Campion stared at the darkness beyond the hedge.

An owl, hunting the great ridge of beeches, sounded hollow across the valley. Bats flitted past the window, wheeling raggedly. A moth flew past Campion, attracted by the candle and causing Charity, the maid, to squeal in alarm, “Shut the window, Miss Dorcas.”

Campion turned. Charity had pulled out the truckle bed from beneath Campion’s. The girl’s pale, frightened face looked up. “Did it hurt, miss?”

“Always does, Charity.”

“Why did you do it, miss?”

“I don’t know.”

Campion turned back to the rich, sweet darkness. She prayed every night that God would make her good, yet she could never please her father. She had known it was a sin to swim in the stream, but she did not understand why. Nowhere in the Bible did it say “Thou shalt not swim,” though she knew that the nakedness was an offense. Yet the temptation would come again and again. Except that now she would never be allowed to the stream again.

She thought of Toby. Her father, before he beat her, had ordered her to be confined to the house for the next month. She would not be in church on Sunday. She thought of stealing away, going to the road that led north to Lazen, but knew she could not do it. She was always watched when she was forbidden to leave the house, her father guarding her with one of his trusted servants.

Love. It was a word that haunted her. God was love, though her father taught of a God of anger, punishment, wrath, vengeance and power. Yet Campion had found love in the Bible. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me”; “And his banner over me was love”; “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth.” Her father said the Song of Solomon was merely an expression of God’s love for his church, but she did not believe him.

She looked into the dark over the Werlatton valley and she thought of her father. She feared him when she should love him, yet the fear had never struck at the very center of her. She had a secret, a secret that she clung to day and night. It was like a dream that never left her, and in the dream it was as if she was a disembodied soul merely watching herself in Werlatton. She smiled. She now found she was thinking of the disembodied soul as Campion, watching Dorcas be obedient, or trying to be obedient, and she had the sense that somehow she did not belong here. She could not explain it, any more than Toby Lazender had been able to explain how the cold fingers knew the pressure of a fish in the water, yet the sense of her difference had been the sense that enabled her to resist the savage fatherhood of Matthew Slythe. She fed her soul on love, believing that kindness must exist somewhere beyond the tall, dark hedge of yew. One day, she knew, she would travel into the tangled world that her father feared.