Page 122 of All I Want for Christmas

‘Emme,’ she murmured. ‘That’s pretty.’

‘This was taken in August 1922. They were all living here that summer.’

‘All of them? Casper, Lilja and Johan?...That must have been intense.’

‘Why?’ His voice was immediately defensive.

‘An artist in the midst of greatness – and a newborn? How thick are the walls in this house?’

He conceded the point. ‘Not thick enough.’

Had there been arguments? she wondered, looking again at Casper and Lilja; they stood stiffly, as if carved from wood. By this point, Casper had been in London heading up the family office there for almost three years and Lilja had settled into permanent residency here. They must have been like strangers by then, surely? There were no letters between them that she had found – which struck her as odd – and from all she had read in his sister’s and mother’s diaries, Casper’s trips back to Denmark had been infrequent. Not only that, she hadn’t been able to find any comment, anywhere, about their relationship, so she had absolutely no sense of its temperature. Stone cold or hot? Had they fallen passionately in love when Casper had returned from his war business to find this beautiful young girl living with the family? Or had it been a marriage of convenience, as Viggo had posited? Good families, merged fortunes, old allegiances and favours...

She looked at Trier...then at the baby in Lilja’s arms again. ‘When did Trier come to Solvtraeer to start working?’ she asked lightly.

‘I don’t know exactly. Sometime in the late spring, I think.’

Had he been down the summer before? She would need to go back to his diaries again. She had stopped concerning herself with his movements as soon as she acquired Lilja’s name, but perhaps their fates had become more intertwined than merely through a painting?

She looked again at the people on the other side of the image. The Saalbachs had kindly faces with appled cheeks, but there was reserve in their eyes and she sensed tension in the photograph. Were they uncomfortable with this presentation of a happy family? What secrets did they know that Casper didn’t? Darcy glanced down the corridor no one would have monitored at night: the Saalbachs across the drive, unable to hear the creak of a floorboard, the squeak of a mattress coil...

‘The Sallys look nice,’ she mumbled, knowing she was staring too hard, too long, as suspicions formed in her mind.

‘They were. And incredibly loyal. Mrs Sally became a mother figure to Lilja during her convalescence here. She helped with the birth.’

Darcy smiled at that. For some reason it comforted her to think that Lilja – practically an orphan, barely more than a child herself – had had someone looking after her after all.

‘My grandmother would tell me and Peder stories about how Old Sally would let her help him with the flower beds. And Little Sally taught her to fish and would take her foraging and truffle hunting in the woods around the back.’

‘You can grow truffles here?’ She was surprised. ‘I thought they only grew further south, in Italy and France.’

‘No, it’s ideal conditions here. To the extent that some ofthe so-called garden visitors who came to enjoy the grounds were interested in more than just the flowers.’

‘They tried to steal the truffles?’

‘They’re valuable. It happens,’ he shrugged.

She stepped back from the image, looking again at Trier. There was a large canvas on the easel in the photograph. This one beside her here? She reached a hand out to it. It certainly looked the same.

‘Is thatHer Childrenon the easel there?’ Its back faced the camera.

Max looked at her and nodded. ‘We believe so.’

She could see how all this added to his claim. ‘So why isn’t this photograph hanging in the gallery with the others?’

He shrugged. ‘Because it’s in poor condition and there’s plenty of other ones of Trier with the family for people to see. This one just feels a bit more candid and private – Lilja’s not wearing shoes, she’s just had a baby, she’s not formally attired...And besides, we can’t put out everything that we have just because we have it.’

‘Yes,’ Darcy agreed. But something had snagged in her mind, an echo that made her look again at the photograph. She could feel a tiny itch in her brain that she couldn’t quite scratch as she stared at the gathered faces. One was unexpectedly familiar...

With a frown, she followed after him as he left the room, walking back down the corridor, past the family wedding photographs again, past Peder’s bedroom that might once have been Lilja’s...

She saw from the bedroom windows that it had begun to snow lightly, dusting the ground like a lacy veil. Light was beginning to fade, the garden starting to glow a soft violet. Dusk was falling.

They came downstairs in a silence that seemed to grow thicker with every step. Max was just ahead of her, and she stared at his back, at the slight dark-blond curl at the nape of his neck. For all his offhandedness, she couldn’t deny he had been generous in opening his home to her today when he had no obligation to do so. He had let her look around without suspicion. He had fed her and made sure she was warm. He had answered her questions...

Now what?

‘The snow really is trying to settle out there,’ she said as they walked through the hall, back towards the kitchen.

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