As ever thank you for reading and/or reviewing. My fellow crime fiction devotees will have noticed this chapter title isn't a reference to anything besides Turn of the Screw, which I'm not sure counts. But I'm doing something slightly different with Nan and Jerry, so thought I wouldn't try and fit them into that mould. You might like to know, though, that this is in our at-home parlance, the 'Have His Carcass' chapter. If you've read your Sayers -and if we've done this right - you'll understand why.


I'm so sorry to ask…' said Faith over the phone, and sitting at the schoolhouse kitchen table, Nan's stomach lurched. For a start, Faith sounded apologetic, meaning she'd thought through whatever petition she was going to make, and the odds were against it being Please would you ask Susan to do up a batch of her gingerbread the next time we come down to visit. It was enough to make her miss the unthinking Faith of the Good Conduct Days –or the war, come to that, when in a panic Faith had sprung news of Jerry being shot on the lot of them over breakfast. But at least Nan had known. Worse, Faith was on the telephone, which meant, Nan knew, that she'd taken the one at Evensong house hostage, and that meant whatever-it-was was urgent.

'Tell me again,' said Nan, realising she had missed whatever the request was. She sounded ill even to her own ears. She felt worse; hot, cold and prickly with nerves.

'Would you come up and visit? I wouldn't aske but –'

'You're asking for Jerry, aren't you?'

'Well of course we want to see you too, Catkin –'

'I was taking that as read. You're not asking on your account, are you?'

'No,' said Faith. Then, as though for reassurance, 'No. What gave it away?'

'You were walking on eggshells,' said Nan, twisting the telephone cord between her fingers, so that the line screeched protest. 'I can't remember the last time you did that. Una maybe, but you…and anyway, I was there over Christmas, and something was off about him then, only I couldn't place it. As if he'd not slept in weeks or something but –worse, somehow. What was it Ariel used to say, 'I can see what's in front of my nose'?'

'And a good deal that isn't,' said Faith, and laughed shakily. 'The pair of you. You'll come up then?'

'Across, you mean,' said Nan, making them both laugh in good earnest this time.

'Geography was it, you were marking, when I called?'

'Latin Fifth Declension, since you ask. When do you want me?'

'Whenever you can get here,' said Faith. She was back to sounding apologetic. 'I know it will be awkward for you. I really wouldn't ask except…'

'Faith,' with teacherly severity, 'I'm coming. I don't know how yet, but I'll wrangle it. It will give me an excuse to drop into The Chronicle anyway, see how Di's getting on with them.'

'Don't you dare. They'll never let you leave, with your gift for writing. The police beat, probably, in light of your obvious fluency in the subject. It was a man, by the way, who did for Miss Wentworth of the Hatpin.'

'Was it? I told you so. And don't tempt me. I'm having one of those mornings where just about anything looks more appealing than a mountain of marking.'

Faith groaned sympathy, reiterating her thanks before ringing off.

In the shelter of the Evensong telephone nook, she pressed her fingers to her temple and drew a breath out through her mouth, counting the beats of it. One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five.

'There, a charaid,' said Mara, whispering out of the woodwork and dropping a kiss on the crown of Faith's head. 'It will pass. Catkin will visit and it will come out fine, you watch.'

'Keep saying that,' said Faith through her fingers, 'and I might start to believe you.'


It had begun with the bagpipes, which all told, was understandable. The fact that the girls who pinned hopes had once chartered the progress of the high street piper as he serenaded passers-by said nothing overly encouraging about the playing. He hadn't even started especially early that morning by Shirley's reckoning; if anything, it was later than usual, and under normal circumstances Jerry would have missed it. But they were still recovering from the breakneck pace of the holiday with its familial obligations, services and evening festivities, and the prospect of the library had been altogether too daunting for all but Carl, who claimed an appointment with a rare book on exotic beetles. It was understandable then that Jerry should say in horrified tones, 'What is going on out there?'

What wasn't usual was that Jerry should drop a piece of Mrs Hugh Alexander's Dresden Sprayflowers over it.

'He is rather murdering Haar on Skye, isn't he?' Shirley had said, handing Jerry a napkin to collect the china shards into, thinking to spare his fingers. 'He's meant to snap the beat in a moment, see if he does.'

The piper didn't, but that hardly warranted Jerry's observation, 'They're screaming.'

They had abandoned the breakfast room by then, as much to escape the noise that was striving to be Haar on Skye as for the sake of the Dresden Sprayflowers. There was no corner of the house the sound didn't find out though, and in the little rose-papered parlour, awash in sun courtesy of the east-facing windows, Shirley looked properly at Jerry and reached instinctively for a blanket. He had seen that look before, and then it had been on young men landing their first airplane, teeth chattering as much with shock as residual altitude cold. Seeing it on Jerry in the rose-spattered parlour was all wrong. It gave him that lurching, foot-in-water sensation he had had the first time he had taken an aeroplane flying. He wished violently for Jem, remembered he was still embroiled in all things Henderson-and-Foxglove case related, and considered tea, before recalling the fate of the Dresden Sprayflowers and wondered if the boarding house ran to such incivilities as mugs. Preferably the thick, pottery kind.

'Sleep badly?' he asked lightly as he manoeuvred them out of the room.

'Guessing, are you?'

'Chalk it up to shared experience,' said Shirley. He paused on the landing to eye the telephone, but of course Larkrise wasn't on the exchange. Anyway, the odds were on all the inhabitants being out. The Haar on Skye was still perishing by inches under the windowsill and Jerry had begun to go a sort of grey colour. Tea with sugar, thought Shirley, lots. Having thought it, he stood hovering on the landing trying to conjure surreptitious ways of fetching it. Drat Carl and his preoccupation with catalogues of exotic beetles, or whatever the insect of the hour was. If he were here it would all be simpler.

In the end, he made up tea on the gas ring in Jerry's room, though the water took an age to boil, and there was, of course, no sugar.

'No reason to keep it in,' said Jerry when Shirley asked, an answer that at first earned him a raised eyebrow. It wasn't until Shirley stirred the tea to readiness that it dawned on him that of course Jerry deemed tea made out of a pot on a gas ring not nearly good enough for Nan's visits. Much better the rose-papered parlour or one of the tea rooms in town.

'Might have some in,' said Shirley, who had never in his life taken sugar with his tea, and set out, ostensibly in search of it. On the landing again he rang for Evensong, because Mondays were off-days for Mara, and she would be in if the others weren't.

'Do me a favour, Ariel?' She had sounded in the middle of about six things at once when she'd answered, but he must have sounded anxious because she let them go without a murmur. 'Of course,' all she said in answer, the briskness of it throwing Shirley backwards suddenly into 1916 and the war-days when they had first known one another and everything had been urgent.

'Fetch Faith, would you? Or Jem if you can't get her.'

'Yes, all right.'

Anyone else, Shirley reflected, might have hovered on the line wanting answers. Nan certainly would have done, mother too. Mara had simply severed the connection, and presumably bolted. It wouldn't be long then.


It wasn't. They arrived, both women on the doorstep breathless from exertion, Mara's skirt folded still into her left hand where she had lifted it to run.

'What's happened?' Faith asked, slipping sideways past Shirley in the narrowness of the porte-cochere entrance. There weren't words to sufficiently explain what the trouble was, and by then Shirley had become preoccupied with the bagpipes himself, still keening, but Haar on Skye replaced now by a giddy rendition of Lillibulero. That being the case he negotiated the stair, Faith at his heels.

Jerry sat much as Shirley had left him when he had gone for the door; blanket slipped off his right shoulder and the mug of sweet tea cradled in his hands. It had cooled, steam having ceased long since to rise from the top. Faith knelt in front of her brother, her eyes narrowed, one hand lightly taking stock of half-a-dozen things at once, glancing off Jerry's wrist, the back of his neck, darting under his eyes.

'All right?' she said, voice soft. There was insufficient space in the little fist-storey room. Faith rocked back on her heels and the others slipped noiseless from the room.

Later as they stood in the hallway, crowded between an excess of wicker furniture and the inexpertly placed telephone nook, Faith sad, 'How long has this gone on?'

'I have no idea,' said Shirley. He was wedged against the telephone table, the edge of it cutting sharply into his lower back. 'I don't think he sleeps especially well, but I couldn't elaborate for you. Carl could, maybe, if you were to find him.'

'With the best will in the world,' said Faith 'you never thought to bring that up before?'

'Faith,' with patience, 'the odd thing would be if he hadn't slept badly.'

She almost flinched and Shirley found himself in the rare position of wishing he could retract the words. Then Faith set her shoulders and offered him half a smile. 'Of course,' she said. 'I didn't think.'

Shirley waved a hand in dismissal. The air was thick with competing scents of the laundry then in progress and tea. Presently a round-faced woman appeared at the foot of the stairs with information that she had heard the guests come in and there was a tray ready in the parlour if they wanted it. The little party trooped dutifully downstairs singing their thanks, but no one had much energy for the civilities of tea on Dresden Sprayflowers. After a respectable interval had passed by the clock, Mara rose, and with a kiss for Shirley's cheek, took Faith's arm in hers and led her towards the door. 'There, a leannan,' she said as they went, voice gentle, 'Come back to the house. You'll be wanting to talk to people, and we've a phone there, if you haven't.'

Which was how Faith had come to ring Nan, late in the morning, a sheet before her full of permutations she had thought up and rejected with which to petition her friend. She hadn't banked on Nan's uncanny intuition. Why she hadn't, in light of her having divined the means of Miss Wentworth's death when no one assigned to it could, was now beyond Faith. She chalked it up to having spent the early part of the morning looking at her brother as a patient rather than a relative and made a mental note to ask Dr Blythe how he did it next time they had cause to be in the same room and a spare moment between them. If she had her way, she was never repeating the episode.


And then Nan was in Kingsport talking Sloanes, Pyes, the recalcitrance thereof and bearing a hamper made up with love from Milly Keith.

'She didn't think we'd want to cook,' all Nan said by way of explanation, as she consigned it to Jem's care. To his raised eyebrow as he slung the basket bulkily under his arm, 'There were three of them until Uncle Davy and I talked her down.'

It was almost normal. It was snowing gently, turning the station improbably into a boule à neige; fat little snowflakes melting against Nan's hat and dying the yellow felt flowers there an inca-berry orange. Faith rather thought they were aspiring to be marigolds. Overhead a cardinal was competing with the train whistle as it left the station. They turned onto the road, where the air was cold, clear and sharply flavoured with hemlock and spruce, and if Faith closed her eyes they might almost be bound for Swallowgate after a holiday away, except that those returns had never left a cat to claw out the inside of her stomach, not even when the war was at its worst. When Jem had been missing, maybe. But she hadn't been in Kingsport then. She drank deeply of the scent of the conifers and made-believe a half minute longer.

'Thank you for this,' said Faith, threading her arm through Nan's and never meaning the hamper.

'Hardly a chore,' said Nan.

'I'm afraid I'll have to leave you –I've a class shortly.'

'You realise the absurdity, don't you?' said Nan, smiling in spite of everything. 'You apologising to me for not playing gooseberry? In another life, you were always bolting to avoid that scenario.'

'No,' said Faith, 'it was the three hours on whether the Socratic method could or couldn't be applied to Ecclesiastes I couldn't do. Anyway, you hardly needed chaperoning. Rosemary used to say that once you and Jerry got your teeth into an argument it was a safe guarantee –Presbyterians not being allowed to bet, you understand –that you'd be exactly where she left you three hours later and only halfway into the argument.'

'We don't argue,' said Nan, occasioning comfortable amusement for Jem and Faith.


To begin with it was, if not a charmed visit, then a sweet one. Term was fully launched by then, the lectures and classes underway, and it was an easy thing to weave between people as their time came spare, here catching up with Di, breathless with bossing reporters to give her deadlines, fingers black and the chemical smell of dyes and inks, mixed with laundry lye, on her clothes, there stealing an evening ramble with Jerry, or pulling Mara away from Evensong for a meal out –much to the distress of one Pilgrim, who had defected with her to the new house.

'Do you know,' she had said when Nan laughed over it, 'that cat followed me to Halifax when I went home? I left him with Naomi and the others thinking to come back for him –'

'You mean hoping he'd settle with other people?'

'Lucky guess, was that, a charaid? He turned up on the Keracher doorstep not a week afterwards –confident in the knowing that last thing we needed to take up cushions was a cat.'

Pilgrim chose this juncture to walk across Mara's knees and settle in her lap, whence he made a cushion of himself and commenced thrumming like a motor-car, and all the while kneading and pawing at her skirt as his ancestors had no doubt done to the veldt before him.

Once, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Mara's room at Evensong, Nan had worked up the nerve to ask, 'Why don't you and Shirley do what Jem and Faith have done and set up house properly? No one would argue the point.'

'It isn't that,' said Mara, turning a what Nan couldn't help but recognise as grandmother Blythe's ring –the blue and gold of it – between her fingers as she said it. 'It's not even that Susan wants an excuse for an occasion, though she does and I don't mind giving her one. It's more…when the war was on, Catkin, anything might have happened. We never knew what was coming with the papers, with the post, who would be on the doorstep next with news of death and destruction. And I thought –I needed –to be able to say –If anything had happened to Shirley, I had needed to be able to say that this much had been mine. That I had counted, if not to you and yours then to him. To hold onto something and say 'We were sweethearts –engaged, married, however briefly.' But it never came to that, and I can stand to wait now.' For all that, Nan thought Mara still looked terrified, as if in talking about it the war would creep back up on them and undo the efforts of the last eighteen months to rebuild the world.


They were taking tea at the boarding house when the bells struck. It startled Nan as much as it did Jerry, which was why in the beginning she hadn't thought anything of it. It wasn't the usual peel, treble-Kent-bob or whatever the wedding chime was, but slow, sonorous, like canon-fire. One, two, three, Nan counted them, the echo rattling through the windowpanes.

'Good God,' said Mara, startling herself, 'a child. Please heaven not one of Jem's cases.'

'Forgive the frivolous question, Ariel,' said Shirley, 'but –how can you tell?'

In the brief silence that fell as the bell came to a stop, Mara blinked at them confusedly. 'You're never telling me the Glen doesn't do this.'

'We are,' said Nan and Shirley in unlikely unison, as they bell began again. Jerry grimaced, as if the sound was causing him acute pain.

'All right?' said Nan, stupidly, turning to him and unable to think of anything else.

'They've never done that before,' said Shirley for all of them. Mara was still unbelieving.

'But they must have,' she said, pouring out tea, unfazed. 'They're ringing the nine tailors'

'The nine what?' from the two confused Inglesideans, while Jerry pressed his fingers to his ears as if to stem some of the clangour. Instinctively Nan set down her teacup and threaded an arm through the crook of his elbow, trying to lay her head on his shoulder. His upraised hands made it difficult.

'You must have heard them, Catkin…no, thinking on it, you wouldn't have done. They stopped during the war. They had to. If they'd tolled out the life of all their dead we'd never have slept for the sound of it.'

As abruptly as it had started, the sound stopped.

'Eight,' murmured Mara, 'so out of swaddling, then.'

'Tell me there's a pattern to your knowing this, won't you?' said Shirley.

Nan didn't stay the explanation. Jerry's skin under her hand had chilled and pebbled with gooseflesh, notwithstanding the combination of Darjeeling tea and Mrs. Hugh Alexander's overzealous radiators. Faith might be the aspiring doctor, but Nan thought she knew enough not to like the colour he had turned. Curds and whey she thought, with a mind for Norman Douglas. Apparently, it was a trait shared between anxious Merediths.

'Come on,' she said, leading Jerry gently by the elbow, 'woods are calling.'


In the hall, with the wind whistling through the imperfect single-glazing, Nan reclaimed her coat and then bundled Jerry into his, his fingers proving either too cold or too clumsy to negotiate the buttons.

'Mara's right, you know,' said Jerry as they walked, 'they did used to do that before –it would have been before you started. Jem and I could never work out the reason. Sort of makes your skin prickle to think they're claiming the dead, doesn't it?'

'Worse than death notices?' asked Nan. 'I still can't read them now, you know. I rely on Susan and Aunt Milly to keep me abreast of what's happened to who. It's probably terribly selfish.'

'It sounds decidedly reasonable,' said Jerry, and they lapsed into silence, their breath rising like mist before them.

It wasn't until they had walked well into the heart of the woods, the trees gnarled and twisted close together with age, that Nan got up the nerve to say, 'That's all it was? About the bells?' Getting no answer, she rushed on impulsively, 'Only –you never used to be superstitious. That was all me.'

'That was years ago, angel.' Perhaps it was the wind, or the cold, or perhaps it was nothing at all, but it seemed to Nan that notwithstanding the old endearment, something put a sting like a nettle's into the words. And the worst of it was, she had no docket equivalent because in bygone years Jerry's stings, for all their debating, had landed on other people's shoulders. In a rational mood, she thought abstractedly, she'd suppose he hadn't meant it. For the time being that didn't lessen the bite of it.

'I suppose so,' she said, sitting down suddenly on a stump. It was half-mired in snow, and it swelled around her, damping her coat and sending a chill creeping into her blood.

'You aren't exactly as I left you either,' said Jerry, sitting down at her feet.

'No,' said Nan, throat tight. But at least the awful nettle sharpness had gone out of him. 'Jerry –lots has happened since then. Ever so much.'

'Quite.'

They sat, not looking at each other, reaching for words to close the space that had sprung, palpable, up between them. The bark of the stump was beginning to bite into the flesh of Nan's legs, stockings notwithstanding and it set her teeth on edge. Near at hand a blue-jay screamed. Thief! It seemed to cry, Thief, Thief, Thief! Nan turned her eyes heavenward, half wondering what it had lost, and felt ice bloom along her eyelids. She was not said some inner voice of resolution, going to end this argument –if that's what it was –with tears. That was a child's trick, and she'd outgrown it –oh back after the loss of her beloved parasol to Dovie Johnson, she supposed. The bark had teeth, it must have. She could feel them gouging out the hollows under her kneecaps, little slivers jabbing at her like needles. Thief, Thief, Thief, went the desolate blue-jay, so that Nan almost wished for the bells. She could stand them, tempered by Mara's explanation –the latest of so many rites and oddments on an ever-growing list of things to be woven into everyday life. But the bird, half-sobbing for something unknowable –'I can't do this anymore,' said Jerry, pulling her sharply back into the present.

'Can't or won't?' said Nan, not at all sure what he meant. She was more than half-afraid of asking.

'Can't,' with conviction. He sounded the way he had sounded when he had come up to Ingleside to tell her he was going to war. 'It was supposed to be easy, angel, coming back here, and picking up where I'd left off. But it was a lifetime ago, and someone else's life –and I can't get back to it. God knows I've tried. They have such great expectations at home. Parliament and Ottawa and I don't know what else. And, however, I try and meet them, the war creeps in, has been doing it for ages, the bells and the pipes and I don't know what else –and I can't go back. It all seems pointless, somehow. Do you never find that?'

'No,' said Nan. 'No. Everything –always Jerry –the Sloanes and the Pyes and those awful Latin sight translations –all I've wanted to get back to is this, to us. But it's like holding an eel sometimes. I don't know where we are any more.' The tears that she had so far staved off betrayed her then, blossoming into little pellets of ice that stung her skin.

'There,' said Jerry, taking the sleeve of his coat to her cheeks clumsily, for she was sitting above him, 'that's not what I meant. You're the one that's good with words, angel. That's why it's such lunacy, the idea of me being a speaker anywhere. I say it all wrong, or I can't say anything –there aren't words. There aren't words for this either,' brushing her cheek with his fingertips, 'but that's something else. You're like the sun. Without the thought of you and what we'd have, I'd have gone to pieces well before now. Days come and go for you. Always for you.'

'That's all right then,' said Nan. She leaned her head against his chest, crushing the brim of her hat in the process, and allowed him to pull her down onto the ground, so that her weight rested partly on the snowbanks, partly on his knees. After the cold of the snow and the bite of the bark it was an unspeakable relief. She closed her eyes to shield them from the wind, and sat there, curled against him, counting his heartbeats, feeling them in her forehead and the bridge of her nose, telling them as the bells had tolled the life of the Kingsport child earlier. The air and the argument had restored to him his usual colour, so that when Nan opened her eyes again, he looked like the Jerry she remembered, the one she had described in so many economies, adventures as they became, of Lord Harrington. He smelled of the snow, that crisp, cold, almost clear scent, of sodden wool, and of the cloves that filled the boarding house closets to defend against moths, of hair oil and tea, and the mulch of the damp leaves where he'd exposed them, sitting so long in the snow.

'Come back,' he said suddenly, startling Nan. She opened her eyes painfully wide in the cold to stare at him, incredulous.

'Here?'

'Of course, here. You thought about it once –wished for it with a passion I was half jealous of. I'd never known you to want anything so much as that second degree. Come back.'

Nan opened her mouth, meaning to say she knew not what, and could only gape like a fish.

'I could do it, I think, if you came back. If you were here. Come back. Please.'

'Jerry, I can't.'

'Can't, or won't?' said he in his turn.

'Can't,' said Nan, almost fiercely. She shifted the better to settle on the snow, but stumbled against the tree stump, and fell instead. Snow seeped under the collar and sleeves of her coat, but the wetness of it scarcely registered.

'If you mean the school –'

'Of course I mean the school! I've promised to stay the year!' said Nan, colour rising, her feel cheeks growing hot with feeling.

'Teachers change hands mid-year all the time. They get ill or they marry or –'

'Are you asking then?'

It was Jerry's turn to start.

'You haven't, you know,' said Nan when no answer seemed forthcoming. 'Not properly. Faith had mother's circlet from Jem, and Mara had ritual, but I had the indistinct promise that if you came back you'd say something and that in the meantime not to wait.'

'An instruction I thought we'd agreed you'd ignored,' said Jerry.

'And that absolves you keeping your part, does it? It made sense when the war was on Jerry. I could explain it to Mums and believe what I said –but there isn't a war now and all the sense is gone out of it.'

'No,' said Jerry. He reached for her but Nan had by then scrabbled to the security of the tree stump, brushing snow from her as she went. With a thought for the awful abrasive bark Nan tucked her knees under her chin. A bruise was blooming along her spine where it had collided with the tree bark earlier, and her skirt was damp and clinging to her. She thought obscurely of Nelly Dean warning against damp feet and wondered how it was that even in the heat of an argument with Jerry about what the future looked like, she could still be ambushed by literature –and unlikely pieces of it at that.

'Not like this, angel,' Jerry said now, softening. 'Not to salve an argument. You wouldn't want that. I don't.'

'No,' said Nan, her breath going out of her all at once. It was as if someone had taken a pin to her lungs, or perhaps a board, because, suddenly, unaccountably, her larynx and throat gave up on working all together and she could only sob painfully, her throat hard and tight with constricted feeling, exhausted by the cost of the conversation, of keeping abreast of its tacks and turns, of holding her future and his in both hands and trying somehow to make sense of it all.

'Come here,' said Jerry, 'Come here.' But in fact, he went to her, knelt by her and wrapped her arms tight around the coiled spring of her, cocooning her in his coat, the brim of his hat jostling hers out of place and exposing her forehead to the onslaught of the weather. It should have made breathing harder, his hands folded tight over her sternum, all logic said so, but in practice it worked the other way around.

'You're all cold,' said Jerry, breath warm against her ear. 'Let's get you home. Faith can be properly cross with me for upsetting you. It will make everything right, I promise.'

'You missed out Jem,' Nan said weakly.

'I must have been hoping he'd be out,' said Jerry, and gingerly pulled them to their feet.

'Must have been,' agreed Nan. Then, as she wove her arm through his, 'But when it came to the point, I'd have fought your corner.'

'I know,' Jerry said. 'A divided house and all that.'

They walked back through the woods, snow crunching under their feet. It was hard going: Nan's sodden skirts kept clinging to her ankles and every few feet she had to stop to untangle them, prise them free of her ankles, while Jerry waited, a prospect no doubt, that would have horrified Susan if she ever got to hear of it. Now and then little shards of ice rained from the treetops as the wind rattled them, and as they neared the town centre, the air began to fill with the comforting smell of smoke and fire as people made their homes ready for the dense cold promised by the blossoming twilight.

'Tell me something,' said Nan, stopping them short of St John's graveyard.

'Anything you like, darling,' Jerry said, and kissed the brim of her hat as if in sealing a pact.

'If you don't stay here…if you were to give it all up, politics and parliament and the old idea…what would you do instead?'

'I was afraid you'd ask that,' said Jerry. 'Or rather, I thought you would, sooner or later. You and your watertight plans.'

'I can adapt them,' said Nan, and Jerry raised a hand, waving away her indignation.

'I know,' he said. 'I've seen you do it. When the war was on for a start. If that wasn't an incursion on the universe, I don't know what was.' He leaned against the lych-gate of the graveyard, resting his full weight on his arms, the better to stretch his legs out behind him.

'What I'd do instead,' he said, apparently to the stones enclosed, 'well I don't know what you'd make of it, angel. It's not at all what we talked over.'

'You might try me,' said Nan, mustering patience.

'Mm. Something in that. When I was –away –do you remember me mentioning Michael Priest?'

Nan, wary of interrupting, only nodded. He was something to do with Jerry's regiment, she thought. His name had been dotted all through Jerry's letters. Michael, and John, and…Matthew, that was it. She could be sure because they had laughed at long distance about the popularity of biblical names among his men.

'There was some talk of his going with friends, sort of dividing up the country and painting it, and did I want to come. I didn't jump at it because –well I didn't know what you'd make of it to start with –and because I didn't want to intrude on something that had always been Faith's link to Mummy. After she died, I mean. Before, when we were little, we shared it. We lost long, golden hours to lying on the Maywater lawn sketching things. And then Mummy died and someone had to be…present…I guess I mean…so I stopped, and it became Faith's…and now I'm afraid of taking it away from her. Is that absurd?'

'No,' said Nan. 'Di, when she began thinking about the paper, even though it was photography she wanted to do for them, and not writing…she said something similar. Said would I mind, when I had always had that from Mums. She could see how close we were over it, and she thought working among writers…might be a tie to Walter, I suppose. But she didn't want to intrude on what Mums and I had, or detract from it.'

It was Jerry's turn to nod. He shifted his feet slightly, scuffing his shoes against the pavement as he recrossed his arms on the lych-gate.

'Then you will know. I never gave them much thought, all those Maywater idylls of days, until now, when the chance of beginning again, somewhere completely else, is almost intoxicating. I can't –and I wouldn't –ask you to go to the wild corners of the world and the ends of the earth if you didn't want it, angel. But will you risk the man I've become for the one you loved?'

'Always,' said Nan, softly, fiercely. 'If it comes to that, I'm not the same either. You said it yourself. I might ask the same of you.'

'Always,' Jerry said. The shadows were long, and the last of the light bleeding from the sky, a ball of taut red fire like a Christmas bauble. By its lingering glow Jerry held out a hand to Nan across the lych-gate. She came and joined him, interweaving gloved fingers with his. As the sun sank into the sea, he closed his spare hand over hers, and together they turned toward Larkrise.