In the back behind her house she grew swede and onions and potatoes and spinach. She had apples and blackcurrants and gooseberries from the trees and bushes her mother had planted. In winter an arsenal of things preserved in jars. A taxi came nine miles up the valley track once every three months and drove her to Penrith for her shopping. Her sister and her brother visited twice a year from Carlisle. She had no phone and no television but she had chickens and her cow and a sewing machine and her father’s books. She knew that there was another kind of world and she could see that it had its attractions but she did not want to live in it. She wanted to be here. She liked it here. She was forty-two and she had not been lonely, not really. She had never lived her life expecting it to change.

Around her neck she wore the small wooden cross that had belonged to her father and as she walked she touched it every now and again to make sure it was still hidden beneath her dress.

She’d tried to leave it behind but in the end she’d not been able to.

She’d unhooked the clasp and dropped the chain into the palm of her hand and tipped it onto a plate and stepped out of the door but when she got to the path she’d felt so naked and afraid without it that she’d gone back and put it back on and slipped it inside her dress, telling herself that Creed wouldn’t necessarily see it. However things went, she would do everything she could to hide it from him.

As she walked her legs shook.

Her damp face boiled with heat, her blue dress clung to her like another skin, her heart thumped like a big beating wheel. She took off her black coat, folded it over her arm, and carried it. She wished she could turn back here and go back down to the beck and splash her face and cool her throat with the icy water.

Above her, a pair of peregrines rose in circles and vanished high up over the crags, into the blue. From beneath she could see the yellow flashes of their legs, the black streaks of their tails and wing-tips and as she watched them she imagined looking down out of the sky at the dark speck of herself moving slowly over the pale brown hills towards Creed’s bothy. The ground was boggy here, up on the higher ground after the path gave out. As she plodded through it the stiff grass brushed her bare knees.