Despite the bitter chill, there was a sheen of sweat on his brow and an alarming intensity to his face when the torch-light caught it. Aysha watched him, thinking that this was crazy, that they couldn’t be doing this, that he must be wrong.

Connor shot his sister a look. ‘Steady,’ he said, and swung again. He was here to prove a point, and he wasn’t about to stop until it was done.

‘Connor, we shouldn’t—’ said Aysha.

‘We have to,’ he cut her off, and swung again, and again, and . . .

Suddenly it happened: the stone cracked. Connor hit it once more, and the crack widened into a fork and split. Connor downed the sledgehammer, grabbed the pickaxe again and levered one of the smaller sections away. It tipped up and then crashed to the side, echoing mournfully in the tomb-like silence of the church. Dust plumed up, and Aysha recoiled, coughing. Connor levered the pick under the remaining section, and heaved. That too gave up and fell aside.

‘What the hell is that?’ asked Aysha, her voice shaking as she focused the torch’s beam on what was revealed.

Connor leaned forward. He’d hoped to find nothing but an ancient skeleton. It was Aysha who stretched down a hand. With a shiver of revulsion she brushed away dirt from the stuff Connor’s blows had revealed.

‘It’s fur,’ she said.

‘Fuck it,’ said Connor.

He hadn’t wanted to believe it, but here was the proof: the tales the Milo women had spun him weren’t lies at all; they’d been telling the truth.

There was a heavy crash behind them as the door was flung open. They both spun around as footsteps came thundering up the aisle. Aysha let out a panicky cry as she saw the men running toward them out of the gloom. Then one of them lashed out and caught Connor a vicious blow on the head. He fell.

The last thing Connor heard before blackness took him was his sister Aysha’s terrified screams.

BOOK ONE

BOOK ONE

1

1

April 1975

On a sunny spring day, twenty-one-year-old Josh Flynn and seventeen-year-old Claire Milo walked away from the gypsy camp that had been their home since childhood. They trod a path they had been using for as long as either of them could remember. Others of their jeal – their kin – had used it too. Not long after the war, a distant Flynn cousin who farmed outside Winchester in the south of England had quietly opened up a puv – a fallow field – so that the Romany Flynn, Milo, Grey and Everett clans – plus a few others – could set up a permanent camp there and stop their travelling.

‘Where you two off to then?’ asked Shauna Everett, passing by, her eyes alighting on Josh. She smiled flirtatiously at him. At him, not at Claire.