He looked away again, directing his gaze across the water to the far trees, and made no reply. He thought she would walk away, but she stayed where she was, waiting for an answer.

Eventually he said: “This dog used to belong to a woman I loved.”

Brindle opened one eye. Strange. Edgar thought, how dogs know when you are talking about them.

“The woman was a little older than me, and married,” Edgar said to Blod. She showed no emotion, but seemed to be listening attentively. “When her husband was drunk she would meet me in the woods and we would make love on the grass.”

“Make love,” she repeated, as if unsure what it meant.

“We decided to run away together.” To his surprise he found himself close to tears, and he realized it was the first time he had spoken about Sunni since talking to Ma on the journey from Combe. “I had the promise of work and a house in another town.” He was telling Blod things even his family did not know. “She was beautiful and clever and kind.” He began to feel choked up, but now that he had started the story, he wanted to go on. “I think we would have been very happy,” he said.

“What happened?”

“On the day we planned to go, the Vikings came.”

“Did they take her?”

Edgar shook his head. “She fought them, and they killed her.”

“She was lucky,” Blod said. “Believe me.”

Thinking about what Blod had just done with Sam, Edgar almost agreed. “Her name . . .” He found it hard to say. “Her name was Sunni.”

“When?”

“A week before Midsummer.”

“I am very sorry, Edgar.”

“Thank you.”

“You still love her.”

“Oh, yes,” said Edgar. “I’ll always love her.”

The weather turned stormy. One night in the second week of September there was a terrific gale. Edgar thought the church tower might be blown down. However, all the buildings in the hamlet survived except one, the flimsiest—Leaf’s brewhouse.

She lost more than the building. She had had a cauldron brewing on the fire, but the huge pot had been overturned, the fire extinguished, and the ale lost. Worse than that, barrels of new ale had been smashed by falling timbers, and sacks of malted barley were soaked beyond rescue by torrential rain.

Next morning, in the calm after the storm, they went out to inspect the damage, and some of the villagers—curious as ever—gathered around the ruins.

Dreng was furious, and raged at Leaf. “That shack was barely standing before the storm. You should have moved the ale and the barley somewhere safer!”

Leaf was not impressed by Dreng’s tantrum. “You could have moved it yourself, or told Edgar to do it,” she said. “Don’t blame me.”

He was impervious to her logic. “Now I’m going to have to buy ale in Shiring and pay to have it carted here,” he went on.