He need not have troubled himself. With a child less intelligent, or less imaginative, it might have been true. But Alice, while of course believing all the stories, had acquired a faith that worked at the simplest – and most profound – level. She was easily able to accept the holy apostles, the saints, and the Lord Jesus Himself, as people who had walked here and done their wonders – magic or miracles, what was the difference? – and who might very well be met again one day. Of course there had been the Crucifixion, but for the pilgrims the strongest emphasis was on the Resurrection, the happy ending, as in the stories that Alice liked best.

Meanwhile life in Jerusalem surrounded her, pressed on her, excited and interested her. There was so much happening, so much to see; the carefully irrigated gardens (think of the rain at home!); the towers where storks nested and swallows darted and twittered all day; the lizards and tiny scorpions, the coloured birds (five for two farthings?); the baby camels trotting after their dams along the narrow souks, the goods for sale in the stalls, the streets of the coppersmiths, rug-makers, linen-sellers; the children playing in the dirt, the robed riders with their beautiful horses.

And Jesus, who had loved Jerusalem too? Some day He would be back here again, walking these streets, looking at all the new buildings, talking to the people and stopping to speak to the children; she only hoped that it would be when she and her father were here on pilgrimage. There would be plenty of chances; the duke had vowed, she knew, to make a pilgrimage every third year or so for his soul’s sake …

And some three years later, when she was eight years old, and back in Jerusalem with her father, it happened.

He came walking along the narrow, stony lane which lay just beyond the garden wall.

Lentulus’ villa was at the edge of the city, with fields beyond – what they called fields, here in the Holy Land; stretches of stony earth with sparse blades of grass in spring, and thin white and yellow flowers like daisies, and the red anemones that her father had told her were the lilies of the field. In summer there was neither grass nor flowers, and the shepherds took the flocks further and further afield to look for pasture.

And this was what this man – Jesus already in Alice’s mind – seemed to be doing. He was not walking the city streets surrounded by his disciples and talking to the people; he was making his way slowly along the lane that led away from the town, and he was knee-deep in sheep. He had a crook in one hand, and across his shoulders lay a lamb, its four legs loosely gathered into his other hand.

The Good Shepherd. Alice recognised the picture she had seen of him, even though the young man himself bore very little resemblance to the paintings and tapestries in the churches. Even to an eight-year-old, who looks on thirty as elderly, and forty as decrepit, this man was young. No fair hair and neat little beard, no white robes, and certainly no halo. Just a thin young man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, his cheeks shadowed with a few days’ growth of beard, and dressed in a brown kaftan girded with a knotted red cord. His feet were bare.