‘She must have gone home,’ one of the others said.

‘Molly Goddard, you mean?’ Kit asked.

‘His new girlfriend,’ someone explained.

‘Not girlfriend,’ Rob said quickly. Even from this distance, I could see him blushing. ‘She was here a minute ago.’

‘I know her. Rather pretty, isn’t she?’

My heart flipped. Kit thought I was pretty.

And yet he hadn’t answered my letter. He must have been home from boarding school for well over a week and hadn’t bothered to get in touch, or come to see me. What did he really think of me? How could I find out what was going on in his mind?

12

It hadn’t rained for weeks and according to Mrs D the farmers were becoming fretful, concerned that the heads of their corn might fail to fill out in time for harvest. I was learning that every kind of weather felt like a threat to their crops: too cold and the seed might not germinate; too wet and it might rot; too windy and the crop might be flattened; too dry and it might not grow or swell. In all the months we lived in the village I never once heard a farmer declaring that the weather was ‘perfect’.

My freckles merged into blobs across my nose and cheeks, resisting daily applications of lemon juice that made me smell like a citrus pudding. Poor Mrs Diamond huffed and puffed as she dusted and swept, complaining that it was altogether the wrong weather for housework.

‘Why don’t you leave it until it cools down?’ I suggested.

‘Whatever would the Reverend say if we let standards slip?’ she grumbled. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness, my mother would say, and she never let me forget it.’ I felt sure Pa would barely notice if the house wasn’t cleaned for a year, and I doubted that God – even if He existed – would care about the odd speck of dust, but I held my tongue.

Jimmy and I were sitting on a shady bench in the churchyard, trying to find some air, when Eli ambled up.

‘Mind if I joins you?’ he asked, sitting down anyway with a groan. ‘Rest me weary old legs.’ Despite the heat, he was still dressed in the same clothes: green canvas trousers and a tattered tweed jacket. His only concession to the weather was shedding his old oiled gabardine raincoat.

He lit his pipe and we were sitting there in companionable silence, while Jimmy went off searching for daisies to make a chain, when Henry Blackman drove past in a brand-new open-topped sports car, gleaming red. He was wearing one of those peaked caps, like a naval captain. Two minutes later came another sports car, in exactly the same red, with Blackman’s wife Melissa at the wheel, her hair tied back with one of those film star scarves, a white wisp of silk trailing out in the wind behind her.