Felbury, 1985

Chapter 1: The Road to Felbury

The hedgerows had grown taller than Cynthia remembered, or perhaps she had simply stopped growing. Either way, the lanes approaching Felbury felt narrower, more enclosed, as if the countryside itself were closing in around the hired car. She sat in the back seat with her hands folded on her lap, watching the green walls of hawthorn and elder slide past the window, and tried to feel something appropriate.

Her father was dead. Edward Hessop, seventy-nine years old, felled by a stroke in his study three days ago. Her mother had telephoned with the news in that clipped, efficient voice she used for all communications, as though reporting a change in the weather. "Your father died this morning. The funeral will be Thursday. You needn't trouble yourself if it's inconvenient." The word inconvenient had carried a peculiar weight, as though Prudence were offering her daughter an escape route and daring her to take it.

Cynthia had not taken it. She had booked a flight from Edinburgh, arranged a hire car from the station at Dorminster, and packed a black dress she hadn't worn since a colleague's funeral two years prior. She was fifty-five years old, a senior lecturer in medieval history at the university, unmarried, childless, and about to set foot in Felbury for the first time in over two decades.

The driver, a young man with ginger hair and an optimistic disposition, had attempted conversation twice. Both times Cynthia had answered in monosyllables, and he had retreated into a companionable silence, broken only by the creak of the steering wheel as he navigated the turns.

"Not far now," he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

"No," she agreed.

The village appeared gradually, as it always had: first a farm gate, then a row of cottages, then the squat tower of St. Dunstan's rising above the trees. The war memorial at the crossroads. The post office with its faded red awning. The pub—the Ploughman's Rest—with hanging baskets that someone had filled with winter pansies, their purple faces nodding in the November wind.

It was all exactly as she remembered, and yet it was not. There was a quality of strangeness to it, the way a dream can replicate a familiar place with perfect accuracy and still feel wrong. Cynthia supposed the strangeness was in her, not in the village. Felbury had continued without her. She was the one who had changed.

The driver turned up the hill past the church and followed the lane to Hessop House, which sat behind a stone wall at the edge of the village, surrounded by mature beeches that Edward had planted when he was a young man. The house was Georgian, symmetrical, built of pale limestone that had darkened with age to the colour of weak tea. It was handsome in a stern, undemonstrative way—rather like Edward himself.

Cynthia paid the driver, collected her bag, and stood at the gate for a moment. The front door was painted the same dark green it had always been. The brass knocker—a lion's head—gleamed. Her mother kept things polished.

She let herself in.

The hallway smelled of beeswax and lavender, with something else underneath—something medical and faintly sweet. Illness had been here recently. The grandfather clock in the corner ticked with the same ponderous authority it had possessed when Cynthia was a child, measuring out the silence in the house the way it always had.

"Mother?"

No answer. Cynthia set down her bag and walked through to the kitchen, where she found Prudence sitting at the long oak table with a cup of tea and the funeral arrangements spread before her in neat piles. Prudence Hessop was eighty-one years old, thin as a blade, with white hair pinned in a chignon and eyes that had lost none of their sharpness. She wore a grey cardigan over a white blouse, and her posture was as rigid as a woman half her age.

"Cynthia." Prudence did not rise. She looked at her daughter with an expression that might have been relief or might have been apprehension—it was difficult to tell with Prudence, whose face had always been a locked door.

"Hello, Mother."

They did not embrace. They had not embraced in years, and the absence of the gesture had calcified into a kind of tradition. Cynthia sat down across the table and accepted the cup of tea that Prudence poured from a pot that was already waiting, as though her arrival had been precisely timed.

"The funeral is at eleven tomorrow," Prudence said. "Reverend Gooding will officiate. I've arranged the flowers. White lilies—your father preferred them, though I always found them funereal even before they had cause to be." A thin, humourless smile. "The Templetons will come, and the Brierleys, and Dr. Fanshawe, and various others from the parish council. I've ordered sandwiches from the Ploughman's Rest for the reception here afterward."

"That sounds well organised," Cynthia said.

"Your father left detailed instructions. He was always thorough about arrangements." Prudence sipped her tea. "Your old room is made up. The sheets are fresh. I put a hot water bottle in an hour ago, but it will have cooled by now."

"Thank you."

A silence settled between them, the kind that had always filled the spaces in their conversations, thick and resistant as clay. Cynthia looked around the kitchen. The Aga was the same one from her childhood, racing green, radiating warmth. The dresser still held the blue and white china. The window above the sink still looked out onto the back garden, where the lawn sloped down to the line of linden trees that marked the edge of the property.

The linden walk. She could see it from here, even in the fading light—a double row of trees, their branches bare now, forming a kind of avenue that led from the garden gate to a small stone folly at the far end. Her father had built it the summer she was eight. She remembered the workmen, the noise, the disruption. She remembered being told to play elsewhere.

"How long will you stay?" Prudence asked.

"A few days. I need to sort through Father's things, if you'd like help with that."

Something shifted in Prudence's expression—a tightening around the mouth, a flicker in the eyes. "There's no rush. I can manage."

"I'm sure you can. But I'm here, so I may as well be useful."

Prudence regarded her for a long moment. "His study is as he left it. I haven't touched anything in there. I haven't—" She stopped, pressed her lips together, and looked down at the funeral papers. "Well. You'll want to freshen up before dinner. There's a casserole in the Aga."

Cynthia recognised a dismissal when she heard one. She took her bag upstairs to her old bedroom, which was exactly as it had been when she was thirteen—the single bed with its white coverlet, the bookshelf with her childhood volumes still arranged in alphabetical order, the watercolour of Felbury church that her father had hung above the desk. It was a museum of a childhood that had ended abruptly, preserved under glass.

She sat on the bed and looked out the window at the darkening garden. The linden trees stood like sentinels in the dusk, their bare branches reaching upward like the fingers of buried hands.

She shook the image away. She was tired from the journey, that was all. Tired and unsettled by the strangeness of being here, in this house, in this room, after so many years.

She unpacked her bag, hung her black dress in the wardrobe, and went down to eat the casserole with her mother in a silence that neither of them attempted to break.