The daft dog had only been getting in his path because of her bred-in urge to round him up. It amused him that they had been each trying to turn the other around and he hollered again into the sky. It was a good sound. Freedom. Oh, he’d seen the path set out for him, had understood the role he was expected to play more clearly than ever after yesterday’s visit from Reverend James. The vicar had come to speed along preparations for the wedding of Silas’s older brother, Peter, to his bride-to-be, Ginny. She was one of several girls that Peter had rolled into the hay, but the first to grow round, and anyway, Peter was twenty now and needed a wife.

Peter would inherit, while he, Silas, wasted his life grafting on a farm he’d never own. That was the way of it. He had no prospects that would convince a girl to roll about with him. There was no reward for being the second son. Then the Reverend James, who had conveniently arrived at dinner time to discuss the wedding, had loosened his tongue over the meat and potato pie and told Silas about the town away over the hills and the opportunities that awaited a strapping and hard-working young man.

‘Don’t turn the boy’s head,’ his mother had said, too late.

Silas felt the weight of the coins from the housekeeping jar in his coat pocket. Thou Shalt Not Steal. He would repay his mother. He would send double the amount he had taken, with a letter to his father, emphasising his good fortune. The good fortune he was bound to encounter.

He pressed his fingertips against the ache on his cheekbone and winced. Peter had beaten him for as long as he could remember and rarely gave an explanation for any of the unexpected blows he landed on Silas’s face, torso or back. Brothers fight, his father said over his mother’s protests, and just look at the size of the lad. He can take it.

Not anymore.

Shandy was at his side, licking the palm of his hand industriously.

Silas bent to tousle her ears and allow her to coat his face with her tongue and her damp doggy breath.

‘Father’s lost his hardest worker in thee, eh? An’ Peter’s kicked me across the yard for the last time, ha’nt he?’

Shandy had spotted the man below. She barked, three sharp retorts that were lost in the wide-open sky. The hem of the man’s cloak lifted in the wind as he disappeared into a small stone building near the bottom of the embankment.

Silas crouched on his haunches to pat Shandy’s sleekly wet head, tracing the thin bones of her skull. ‘No goin’ back, girl. Never goin’ back. Think tha can round me up a hot meal and a warm bed for the night?’

Shandy at his heel, he strode down the valley’s steep hillside. He knew, because he had been paying quiet attention to the enthusiastic chatter of the Reverend James, that he was heading for the newest and largest of several reservoirs set like stones in a jewelled necklace on the high ground all around the town. This grey lozenge of water could use a polish from the cloth of a blue sky. Fat chance of that today.