We trod carefully across the uneven ground and pushed the wide door open. Our feet sank into deep wood shavings, thickly scattered all around the floor. Above our heads, almost hidden in the gloom was a wooden bar on a frail-looking pair of ropes swinging slightly in the draught like a waiting gibbet. I had never seen such a thing before, except in that hand-bill. Just standing on the floor and gazing up made me sick with fright. Dandy glanced up as if she hardly minded at all.

‘How on earth will we get up there?’ I asked. My voice was quavery and I had my teeth clenched to stop them chattering.

Dandy walked across and stood at the bottom of a rope-ladder which hung from a little platform at the top of an A-frame built of pale light wood.

‘Up this, I suppose,’ she said. She tipped her head back and looked up at it. ‘D’you see, Meridon? I suppose we stand up there and jump across to the trapeze thing.’

I looked fearfully up. The trapeze was within reach, if you stretched out far and jumped wide out over the void.

‘What d’we do then?’ I asked miserably. ‘What happens then?’

‘I s’pose we swing out to Jack,’ she said, walking across the floor of the barn. On the other side was a matching A-frame with an open top. ‘He stands at the top and catches my feet, swings me through his legs and back up,’ she said as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

‘I won’t do it,’ I said. My voice was harsh because I was so breathless. ‘I won’t be able to do it at all. I don’t care what I promised Robert, I didn’t know it would be so high and the ropes so thin. Surely you don’t want to do it either, Dandy? Because if you’d rather not, we’ll tell Robert Gower we won’t do it. If the worst comes to the worst we can make a living some other way. We could run away. If you don’t want to do it too, he cannot make us.’

Dandy’s heart-shaped face rounded into her sweetest smile. ‘Oh nonsense, Merry,’ she said. ‘You think I’m as big a coward as you are. I don’t mind it, I tell you. I’m going to make my fortune doing this. I shall be the only flying girl in the country. They’ll all come to see me! Gentry, too! I shall be in all the newspapers and they’ll make up ballads about me. I can’t wait to start. This is everything for me, Merry!’

I held my peace. I tried to share her excitement, but as we stood in that shadowy barn and I looked up at the yawning roof and the slim swing and the slender rope I could feel my mouth fill with bile and my head grow dizzy.