My first glimpse of Rosemere Priory came just before dusk, when the last of the day’s sunlight fingered the old stones a rosy gold. It was vast and rambling, bay upon bay of Elizabethan windows, with two crenellated towers pointing into an eggplant sky. Everything I knew about my mother shattered in that instant. I recognized it, of course, from her fantastical paintings. I recognized the woods, too, and the owl that flapped its wings and flew out of an upper window and probably even the fox that dashed across the rutted road, its fat tail sailing behind it. I simply believed that she’d made
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