I am really not sure why I am writing this. A foolish whim by a foolish old lady and it will probably sit in a box unread and decay much like its writer when Death makes his careless decision. But perhaps someone will find it. Someone will care enough to read it and somehow I know this is what will happen.

Hetty snorted and slammed down her fountain pen. Pompous stuff! She could hear Richard saying the very same thing. He had always hated any whiff of pretension. She smiled. Richard and Edward. The aunts. Papa. Dear Peter. She hadn’t allowed herself to think of them all for such a long time – had been too busy tagging on to other people’s lives. She sat back to ease her stiff shoulders. Gazing at the view from the window in the sitting room, where she had placed her desk, she realised she had always been squeezed into other people’s lives.

‘A veritable cuckoo,’ she said out loud to the emptiness. ‘I’ve never, until now, had the luxury of being myself, of having my own life, as I want it.’ She glanced around the sitting room of her little cottage. ‘And I’ve never had a home of my own until I moved here.’

It was all the fault of that pesky young curate at the village church. He was the one who had suggested that she write up her life. He seemed to think she’d had an eventful one – she’d certainly lived through a time of great change, of great tragedy.

She picked up the pen again.

I was a young girl when I went to the big house…

Chapter 1

April 2000, Clematis Cottage, Stoke St Mary, Herefordshire

She was mad, they’d said. Utterly mad.

Rachel stood with her hands on her hips and surveyed her new home. Buying this little house was the only truly impulsive thing she had ever done. She swallowed; there was no going back. It was all hers now. Clematis Cottage belonged to her.

The house in question was tiny: little more than a two-up, two-down but pleasingly symmetrical, with windows flanking a satisfyingly solid red front door. A straight path led up through what must have once been an old-fashioned garden.

That was the good news.

It had been six months since Rachel had seen it last. She’d forgotten the ivy growing up the walls and across the windows – choking the brickwork and stealing the light. She’d forgotten the crazily dangling guttering. She’d forgotten the five-foot-high weeds obliterating the front garden.

She was mad, they’d said. Perhaps she was.

Rachel turned her back on the house and faced its view instead. This was what had sold it. The cottage stood on rising land, some way from the rest of the village of Stoke St Mary and could be reached only by a rutted track. The farmland behind sloped gently upwards, but in front of the house there was nothing but glorious open countryside.

The estate agent had said that spring was when Herefordshire was at its finest. Mr Foster had been a nice old boy, very different from the gelled-up-haired and shiny-suited types in London and she’d dismissed him as eccentric. She’d been wrong. She’d first seen the cottage in October and thought the landscape beautiful then, clothed in crimson and brown. But now, in early April, it was magnificent.

To her right she could see the baldy-smooth Brecon Beacons and beyond the jagged mountains of Wales loomed. Her eyes followed a sweep of hill to where the river valley sank and then rose again towards the east. Isolated houses were dotted about burnt-sienna fields, vast patches of a yellow so vivid it hurt her eyes interspersed ploughed fields and the apple orchards yet to blaze with blossom.

The furniture removers had finally gone. They’d backed the van, in a haze of dust and diesel fumes, down the track that led to the village and the outside world. Rachel felt her shoulders drop and exhaustion creep in. She turned back to scrutinise her new home once again. Behind it, the curving slopes of farmland seduced. Each field, green or red, was shining with fertile promise. Rachel tried not to look at the roof of the cottage; the choking moss and missing tiles were a symphony of neglect and future expense.

Was she mad? Her friends might yet be right. When she’d announced her decision to leave London and set up home in this tiny village in an isolated part of an isolated county they had forecast doom, gloom and a hasty retreat back to ‘civilisation’. No matter how much she tried to persuade them, they all thought it was a mistake.

A cottage?

In where?

On your own?

But Rachel was to be thirty soon. That’s

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