Redevelopment loomed, spurred on by a consortium led by two brothers, Ron and Reg Ferryman. Though they’d grown up in the village, they seemed to have no sense of the past, and they certainly had no feelings for a historically sensitive future.

The Village Green was on its way to being turned into luxury flats with million-pound views of the sea. And nearby Poorhouse Lane was destined to become a driveway leading to 25 luxury homes with an underground car park. These events were not unconnected, in anybody’s minds.

Charlie cycled on, unsettled and unhappy.

#

Stoneford Village Museum was housed in the building that had once been the St. Eligius vicarage. It was here that Charlie spent her days, immersed in her role as a Historical Guide and Interpreter, dressed in a Regency-era frock that would not have been out of place in a Jane Austen novel.

This morning she was explaining the museum’s latest display to a group of seniors from a posh assisted living home in Bournemouth, just along the coast to the west.

The Travellers Room was housed in what had once been the front room of the vicarage, and it told the story of the Gypsies who’d once populated the nearby New Forest.

Charlie led the group to her favorite exhibit, a beautifully decorated and restored vardo painted in brilliant red and sunny yellow, sky blue and polished gold.

“How many of you know how the term ‘Gypsy’ came into existence?” she asked.

“Stevie Nicks, 1981,” a dapper gentleman at the back piped up. “From the album, Mirage.”

“Nigel!” admonished his wife, a little thing who looked as though she’d been embarrassed by her husband for most of her married life.

“Number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100,” Nigel added.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Mrs. Nigel said to Charlie. “He used to be on the radio.”

“Not to worry,” Charlie smiled. “It was the second single released from that album, wasn’t it, and the second biggest hit after Hold Me.”

“A woman who knows her music!” Nigel exclaimed, obviously delighted.

“My husband was the musician,” Charlie said. “Knowledge acquired by default.”

She led the little gathering around to the side of the vardo, where there was a mockup of an encampment, with a tent, the makings of a fire, and a collection of well-used cooking pots.

“The term ‘Gypsy’ comes from the word ‘Egyptian’,” Charlie continued, “as people once believed this was where Gypsies, or Romani people, originated. In fact, evidence suggests the Romani came from central India, landing in Europe around the 14th century.”

“It’s a lovely caravan,” Mrs. Nigel ventured. “Is that what they lived in?”

“Yes and no,” Charlie replied. “Yes...but only after about 1850. Before that, the Travellers walked on foot, and carts were used to carry their possessions. They slept outdoors in canvas tents, like this one, slung over bent hazel twigs.”

“This is interesting,” Nigel said, picking up a deck of Tarot cards lying on top of an upended pot.

“Yes,” Charlie replied. “The Gypsies were well known for telling fortunes, usually for the benefit of the villagers at fetes and fairs. Among themselves, they tended to be less flamboyant. This deck is very old, but incomplete. It’s missing The Fool.”

“I imagine if you had The Fool, it would be worth a few quid,” Nigel guessed.

“So we’ve been told,” Charlie said. “But, not much chance of finding it, I’m afraid. It seems to have been misplaced in time...”

Charlie had discovered the deck of cards in Edwin Watts’ antique shop. They’d been sitting on a table, wrapped in an old scarf, beside a very rusty knife and a dangerous-looking sword. The knife and the sword were of no interest to Charlie — and Mr. Watts wanted far too much for them, in any case. But the cards were going for a song, and had intrigued her. There were painted figures in period clothing, wearing robes of gold and silver and blue. Some of the figures had armor and crowns, while others held staffs and chalices and swords.

And so she’d bought the cards herself, and loaned them to the museum, with the proviso that if the deck ever turned out to be worth anything, she was going to have them back.

“Now if you’d like to come around here,” Charlie continued, “Noah Roberts, our resident expert on Travellers — and a descendant of one of the New Forest Gypsy families — will give you a little talk about Romani Ways.”

Charlie left the pensioners in Noah Roberts’ capable hands and went back to her office. The room had been created out of the vicarage’s kitchen, and her desk was an ancient table salvaged from the vicar’s dining room. She sat down. Next task: working out a budget for her proposed pet project, a village sightseeing tour.

At the back of the vicarage, in a ramshackle shed that had survived both World Wars, but not the ravages of sea air upon old wood, there was a very old wagon in dire need of restoration. One day soon, when the money could be found, Charlie was going to have the wagon repaired. And, with the help of Horace Inkersby, a local farmer who kept heavy horses, she was going to launch a sightseeing service that would take visitors around the historical sites of the village.

This was assuming there would be anything historical left in Stoneford to show off to anyone, if the Ferryman Brothers got their way.

#

Some hours later, Charlie left for a walk. She did this every day, from one o’clock until two, combining her lunch break with an opportunity to stretch her legs, and a well-earned opportunity to think.

Charlie had lived in Stoneford all of her life. She knew its shaded lanes and its secret passages, its rolling, grassy fields and its wildflower meadows off by heart. She knew the village as well as she knew its history.

Plugging ear buds into her mobile and switching over to music, she let herself out through the wooden gate at the back of the Old Vicarage, and walked the short distance to the churchyard adjoining St. Eligius. She turned left onto a path that meandered between a collection of cottages, and emerged at the base of a rise that was just high enough to call itself a hill.

At the top of the hill, overlooking the village, sat a stately home which had seen finer days, but which still retained its classical dignity, in spite of its conversion to a three-star Bed and Breakfast.

There were historical documents in the Parish Council Office that identified the manor on the hill as having once belonged to Charlie’s ancestral great grandfather, Louis Augustus Duran. There were also documents tracing the history of her cottage, which she’d inherited from her father, and he’d inherited from his father, all the way back to her ancestral great grandmother, Sarah Elizabeth Foster.

There was a marriage notice in the St. Eligius church archives, confirming that on Saturday, the 30th of July, 1825, Sarah Elizabeth Foster had married Louis Augustus Duran.

But two years later, they’d sold the manor, for what was then a fairly substantial sum of money, to the family whose descendants had eventually turned it into the Bed and Breakfast.

Indeed, Sarah and Louis appeared never to have lived there as man and wife at all, and for some unfathomable reason, had chosen to begin their domestic life together in the little cottage at the bottom of the hill.

Charlie walked along the footpath at the base of Manor Rise, casting a glance up at what was now a graveled courtyard where the Bed and Breakfasters could leave their cars overnight. And that was only one of the enduring mysteries of her family’s past.

The greatest mysteries of all were Louis Augustus Duran and Sarah Elizabeth Foster themselves. So far, in two years of spare-time searching, Charlie had been unable to come up with any kind of information at all about them, prior to their marriage.

The St. Eligius Parish Records were extremely helpful when it came to descendants. The dusty volumes had given up details of christenings, marriages and burials of everyone who’d come after Sarah’s union with Louis.

But prior information about Sarah was another matter. Charlie suspected that Stoneford was not her birthplace, and that she’d arrived in the village at some point before 1825, from parts unknown.

Charlie had subscribed to an online ancestry site which was proving to be useful, but only in dribs and drabs, as information was only slowly being discovered and made searchable.

And since official records had only begun to be kept in 1837, they were of no use at all in trying to locate Sarah Foster’s forebears, or even her date and place of birth.

But if Sarah’s beginnings were difficult to pin down, her husband was even more of a puzzle.

Charlie turned off the footpath and trudged down the hill, doubling back to the main road that skirted the western edge of the Village Green. Here, there was a tiny bakery run by Clive and Rosa Parker that did a roaring trade over the summer, making up sandwiches and picnic baskets for visitors who planned on spending the day at the beach.

Charlie popped her head in through the open door — which was the signal for Rosa to create her special daily baguette. And while her lunch was in the process of being made, Charlie went into the newsagent’s on the corner and bought a chilled fizzy water in an expensive bottle, and then a potted geranium from the hardware store.

Paddy McDonald was on the pavement outside his grocery, polishing apples.

“You seeing Emmy Cooper today?” he asked, spotting Charlie.

“After work,” she said.

Paddy handed over an old-fashioned change purse, made of scuffled leather, with a well-worn kiss lock. “Left it in the lettuce,” he provided.

Charlie checked inside. Two pounds, a few pence in coins, and an elastic band. “Thanks, Paddy. I’ll make sure she has it back.”

Baguette, bottled water, change purse and plant in hand, Charlie carried on to the last stop of her daily walk, the graveyard attached to St. Eligius Church.

The oldest part of the cemetery, in common with the churchyards of all of England’s towns and villages, contained a collection of weathered tombstones in various stages of mossy topple and collapse. Sarah and Louis Augustus Duran were interred there, as were their children, Augustus and Emily, and their respective spouses. A few of their children were also there, but the rest had been caught up in the frenzy of relocation to cities during the urbanization of Queen Victoria’s rule.

Charlie’s great-grandparents were buried in a newer section of the graveyard, on the shady side of the church, where the polished granite markers had been civilized into orderly rows.

Charlie’s husband was buried there, too.

Sitting on the damp grass beside Jeff Lowe’s headstone, she removed a pink geranium that was outgrowing its little pot, and replaced it with the red one she had just bought. The back garden of her cottage was planted with many of these substitutions, a blazing riot of pungent color, celebrating Jeff’s life as much as declaring his death in a traffic accident, five years earlier.

“Today,” she said, unwrapping her baguette and screwing the lid off her fizzy water, “I was complimented on my knowledge of music. I blamed it all on you.”

It was not as if Jeff ever replied, but she could easily imagine his half of the conversation. It was an eccentricity she maintained, unashamedly, the same way her grandmother had kept her grandfather’s suits in a wardrobe in their bedroom, long after he’d died of cancer.

The interesting thing about sharing a village with a lot of one’s ancestors was the prevalence of present-tense relations.

Most of the members of Charlie’s family now lived elsewhere — including her parents, who had some years earlier retired to Portugal, and a sister and a brother who had long ago relocated to London. But there was still a smattering of uncles, aunts and cousins within the vicinity, and one of them was coming to see her now, limping through the churchyard with his cane, his bright Hawaiian shirt a brilliant splash against the shady grey stone walls of the church.

“Nick!” Charlie called, waving.

Nick Weller joined her, sitting on the grass. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. Chatting to Jeff. It’s been five years.”

Nick contemplated Jeff’s date of death. Five years to the day. He didn’t need reminding.

“How’s you?”

“I’m good. Been playing with sprites and tachyons.”

Nick lectured at a university in London for most of the year, but spent his summers in Stoneford. He had a wife and children somewhere — Charlie had met them. But they seemed not to like the English countryside much, and were always staying at their villa in Spain, or on their way to New York for shopping, whenever anyone asked after them.

“Sprites and tachyons,” Charlie mused. “Go on then, give me a few more clues.”

Nick showed her his mobile. On the little screen was a photo of something resembling a fountain of red particles, streaming up into a black sky from the top of an immense thundercloud.

“A sprite,” he announced, with obscure delight. “A massive electrical discharge that occurs during thunderstorms. It only lasts a nanosecond. And it’s exceedingly rare.”

Fiona, Nick’s wife, would not have been impressed. But Charlie was amused by her cousin’s obsession with electrical discharges and subatomic particles.

Nick changed the picture.

“And that’s an outer space sprite, shooting up from earth. They took that fantastic shot from the Space Station.”

Charlie peered at the little screen.

“Where’s the tachyon?”

“It’s hypothetical. You can’t see it. We don’t even know whether it exists.”

“If it did exist, what would it do?”

Nick put on the face and the voice he reserved for his first year physics students.

“Simply put, when matter approaches the speed of light, time slows down. As it reaches the speed of light, time stands still. Below the speed of light, we travel in space. Above the speed of light, we travel in time. Tachyons are particles that allow us to accomplish this.”

Charlie turned Nick’s mobile towards Jeff’s gravestone.

“Look, Jeff — Nick’s writing the next Doctor Who.”

Nick regained control of his phone.

“Under the right conditions, a tachyon event and a sprite event could combine to create an energy field that would be extremely conducive for time travel.”

“Wouldn’t that be interesting,” Charlie said. “What are the ‘right conditions’?”

Nick shrugged. “The most accepted theory seems to be a massive electrical discharge.”

“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could go back, Nick. Visit our ancestors ...solve all those little niggling mysteries...”

“You want to be careful with that thought,” her cousin said. “What would happen if you changed something — and ended up not being born, for instance.”

“Then I wouldn’t be around to worry about it, would I?” Charlie answered, cleverly. “Perhaps I’d end up being you.”

“Now you’re really frightening me,” Nick said.

“There’s that theory that you carry, in your genes, memories passed down from your ancestors. Your DNA remembers. Jeff used to joke that he’d descended from the same line as Hank Marvin. There’s a Rankin somewhere in his ancestry. He couldn’t explain his obsession with The Shadows any other way. A bit unlikely though, as I think all Hank Marvin's people came from up north. Newcastle.”

“Rankin?” Nick inquired.

“Yes, it was Hank Marvin’s name before he changed it. Brian Rankin.”

Charlie remembered why she’d asked Nick to meet her.

“I’m still having problems with my family tree program,” she said. “Can you fix it?”

As well as being a whiz at quantum physics, Nick was also Charlie’s computer guru.

“I think it must have some kind of virus,” she said. “It won’t save anything properly. And it keeps linking up all the wrong people.”

“I’ll download a new release,” Nick said. “I’ll pop in after dinner and do a clean install. And I’ll check for viruses. That should solve it.”

“I thank you. Our ancestors thank you.”

Nick got to his feet, slowly, using his cane for leverage.

Charlie picked a dead leaf off the new geranium plant, and leaned her head against Jeff’s grave marker as Nick limped away.

“There you are, love,” she said, wistfully. “Sprites and tachyons. That’s all that’s needed to turn back the hands of time.”

Chapter 2

At the end of the afternoon, after work, Charlie rode her bike towards the old wooden bench at the top end of the Village Green. There was old Emmy Cooper, in her usual spot beside the stone bird bath, feeding the pigeons crumbs from a brown paper bag.

“Hello,” she said, leaning her bike against the back of the bench. “Pigeons all right today?”

“That one’s got the mange,” Emmy said, pointing to a rather threadbare individual pecking at a bit of crust.

Charlie joined her on the long wooden seat.

“Toast from your breakfast?” she asked, conversationally.

Emmy lived alone in Poorhouse Lane, renting a tiny flat in one of the listed buildings the Ferryman Brothers owned. She was 89 years old and her memory was not what it once had been.

“Yesterday’s,” Emmy said. “It was boiled eggs this morning.”

Because she deliberately kept to herself, it was really only Charlie who ever bothered to stop and say hello, to sit with her for a few minutes, ask how things were and whether or not she was eating properly.

“And you remembered to switch off the stove, didn’t you?”

Emmy stopped to think.

“Yes. Because I was tidying my cupboards and I put Kenneth’s picture on the counter. I remember switching it off.”

Emmy had loved a flier who was shot down in World War Two, and had never, because of this, married. She did not, as far as anyone knew, have any living relatives anywhere in all of the United Kingdom.

Charlie took the change purse out of her bag, and gave it to Emmy.

“Mr. McDonald said you left this in the lettuce.”

“Dear me,” Emmy replied. “What will it be next?”

Last week it was her keys on the counter in the fish shop. Emmy muddled the hours of the day, and the days of the week. And forgot to wash. And change her clothes.

“I’ve been in touch with the parish council again,” Charlie said, carefully. She needed to tiptoe up to this conversation.

But Emmy knew what was coming.

“Not interested. I can manage on my own. Thank you.”

“You can’t, though. Not really.”

Only Charlie could say that to her without having her head bitten off. Emmy had no money, and she’d had an increase in her rent which she obviously couldn’t afford. She was going to be evicted by the Ferryman Brothers. She knew what Charlie was telling her was true. The Parish Council desperately needed to be involved.

“I’ve written down a telephone number, and a name. She’s lovely, this lady. Josie Griggs. So helpful.”

“Griggs,” Emmy sniffed. “Gypsy name. Wouldn’t trust her.”

Charlie studied the plaque on the stand beneath the birdbath, memorializing Mrs. Tamworth, an early women’s rights campaigner. At the age of 35 she’d donned a pair of her husband’s knickerbockers and turned cartwheels on the green, observed by all of her children and most of the villagers.

Even Mrs. Tamworth wouldn’t have had the patience required to deal with Emmy Cooper.

Back to the drawing board. She’d find another counselor who didn’t have a last name Emmy would consider suspicious.

#

It was, she thought, as she cycled on to the middle of the grassy triangle, where some members of the Committee to Save the Village Green and Poorhouse Lane were unfurling a large banner, almost ironic. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Village Poorhouse had looked after its inhabitants. There had been a matron to ensure everyone had proper clothing and regular meals. And the children had been apprenticed to local tradespeople, so that later in life, they would be able to earn a decent and honest living.

Until 1834, anyway, when the Poor Law changed and the poorhouses became workhouses and poverty was seen as a dishonorable state, requiring corrective servitude.

Ron and Reg Ferryman, Charlie thought, would have made excellent workhouse guardians.

She stopped her bike at the large banner, which was now unfurled and fastened to the low stone wall that ran the length of the west side of the green, facing the road.

SAVE STONEFORD VILLAGE GREEN AND POORHOUSE LANE FROM UNSCRUPULOUS DEVELOPERS, it proclaimed, in large red hand-painted letters.

The issue was not the Georgian houses that lined the tiny cobbled lane, eight on one side, six on the other, all constructed in the 1790’s, all Grade II listed. They were untouchable. The issue was Poorhouse Lane itself, a mere eight feet wide and 100 feet long, and the only way in to the vacant plot of land slated for development. It was the Ferryman brothers’ intention to turn the road into a truck route — a decision which would mean eight heavy vehicles an hour for at least four years.

That was the other thing that occupied a great deal of Charlie’s time, when she wasn’t at work. And in a way, it was all connected; because, interestingly, she’d recently discovered that the Village Green, together with that vacant plot of land, might once have been owned by her family.

In a dusty box in the Parish Council Office, she’d discovered a letter. It had been written by a woman named Catherine Collins to Sarah Elizabeth Foster in 1823, and Sarah’s ownership, and subsequent loss, of both plots of land was mentioned. But there were no further details and there was no singular piece of paper that actually proved it. The document which would have confirmed the chain of ownership — a deed to the properties — had apparently gone up in smoke at about the same time that Sarah Elizabeth Foster had taken Louis Augustus Duran’s hand in marriage.

For centuries it was believed that both the green and the vacant land at the end of Poorhouse Lane were under the protection of the village. That was until Ron Ferryman had come up with his grand designs for seaview flats and luxury houses.

Never mind fetes, carnivals and May Days, dog walkings and informal footie matches. Ron knew someone at the Land Registry Office, and had done his research. The horrible truth was out. In spite of there being no piece of paper to confirm it, the Village Green and the empty field had reverted to ownership, in 1825, by one Lemuel Ferryman. He was proprietor of The Dog’s Watch Inn and ancestor of Ron and Reg, who now comprised Ferryman Bros. (Property) Ltd. And the Ferryman Bros. were in no mood for historical conservation. They were planning a prosperous retirement somewhere warm, preferably in a country where English was understood, but was not necessarily the language of everyday life.

Charlie wheeled her bike across to the Village Oak, where Mike Tidman, an almost-retired arborist from Southampton, was on his knees on the ground beneath the spreading branches, collecting samples of earth from between and under the tree’s gnarled and massive roots.

“It’s definitely a poison,” he said, acknowledging Charlie’s presence. “Some kind of liquid suspension, poured directly into the soil here. Likely over a period of time, to counteract the tree’s ability to produce a new set of leaves as the old ones died. I suspect it was probably a herbicide designed to kill trees, and it was probably applied in a much higher dosage than would be required to do the job.”

“That’s deplorable,” Charlie said. “Can you save it?”

Mike pocketed the little plastic bags that held his collected samples.

“I’ll do my best,” he promised. “It’s criminal, what’s been done to this lovely old thing. And if it’s what I suspect it is, we’re going to have a fight on our hands. Whoever’s responsible ought to be hanged. Preferably from one of the higher branches.”

He stood up.

“Sorry. I’m letting my emotions get the better of me. I’m too sentimental, especially about trees.”

“We all are,” Charlie replied. “Especially this one.”

She glared at Ron Ferryman, with his Savile Row suit and his London haircut, standing at the eastern edge of the green, texting into his mobile.

“And you’re right. The person responsible for this ought to be charged with vandalism. At the very least.”

#

Charlie unlocked the front door of her cottage, and wheeled her bike inside.

Normally, she’d have left it in the garden, propped against the wall. But the sky was smudging over with ink-bottomed clouds, and Natalie at the museum had mentioned thundery showers along the coast. And so, it was best brought indoors, to preserve its rather ancient parts from the possibility of further rust.

Parking her bike at its rainy-day post beside an old dairy can that had been converted into an umbrella stand, Charlie pulled off her helmet. She kicked off her shoes, then collected the letters that had been dropped in through the mail slot halfway up the door.

The latest leaflet from the local wildlife charity, imploring her to Save the Hedgehogs by growing shrubbery borders in her garden and minutes from the most recent meeting of the Committee to Save the Village Green and Poorhouse Lane. The monthly newsletter from Jeff’s guitar club.

Charlie threw them all on the stove, an ancient cast-iron AGA that her mother had bought at an auction when Charlie was two. After Jeff had died, she’d given up cooking — real cooking, anyway, with gas rings and pots and pans. If anything had to be heated, there was a microwave on the table under the window, and a small convection oven beside it for baking or broiling or browning. The abandoned AGA was piled high with books, papers, old magazines, even older newspapers, and a stack of Jeff’s favorite CD’s that were perpetually in the process of being converted to mp3 and then put somewhere else.

She went through to the sitting room.

Embedded in the back wall was a huge open fireplace, where she could easily imagine her forebears sitting on chilly winter evenings, faces lit by the crackling flames, rain-damped shawls and stockings draped over chair backs to dry. It was a grand but necessary cousin to the much smaller fireplace in the kitchen, which had long ago been converted into the alcove where the AGA lived.

In the sitting room, too, was an old second-hand upright piano. Jeff had bought it for Charlie not long after they’d married. She’d played it often when Jeff was alive, but since his death, it had slowly reverted to the same fate as the AGA, an unused appliance littered with CD’s, random sheet music, bits of notepaper scribbled with song titles and singers’ names.

Facing the big open fireplace was a venerable wooden desk that had always been there. Its drawers squeaked in protest when they were opened, and stubbornly stuck fast when she tried to shut them again. But it was solidly constructed, and it was immense. One did not merely sit at this desk, one occupied it.

Antique though it was, the desk was entirely up-to-date when it came to technology. There was Charlie’s laptop. And things attached to it which charged her mobile and an iPod. There was a hub that routed a Wi-Fi signal, a printer, a scanner and a wireless mouse.

And there was a timepiece. It was clever — it looked like one of the melting clocks in Salvador Dali’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory. Charlie’d bought it on a whim from an online shop. She wasn’t a particular fan of Dali. Her imagination had been captured more by the whimsical idea that time was something that could bend and drip, instead of being fixed to rigid hands and perfunctory tick-tocks.

Charlie didn’t bother to change out of her Regency frock. It was actually quite comfortable, with no confining waistbands and a low-cut neckline that was pleasant in the heat of a summer’s afternoon. She plugged her mobile into its recharger, set it to play music and switched on her laptop.

Its default page was Stoneford Village Online, which had the Village Oak as its welcoming photo. It was a glorious picture, taken two summers earlier, when the tree was in full leaf, branches still spreading and healthy.

Charlie was shocked at the difference between then, and now. What was happening now was devastating.

Anger was something she rarely felt. She’d wanted to be angry five years earlier, when Jeff was speeding home with Nick after a get together of pals to celebrate a pending nuptial. On the other side of the road, an irresponsible git who’d been drinking all night had lost control of his Porsche. He’d slithered over a patch of wet leaves and smashed headlong into Jeff’s old Nissan, killing him and seriously injuring Nick.

She’d wanted to be angry then. But nothing had come, defying all of the rules of grief, completely skipping over Step Three of the agreed-upon stages. Completely skipping over all of the steps, really, except shock, and loneliness.

And then, after about two years, Charlie discovered she’d reached Step Seven, and that she’d ended up in a kind of mute acceptance, as if all of her emotions had been put on hold. She would not be sad. She would not be happy. She would not love. Or hate. She would not be anything, except what her job at the museum required her to be. And it was an incomplete Step Seven, because the rest of it was supposed to include an element of hope.

And there was no hope.

But now, there seemed to be an emotion. A strange kind of sense, struggling to beat its way out into the open. Something she’d not experienced since she was a child, hurling herself to the floor over a perceived personal injustice, kicking her legs in the air and shrieking at the top of her little lungs.

It was anger. No, it was rage.

Pure, unadulterated, focused, rage.

Charlie stood up.

Her rage was directed squarely at the Ferryman Brothers, for daring to impose their selfish wills on her, and on the other villagers of Stoneford. For daring to evict an elderly woman whose family had lived in the village for as long as anyone could remember.

She stormed through the kitchen, her anger rising.

For threatening to wreck a small road and make life dangerously miserable for all of its inhabitants.

For daring to destroy the enduring symbol of Stoneford’s history, the Village Oak.

Charlie slammed the kitchen door of her cottage, and with her head down, fists balled, walked purposefully down her cobbled lane. She crossed the main road and cut through the Village Green, then turned towards the row of establishments on the eastern side of the grassy triangle.

There were two solicitors’ offices, the Stoneford News, a hairdresser’s, Oldbutter and Ballcock Funeral Directors. And the little place that had once been Patrick’s Coffee Shop, but which had since been taken over by Ron Ferryman as his planning office.

It was past six and the office was shut. But Charlie knew the layout of Patrick’s well, having spent a summer when she was at school behind the counter, dishing out doughnuts and slices of cake, frothy coffees and hybrid teas.

She knew that there was a back door to Patrick’s and that there had once been a spare key to that back door hidden under a flowerpot. It was still there now, eight months and one superficial renovation later.

And it still fit into the lock, which Ron Ferryman had evidently never thought to have changed.

The rage was still burning as she let herself inside. She saw the desk upon which Ron Ferryman’s laptop sat. She saw the rolled up plans, his telephone, his nameplate. A certificate, presented to Ron by the Parish Council, for a donation that had helped fund activities at the Stoneford Youth Club. A photo, in a heavily embellished silver frame, of Ron and Reg, turning over a symbolic shovelful of sod at what had become a garish pink block of flats along the coastal road. And his nameplate.

That picture was the first to go, flung to the slate tile floor and smashed into pieces.

There.

Serves you right, you bastards.

Charlie fought back sobs as she seized the cardboard tubes and slammed them into the edge of the desk, over and over, fracturing their protective shells and tearing to bits the paper blueprints inside.

Her ragged tears would not be contained. And neither would her anger, exploding into a maelstrom of indignant fury.

She picked up the laptop and hurled it to the floor. Not once. Not twice. Six times in total, until its lid was bent and its screen was shattered and its keyboard was in three pieces, keys scattered everywhere like a boxer’s teeth.

“And this,” she cried, giving the screen an extra few smashes with what was left of the silver picture frame, “is for Emmy Cooper, you greedy pig.”

Charlie was kneeling on the floor, in full mid-smash, when Ron Ferryman unlocked the front door and let himself into the office.

Charlie froze.

If she had been thinking rationally, she would not have stood up at that precise moment and exited through the back door, giving Ron Ferryman a perfectly good view of her retreating back.

If she had been thinking rationally, she’d have crawled away, quickly and quietly, before Ron Ferryman had a chance to switch on the lights and discover his laptop and picture in pieces on the floor.

But Charlie was not thinking rationally. She was driven by fear and the overwhelming need to flee. And she was determined to put enough distance between herself and Ron Ferryman that he wouldn’t be able to follow her, or even determine which way she’d gone, once she’d disappeared into the early evening.

Heart pounding, her breath ragged, Charlie retreated into the jumble of little streets on the eastern edge of the village, purposely complicating her retreat. She was aware, as logic displaced rage and panic, that she had been seen. And she would likely now be arrested for vandalism. Charged, found guilty, and sent to prison.

Disgraced. She’d lose her position on the Committee. Lose her job, her cottage, her self-respect...

Gentle Charlie, who had never lifted a finger against anyone.

Placid Charlie, who’d fallen all over herself apologizing with mortification when she’d accidentally walked out of Asda with a packet of crisps that she hadn’t paid for.

Quiet Charlie, who spent her lunch hour talking to her poor dead husband in the churchyard...

It was a nightmare. It was worse than a nightmare. It was real.

What, oh what, had she done?

Chapter 3