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her, ‘I’ve thought it over. You’ll have to get a job. You can’t just live in Rose Cottage and worry about who you are and what you left behind. You’ll need to earn some money. I know the house expenses are carried by the bank – hell, the whole town knows that – but that doesn’t put bread on the table. And I know you can’t have any money or I would have found you in Ned Palmer’s keeping warm and drinking hot coffee instead of sitting in the cold on a hard bench. I’ve got it all worked out, you can come and work part-time in our shop. We don’t pay much but we give our employees a discount on clothes and with your looks and style our clientele will take to you, although I doubt you’re a very good saleswoman.’
    Jessica began to laugh, really laugh for the first time since she had run away from Hong Kong. ‘I’m sure you’re right, Cissie. I think I’d make a terrible dress saleswoman.’
    From the first time she had seen her, Cissie had been attracted to Jessica as much by her beauty and seductivecharm as curiosity as to how a woman like her could have landed in Newbampton. And now she was enchanted by Jessica’s laughter. It gave her another view of this stranger; she felt there was much more to Jessica than even she had imagined. For the first time since they had left Rose Cottage, Cissie was lost for words.
    ‘But I’ll try,’ Jessica was saying. ‘I am very grateful to you, Cissie. You are my first friend in Newbampton and I will never forget that, nor your generosity of spirit.’
    ‘And she’s bought you your first Wiggin’s Tavern meal,’ said Bridget Copley as she joined them at their table in time to hear Jessica express her gratitude. ‘How did you find the food? Familiar? Reminiscent of anything?’
    ‘Just very good, Sheriff,’ replied Jessica.
    Luke Greenfield was standing at the window contemplating his life and work. He had walked away from an over-ambitious wife who had been more in love with being the wife of a handsome doctor whom the rich and famous chased after for his expertise than she had been with her husband.
    Dr Greenfield was a brilliant diagnostician who had little trouble raising grants for his research work. At twenty-nine, he was a well-respected name in his field of infectious diseases of the brain. When he left his wife, he also left New York and the fast-lane living which he had been dragged into by her, and which he detested. He had chosen to return to Newbampton and now practised at Newbampton General Hospital. He continued his research work at a laboratory he had installed in one of the outbuildings a few steps from the back door of his eighteenth-century American farmhouse set in an old apple orchard.
    Luke had been born and bred in Newbampton, educated at Harvard Medical School and did his residency at St Vincent’s Hospital in New York before going into private practice on the fashionable Upper East Side. His wife usedto claim that for all his education, sophisticated Manhattan life and world travel, he had never really left Newbampton. What he was contemplating while looking through the window was how right Deborah had been. Since his return he had been living a happy and satisfying life. He enjoyed what Newbampton offered: poker with his childhood friends – they played every Friday night – morning coffee and town gossip at Ned Palmer’s every morning, the hospitality of friends whose families he had known all his life. He liked the simplicity of life in Newbampton and the opportunities the college town provided to meet interesting people as they came and went: visiting scholars, writers, painters, historians, musicians. The hospital itself now drew patients and medical scholars from great distances, and Luke had the satisfaction of knowing that his work had done much to give it a reputation that rivalled some of the best institutions in the United States.
    He ran his hand through his dark hair, which he wore on the long side, and turned