Constance waits for the sound of the front gate to click into place before they turn their backs to Lawless House. The weeping willow shed late this year; its tiny yellow leaves look like eyelashes that create a carpet on the pavement.
‘Oh good great God, the streets are throbbing,’ says Constance as they turn the corner onto one of the main thoroughfares.
‘And it’s only Wednesday.’ Verity replies.
‘Christmas shoppers.’
Their long capes swirl in a breeze that carries discarded sheets of newspapers and the invisible grit of the high street. The sisters reach the pulsing intersection, where one of Camden Town Station’s resident buskers plays a cheesy, pop rendition of ‘ White Christmas’. People surge from the Underground in droves; pulled by the gigantic magnet of the market, they make an orderly migration to the stalls.
The sisters, immune to the market’s force, turn their anxious faces south to one of London’s secret gardens, nestling off the high street. They arrive at the gates of St Martin’s Gardens gripped in anticipation.
They aren’t even sure he’s still alive. They’d tossed around ideas about him so often and for so many years that they’d created a shared fantasy about the kind of man he might have become. He might still be a boy, they reasoned. They considered, too, that he might be dead. They have no way of knowing.
CHAPTER TWO
Clovis Fowler’s eyes race across a sheet of paper. The longer she reads, the stronger her fury builds. She tosses the letter on the table.
‘Willa!’ She bellows.
Nothing.
‘Finn!’
Sheathed in a long black dress, she stands like a proud raven in her gleaming white kitchen. She gathers and twists her burnt-red hair that flows in a thick wavy mass, and secures it with a wide clip, then begins a swift search through her house.
On the top floor in the converted attic, her boot heels clip across the wooden floor of Willa’s room. She surveys her employee’s space. Once littered with charms and tokens, the room is now home to bolts of fabric and a small sewing table. Shelving holds remnants of old lace, a pair of Victorian ladies’ boots and boxes of buttons and trimmings. An original Mary Quant fits snugly to the form of a tattered dressmaker’s mannequin. Her single bed is neatly made.
Clovis feels the quiet of being high above this south-east corner of London. Her glance falls towards the small window tucked into the eaves as a steel-grey cloud passes. In a rare moment, her expression is unguarded and her thoughts ride that dark cloud to the green and blue shimmering skies of her birth country. But this indulgence passes in an instant and her face returns to its more familiar mask, steely like the cloud, and she walks out of the room, satisfied that Willa is out for a while.
‘Finn!’ She calls from the landing.
Clovis moves quickly down the stairs. She jets around the house, stalking the rooms for a sign of her husband. She won’t allow him to trick her again. Satisfied that neither Willa and Finn are in the main house, she takes the stairs again to her bedroom on the first floor and quickly enters her compact walk-in wardrobe. There, behind the shelving, is a small concealed compartment. She enters the code. When the door pops open she snatches a silver chain belt, places it around her waist and then reaches back into the compartment for the chatelaine.
She fastens the chatelaine to one of the links in her belt. Six delicate chains hang from the chatelaine’s clip. Suspended from five of the chains, keys of various shapes and sizes jingle against each other. It is the sixth chain that she grasps tightly for a moment. Attached to it is a glass phial filled with a fluorescent greenish-blue liquid. She closes the compartment and changes the code.
Downstairs again, she dashes to the back of the house, puts her ear to a door, raps and waits. Satisfied, she uses one of the keys to unlock the door and steps into an anteroom. Here, another heavy wooden door leads to Finn’s workroom. This, the oldest section of the house, is in stark contrast to the modernized rooms in the front.
The windows in this vast space are without order and sit nonsensically high near the ceiling. Only a few beacons of light shoot down into the room, inhibited by towers of furniture that look like great, tall monsters rapidly gaining strength in the darkening December afternoon. Clovis flips the switch, casting shadowy light from a carnival of lamps, chandeliers, lanterns and shades onto a sea of furniture mania.
At first glance the warehouse-sized room seems to be a wonderland of junk – a madman’s stash, from decades of collecting. An educated and experienced eye would declare no such thing. Treasures. Haphazard in their presentation, but nonetheless treasures of beauty, rare and priceless, occupy this corner of Bermondsey.
Clovis keeps a mental inventory of each and every item: where they are placed, when they arrived, and what they are worth. She locks the door and heads directly to the middle of the room where a grouping of seventeenth-century wardrobes dwarf the delicate Victorian birdcages piled on tables beside them. Hidden behind a six-legged Portuguese wardrobe, a smaller oak tack cupboard seems unimportant in the company of more ornate pieces. But a certain precocious young prince had carved his name inside it and therefore rendered it practically impossible to price. Clovis gives it a light pat. One day Finn will sell it for an enormous sum.
The cupboard doors open with a faint creak. Kneeling down, she removes a thin plank that covers a false bottom and carefully retrieves a wooden box. Clovis places the box on a nearby table and opens
