Many thanks for the lovely reviews -I too am almost sorry to see Annunciata go, she did have a flavour all her as for the realism of the conversations that followed her departure -they are all of a pattern with my life, so I'm glad they read believably. I never wrote them so much as let them write themselves. Now its away from Acadie for a spell, and onto other people and places.


They did not see Colette for many days in the wake of the conversation that had failed to be about the twins' baptism. It seemed after all that Peter had not been wrong when he had said to Di in the early days of her arrival, that Colette was not one to let herself grow close to anyone. She had parted with a well-kept secret over the comfort and seclusion of a late evening's tea and having done so was afraid to come back, for fear of what she should find on arrival, worried perhaps she might find still spread over the trestle table the contents of her soul as she had left it. Such had never been Nan's habit, Di remembered, but it had been Persis Ford's, and Una's too, she thought as she paused in her weeding of the garden to look over her shoulder on the chance Colette was to be seen coming up the hill. She was not, of course she was not, she would have called out in greeting long before now if she were there, and Di cast her mind back to that golden and short-lived interval before the war. Yes, she thought now, it had certainly been Una's habit to tell you something almost accidentally in a moment of unguarded honesty, and then to remember that she had promised to make the supper for that evening, or to take one of Rosemary's music lessons, anything that would take her away from the person she had unwittingly confided in. Now, at the sound of footsteps behind her, Di turned her head again, but it was only Peter, coming back to the house after a day going over the various pastures and evaluating them as to how serviceable they were.

'I startled you,' he said, by way of apology and greeting both, 'I never meant to, sure. What ghost have you seen to make you look so? Or have you only heard it?'

'I have been listening,' said Di, taking the arm he extended to her and rising, brushing from her skirt with her unengaged hand the fuzzy little leaves of the thistles that had sprung up in the herb garden overnight, 'but I haven't heard anything, or hadn't till you came up.'

'Ah,' said Peter, relinquishing his hold on her and turning the handle on the door before holding it ajar with one hand, beckoning her into the kitchen with the other, 'then it's no wonder I should have spooked you. You've been listening for our colleen –where has she got to, do you know? It's been weeks since we've seen her.'

'Oh I expect she has places to visit besides Hillside,' said Di, interpreting the glance he sent in the direction of the stove as a suggestion that someone make up tea. She went to the kettle and began to fill it, 'and not quite weeks, I think.'

'Ah, but it feels like it,' said Peter, 'and I don't know but that she hasn't nearly so many places to call in on as you're thinking. There's one or two lasses as she knows from Mass I grant you, that she might look in on, but she never strikes me as being so warm with them, so much herself, as she is with you,… and of course there's doctor Gregory, but never before would I have thought her to call there to the exclusion of us. Mind you,' he said, rubbing the side of his face with his hand, 'she did disappear months at a time when you first came, not that I should suppose that had much to do with it.'

No, thought Di, I don't expect it did.

'What are you thinking?' Peter demanded of her now, almost playfully, as she began to fuss over the kettle. She hardly felt she could say I am thinking that I should have fled here and kept away too if I was more than a little in love with you and worrying over how you would take to whoever had come to fill my place, as Colette very likely was.

'I hope you don't think I can tell you where she's got to,' said Di, laughing to cover her confusion more at the manner of the asking than the question itself, 'not when you've known her longer and no doubt better than I do?'

'Differently, not better, colleen,' said Peter, following her about the room as she took down the constituent parts of the tea service from their places. Di took no notice of him.

'Thinking on it,' said Peter, almost to himself, 'in light of that book you uncovered I suppose there's a chance she might be away being –helpful –Gran would have called it, to someone somewhere…but you've never been told have you about Colette's gift for 'catching' children have you?' Di admitted more than a little confusedly that she had not, at least not properly.

'No, I didn't think that you had,' said Peter. 'But when it comes to the point, there's so much of Burnt Church's history tied up in that story that I don't know but that Colette oughtn't to have the telling of it; I never did get to grips with the history of the place and people tell colleen things…she knows more about our piece of the world than almost anyone else in the village, and she's fiercely proud of it too; it's as much her inheritance in some ways, the story of Burnt Church and how her people got to be there, as her language and her beads. Besides, I only half understand what it is she does and would mangle it in the telling –it's more than baptizing children dying of croup though, of that I am sure. I told you she was too good by half, very much the Christian in works and faith, is Colette. Yes, that will be it – Willow-Book-work. I always have heard it said there was no one better for help in a crisis, where children were concerned, than she was.'

'You told her she was too good by half,' amended Di, and then, provoked to teasing, 'and if you've heard all that, you can hardly have been surprised by that book of hers,'

'No-o, not exactly, only by how much of it there was,' Peter admitted. 'The children I knew about –her hands you know, are quite famous –it's their smallness, I think, like child's hands really. Have you never noticed them? But the rest of it…'

Without warning the promise Colette had extracted for her early in the twins infancy sprang to the forefront of her mind;you must see there aren't any more…send Laura Lee running round for me if it comes to that. She had forgotten it between the incident of the ducks' eggs, the twins' christening, and that rather more pressing admission of Colette's, but it came back to her now, and in the sanctity of the kitchen, warm with the heat of the May-time sun and the oven, the skin on the back of Di's neck prickled uncomfortably and she shivered.

'Here,' said Peter, taking the kettle from her, 'let me do that. There's a goose treading your grave to judge from looking at you – sit at the table and tell me what's frightened colleen away faster than a knife in hot butter –or can't you?' He looked at her uncertainly across the table.

'No,' said Di, thinking of that last conversation with Colette, 'I can't tell you that.'

'Well then perhaps,' and Peter began to unfold the section of the paper with the crossword printed on it, 'you will be able to tell me the meaning of some of these. 'Weather men caught in a flurry of sleet,' for instance, I've been puzzling on it all afternoon but haven't yet come near to making sense out of it.'

''Elements,' I think,' said Di after a moment's pause.

'Of course,' said Peter, writing it down, 'I never do seem to have your trick for unscrambling words, leastwise not so quickly as you do, and by rights I ought to have at least something of a knack for it, all that time spent on the sundial. And yet it's the hidden answers and definitions I have most luck with –listen, what's that?'

Di, who had been hearing shadows all night, nearly laughed. 'Only the kettle I think,' she said, abandoning the trestle table and crossword in favour of stopping it before it began to boil dry, 'I can't have taken it off the heat.'

She had though, as became apparent when whatever it was persisted even when Di stood with the kettle suspended in her hands over the stovetop.

'No, not the kettle,' Peter persisted. He turned in his seat towards the door that lead to the front of the house, his ears straining to catch some uncharacteristic sound, and now Di, holding the mute kettle in her hands began to hear it too, the faint rumbling sound of Mr. Harris's voice, and Mimi's too, watery and uneven, as though perhaps she were crying. Very probably she was crying, Di thought, and began mentally to take a tally of the children, to be sure they were not near at hand could not hear what could only be arguing, for there was no other word for it. Laura Lee had gone with Richard to race crayfish into the sea, Paul had gone to town for penny-sweets before the shop closed, and no doubt had run into a friend and run off for the evening…Caro was out in one of the unused sheds, scrubbing the floors with water and thereby converting it to a 'cabin' for playing in, so that was all right. And now came the gradual crescendo of Mimi's voice, as Di had never heard it before, weeping certainly, but growing almost into hysteria. She dared not look at Peter for fear his face should confirm that he was hearing it too, and yet he must be, for how could he not? Now he was taking the kettle from her hands, saying, 'you'll scald them that way, colleen, holding onto it so long. Set it here and come tell me if I ever told you –I suppose I must have told Caro and the others, about Castle Rock? I used to swim there in spite of the waves –they terrified me you know. Richard now, he loves rushing into the water, especially if it climbs up to meet the heavens, and he would have loved Castle Rock for just that reason, but I was always convinced the water would swallow me –I never was much of a one for water. That I believe I did tell you.' He paused for breath and to make up more tea for both of them before resuming his story, knowing full well that at any other time she would have given him her full attention but that at this particular moment she had more than half an ear fixed on the mounting conversation overhead.

'They're down at the water now, aren't they, Richard and Laura Lee, I mean,' said Peter, thinking perhaps he might get Di to talk of the children if nothing else. 'And Caro's making over what her dad always called 'the cabin?' Laura Lee used to do that; I suppose she feels she's outgrown it now. It was Colette's idea, making over the cabin I mean, and Laura Lee took to it…for her it was the Golden Staircase one summer and the Lonesome Island the next, but she never did turn it into that place with the lasses that danced all night, which is a mercy because…' Di never did find out why it was to have been merciful that Laura Lee never took to playing at 'the twelve dancing princesses' because there came from overhead a shout and suddenly Mr. Harris was saying,

'What are you doing? Don't you realize –you must know you'll poison him like that?' and Mimi, who had only been weeping with increasing violence, suddenly sent forth a wail of anguish and Peter, in spite of his sometimes attendance at church, crossed himself with a rapidity that suggested he had never quite lost the habit, and called upon the Virgin in Heaven in the language of a prayer he had not yet forgotten, and only then stopped to say, 'what a blessing they're all out of the house –if Laura Lee were to have heard it, or Caro…' but Di had already bolted from the room and was even then taking the stairs two- and three-at-a-time, disregarding entirely Susan's old injunction that to do so was unladylike.

Mr. Harris had disappeared Di knew not where when she at last found herself hovering in the doorway of Mimi's room. She was struggling with the buttons to her blouse and little Robbie lay awkwardly in her lap, just big enough to find the position in which he found himself, his head balanced almost as an afterthought on his mother's knees, the rest of him lengthwise on the bed, an uncomfortable one, and he pummeled the quilt with his fists to communicate as much, his face red and angry with the effort of it. Mimi had subsided into a low moaning, and Di, who had meant to ask if she might come in, instead found herself crossing the room uninvited and kneeling before Mimi, taking over the buttons of her blouse.

'It's all right,' she said to no particular purpose, 'it's all right now,' as she might have done for Caro or Paul, or Laura Lee when she was unduly wound up with nerves.

'I suppose,' said Mimi unsteadily, 'you heard all of that?'

Di did not answer, but went on with the buttons, making soft shushing noises. They went a long way to soothing Mimi, who hearing them began to breath easily again, but Robbie, still abusing the quilt, began to cry in his turn, ' 'Aurlee, 'Aurlee,' over and over again. Di lifted him up into her arms and smoothing his head with the back of her hand began to wrap him in the crochet blanket at Mimi's feet, one of Colette's offerings, Di thought, catching sight of the cross pattern woven into the stitches, but she thought it abstractedly, the better part of her focus being then given over to the mother and child before her. Robbie, once securely swaddled, began to subside, only saying spasmodically, that nonsense word, ' 'Aurlee,' and Di was able to turn back to Mimi, and give her again the bulk of her attention. She came and sat beside her, and disregarding altogether the list of things that would make 'baby unhappy and cross,' began to bounce little Robbie on her knee, even as she balanced him in the crook of one arm, while with her hands she reached out to Mimi and taking the woman's hands in hers said gently, 'tell me what happened. Tell me what is wrong.'

In another mood, another moment, Mimi might have said, 'you sound like Colette,' and teased her for the carefulness of her diction, as if each word had to balance a scale somewhere. But tonight words mattered terribly and Mimi had not the energy to tease. She pressed hard the hands that held her own and said, 'there was blood,' but offered no further explanation.

'Blood?' Di repeated, feeling very much like the Echo of Ovid in her mother's books of mythology and Elsewhere, something out of Tomorrow perhaps.

'Yes, blood,' said Mimi again, 'like at communion, you know, take drink, this is my blood,' that's how it goes, isn't it?' and even as she said it, Di saw for the first time what had been pinpricks on Mimi's blouse when she first came into the room but had since swollen into little red rosettes that threatened to blossom still more.

'There was blood,' Mimi said again, 'with the milk and I didn't know what to do…and his father thought –he said –when he saw it –'

'It wouldn't have poisoned him,' said Di, thereby betraying that she had in fact, heard at least a little of this argument, 'it wouldn't have hurt him.'

'You can't possibly know that,' said Mimi forlornly, but Di did know, because one of the Crawfords –or perhaps one of the McAllisters –some over-worried mother from Over Harbour at any rate, who had called her father out of the house just as a blizzard was beginning, some years ago now. He had gone, because he never would have coped if he hadn't, and had come home half frozen, with snow and frost clinging to his whiskers, his eyes, anywhere it could, and he had said to Di earnestly as she brought him a mug of coffee up in his study, 'Di-dearest, never, never let anyone tell you blood will harm a baby, do you promise? Never.' Di had duly promised, and now she brought forth the memory and in so doing talked the remnants of Mimi's anxiety away.

'I never noticed,' said Mimi, 'not until Robert came in and wanted to know what had made Robbie's mouth so red –look at it, as if he had been eating cherries.' It did rather look as though someone had been feeding the boy cherries and Di laughed.

'They would do him far more harm than anything he's had this evening –think of the stones in them,' she said, and Mimi too began to smile.

'I never thought,' she said. From below came the sound of the front door swinging wide in its hinge and hitting the wall.

'Oh –that will be Richard come back, I suppose,' Mimi said, adding mournfully, 'if I've told him once, I've told him half a dozen times to be gentle with that door, it will hit someone, or break something one day.'

'You have, I have, Colette has, and I once heard Annunciata admonish him for it. Here, if you take Robbie for me, I'll run hot water for a bath and you're to sit in it until the heat has gone out, do you promise?'

'I really don't need –' Mimi began, but Di, having handed the baby to his mother, was already out of the room and moving down the hall, and there was little sense in protesting further.


Richard and Laura Lee tumbled into the kitchen just as Caro was raising appealing blue eyes to Peter and asking, 'what was daddy shouting about?'

'Shouting?' said Peter, scrabbling for an answer and willing Di to reappear, 'I don't know as I heard him shouting, colleen, not properly at any rate.'

'But he was cross,' persisted Caro, forgetting in her anxiety to protest against that much-used and all-purpose endearment of Peter's. She had been cheerfully scrubbing the floor of the shed nearest the house at the time of her parents' argument and with ears to rival a cat's, had heard enough of the conversation to have an uncomfortable feeling that something had gone wrong.

'Cross with mummy,' she added for clarification. Peter lifted her up into his arms and kissed the top of her head, adding as an afterthought, 'and I'm not colleen.'

'We-ell,' he said reluctantly, 'I suppose they weren't exactly happy…but you needn't worry over it, colleen – no, hush, that is just what you are until the day you are too big to be held like this, then I must call you something else –but there, people sometimes disagree, like Paul and Richard or…' but Caro had interrupted him and was saying, 'but you never disagree with anyone, Peter, you and Di and Colette, you always agree.'

Into this came Di, meaning to look out and tackle for once and for all the dreaded percentage tables, more than a little harried, only to have Laura Lee fling herself at her knees and say, 'can you tell us why daddy was shouting? Caro thought he might be and Peter says people don't always agree…'

Peter, had he not still been holding Caro, might have thrown his arms up in the air. As it was he merely shook his head, at once a gesture of apology and confusion. He had not even had the time to put Caro right, to say that he and Colette did not always agree, and after all, he wasn't sure, as he looked at her deeply blue eyes, like some moonless sky at midnight, that he wanted to enlighten her.

Di took all this in at a glance; the worry of the little girl in Peter's arms, Laura Lee's stifled nervousness as she held Di's knees in a vice, Peter's radiating confusion, the muffled perplexity of Richard, betraying itself only in the way he rubbed at his lower lip. The percentage tables would have to wait.

'It isn't anything to worry about,' said Di, trying to think quickly, 'your father was worried about Robbie and his mummy, but they are both safe and sound and happy, so there's nothing to fret over.'

Peter thought she had done rather well at no notice but of course the mention of Robbie only made Laura Lee the more determined, and Richard likewise, when he came and joined them at the trestle table. His crayfish had won all that evening's races, and he was pleased, but now did not seem the time to mention the crayfish; Caro looked as if at any moment she might dissolve into tears and Laura Lee was fidgeting as she only did when nervous, though she had at least let go of Di. Instead she kept picking up the Willow Book from where it was sitting on the table and turning over the pages absentmindedly, then turning them back, closing the book, opening it and starting over. Richard came to her and took the book out of her hands, tucking them instead into his, whispering incoherently in her ear the Acadian of their first golden years that made Laura Lee still and rest her head on Richard's shoulder, where the autumnal glory of her hair stood out against his dark and gentle sombreness at that moment. Even so, Nothing but a story would do for them, after all the excitement of their coming home, and Peter said, in an effort to turn their minds another way, 'have I never told you of the children that lived in Carradoc Castle?'

'No,' said the little ones at once, though Richard said as he smoothed imaginary creases on his sister's hand –a habit he had caught from watching Peter with Colette in those far-away war years, 'you have, you have, about Mary who spins the thread and her brother who makes shoes and, and, and…*'

'Seemingly I have done then,' said Peter ruefully, 'can you bear to have it again, Richard lad?' Richard screwed up his eyes in such a look as to suggest that he could not bear it, though what he really meant was that he would endure it if his sister had pinned her happiness on it for the foreseeable future. Laura Lee though, was making some protestation in two languages at once, that even had it not been, was swallowed by Richard's shirt collar.

Di found herself saying, 'don't you think after all they've had their share of nonsense for tonight? Why not a sensible story, just for once.'

'Oh well,' said Peter, as one deeply grieved, 'if it's sense you're after I won't do anyone much good.'

'You were telling me about Castle Rock earlier,' said Di in an effort to be helpful, and Peter beamed at her over Caro's dark and downy head.

'So I was,' he said comfortably, and Caro pillowed her head on his shoulder, the better to feel and take in the low resonance of his voice, which felt to her as though it rose out of the ground, so low in his sternum did it originate.

'But we've heard all about Castle Rock, Peter,' said Richard, who was not to be easily placated that evening, 'you've told us heaps and heaps about it.' He sounded cross and he knew it, but he could feel the fabric at his shoulder softening and growing cold with his sister's silent crying, in relief or unease he knew not, and uncertainty was making him tetchy.

'You never did say Peter,' said Laura Lee , lifting her head at last, and turning her eyes on the others and speaking with great care and attention to manners, 'where you used to live before you came to us.'

'No you haven't,' agreed Di, who had always been curious to know and felt she told rather more than she listened when Peter was inclined to talk over the past.

'That's a story hardly worth tuppence,' said Peter, sitting down and pulling Caro into his lap, 'I only hail from 'over the hills and far away', as the old song goes.'

'Yes but where?' asked Caro, fixing her steadfast blue eyes on him. Her siblings took up the question in chorus and Di tilted her head inquiringly.

'They will never sleep now until you tell them,' she said to the cuckoo clock, merrily counting off the seconds as they passed.

'Oh well, if you're determined to have it, you're determined and what can I do but give way,' said Peter, bowing his head nobly and tugging lovingly at Caro's ear as he said it to make the child's eyes crinkle. 'Though I take it from that, Richard, that whatever else I have told you, I never did let on where Castle Rock was.' Richard had to admit that in this Peter was right.

'The story Peter,' said Laura Lee, even as he was working out it's beginning, 'you were telling us a story.'

'Mm,' said Caro, resttling herself in his arms, turning inwards to his chest to feel again the sound of his heart and take in the sound of his blood as it rushed through him, full wit the business of living, her nose prickling with the sharpness of the smell of outdoors; cedar, clover, salt and cattle that was and always had been Peter to her.

'Let me think,' he was saying, laughing a little and tapping a finger against his chin, 'let me think,' and he began to sing, the notes rising up out of the floor,

Merrily, cheerily, noiselessly whirring,

Swings the wheel, spins the wheel, while the foot's stirring,

Sprightly and brightly and merrily ringing…†

As he sang, he began to unravel the story of the family he had kept so close; the grandfather who had been sent away and died in prison for stealing food that his children might eat, how his grandmother, a land-person to her inward-most soul, had learned the trick of fishing and what kinds of seaweed were edible after that, so that her family would not die of the hunger pains. He told them of the clothes his mother had made for a living, the deep oceanidic blues and countryside greens of bolts of cloth bigger than hams and the silks the red of martyr's blood. Di thought of Annunciata's red gown and wondered how many martyrs' lives had been spent in the dying of it. All of this came vividly to light before Caro, and the vividness of the fancy, the acuteness of the things he described, lulled her to half-sleep.

Peter talked on, of the low-roofed cottage with the rafters wide enough to lie on, the whir of the wheel and the clatter of the treadle on his grandmother's spinning wheel, the hum of her voice and the whistle of the wind coming down the chimney into the hearth on a blustery night, and how the same wind made the room fill with smoke if the fire should be going in the grate when it did so. The children thrilled to hear him talk so, revelled in the sing-song of his voice, the way it rocked as he spoke of the cat that half-drowned in the butter-churn and the lilt of it when he talked of the fickleness of the weather, the shimmer of the heat as it yielded to the mizzle of undecided rain, the taste of it, the feel of it, the smell of the peat fire and the whirring of his grandmother's spinning wheel. Laura Lee's skin prickled with the sensations it evoked, and Richard let go of her hands to put his arms around her absentmindedly, so in thrall was he to the story unfolding around them.

Paul, creeping in midway through the story, sleepy with the after-effects of sugar and exercise, whispered irreverently into Di's ear that there must be an awful lot of spindles in the place Peter was from, for them to feature so much in the stories he told; she had to take long shaky breaths, burying her face in his hair to smother her laughter.

At long last Peter seemed to run out of history for them and setting Caro down and he took up instead his fiddle from where it had been lying on the table, saying as he did so 'what will you have colleen?' Caro, jolted to alertness by the suddenness of the movement, made the only answer she could have been expected to make, the one she had earlier forgotten in her nervousness, 'not my name Peter, not my name,' but she was laughing, she had ceased to worry about the argument she had overheard snatches of from the shed called 'the cabin', and Di was glad.

St. Christopher, who had been good-naturedly listening until that moment, took one look at the instrument in Peter's hands and fled, clearly of the opinion that fiddles were little better company to be caught with than dogs, and closeted himself in the 'house-space' until the sound of the strings died away. It was Richard who said, 'play that song you were singing before Peter, about the wheels whirring.'

'Yes,' said all the others, 'yes do, Peter, do,' and he relented but not without making the children to dance and clap until the flush of sleep crept over them and reluctantly they were bundled off to bed.

It was Di who saw them off to sleep, Mimi being then still too much overwrought to know very well how to manage them, and so it was Di rather than Mimi, who at last parsed the gibberish of little Robbie as she put the girls to bed. They knelt one beside another, the one with hair the colour of marigolds –'Mary's Gold,' Peter would no doubt have rendered it – and the other dark as any raven's, their heads inclined towards each other, reciting in childish unison, Mathew Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lie on…

There was nothing unremarkable in this, and Di leaned against the wall opposite taking the scene in and smiling at the harmony of it; Laura Lee's thoroughly unmixed English, full of the sound of nothing but Canadian vowels and consonants, Caro with her R's halfway between those she loved best; not so far back in her throat as Peter's and not so fully rounded as Colette's, her little voice lilting and tumbling her words together, as she enumerated those she wished blessings upon, 'RichardandLauraleeand…' but Di lost the thread of the rest of the prayers. It was something about the way Caro had bled her sister's two names together, and turned them into one that brought to mind a moment earlier in Mimi's room, as she walked the floor with Robbie and he had sobbed for ''Aurlee.' He had been crying for his sister, she realised suddenly, in that moment of unhappiness, and Di was not sure if she ought to find it sweet or unnerving. Something of both, she decided, as she tucked the girls into bed.

When they had been settled and could be thought to be sleeping soundly, Di returned to the kitchen and Peter, and said almost indignantly, and quite without warning, 'worth tuppence indeed. That was the best story you've ever dreamed up for them, much better than your talk of castles and love potions and everything else.'

'Perhaps it was,' said Peter, busily making up the nightly saucer of milk for his green people though managing still to catch the way the candlelight turned her hair from the colour of the Mary's Gold flowers to something that was almost the amber of Colette's rosary beads out of the corner of an eye.

'For it made you smile, and there's few stories I've known as have gained that end, certainly nothing I spoke of earlier in the evening managed such a thing. What was it Paul said anyway? I should like the trick of it, I think.' He set the milk bottle down and turned round in time to catch her pull all the loose pieces of her hair up and back into the knot they had come free of. Her lips twitched but she would not betray Paul's talk of spinning wheels for worlds, he had meant it for her, she said, it would grieve him to think she should part with his secrets so easily.

'Ah well, there's sense enough in that,' said Peter, 'and it can't be all bad then, you'd have told me sure enough if it sat ill with that tree-dwelling imp. But I will see if he won't part with it –not the secret but the other thing –for it was no uncommon trick he worked with you. Richard has it too, you only have to watch him with his sisters to know that –but I never seemed to have learned it, and it's a great thing, sure to be able to turn over the mood of a person from disquiet to laughter. Oh I might manage it in moments with colleen, but they aren't often –and I never have done yet when you're fretting. But Paul can and has done, so I must find out from him the way of it. As to that story, it's an old one and long and I don't need the telling that it wasn't a children's story –there was too much life in it for that.'

'I shall never understand,' said Di, taking up a candle to light a lantern for him, 'how you make out Irish maidens by Cornish prows to be stories for children any more than that one was. Don't tell me you never thrived on adult talk?'

'Sure and that's true too –Gran was always forgetting my age, likewise the visitors who came to call on her. To my mind the best way to spend a grim afternoon was lying in the rafters of our front room listening to her talk with her friends over tea. How they talked… I loved especially her stories of the neighbour who was buried and came back to life, have I told you that one?'

'No, and don't start now, it sounds ghoulish,' said Di, handing over the lantern and retreating to the shadow of the doorway that divided her own room from the kitchen.

'Thinking on it, I expect you're right,' said Peter, crossing to the back door of the kitchen and hovering thereat longer than was really needed.

'It's not right when a person can't stay dead that hasn't been summoned up before God and weighed and balanced first.'

Di made a gesture with her hands that put Laura Lee to shame and rivalled even Colette, and shook her head. 'Never mind that, how am I ever to lock up with you and Gyp hovering and making St. Christopher look decisive?'

'Going? We're gone –but you might tell me what all the trouble was about earlier.'

'What, and risk one of the children wandering down and hearing? Mimi's well, Robbie was never unwell in the first place, it's all been a storm in an anthill over nothing.'

'Well if you're sure –only I've never heard her like that before and I don't know as I want to again.'

'Nor do I, and I certainly don't want Caro hearing anything like the sound of it ever again if I can possibly help it.'

'Gracious –do you know I'd nearly forgotten? It's been such a long, full evening. No –don't tell me, I'm going this time, I really am, you'll make sure that cat doesn't touch the milk, won't you? Come by, Gyp.'

'He's more sense than that,' said Di of St. Christopher as man and dog disappeared into the moonlight. She lingered in the doorway, ostensibly calling to St. Christopher, forgetting that he was lurking in the house-space, and properly watching to see the pair of them, Gyp and Peter, safely across the yard. I think, she thought as they vanished into the night, I begin to understand Colette. It would be easy, so easy, to fall in love with him. The thought, coming as it did seemingly from nowhere, startled her, and she sprang away from the door as though it had struck her.

'Nonsense of course,' she said to St. Christopher, as he dared to re-emerge from the front of the house in favour of the warmth of the kitchen, 'it is only the fullness of the evening that has made me think of it –I am tired and I must write home. I can read dad's handwriting even if I can't read doctor Carson's, and if I ask, he will tell me how the percentage tables work.'

St. Christopher tilted his head and seemed to say, it is nonsense –you are forgetting all those girls that go with him and Colette to Sunday morning Mass.


*The story Peter and Richard are describing is Maria Edgeworth's 'The Orphans' and comes from The Parent's Assistant.

†A favourite with me, perhaps because I am a spinner myself (though on a top-whirl spindle and never a wheel), the song here is 'The Spinning Wheel,' and I can attest to its having the rhythm of a wheel in the melody.