He scrolled through the options. “You pick.”
The movie featured at the top of the screen was an older one about Queen Victoria, filmed thirty years ago. The actress who played Queen Victoria was dressed in a beaded ivory gown with orange blossoms in her hair.
Quenby pointed at the image. “I interviewed her earlier this year.”
“Queen Victoria?”
“Very funny,” she said. “Hannah Dayne.”
“I thought she stopped giving interviews years ago.”
“I talked with her via phone. She asked me to write about refugee children.”
“Brilliant of her.”
“It was,” Quenby replied. “She’s been quietly assisting refugees in Yorkshire, but if readers found out about her involvement, they might be more interested in her reappearance than the plight of the people she wants to help.”
“You want to watch her movie then?”
“I think we need something more whimsical.” She pointed at another icon. “Like Pride and Prejudice.”
He groaned, but without much conviction.
She smiled. “You’re a closet fan, aren’t you?”
“I admit to nothing.”
“Right. Superpowers.”
He started the movie, but before the Bennet sisters began dancing at the ball, his mobile rang. It was Mr. Knight.
“He wants to speak with you again,” Lucas said before turning on the speaker.
“Hello, Mr. Knight.”
“Do you have your computer?”
Quenby flipped her iPad screen up from the keyboard. “It’s right here.”
“Look at the panoramic picture of the house again,” he instructed.
She pulled the picture up on her iPad, and she and Lucas studied the tangled web of branches, leaves, and vines surrounding it.
“That tree,” Mr. Knight said, almost breathless. “The one to the right of the Mill House.”
She enlarged the photo and examined the dying yellow leaves, the emerging green to replace them. And she realized it was like no other tree in the forest around it. Where the sunlight hit the branches, the waxy new leaves glowed.
“Magnolia,” Mr. Knight said.
The words in Brigitte’s letters flooded back to her. The tree in her father’s yard. The tale of Cinderella.
Eyes wide, Quenby glanced at Lucas. “It’s a wishing tree.”
Chapter 46
London, February 1953
The girl clung to her mummy’s hand as they skipped over puddles on the pathway that threaded through Kensington Gardens. Rosalind watched them closely, mesmerized by their camaraderie. It was an anomaly to her—a mother and daughter who actually enjoyed one another’s company. Not once, in her memory, had Lady Ricker wanted to be with her.
Rosalind visited the garden nearly every Sunday and sat on a bench by the Long Water, even on days like this when the clouds drizzled a winter rain. Her umbrella and Burberry trench coat were the stoic color of stone, though she longed for a brash red, emerald, or sapphire to pierce through the gray.
But neither she nor her coat could stand out in London or anywhere else in England. Her role for the moment was to be like everyone else, one of a thousand raindrops blending smoothly into the lake before her. Not making any waves. Even her string of boyfriends had been as bland as the autumn sky.
The narrow stretch of water, dividing the gardens from Hyde Park, transported her back a decade, to that fateful spring afternoon when she’d jumped out of the blue Wolseley and watched her old life plunge over a cliff. It was so surreal that sometimes she thought she’d dreamed it.
But it had been no dream. Eddie Terrell, the fool, had left a bag of banknotes behind in the car. She’d discovered it before they left the Mill House, when she was throwing her suitcase into the boot. The moment Brigitte had leapt from the car, the baby in her arms, Rosalind knew exactly what she was going to do.
She’d stopped the car before the edge of the bluff, removed the money. Then she’d snapped her life in two.
The past behind her, she opted to embrace her new existence in shadows of her making. Lady Ricker, she felt certain, would want her dead, even in this decade after the war. Rosalind knew far too much about her mum’s dealings with the Nazi dreck. The secrets she had to keep.
If her mum was able to change her colors, acting as the loyal wife of a British MP even as she supported Fascism, then Rosalind figured she could be a chameleon as well. Changing her colors until Lady Ricker died—from a vibrant modern woman into the drudgery of browns and grays.
She didn’t regret what she’d done all those years ago. Brigitte might have thought she was much older, more mature, but Rosalind had only been sixteen when she’d parachuted into Breydon Court. And she’d known little about how to survive on her own.