She left him without a word and went into the house. Undressed and got into the bed beside Jonathan. She thought that he was asleep, but he wasn’t. Or he had been asleep, and woke when she came in. He stirred and reached for her, put an exploring hand between her legs. Often they used to make love like that, so easily, before they slept. But you’re already wet, he murmured, with a kind of surprise. With a half-asleep chuckle in his voice that she wouldn’t forget. Ready for me, he said. And slipped into her in an instant.

Then he was asleep again, and she lay awake for hours. She heard the clock in the church across the fields, pictured the rabbits lying there on the ground. It was not right, not ordinary, not OK at all.

She slept very little that night. Soon after it got light she went out. She crept downstairs as silently as she could and unbolted the door, and the dog woke and came out with her.

It was where the summer led, she told herself later. Something that they had been waiting for, in all those sultry days in the countryside, that was growing in them when they had thought they had been waiting only for the harvest. Like the fungus, growing in those conditions and fastening on the head of wheat. She had learned a bit about ergot since then. It caused hallucinations. There had been times in history when ergot had got into the harvest and into the flour, and when the flour was baked into bread its effect was so powerful that whole villages went crazy. There was a theory that it happened in a place called Salem when there was a witch fever. Women became hysterical, and others saw strange things and blamed the women who they said were witches. And then the women were burnt at the stake. She didn’t know where Salem was, when she first read that. She imagined it must be some village on its own in the marshes, like the villages she passed through with Jonathan when they drove to Ely, but it wasn’t anywhere like that. It was in America.

Or maybe it was something in the spinney. The old witch Richard said lived there once. She might have left some evil behind her.

But no. It was something much simpler.