Chapter One

      Early mornings in Avalon were among Tess Power’s favourite times of the day. On a weekend, nine-year-old Kitty would sleepily climb into her bed and snuggle up to her mother. And sometimes – only sometimes, because he often forgot – Zach would bring her a cup of tea in bed. This would never happen on a weekday like today, when Zach remained buried under his duvet until she hauled him out to go to school.

      ‘Teenagers need extra sleep, Ma,’ he’d plead. ‘It’s official: I read it on the Internet. Ten minutes more …’

      Anything to do with her two beloved children made her happy – unless it was detention for Zach or an argument with Kitty over eating any foodstuff which could be classed as a vegetable: ‘I hate broccoli and tomatoes and all greens, so there!’

      That aside, Zach and Kitty’s existence made Tess giddy with happiness. But there was something special about weekday mornings like this one, when she would slip out while the children were still sleeping and take Silkie, the family’s fawn-coloured whippet, for a walk in the woods beside the home where she’d grown up.

      Up here with the wind whistling around them it felt as if Tess and Silkie were the only creatures in the world. As they approached the abbey ruins, Silkie suddenly turned and ran with easy greyhound grace over fallen leaves and twigs in the direction of the great house. Tess hesitated a moment before following. Even though she came up here almost every day for a bit of early morning meditation while gazing out to sea, she rarely went too close to Avalon House.

      It was nearly two decades since she had left her old home, had watched it sold to strangers, knowing how desolate her father would have been if he’d lived to see it. And despite that lapse of time the pain had not lost its edge, so she tended to steer clear of the house, rarely venturing into the grounds, let alone inside.

      Silkie, thrilled with this rare adventure, had found a path through the undergrowth. Tess didn’t know what was drawing her towards Avalon House, but she followed, picking her way gently through the brambles and briars that had taken over the beautiful gardens her father had worked so hard to maintain. He had loved that garden, and it was strange that neither Tess nor Suki, her older sister, had shown even the slightest interest in gardening. Back then, they’d looked on gardening as a grown-up’s pastime. Now, Tess found that the smell of freshly dug earth took her back to the lovingly tended gardens of the house at the end of Willow Street and awakened an overwhelming sense of loss.

      Stop being so melodramatic, she told herself briskly, lots of people have to move from the house they were born in!

      Yes, that was the attitude. Show some Power backbone.

      She marched on, determined to have a good walk. She was perfectly able to approach the house and look at it and check how far into disrepair it was falling. The American telecoms millionaire who’d bought it ten years ago had lost all his money and now there was no chance that he and his wife would come here to restore the house to its former glory.

      Avalon House was not the most beautiful piece of architecture, but it was certainly majestic, and its hotchpotch of styles reflected the fluctuating fortunes of the de Paors. There was a Victorian great hall, a Norman tower that nobody was ever allowed in because it was a danger zone, and a crumbling Georgian wing. The entire place was shabby and decaying when Tess and Suki were children. They’d lived in the most modern part of the house, which dated back just over a century; despite the vast space, the only inhabitable parts of the old building were the kitchen, the library with its panelling and huge fireplace, and the back stairs that led to the bedrooms.

      The De Paor fortune had long since vanished, leaving no cash for fires or modern heating. As a child, Tess had been conditioned to turn the lights off and to put as many blankets as she could on the bed to keep out the icy breeze that wound up from the coast to the house on the hill. Kids from the village school used to tease her about her big home, but once they’d actually been there, they were less likely to do so.

      However, none of her schoolfriends had Greek goddesses, albeit crumbling and dressed with lichen, in their gardens. Nor did they have an eighteenth-century family silver teapot (one of the last items to be sold) or huge oil paintings of dusty, aristocratic ancestors staring down at them from the gallery. Her father had held on to the paintings till the end, convinced they were worth something.

      Now Tess knew better. None of the portraits had been by important painters, and no one had been interested in paying a vast sum for someone else’s ancestors.

      Yet the house and the name had meant something in Avalon, and people had instinctively placed Tess in the category of elite. It didn’t matter that her clothes were threadbare or that she had jam sandwiches for lunch, she was a De Paor, although the name had been anglicized to Power many years before. She lived in a big house. Her father wore elegant, if somewhat tatty, riding clothes to the village shop and spoke in clipped British tones.

      Only one person in her younger life had ever seemed impervious to the patina of glamour about her name and her home: Cashel Reilly.

      Tess didn’t do regrets. Didn’t believe in them. What was the point? The past was full of hard lessons to be learned stoically, not memories to be sobbed over. But it was a different story with Cashel Reilly.

      How ironic to be dwelling on memories of Cashel and heartbreak when she’d come here this morning to have a serious think about Kevin, herself and the separation.

      Nine months earlier, when the cracks in their marriage became too wide to pretend they weren’t there, she and Kevin had both agreed that counselling should help. One of her husband’s better qualities was the way he was open to ideas other men wouldn’t dream of countenancing. There had never been any danger of him dismissing her suggestion that they see a marriage counsellor.

      ‘We love each other,’ Kevin said the day she’d suggested it, ‘but …’

      That ‘but’ contained so much.

      But we never spend any time with each other any more. But we never make love. But we lead separate lives and are happy to do so.

      The counsellor had been wonderful. Kind and compassionate and not hell-bent on keeping them together no matter what. As the weeks went by – weeks of date nights and long conversations without argumentative statements starting ‘You always … !’ – Tess began to face the truth she’d wanted not to see.

      Their marriage was over. Living with Kevin was like living with a brother, and had felt so for years.

      There was no fierce passion. If she was entirely honest, there never had been. Kevin was the man she’d fallen for on the rebound. She’d been twenty-three then, still a romantic, vulnerable. Now, at the age of forty-one, she no longer dreamed of a knight on a white horse racing to save her. Nobody saved you, Tess had discovered; you had to do that yourself. Yet some part of her longed for the sort of love that had been missing from her relationship with Kevin right from the start. You couldn’t rekindle a