Spring Skies Over Bluebell Castle. Sarah Bennett

she’d opened the email offering her the position at Camland, she’d been thinking about what she should say if Sir Arthur asked any awkward questions about why she’d left her position at Witherby’s. On her application, she’d said she wanted the chance to explore a collection in depth, and highlighted the six months she’d spent in the cataloguing and records section at the auction house as part of her training. Not a lie, but also not the truth, and it was beginning to sit uncomfortably with her. That bloody non-disclosure agreement had tied her hands. Then again, who in their right mind would let someone suspected of what she’d been accused of doing cross their threshold? Talk about a Catch-22 situation. She’d just have to hope the topic didn’t come up. As the train pulled out of the station, she leant her head back, closed her eyes and began to run over the introductory speech she’d been working on.

      *

      In what seemed like a matter of moments, Lucie woke to a hand shaking her shoulder lightly. ‘Wake up, love, this is the end of the line.’

      Panic and adrenaline shot through her. ‘Have I missed my stop?’

      The driver shook his head with an amused smile. ‘No, love, Camland is the end of the line. The end of the world some folks might say.’

      Fuzzy from the heat and her impromptu nap, Lucie tried to concentrate as she collected her belongings, shrugging on her now only slightly damp coat and shouldering the cursed backpack once more. When she reached the luggage area, it was to find the driver had already lifted her suitcase down onto the platform and popped up the handle with apparently no problems. ‘That’s very kind of you, thanks.’

      ‘My pleasure, love. Now you know where you’re headed?’

      ‘The castle. I’m hoping it shouldn’t be too hard to find,’ she said with a grin.

      The driver laughed. ‘Not hard at all, love. Just keep heading up until you can’t go any further.’

      Oh. Great. Trying not to let her smile slip, Lucie gave him a wave and trundled down the little platform towards the open gap at the end which led onto a tiny car park big enough for no more than a dozen cars. ‘The end of the world, indeed,’ she murmured to herself at the idea of any place small enough to manage with so little parking.

      The stone cottages she’d seen on her computer screen looked a little grimmer in real life, set as they were against a heavily leaden sky. Without the pretty hanging baskets and blooming window boxes of summer it was easy to see the peeling paint, the cracked and weathered pathways, the moss on the roof tiles. The front of more than one was marred with the ugly wheelie bins that pervaded housing estates throughout the country, even remote areas such as this, it seemed.

      Glancing left, then right, it wasn’t immediately obvious to Lucie which way she should go, and the tiny car park didn’t bear something as metropolitan as a taxi rank. Did they do Uber in Derbyshire? Lucie retrieved her phone from her pocket, stared at the single bar on her screen and tucked it away with a sigh. They might do Uber, but they didn’t do 3G.

      The path to her right was the more appealing of the two, with its gentle downward slope, but that’s not what the driver’s instruction had been. Taking a deep breath, Lucie grasped the handle of her suitcase and turned left. Up, the driver had said, and boy, he wasn’t kidding.