I hadn’t wanted him leaping to any conclusions about what that might mean. Not that he’d ever suggested we might become any more than travelling companions. But he was a man, and my experience of men suggested I’d better make it quite clear where we stood. So, right at the start, I’d told him he’d be sleeping in the outhouse. It was a low structure of stone, separated from the cottage by a weed-choked garden patch. In fact the outhouse had survived the years better than the cottage itself, with its earthen floor reasonably dry. It only needed the cobwebs brushed away and a new door and shutters fitted. A few boards, a supply of fresh straw, a couple of blankets – it would be more comfortable than many places we’d slept in during our journey. Compared with Mathuin’s lockup it was a palace.

At the time Grim had made no comment, simply taken his pack and his blankets out there and found some old sacking to hang across the doorway until he could get started on the work. The cottage had to come first. We’d found the place full of cold draughts. The chimney was blocked by the dried-out corpse of a blackbird, the roof leaked, the shutters were hanging broken or gone altogether, and the whole place stank of mould.

But that had changed quickly enough. Grim had put in long days on the repairs, making the place clean and comfortable. If he was not up a ladder or digging a hole or planting something, he was off bartering some of our small stock of coppers for tools or seeds or other supplies. The local folk started offering him work, helping to get a harvest in or dig a well. They paid him in coppers or food or other items we needed. But he never did more than a day or two for them; mostly he worked on the cottage. Grim wasn’t a man who gave much away, but as the place changed I saw him changing with it, walking straighter, holding his head higher, readier with a smile.

I thought it likely the little house was more of a home now than it had ever been in the days of the last wise woman. Grim had lime-washed the outside and adorned the newly thatched roof with a row of fanciful straw creatures. He’d mended the broken furniture. He’d dug the garden and planted seeds. I’d added roots of this and that, which I’d gathered in the woods. Conmael had chosen the spot well; there was a good supply of herbs in season if a body knew where to look for them.