The Treachery of Time

Esther Aumery - only child of the decaying manor house at Lady Green is woken one morning in 1914 because of the sound of a cart being driven furiously along the lanes. She looks out and sees a man, with a face so evil she never forgets it, driving like a devil. Later that day in the village, under a hedgerow, a young girl, filthy, clad in rags, unable to speak, is discovered. Daniel Godwain, pupil teacher at the school at Lady Green, and the boy that Esther loves with childish devotion, tenderly wraps the traumatised girl in a blanket, takes her into the inn, and later arranges for her to be delivered at the workhouse in a nearby village. But before she can get there she disappears. This is the beginning of a pastoral mystery that continues after the war and goes on into the 1930s. Who was the girl? And who is Clairy, the maid in the village who eventually seduces and steals Daniel from the grown-up Esther. How does this relate to the horrifying disappearance, at the turn of the century, of the baby daughter of Gervase Lincoln and his wife at the Big House. Gervase, a sad and bereft widower, finally marries the abandoned Esther, and the mystery becomes deeper, more evi