All that she feels for my father races through me, and is met by my own thoughts of Daniel. Love, rotted to bitterness. I blink, breathe. Tear myself free of it. I will not let myself hate him. I will not become Mam.

‘Tell them you are a widow,’ he says. ‘And brought your mother and sister out of desperation.’

He helps me on to the horse, places the reins in my hand. From his pocket he takes the hag stone, unties the strip of cloth and fastens it around my wrist.

‘For protection,’ he says, voice cracking. ‘Go, before light comes.’

‘Daniel?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you.’

He shakes his head. ‘I wish—’

‘I know.’

I flick the reins and click my tongue as he taught me. Bonny walks on, and the cart rattles and jolts into movement.

‘Sarah,’ he calls. ‘Sarah, wait.’

I stop the horse, wait for him to catch up.

‘Tell them you’re a widow because you are one,’ he says. ‘This body shall work and eat and sleep until God chooses other. But the part of me you brought to life goes with you.’

I lean down, press my lips against his for the last time.

He stays on the roadside and watches. Whenever I turn back I see him, until the path itself is obscured by hills and trees.

I hear Annie’s steady sucking on her thumb behind me, Mam murmuring sweet words of love. What remains of my family. And I, Sarah, daughter and sister, dairymaid and widow, shall lead them past Middon, through Aldmore to Blackop.

I do not know if Dew-Springer rides with us. My own familiar, the creature born of my anger, is carried in me, unseen, and always shall be, for I choose a different life. Never shall it run separate, never shall it be named. And never in command of me, but I over it, to give strength when needed.

I look to a path obscured by shadow, so that what lies ahead remains unknowable. But the sun will rise, and when it does our new home shall be waiting. The darkness has dropped away again, and we travel from death, towards life. A life I will make with the chance Daniel has given us and my own honest labours. A life where Annie is fed, and free. No more shall I search her skin, no more shall she be the urchin from the cursed hill, feared and forsaken, but simply the dairymaid’s sister, and will know herself only as this. Soon all memory of the life we leave behind will be washed from her.

But not me. I shall remember him always.

At last I am the other Sarah. I have crossed the river.

Acknowledgements

Writing this novel has taken a village, not least the one I grew up in, a community far kinder than the one in this book.