So she wasn’t going to let that happen.

With an audible yell, she pushed her head straight at the blade.

The balloon hit it. And exploded.

In the garden, Aphasia started screaming, shrill child screams that didn’t stop.

Greeneye snarled, slammed his gun into some invisible holster and reached down with his free hand to grab Benny. He hauled her up to his eye-level by her hair, and shook her until the scraps of balloon, now turning an ugly brown, fell from her face. ‘You hurt her!’ he bellowed.

‘You started it,’ Benny told him.

He yanked her head roughly to one side.

Her hair-extensions came away in his hand. He stared at them for a second.

She butted him across the bridge of the nose.

Greeneye fell back and slashed wildly with his sword.

The blade cut a fine line across the blouse material over Benny’s stomach.

She turned and sprinted away along the ditch in her bloomers, glancing over her shoulder to see him scramble to his feet, clutching his nose. A little crowd of townsfolk were kicking the stile away. One pointed at her, and suddenly Greeneye was at the centre of a mass of hearty and drunken young men, determined to avenge her honour. She ignored gallant shouts to return and jumped up on to a gate, then over it.

She landed in a side-road, right in front of Mr Hodges’ greengrocer’s wagon.

‘Whoa!’ Hodges shouted, pulling up the horses as they whinnied and bucked. He opened his mouth at the sight of Benny’s muddied and disrobed state, blushed and started frantically to clamber out of his apron. ‘What in⁠ —? I mean, by God, girl⁠ —’

Benny jumped up beside him and swiftly covered herself up with the apron.

‘Home, Mr Hodges,’ she told him grimly. ‘And don’t spare the horses.’

Chapter Four

Good and Bad at Games

Smith wobbled out on to the pitch, pullovers wrapped around his waist. He took up his place on the little rise beside the cricket pitch. On a distant hillside, a shaft of undiluted sunlight was illuminating the ground.

Smith wished he were there. Only this cricket practice, and then he could go home, change, settle down to dinner and conversation with Joan.

It had been nice to see Bernice. She was like her father in some way, he wasn’t really sure which. Jonathan had been in the Navy, broke his nose in Pompey Barracks. Bit of a clumsy so and so. Which was odd, for a sailor. Smith pondered on his image of sailors. He’d known of two, and both seemed very unlike everything he knew about the profession. Everything he’d learnt.

He glanced down at the woollens wrapped about his waist. He remembered the feel of them. He’d worn one that his mother had made for him, playing in the street with the other children. His should associate them with proud poverty and ambition.