Chapter One
Suspended like a small glider on a windless day, Tessa floated through the silent dining room, across the hallway, into the sun-lit drawing room and back again. As her white clad form passed by, she snapped blooms from the vast displays. She did not hesitate as she dropped each perfume-laden flower into the cotton basin that she’d made by pinching up the hem of her nightgown with her eight-year-old fingertips. She gathered her harvest noiselessly, her undersized bare feet soundless on both carpet and wood. Her reflected figure glinted in the dark, polished surfaces and brass inlay handles of the sideboards.
She paused at the foot of the stairway’s wooden banister and glanced with dark, hopeful eyes at the imposing front door. It was too early for the rattle of the milk cart. Too early for the postman. Too early to be downstairs alone in the Garcia household. But not too early to garrotte heady blooms from Tessa’s mother’s carefully arranged Covent Garden flowers.
Tessa blossomed in the silence of the house and had made her flower harvesting at this hour a weekly ritual. She anticipated it. She planned it, washed out the bottles begged from the cook, re-arranged her sleep and waited patiently for the dawn to rise the day after their delivery.
She dangled out of the Nursery window as the Covent Garden van arrived, angering her elder sister, Mariquita, with her apparent recklessness. She hovered in the kitchen as Abigail lifted the lids of the long boxes. Peering inside, she inhaled, as the Cook paused with the wooden spoon, offended that Tessa preferred the scent of the flowers to her freshly baked cakes. Whilst little Carmen screamed to lick out the bowl, Tessa quietly stored away any dropped flower heads for further dissection.
Inwardly holding the peace of the house like the cradled blooms in the curve of her nightgown, Tessa turned from the front doorway and carefully mounted the stairs. The second tread from the top creaked underfoot and Tessa paused, listening to hear if the air in the bedrooms stirred. It did not. Not this morning. Not this perfume-filled day.
Black-haired Mariquita snored. Auburn-headed Carmen lay abandoned to her dreams. The room was warm and cocooned by sleep. The cream curtains and the closed door suspended awakening. Tessa's feet stepped exposed across the wood, then hidden over the rug and once more touched polished floorboards.
