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factories. She ruled off the back of the lawn with a hedge, the tiniest of gaps in the centre to allow one person only to pass. Beyond that, the garden billowed, a riot of thorny rose beds flanked by shrubs that not even Mr Camlett recognised, so overgrown that you could not tell where one ended and the next began. The oldest trees Celia had ever seen in a garden grew around it, the bottom of their trunks thick and furled with age. Behind it all was an old pond,with a dried-out fountain in the middle, green and stagnant, the edges untidy with weeds and frizzed with grass, a great willow tree hanging over the water. Verena hated it all; she fenced it off with the hedge and planted trees in front so she would not have to see it from her bedroom. It was like the room with all the broken things in a house, the door you did not open, and it was Celia’s favourite place. If she just crept under the willow next to the pond and past the red flowering bush, there was a patch of soil and a rock where she could sit. Even though she had grown two inches since last summer, she could still just about perch herself there without the shrub scratching her eyes. She loved the darkness and the smell of soil, the feeling that what she had was hers alone. In the spring, daffodils flowered next to the stone, and in summer, she watched the violets bud by the moss. She could stay for years, she thought, emerge and still be the same, while everyone else had become aged and grown. When she was younger, she had thought it was a place where fairies played, their tiny feet touching the stones, leaving no trace.
    She stared at the leaf in her hand. In the flower press on her windowsill, she had two pansies from her spot in the garden. She had picked them yesterday, delighted by how the more you stared at them, the more it seemed quite amazing how perfectly joined together was the whole thing: stem linked to leaves and petals dropping from their green tip behind. She thought she had never seen anything quite as marvellous as a pansy. She touched the screws on the edge of the flower press. She would just open them, see how it was getting on, even though she knew it would spoil the effect.
    There was a heavy knock on the door and Jennie poked her head around. ‘Come on, miss! They will all be waiting!’ She bustled into the room and started pulling at Celia’s dress. ‘Sir Hugh will be here in a minute!’
    ‘Is this a German dish?’ Sir Hugh poked at the plate in front of him. ‘I fail to recognise it.’ He sat poker upright, eyes crinkled around his monocle, his moustache quivering as he spoke.
    ‘It is chicken in wine,’ Verena replied. ‘French influenced.’
    ‘The whole thing tastes German to me. The seasoning is too strong.’ His plate was hardly touched. Celia thought he never really ate anything, just pushed the food around almost as if it were poisoned.
    Thompson, standing at the side, moved forward, but Verena was quicker. She passed him the gravy boat – the best fine china one. ‘Try a little gravy, Sir Hugh.’ She had put her hair into a particularly elaborate style. The curls dropped around the diamond earrings that Rudolf had given her for special occasions. Celia looked at the slight quiver in her mouth and knew immediately that her mother wanted to bite her nails.
    Sir Hugh nudged the meat with his knife. ‘I think the thing cannot be salvaged. Your cook has too heavy a hand.’
    Celia hated how Sir Hugh hardly ever called her mother Mrs de Witt. She detested how Verena flurried around him, asking him his opinion, humiliating herself, she thought, in her desperation to please. They all had to agree with whatever Sir Hugh said, as if the King himself was at dinner. Although the King, she thought, would surely be nicer to her father than Sir Hugh was. Sometimes she even yearned for Arthur, who might have been rude to Sir Hugh, laughed in his face as he did to everybody.
    She kicked the table. Now she hated Sir Hugh even more.