It took me almost an hour to get anywhere near the castle. It was pushing four p.m. by the time the low-hanging clouds delineated into a child’s drawing of a fortress: a landlocked battleship of turrets and columns and pencil-shaded walls. I was still trudging up the winding grey road. The river surged to my right, already a couple of feet higher than the last time I had visited. Then it had been a spring day and Stefan had spoiled the trip by grizzling and sweating against me and refusing to walk even a handful of steps. He wanted to be carried. Wanted to loll against me like a roll of carpet. Wouldn’t eat or drink and refused to be comforted. Refused to be my little prince. The sunshine did not seem strong enough to have caused him such distress and I grizzled back at him for spoiling our adventure with his ungrateful mewling. We didn’t get to see the castle properly. Didn’t get to watch the rainbow trout in the shallows or drop sticks from the small stone bridge. I marched him home. Arrived angry and sweat-soaked, impatient and sore. He was dead four days later.

‘Watch it, lass!’

I turned sharply. A green farm vehicle had pulled up next to me. I hadn’t heard the tyres on the wet road for the sound of the raging river. The driver was leaning his head out of the window; the solitary windscreen wiper wagging like a happy dog’s tail. I must have looked at him sternly because he pulled a face and motioned with his hands for me to calm down.

‘Dint see yer till I were almost on yer. What yer daeing out in this?’

For a moment I saw myself through his eyes. A city girl in all the wrong clothes; soaked to the bone and shivering in the half light, trudging up a road towards a castle that offered no promise of warmth or welcome. I softened my face, grateful for the interruption.

‘I wanted to see the camp,’ I said. ‘I think I picked the wrong day.’

He smiled. He was maybe forty but it was hard to say for certain. Handsome, if you liked the sort of men favoured by Renaissance painters. He had pale skin and a full beard, pale eyes and long features. He had a woollen hat perched on top of his dark hair and was wearing blue overalls beneath a brown leather coat. I didn’t recognize him.

‘The camp? POW? Not much to see, love.’

I squinted at him. The rain was still coming down. The sides of the narrow road were running with brown water and the bushes by the stone walls were sinking in on themselves; collapsing like cardboard. The rain seemed to hang in the air. It felt like walking through a fishing net.