‘Do you know why I was called Agnes? It is part of the old story - my mother told me this - in every generation there is an Agnes, so we remember that Eadgyth’s church was dedicated to that saint. And it is said that Eadgyth returned to the church later, when she sickened, and her mind failed. Poor Orm had to seek her here again.

‘When I ran away from home, I was only ten years old. I had travelled no further than a day’s walk from home. I had no idea what shape England was, Harry! The only place I had ever heard of that had anything to do with the family was Eadgyth’s church near York. So I made my way here.’

‘This is Eadgyth’s church?’

‘Rebuilt since then - but yes, it is her church.’

‘Quite a journey for a child,’ Geoffrey murmured.

‘I hardened.’

Harry thought there was a whole desperate saga contained in those two words. He was full of guilt.

She whispered, ‘I worked here, on the farms. I knew how to shear a sheep. Then I worked for the parish. And, in time, God and Father Arthur granted me the privilege of this, my enclosed life of prayer. My only stipulation was that my cell had to be here, in this corner of the church, on the old foundations.’

Harry guessed, ‘Because this was where Eadgyth had hidden.’

‘And where she came back to at the end of her life. I know this, Harry, because she scraped an account of her visions into the wall. The lettering is faded and lichen-choked, half-buried by rubble, old-fashioned and hard to decipher - but it is here. And as I dig my trench, I have uncovered it steadily.’

Harry felt a return of that uncomfortable dread, a sense of enclosure. He wanted nothing to do with this antique strangeness. ‘I know the story of the man called the Dove,’ he said. ‘Who will be the spawn of the spider, and so on. And in the last days before the end of the world is due, he must have his head turned west to the Ocean Sea . . .’

Geoffrey quoted from memory, ‘“All this I have witnessed / I and my mothers. / Send the Dove west! O, send him west!”’

‘There is more,’ Agnes whispered. ‘Orm remembered twelve lines. That is what we have come to know as Eadgyth’s Testament. But there is more.’

‘More lines scraped in the wall?’