Constance and Verity accepted without hesitation. They are willing to flirt with danger if it means helping Rafe, for they assume that wherever he is, he too needs the phials. And perhaps, just perhaps, this sacrifice will take them one step closer to him.
Camden Market is at its mid-September phase. Schools are in session and people are gearing up for the heavy work period before the Christmas break. After she makes her purchases, Verity is captured within a flux of Japanese tourists in the warrens of the food stalls. Escaping to the outer food courtyard, she considers what she’ll take home for dinner when she hears the incredulity in a young woman’s voice.
‘Mrs Fitzgerald?’
Verity freezes at the stranger’s call.
‘Mrs Fitzgerald, is that you?’
Sometimes Verity will search faces on the streets of London and think that she recognizes them; over the years she must have seen the same faces many times. But this girl staring at her now with her mouth agape, she does not immediately recognize. What an odd girl she is, too. With a cone of chips in one hand, the other waves at her in a wild, frantic sweep. People inadvertently stand in her way as the young woman circumvents them towards Verity.
Slowly backing away from the young woman, Verity turns a corner and wends through the stalls and out of sight. She hurries along Parkway until she’s sure she’s not been followed, and then it hits her.
Rushing through the gate and into the house, she tosses her coat on the floor.
‘Constance!’
She climbs the steps and finds her sister packing a carry-on.
‘You won’t believe it. You won’t believe who I just saw at the market. I couldn’t place her at first. I can’t believe it.’
‘Slow down.’
‘Oh, what’s her name … Clovis Fowler’s girl. What’s her name, Constance?’
‘Willa? You saw Willa? Are you sure?’
‘Oh yes. I am now. She called out to me. And she looked like she’d seen a ghost. I wish I’d recognized her. She must know about Rafe.’
‘Yes, she must. Was she on her own?’
‘I’m not sure. Should I go back?’
‘There’s no time. When we return we’ll comb the market. Did she look the same?’
‘In age, yes, but not in any other way. I remembered her as frightened, cowering, a nervous girl. There’s a remarkable difference. It’s probably why I didn’t recognize her right away.’
‘We must find her, sister.’
ICELAND
PRESENT DAY
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Benedikt arrives just before nightfall. The cottage rests on a quiet, peaceful plot of land that sits in The Golden Circle, near a national park in the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur. Tourists have been visiting this area of Iceland since the eighteenth century, and now holiday cottages sparsely dot the landscape, from which a constant flow of twenty-first century tourists marvel at the erupting geysers, giant waterfalls, hot springs, mud pots and steaming fumaroles. They will get themselves in all kinds of trouble. Tough men cry like babies when they watch their tents explode in the wind and learn the meaning of inhospitable. The elements wage an unforgiving perpetual war. Calamity is a commonplace certainty. Tourist hikers have been known to have mental breakdowns. When a blizzard comes on fast and unexpectedly, they give up, lie down and prepare to die in this magical, devastatingly beautiful and savage land.
Benedikt places his bag down in a cottage that gleams with glass and polished wood – strikingly different from the turf walls and dried sheep’s bladder windows of his childhood. He peers into the powerful telescope that faces the expanse of the surrounding vicinity, checking for intruders, or at best, lost travellers who may interrupt him. Satisfied, he promptly closes the blinds and the curtains. The Aurora Borealis will soon beckon tourists in rented cottages to their terraces, or bid them to sit indoors by their fires to gaze in wonder at the green and blue lights billowing across the sky. It’s a clear night in the season; the chances are good. Benedikt cannot risk their glancing his way.
He builds and lights a fire and then makes his way into the bedroom where he locks the door. Benedikt’s hair, long-ish on his forehead, falls into his eyes as he removes his knitted cap. He needs a haircut.
He begins to undress slowly, methodically. First he slips out of his jacket, then a wool jumper, a shirt, and a cotton vest. Then he unwraps the binding around his torso to reveal breasts that have been sheathed for months at a time over a period of one hundred and eighty-five years. Elísabet looks into the mirror. Her arms are slender, yet incredibly muscular and strong. Her breasts are still firm, her face is unlined, and yet her eyes, wise with age stare back at her.
A long scar runs from her right shoulder, midway down her arm, a reminder of the knife fight between the first two would-be abductors. The first men she had killed. There were others – men and women who came too close to the truth, all of whom threatened to harm her son, to harm them all.
Elísabet and Stefán had entered the most elaborate and painstakingly devised plan. She trained her body and her mind the first six months of her baby’s life, almost to destruction. Forever adjusting, living through the years like a streak of quiet lightning, constantly responding to legions of alerts, and training, always more training to remain a step ahead, to be stronger and rise to the impossible demand to occupy several places at once. The physical pain she could endure. The emotional pain nearly broke her. The only semblance of peace she possessed during
