As for the foal, there had been a brief hesitation when we set off and he didn’t quite understand that he should be coming too. Then Loulou gave him a commanding whinny, as if to say, “Hurry up, little one”, and in a frantic gambol of skinny, ridiculously long legs, he gave chase. The waves were so high up on him that he had to do an ungainly waterbound canter to catch us up, and then within a few seconds he was at Loulou’s flank, where he took his place tucked in tight against his mother.

In this way, a bedraggled caravan beset by the storm, we departed the submerged marshlands. As we traversed the watery coastline with the sea to the left of us the roar of the waves was deafening. The sea was still coming in and the tide had not yet reached its apex. We followed the shoreline, along the beaches, until we reached the swift-flowing waters that now surged inland through the rice paddies.

“Be careful!” Pierre called back to me over his shoulder as he entered the rice fields. “The water here is deep!”

And then we were plunging in and the seawater was all the way to Loulou’s chest and I looked back and the foal was being pushed this way and that by the currents. He was such a plucky little fellow! I watched as he braced against the current and kept valiantly alongside his maman. Soon we were through the worst of it – we had entered the calm waters of the broader inland canals, the ones that Pierre had punted me along in his flat-bottomed boat when I had first come to live here, the day he had taken me out to meet Mimi and the gardians. Up ahead in the distance I saw the stables and the grey slate rooftops of Flamants Roses and I knew for certain at that moment that we’d made it! We were going to get Loulou and her foal home.

“There’s Chantal!” Pierre exclaimed. And through the rain I saw her riding for us, mounted up on her horse Dante, waving and shouting with excitement.

“We’ve been out searching for you!” she cried. “When the gardians brought Babette back to us, we were so worried …”

She was soaked to the skin by the rain and her horse was flecked with foam and sweat. She pulled up alongside Loulou and threw her arms around me, hugging me, and then she realised.

“Rose! You’re riding!”

“Rose!!”

Mimi was coming for us too now. She was on foot, running with the dogs at her heels.

“Get them inside the stables,” she shouted at us, struggling to be heard above the high winds of the storm.