A Christmas Letter: Snowbound in the Earl's Castle. Shirley Jump

when I thought of paths and shining lights and the need for another piece of the puzzle this place popped into my mind.’ He walked round the sundial to stand next to her. ‘Song, I think, is short for Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, and if you look carefully there, between the twos, it’s a colon.’

      ‘Song of Songs, Chapter Two, Verse Two?’ she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

      He nodded.

      She turned to face him, did her best to read his face in the semi-darkness. ‘You think there’s something in this?’

      He stared back at her and breathed out hard. ‘Maybe. If it was any of these things on their own I’d probably dismiss it, but put them all together …’

      ‘What about Bertie? You were really worried this would upset him. It still might.’

      His eyelids lowered briefly and he looked away. ‘I know. But if what my family has told him all these years is wrong, he has a right to know.’ Marcus looked back at her. ‘I’ve been trying to protect him from a lie, but I don’t think it’s right to protect him from the truth.’

      She saw it—the twist of guilt in his face as the dual needs both to keep his grandfather safe and to do the right thing warred inside him.

      ‘The truth comes out sooner or later,’ she said. ‘I wish …’

      She closed her eyes. She had been about to say that she wished her parents had told her who her real father was earlier, but she suddenly realised how cruel that would have been. There had been no easy way to handle it, had there? Telling an eight-year-old something like that would have been devastating. Although not telling her had wreaked its own kind of havoc. Suddenly she understood why her mother had swept it all under the carpet and pretended it had nothing to do with her, why she still seemed so blasé about the whole thing.