She stood up again and he rubbed himself against her legs, purring loudly. She hitched the bundle to a more comfortable position on her shoulder and continued her way across the yard, the cat following. At the gate, she paused and looked back once at the house, still and silent, awaiting the start of a new day. As dawn crept over the sand-dunes, suddenly, from the chicken house, the cock crowed, a startling shriek in the quiet. ‘Stupid bird!’ she muttered, and began to hurry along the lane before her grandmother should rise and find her gone.

At the fork in the road, Ella hesitated again, looking towards the white walls of Rookery Farm just glimmering with the first rays of light. She sighed and made a silent apology to those who lived there for going without even saying goodbye. Rob . . . Her mind shied away; she couldn’t let herself even think about him.

Tibby gave a miaow and jumped up on to a broad-topped gatepost where he balanced himself and then sat down facing the direction in which she was heading; the only one to watch her leave.

Twenty-Six

‘Ella! Whatever are you doing here?’

Peggy’s eyes were wide with delighted surprise, but in the next moment filled with concern. ‘Why, my dear girl, whatever’s wrong? Come in, come in.’

The resolve, the bitter, desperate loneliness that had driven her from Brumbys’ Farm, had carried her along the road to town and on to the early morning bus and had sustained her throughout the two-hour journey, finally broke. Ella dissolved into racking sobs, the tears pouring down her face as she put up her arms. ‘Oh, Aunty Peg, Aunty Peg.’

The older woman drew her into the house, pushed her gently into a chair in her living room and went through to the small kitchen and plugged in the kettle.

‘Now, dear,’ she said coming back and sitting down in front of Ella. ‘Dry those tears and tell me what this is all about.’ There was deep anxiety in her own eyes but she knew she would get no sense out of the girl until she had calmed down.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ella sniffled, pitifully. ‘This isn’t like me, is it?’

Peggy shook her head. ‘No, it isn’t.’

It seemed as if the floodgates of six and a half years’ unhappiness were opened at last. She cried for her mother; the loving, gentle mother she had lost. She wept at having been obliged to live in an alien place of wide open spaces and glowering skies and she railed against the woman who had grudgingly taken her in out of a sense of duty. And she cried for Rob.

She told Peggy everything, not sparing herself, right up to the moment when she knew she could take no more.

‘I know I’ve always been difficult, wilful, but – but it’s always been as if no one loves me any more . . .’