Now the villagers had loved having Loveness in the village: in the early mornings, she loaded as many children as possible into her father’s carriage and drove them to school on her way to the clinic; in the late evenings, while others listened to stories by the homestead fire, she wrote letters, under the unpredictable light of a paraffin lamp, for those who needed to communicate with relatives who now found themselves in the City of Kings and further afield; on weekends, she, a trained midwife, helped deliver whichever of the village children had chosen to come into the world. She provided the village with these essential services without asking for anything in return. However, the villagers’ gratitude could not let them overlook the fact that, at twenty-five, she was fast becoming an old maid and would soon become impossible to marry off.

Loveness found that for many reasons, she could never tell them that, because a man had once followed a book she held in her hands all the way from the City of Kings and then recited a line from it, she had gained a very definite idea of the kind of man she wanted to marry. The only kind. She could not tell them that she was now waiting for such a man to come into her life again, and would wait for however long it took. She chose, instead, to tell them that she simply wanted to marry a man who so loved literature that he felt it in his soul.

Upon hearing this, the villagers soon arrived at the conclusion that Loveness was not to be trusted when it came to determining her own future. They tried to reason with her, but she, who was reasonable about everything else, proved to be unreasonable about marriage. They believed that she read too many books and was looking for something that she had found in them in real life – something that she thought was vastly different from anything any of them had ever felt or experienced. They lamented the fact that she had made them buy her a book, Pride and Prejudice, when she had passed top of her class – because it seemed to have promised her a life that was not meant to be hers.

Since all the villagers knew was the business about the literature in the soul, and since all they saw was Loveness refusing all the Krum’s Place men, they had no idea that she was waiting for something that was possible; and so when Constable Spokes Moloi came back to the village, and, in a considerably short space of time, succeeded where every other man had failed, they breathed an audible sigh of relief and forever believed him to be a godsend capable of performing miracles great and small.