'No.'
'On the way back from Auntie Helen's,' I elaborated, 'lust after my fifth birthday. It was raining and Daddy took the wrong turning and a cat ran onto the road and he had to stop the car.'
My brother looked at me in the same way a scientist must look at a curious new specimen, and shook his head. 'No, I don't remember that.'
'Well, it happened,' I said stubbornly, 'and the car stalled just here, and I saw that house.'
'If you say so.'
The car was running again now, and Tom maneuvered it over to the side of the road so I could have a clearer view.
'What do you think it means?' I asked.
'I think it means our family has bloody bad luck with cats in Wiltshire,' Tom said. I chose to ignore him.
'I wonder how old it is.'
Tom leaned closer. 'Elizabethan, I should think. Possibly Jacobean. No later.'
I'd forgotten that Tom had been keen on architecture at school. Besides, Tom always knew everything.
'I'd love to get a closer look.' My voice was hopeful, but Tom merely sent me an indulgent glance before turning back onto the road that led into the village.
'I am not,' he said, 'going to peer into anyone's windows to satisfy your curiosity. Anyway, the drive is clearly marked Private.'
A short distance down the road we pulled into the car park of the Red Lion, a respectable half-timbered pub with an ancient thatched roof and tables arranged on a makeshift terrace to accommodate the noontime crowd. I stayed in the car, preparing to take my shift as driver, while Tom went into the pub to down a quick pint and get directions back to the main road.
I was so busy pondering how great the odds must be against being lost twice in the same spot, that I completely forgot to ask my brother to find out the name of the village we were in.
It would be another eight years before I found myself once again in Exbury, Wiltshire.
*-*-*-*
This time, the final time, it was early April, two months shy of my thirtieth birthday, and—for once—I was not lost. I still lived in London, in a tiny rented flat in Bloomsbury that I had become rooted to, in spite of an unexpectedly generous legacy left to me by my father's Aunt Helen, that same aunt we'd been visiting in Exeter all those years earlier. She'd only seen me twice, had Auntie Helen, so why she had chosen to leave me such an obscene amount of money remained a mystery. Perhaps it was because I was the only girl in a family known for its male progeny. Auntie Helen, according to my father, had been possessed of staunchly feminist views. 'A room of your own,' Tom had told me, in a decided tone. 'That's what she's left you. Haven't you read Virginia Woolf?'
It was rather more than the price of a room, actually, but I hadn't the slightest idea what to do with it. Tom had stoutly refused my offer to share the inheritance, and my parents maintained they had no need of it, being comfortably well-off themselves since my father's retirement from surgical practice. So that was that.
I had quite enough to occupy my time, as it was, having shifted careers from graphic design to illustration, a field I found both more interesting and more lucrative. By some stroke of luck I had been teamed early on with a wonderfully talented author, and our collaboration on a series of fantasy tales for children had earned me a respectable name for myself in the business, not to mention a steady living. I had just that week been commissioned to illustrate a sizable new collection of legends and fairy tales from around the world, a project that excited me greatly and promised to keep me busily employed for the better part of a year. I was on top of the world.
Ordinarily, I'd have celebrated my good fortune with my family, but since my parents were halfway round the world on holiday and Tom was occupied with Easter services, I had settled for the next-best thing and spent the weekend with friends in Bath. On the Monday morning, finding the traffic on the main road too busy for my taste, I detoured to the north and followed the gentle sweep of the Kennet River toward London.
It was a cool but perfect spring day, and the trees that lined the road were bursting into leaf with an almost tropical fervor. In honour of the season, I drove with the windows down, and the air smelled sweetly of rain and soil and growing things.
My arthritic but trustworthy Peugeot crested a small hill with a protesting wheeze. Gathering speed, I negotiated a broad curve where the road dipped down into a shallow valley before crossing over the Kennet via a narrow stone bridge. As I bumped across the bridge, I felt a faint tingling sensation sweep across the back of my neck, and my fingers tightened on the wheel in anticipation.
The most surprising thing was that I wasn't at all surprised, this time, to see the house. Somehow, I almost expected it to be there. I slowed the car to a crawl, then pulled off the road and stopped altogether, just opposite the long gravel drive. A large ginger cat stalked haughtily across the road without so much as glancing at me, and disappeared into the waving grass. Three times in one lifetime, I told myself, even without the cat, was definitely beyond the bounds of ordinary coincidence.
Surely, I reasoned, whoever owned the house wouldn't mind terribly if I just took a casual peek around ... ?As I hesitated, biting my lip, a flock of starlings rose in a beating cloud from the field beside me, gathered and wheeled once above the gray stone house, and then was gone.
For me, that was the deciding factor. Along with my mother's looks, I had also inherited the superstitious nature of her Cornish ancestors, and the starlings were a good-luck omen of my own invention. From my earliest childhood, whenever I had seen a flock of them it meant that something wonderful was about to happen. My brother Tom repeatedly tried to point out the flaw in this belief, by reminding me that starlings in the English countryside were not exactly uncommon, and that their link to my happiness could only be random at best. I remained unconvinced. I only knew that the starlings had never steered me wrong, and watching them turn now and rise above the house, I suddenly made a decision.