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‘Do they bother you, my lady?’

She nods. ‘Ache.’

‘Where is your veil?’

‘I do not like it.’

‘But where is it?’

Lady Gwen looks as if she is trying to recall, but then she plucks a creamy flower from one of the nearby trees, holds it out to Henry in her small and delicate hand.

It tremors slightly. He has not noticed a tremor before.

‘Criafolen,’ she murmurs. ‘Rowan. The tree of enchantment. Its berries will come soon.’

Henry hesitates, takes the flower from her. She turns back to the fountain and politely he watches it with her, its merry trickle.

‘You play the harp,’ Henry says after a moment, and Lady Gwen pulls her eyes back, the soft smile that crosses her lips the very twin of Linette’s when she chooses to bestow it.

‘Ydw, I’ve played since I was a child. The only true pleasure I have.’

‘What of your daughter? Is she not a pleasure?’

A beat. ‘My daughter?’

‘Linette.’

Gwen Tresilian frowns. ‘I don’t have a daughter.’

A knot tightens in Henry’s stomach. Once, in his most lonely years at the Foundling, Henry thought it was the worst thing in the world to have no mother to love him, but now he realises he was mistaken. This, this is worse – it is better to have no mother at all than one who does not recognise her own child. If she cannot even recall her own daughter, what else does she not recall?

‘Do you miss your husband?’ Henry asks, testing her, and immediately Lady Gwen’s face fills with an acute sadness. She remembers him, then.

‘Every day.’

‘Can you tell me about him?’

Lady Gwen nods. ‘A kind man, of noble birth. Father was so proud to unite us.’ She ghosts a smile. ‘The Tresilians are of an old Cornish bloodline, did you know that? ’Tis thought the Welsh and Cornish are the purest of Britons, and it pleased Papa to think our ancestry could be joined together. Hugh and Julian, you see, are the last of them.’

‘The last?’

Another nod, a wistful sigh.

‘My husband and his cousin were the only surviving heirs. Their fathers both died young of a wasting disease.’

In the lilting pause that follows Henry thinks of Julian’s illness. Hereditary, then. If not for Hugh Tresilian’s accident, might he have eventually suffered the same fate?

‘I’m sorry,’ he says now. ‘It’s no wonder your husband wanted to memorialise the Tresilian line by adding his family crest to Plas Helyg’s furnishings. The symbol above the fireplace is particularly impressive. One would not forget it.’

He has said it to test her, to see if – in her more languid state – she might rise to the bait, and her next words confirm his suspicions.

‘That is not a crest.’

‘It isn’t?’ Henry asks, feigning surprise. ‘Then what is it?’

But she does not answer, stares unseeing across the pond. Henry touches her arm; the gesture brings her back.

‘The goats,’ she says softly.