Part One

FLOWERS

Lottie, June 1912

The girl walked down the wide staircase, through the house all the way to the cellars. She marched along the dank gloomy corridor then climbed up the steps into the bright glare of the glasshouse. The sun was high in the sky. Lottie walked out into the kitchen garden.

What is anger?

It is a fire, smouldering. Memories are pinches of gunpowder thrown into the flames, they ignite and explode. A person's mind, bellows breathing, seething in and out.

The girl strode across the terraced lawns and on through the jungle. She hoisted her long skirt and clambered over the fence and marched across the field. Her passage disturbed bullocks there. It made the beasts frisky. Perhaps it was the dark red of Lottie's skirt. Or perhaps they detected her preference for horses, and affected the spry skittishness of colts. She fancied that they cantered here and there for her approval, clumsily kicking their heels, but they were awkward lumpen creatures, and their ambulation held no beauty. Clouds billowed in the sky and blocked the sun.

Or ...

Anger is ice, at the centre of a snowbound waste. The frozen core of a heart and nothing will melt it, ever.

Lottie walked through the wood until she came to an area of coppiced hazel. There she slowed and scanned the ground. Soon she found what she was looking for: the wild flowers that resembled nettles at a lazy glance but did not sting. Yellow archangel. A dead-nettle with primrose-yellow flowers, it was easy to pass it by unremarked. You had to look closer to appreciate that each flower was shaped like an angel, its hood curved like a pair of wings.

Lottie picked half a dozen. She possessed little knowledge of flora, but had inherited a notebook in which her mother had pressed certain flowers, and added her drawings and observations, and these wild flowers the girl had committed to memory. The year inscribed in the front of the book was 1894. Lottie calculated that her mother had been two years older at that date than she herself was now. It stated in the notes that archangel was edible. 'Mixes nicely on the tongue with tomatoes and cheese,' according to the young Beatrice Pollard. Lottie sniffed the plant. Both flowers and leaves gave off an acrid smell. She walked on out of the wood.

Anger is pain. It is like some miserable affliction, a headache or gripe of the stomach, except a cure for it is something to be resisted. Rather, the pain should be nurtured.

'Thou didst march through the land in indignation. Thou didst trample down the nations in wrath.'

The girl strode on beside the stream. On a grassy slope rising from the opposite bank she saw a purple rash in the green grass. A patch of bugle. Another dead-nettle, its flowers a paler mauve than the leaves and stems. In the gloomy afternoon she stood and watched a bumblebee working the patch, floating from flower to flower, buzzing in close like some hovering inspector. In search of nectar.

But then drops of rain appeared on the water. If you watched closely each drop seemed not to fall from above but to rise up from beneath the surface. Lottie stepped over the stream and plucked six stems, and walked on.

In the meadow, she found to her surprise some last surviving fritillaries. Their purple chequered bells or heads hung on the tall slender drooping stems, like lanterns. She picked a few. She knew they would not last long once snapped from their roots or pulled from the soil, but they did not need to.

At the side of the lane into the village she spotted meadow cranesbill. Most of the flowers on each plant were still enclosed but some had opened, the five petals forming a shape like a saucer or plate. They were violet-blue, and marked with pale veins radiating from the centre, like paths, to draw the bees in.

In the yard Lottie did not seek a jar but laid the flowers directly upon the earth and kneeled down before the stone.

The vicar came out of the door to the church and stood in the porch looking out at the rain mizzling in the graveyard. He did not see the girl at first. He had been given an umbrella by his brother, but on the rare occasions he remembered to take it with him the rain inevitably held off. Usually he did not think of it, and the rain caught him out.

Then he saw the girl, kneeling at her mother's grave. He stepped out of the porch and walked over.

'Miss Charlotte,' he said.

The girl looked up. The Reverend Mr Doddridge loomed over her. He was an unnaturally tall man, lean and bony but broad shouldered. He had white hair and whiskers, and craggy features. He issued grim warnings from the pulpit, scolding his congregation, and when the readings were of Old Testament prophets Lottie pictured them as being much like him. She suspected that he had spent years wrestling with temptation in some desert place before coming to this hidden parish in the West Country. The rain did not appear to bother him.

'I was speaking to my mama,' Lottie said.

The vicar pondered the girl's statement. 'I am sure she hears you,' he said.

Lottie nodded. 'I told her that I do not believe she would have allowed it to happen.'

The vicar said he did not doubt it. He said that the rain was falling more heavily, Miss Charlotte was welcome to come to the vicarage. Mrs Dagworthy would give her hot chocolate and cake. A boy could be sent to the Manor for her father's gig to fetch her. Lottie said that she was grateful but would prefer to stay a moment longer here alone, then make her own way home.

'Mama may be able to hear me, Mr Doddridge,' she said. 'But can she help me?'

The vicar opened his arms, hands outstretched with palms up, as if to catch the rain. He looked at a loss.

'Only the Lord can help us,' he said. 'If we trust in Him.'

The girl thanked the priest. He nodded and walked away through the graveyard.

Lottie did not stay much longer. She put her hands to the ground and pushed herself up. She turned and walked away, as if to collect her thoughts from somewhere she had dropped them. Then she came back. She looked down at the flowers. Already they were wet and wilting, their pale colours fading. She should not stay.

'You know I have a governess, Mama,' she said. 'Ingrid. I have told you of her before. Oh, she is not so bad. I might have exaggerated her defects. But do you know what she told me? Something that she had read. "If we lose those we love, where shall we seek them? Where shall we find them? In heaven, or on earth?"'

Lottie sighed, and nodded to herself. Then she turned and walked out of the yard, through the lychgate and into the lane, and back towards her father's estate.

Part Two

A SLAVE

1

Leo, June 1912–May 1913

The boy stumbled in the night over dark earth. The land was silver. His steps were heavy. At first light in the waters of a stream he cleaned the charred red mud off his boots, and limped on in a kind of crouch that seemed best to allay the pain that racked many parts of his body. He saw where the sun rose and headed in the opposite direction, hunched over like someone with secrets from the light. He opened gates and closed them quietly behind him. He skulked close to hedgerows though on occasion he crossed pasture from one corner to its opposite. A herd of Ruby Reds chewed the cud and watched him. Where beasts were, so were men, and he wished to pass unseen. In the undergrowth of...