‘Wet wipe allergy.’ Bridge held up her hands, eyes glittering, enjoying the backchat. ‘I’m sure Luca can hang on for five.’

‘Sure,’ he smiled and Carly was reminded how kind his face was.

‘Use the cottage.’ Pax pointed her towards the arched gateway. ‘It’s unlocked. Kes and Ellis can play in the hay store.’

With a grateful war cry, Kes raced off again to an open bay side of the stable yard where several big round bales were stacked for netting up, Ellis and his duster in hot pursuit.

‘Come and find me when you’re ready.’ Luca raised a black coat arm, loping off in the direction Ronnie had taken earlier.

‘We will!’ Bridge called, steely eyes rolling from Pax to Carly, voice hushed. ‘Oh my fecking God, is he hot or what? That’s a lot of testosterone right there.’ She returned to her buggy to hoik Flavia out, sending her in after the boys, then turned back for Sienna, catching herself, eyes cast up to heaven to mouth ‘sorry’ before turning to Pax and Carly. ‘Sorry. Language. I’ve a Belfast docker’s mouth, so I have.’

‘It’s nothing compared to the language these walls have heard; horsemen are far worse,’ Pax laughed, which made Carly like her a bit more.

She picked up her changing bag to carry inside with Jackson, using her teeth to pull her gloves off scorching fingers as she went, no longer convinced their healing heat was for Bridge.

The cottage smelled of burnt cake, polished leather and dog, a big mantel clock creaking uneven ticks as Carly laid Jackson out on his changing mat on a threadbare woven rug. There were antlers and stuffed fox masks on the walls and lots of hunting paraphernalia lying around, incongruously counterbalanced by brightly coloured toys underfoot. Jackson mewled for a large remote-controlled car nearby.

Leaving him crab-crawling towards it, she bagged up the soiled nappy and took it through the kitchen and out to a dustbin she’d spotted on the way in, stopping in amazement as she realised that what she’d taken to be a ferret in a hutch was a fox, fast asleep; it was the same colour as Pax’s hair. Carly was transfixed by its caged closeness.

A gurgling wail of fury brought her back to the present and she dashed inside to find Jackson had pushed the toy car into the hallway, losing it under a bowed Welsh dresser, small grabby fingers now pulling out the contents of a big box stored there, which he was rapidly emptying.

‘You little – oh!’ As she dropped down to tidy the mess, she realised they were letters, a lot of them ripped and creased. Surely Jackson couldn’t have done so much damage in so little time? She raked them out of the way, reaching under the dresser for the car to distract him again.

The letters, many in small fragments, were written in beautiful old-fashioned ink handwriting on thick paper, something she’d never seen. Nobody wrote letters any more, she realised. At least not to her. Ash had written a few when he was deployed in Iraq, but by the Afghanistan tour it was all email and Skype. He wasn’t a great wordsmith, unlike this correspondent in whose flowing lines she could already spot phrases like ‘the moonlight silvers our tears’ and ‘a thousand nights for one with you’. Two different hands, she realised, one rounded blue ink copperplate, the other black and spidery, both sides of a secret conversation.