That had made Gormán smile. ‘Finding the wood, getting all the pieces ready, maybe. Putting a house together, no. I’m no builder. And this would be quite a tricky sort of house. A very special house.’ Then, in a different tone, ‘Want to see a thrush’s nest? I spotted one this morning, up in the big oak.’

Her mother and the heartwood house and the things she could not ask her father had all been instantly forgotten. A thrush’s nest! With eggs in it, or even little baby birds! She was, after all, only five years old.

But the promise she’d made was a deep-down thing, and Cara did remember it. As time passed and she grew up, the heartwood house crumbled away year by year, and Father did not mend it, and never once did she ask him why.

There was a special tree down by the heartwood house. Cara called it the guardian oak. When she was little, it had seemed to her so tall that its topmost branches surely touched the clouds. It had seemed a being of wonder and secrets, full of hiding places, tenanted by all manner of creatures, the seen and the unseen. She’d been a confident climber almost from the time she could walk, and had spent more time than her father and aunt ever imagined up in that tree, safe in the cradle of its great arms, pretending to be a squirrel or a bird or a beetle, peering out through the foliage to see folk about their work, hoping nobody would come looking for her before she was ready to be found. Birds would gather on the branches around her, preening their feathers, making their subtle sounds, taking so little notice of her that she might as well have been part of the tree. Sometimes they would come and perch on her shoulders or in her hair. She used to tell the guardian oak stories, the kind of stories little children make up, and she thought the tree replied in a voice so slow and deep that human ears could not really understand it, though she knew what it was saying: Ah, yes. Tell me more, small one. Even now she told the tree her secrets. It was so much easier to talk to trees than people. People didn’t stay quiet and listen, really listen. People interrupted. They fidgeted. You could see from their faces that their thoughts were at least half on something quite different. Aunt Della would be thinking, How will this strange child ever find a husband? Father would be lost in some dream of the past, his eyes full of a sorrow his only daughter could not lift. Gormán was a good listener, but even he would have his mind on whatever job he had to start on as soon as Cara had finished her tale.