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1

Harriet

If my mother could see me now, Harriet thought wryly as she reached the top of the hillside and bent to cup her knees, panting. For the first twenty-six years of her life she had, like her parents and three younger sisters, been a sophisticated London urbanite: taxi-hailers and latte drinkers all, they’d had the shortcuts of the city inscribed on their hearts and considered the world beyond the M25 as alien and impenetrable as the Amazon jungle.

And then she’d met Oliver Lockwood and her life had been transformed in a way she never could have anticipated.

She straightened now and shaded her eyes to take in the spectacular view. The spring foliage hadn’t yet started to come in, so she could see right through the bare trees to the valley below. On a distant slope opposite, ski trails poured down from the mountain summit like rivers of white paint. She couldn’t believe how quiet it was, even for rural Vermont, a state one-fifth the size of England with a population of barely six hundred and fifty thousand. Up here, there was no thrum of traffic, no sirens, no planes passing overhead; just the faint whisper of the wind in the trees. Ironic that she’d moved four thousand miles across the ocean to New England and discovered an old England that hadn’t existed since before she was born.

Tugging off her thick sheepskin gloves, she pulled out her phone and checked the time. No reception here, she noticed, slightly anxiously; not even one bar. Well, she wasn’t going to be long. She’d seen what she needed to see. She’d be home soon, no harm done.

Nonetheless, she picked up her pace as she turned east along the ridgeline. She really shouldn’t have come this far from home, not with Oliver a hundred miles away in Connecticut, where he was scouting out a possible location for their latest restaurant, leaving Harriet the parent on call. This wasn’t just a nominal responsibility in the Lockwood household, given that their fifteen-year-old daughter Florence had had juvenile diabetes since she was six, and Charlie, at five the youngest of their three boys, had chronic asthma. Either she or Oliver found themselves being called out to one of their expensive private schools to deal with a medical crisis at least twice a month.

She turned at an orange flag marking the boundary of the eleven-acre property for sale and headed back downhill, picking her way carefully through a spider’s web of transparent tubing that snaked from one sugar maple to another: there were miles of it – literally two or three miles – weaving back and forth from tree to tree like a giant cat’s cradle. It was March, so the tubes were full of maple sap. The clear liquid flowed down the mountain to the holding vats she’d seen earlier behind the small wooden sugar house at the foot of the hill, where it would be boiled off and turned into the familiar amber syrup.