She paused on the little bridge spanning the narrow stream that separated Robinson Crusoe’s Island from the rest of Sheep’s Green. Although it was daylight, the mist was heavy, and it lay against her field of vision like a bank of clouds. Through it, the rattling song of an adult male wren shot out from one of the trees above her, and the causeway traffic passed with the muted rise and fall of engines. A duck wak-wacked somewhere nearby on the river. A bicycle bell jingled from across the green.

To her left, the boat repair sheds were still closed and shuttered. Ahead of her, ten iron steps climbed up to Crusoe’s Bridge and descended to Coe Fen on the east bank of the river. She saw that the bridge itself had been repainted, a fact she had not noticed before. Where once it had been green and orange and patchy with rust, now it was brown and cream, the cream a series of crisscrossing balusters that glistened luminescently through the mist. The bridge itself looked suspended over nothing. And everything round it was altered and hidden by the fog.

In spite of her determination, she sighed. It was impossible. No light, no hope, and no inspiration in this bleak, cold place. Be damned to Whistler’s night studies of the Thames. To hell with what Turner could have made from this dawn. No one would ever believe she had come to paint this.

Still, this was the day she had chosen. Events had dictated that she come to this island to draw. Draw she would. She plunged across the rest of the footbridge and pushed open the creaking, wrought iron gate, determined to ignore the chill that seemed to be inching its way through every organ of her body.

Inside the gate, she felt the squish and ooze of mud sucking noisily against her plimsolls, and she shuddered. It was cold. But it was only the cold. And she picked her way into the copse created by alder, crack willow, and beech.

Condensation dripped from the trees. Drops splatted with a sound like slow-bubbling porridge onto the sorrel tarpaulin of autumn leaves. A thick, fallen branch undulated across the ground before her, and just beyond it, a small clearing beneath a poplar offered a view. Sarah made for this. She leaned her easel and canvases against the tree, snapped open her camp stool, and propped her wooden case next to it. The sketch pad she clutched to her chest.