Chapter One


October 2008 Kent, England Jo Bellamy eased her rental car cautiously into the Slip Road roundabout, every fiber of her body braced for the shuddering crash that must surely come, and when it didn’t—when the circular bit of carriageway remained miraculously free of maddened English drivers on this late October morning—she darted a glance in the wrong direction, cursed softly, then searched over her left shoulder for the first available exit from this particular rung of hell. She was looking for something called the A262, which ought to lead straight to the castle, but after an hour and a half of descending from London’s Victoria Embankment through the Blackwall Tunnel, not to mention Margate and Maidstone, her patience was frayed and her calf muscles cramped. She was a brown-haired, crinkle-eyed American woman, thirty-four years of age, and this was her first visit to England—which sufficed to say that she had never driven on the left side of the road before. She had particularly never driven a stick-shift transmission on the left, and both her feet and her hands were disobeying her rational mind’s orders. She had stalled twice, clipped the left side of the car with an errant curb (or kerb, as they insisted on spelling it here), and was desperate for a stiff drink, although it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. If she did not find the castle soon, she intended to drive the darling little Mini straight into one of the massive oaks that lined the carriageway, and walk to Sissinghurst.

And then, quite suddenly, the tower rose up from the sheep pastures and tilled fields and she felt her pent-up breath exhale slowly from her lungs.

For year...