Time flowed quickly and profitably in the busy life of my sister, echoed by the scratching and caresses made by her pencils and brushes in the attic studio, of the four-storey building that she now shared with Mary, who never broached the subject of giving birth nor the s*x of the child she had lost when aged seventeen, eighteen years ago to the very day that she met my twin sister. That coincidence was not divulged either.
Number 54 Charterhouse Square London EC1 with its curved façade and in all its grandeur was now her home and workplace. Inside it was a lavish home from a different age, set in the middle of a fourteenth-century terrace of a dozen houses beyond a bricked gatehouse and which now saw spontaneity with more glamour added to its impressiveness. If there had been expense spa
