Before we go in, Nicolas retrieves a small lantern he keeps hidden here. He lights it and crawls under that slab, and I follow to find rudimentary stairs leading down into a room.

“It is the crypt!” I say, peering about. “We are in the old church crypt.”

“Yes, and we may return later for better examination, if you are interested. I spent nearly a week hiding in here, and I consider the residents some of my dearest friends.” He gestures to a moldering set of bones that has fallen from its berth. “That is Peter. He likes tall women and dark ale. Do not get him started on sheep, or he shall never stop talking.”

I smile and follow him through the crypt to the far wall. He bends and unlatches something. Then, with a tug, an entire shelf of bodies comes free from the wall. Behind it, darkness beckons.

“You will need to kneel here,” Nicolas says. “We have to crawl hereafter. I hope that is all right.”

“As I am not wearing a skirt, which would bunch and bind and restrict my crawling, it is quite all right. Onward.”

He drops to all fours and disappears into the tunnel. We enter what becomes a spider’s web of them, crisscrossing with no markers to indicate direction.

“That is also intentional,” Nicolas says. “Many lead nowhere at all. One leads to a bog. Another heads straight off the cliff. One night, I made the mistake of attempting the tunnels with only a matchstick and found myself hanging off a cliffside. That is when I procured this lantern.”

The tunnels are as glorious as I envisioned, and I am somewhat annoyed that I could not find them sooner. I understand the villagers’ deceit. I imagine it is quite a trial to have holidayers popping about asking after the tunnels they read of. So I do not blame the villagers, though I do still blame the one utter jackanapes who smirked and suggested I wouldn’t fit in the tunnels anyway. I do fit—with room enough that Nicolas could squeeze past me.

I wish I did not dwell on such things. I don’t, in my everyday life. My body does everything I ask of it, and so I do not see any reason to change it. I have been plump since birth, and the one time—as a silly young woman—that I surrendered to pressure and became slender, I was both miserable and unwell. So I have accepted my shape, not with resignation but with pride, and I want to laugh off insults, yet some seem to lie like traps waiting to spring.

The point is that the tunnel is quite wide enough, and I will dismiss that man’s petty jibe with one of my own, that judging by his own physical condition, he would not have been able to endure this endless crawl. For me, it is a delightful experience, complete with nuances such as a lewd drawing on a bracing post, sheep’s teeth set into a macabre signature and a spot where two people traded joking insults, searing them onto driftwood set in the ceiling. From one wall, I even pull the remains of an ancient, hammered amulet, which I pocket.