If we expect her to explain her actions, we are mistaken. But then, it’s obvious, really. She and Charlie haven’t said good-bye. They like each other, but she’s the type of girl for whom that sort of thing is a big fuss. Only now there’s three in the coach, which is one too many for this sort of talk, so she looks at me grimly, while Charlie asks her shyly how does she do, and has she slept soundly and well. I could climb out, leave them to it, but the box only has one seat, and Price is on it, holding a shotgun as thick as my arm. So I settle into my coat and pretend to doze. I find the room without any difficulty. The door is only leaned to. I can feel the wood against my cheek, the handle in my fist. What harm can it do, just to take a peek?

I wake — if that’s what I do — when the morning sun falls into the coach window and finds my face. Blinking, I lean out, see a windmill grow out of the long stretch of its shadow and have a sudden sense of déjà vu. I have seen the same windmill in the same sort of light before, on the way to the house; then, too, in the moment of surfacing from the depths of dream, its currents and tides still tugging at my limbs. Then I realise it is not just the sun that has woken me. We have stopped.

There is a muddle to the things that follow, a violation of the laws of sequence that troubles me as much as the events. It starts with the birds, an explosion of birds, spat out of the windmill as though it is a cannon. Starlings. There must be a thousand of them, a spray of ink stains in the sky, clotting, thinning, shrouding the sun.

Then (but how can it be then and not before?) the whip-crack of a shot, followed — anticipated? — by a scream, a whinny, a sound so poised between the equine and the human tongues that I cannot place the screamer. The coach quivers, buckles; Charlie shouts and my hand can’t find the bloody handle of the door. I open it in time to see the second horse shot. The word does not capture it. It’s like a hatchet has been taken to its neck. A fist-sized chunk just disappears, is torn out in a spray of meat and bone, then the beast crumples in its harness. I see Price, leaping off the box seat and landing hard in the mud; see rather than hear him screaming to take cover. Behind him the first of the horses that was shot froths in wonder at the deadweight of its hoof dangling from a thread of skin.