It wasn’t from naivety that Edith complied but from a certainty that her love would be as true as the snow that fell every winter. Though she had to admit to a nagging voice inside her head that said, ‘You are tempting fate.’

That evening she went to find Demetrius and they walked hand in hand down to the old forge. The air smelled of spring, of new beginnings. Tentatively, she told him what had happened.

He listened then said, ‘What a foolish man the butcher must be. An old dog marking trees.’ He stopped when he saw the worry in her smile and said, reassuringly, ‘Nothing will come of it.’

How empty the word ‘nothing’ sounded to Edith. It was a word she knew all too well. Nothing had been her life before Demetrius had appeared.

‘I’ll be back,’ he said. ‘Don’t be upset.’

‘I shouldn’t have sworn on my mother’s bible.’

‘It makes no difference, my love. If it’s the only way your father will agree to our marriage, what does it matter? We’ll be married well before the first snow.’

‘It seems so long to wait until we can be together,’ she said and kissed him hungrily.

He held her tight. ‘We are together. No man can separate us.’

The village being small and gossip cheap, and love a rare thing hardly ever seen, the neighbours’ talk was all of Edith and her shepherd. They had been taken aback by how fast she had agreed to marry him, especially when they considered all the eligible suitors she had turned down. But the gossip that stayed on their lips and in their minds was the news that Edith had sworn on her dead mother’s bible to marry the butcher if the shepherd didn’t return by snowfall.

‘No – never,’ said Una, the butcher’s daughter, when she heard.

‘It’s true,’ said her sister, Vanda. ‘The cabinet maker had the paper signed by the mayor and then he gave it to our father.’

‘Never,’ said Una again. ‘It will never happen.’

Chapter Four

A Dead Lamb’s Fleece

Demetrius dreamed he was standing with Edith by the small stream beyond the orchard at the end of her garden. The sun was setting, and Edith was laughing as she criss-crossed the water. In her hand was a small bunch of snowdrops. He followed her and back and forth they went in the same rhythm until he realised that he was on the far side of the stream which was now a river. Edith called to him and each time she was further away until she was lost in the mist.

With a gasp Demetrius woke, drowning, into the dawn of a new day.