‘Well, I hope you feel, as I do, that we’ve become friends since then.’

She shrugged. ‘Aye.’

‘Please, then. Won’t you indulge me with this? I have no wish to alarm you, but I know it will delight you and there’s really no more time. It’s now or never.’

‘Delight me? Those are strong words, Mr Felton.’

‘I’m confident I can deliver on them.’ He smiled and it enlivened his eyes, softening his face from the gentle frown it settled into at rest. ‘It’s just through here,’ he said, pointing towards the woods. ‘Will you follow me?’

Effie felt herself tense. The last time she had found herself alone with a man she thought she could trust . . . ‘It will be dark soon.’

‘Which is why we mustn’t delay.’ He smiled and she saw the man who sat and talked with her father, who helped chop their logs.

‘Fine,’ she nodded.

A relieved smile enlivened his face. ‘Good. Follow me.’

Effie looked back towards the house as they began walking through the gardens, but amber lights in the long vaulted corridors glowed through the windows in silent reply. They were observed by unseeing eyes only.

They walked into the woods. It grew dark quickly, in the trees. Shadows ceased to have edges, the first fallen leaves rustled beneath their feet. He walked briskly with his eyes down, making no attempt at conversation. The birds were singing wildly at the tops of their voices in a final symphonic blast before night fell, and Effie noticed how cloistered their songs were, trapped by the tree canopies.

She saw a nuthatch and a green woodpecker but most of the birds were hidden in the leaves. She had grown up under open skies, where gannets, shags, cormorants, fulmars, guillemots and puffins soared, dove and danced in the blue; aerial mating displays, dogfights and bullying all took place in plain sight, the experience more visual than aural. But here, largely out of view, melodies soared, skittered, chattered and tripped in an invisible choir and she realized that while her books had educated her in plumage, migration patterns, egg identifiers and so on, the birds’ songs were an intangible beauty that couldn’t be described. She could no sooner pinpoint the song of the blackbird than pocket a sunbeam and bring it home.

They didn’t stop walking till they arrived at a clearing. The wood ended in a clean slice, the ground before them dropping away in a narrow gorge to a river a hundred feet below. She had had no sense of climbing but as Felton crouched low before some boulders, she looked around and saw the horizon had indeed dropped. She knelt down beside him. ‘What are we looking at?’ she asked in a low voice.