The GalleryHill and CartersThe scant details Adam had retained about Hilda’s early years, imparted to him when he was only a child himself, seemed to slot neatly together with this new information. She had moved to Bassington shortly after turning seventeen, leaving behind her parents’ farm, and lodging initially with a family somewhere in town. He knew she’d married David – her late husband – when she’d been in her 20s and had been left widowed by her mid-40s. Those few years between her moving to Bassington and the start of her married life remained blank; not, he thought, through any deliberate act of evasion, but simply because they had never come up in conversation.
The one piece of the puzzle that neither he nor Victoria had been able to make any sense of was why Hilda would have si
