That weekend Jimmy and me delivered the newsletter, walking the streets and pathways of the village, reaching hidden-away cottages you’d hardly know were there, and steeling ourselves to open letter boxes behind which barked fierce dogs. We even went down to the Hall and I plucked up the courage to ring the bell, hoping for a chance to ask whether they had been able to forward my letter to Kit. It had been three weeks now, and I’d received no answer. But the bell rang hollowly inside and no one came to the door, not even a maid, so I had to post the Village News through their letter box.

Why hadn’t Kit replied to my letter? Had he even received it? Perhaps he was just a terrible correspondent. Most boys were, Dinah tried to reassure me when, in desperation, I finally confided in her. Or perhaps he really didn’t care and had forgotten all about me? The thought was almost too painful to bear. I took refuge in reading yet more romance novels, weeping in sympathy with the heroines as they nursed their sorrows. He’d broken her heart and walked out of her life without so much as a flicker of remorse in those haunting eyes.

The next day we arrived home from completing the newsletter deliveries to find Pa at the dining-room table.

‘Come and take a look at this,’ he called.

We hastened in. Covering nearly the whole table was a large sheet of paper held down with books at either corner. It took a few moments to realise that we were looking at the reverse side of two strips of wallpaper pasted together to create a canvas more than a yard wide and treble that in length. A complex drawing covered the whole of the paper, coloured in with water paint.

The design was divided lengthwise into what I now saw represented the two panes of a church window, separated by a stone pillar – the ‘mullion’ was what Pa called it. On either side of it were portraits of two knights, a man and a woman, both in full medieval suits of armour. She was holding a shield decorated with the red cross of the English flag. He had a sword in one hand, and in the other a set of scales that appeared to be balancing an effigy of Christ on the cross against what looked like a proper fire-throwing dragon.

‘Is he weighing Christianity against heathen legend?’

‘Who knows?’ Pa said with a shrug. ‘Let’s have a look at the rest.’

When he unrolled the lower end of the scroll, Jimmy shouted, ‘Croc . . . croc.’