AS WE RODE Darcy urged his mount closer to me. Snowflake was too tired to protest by now and allowed her stablemate to come up beside her.

“It’s one rum do after another, isn’t it?” he said. “They said you were the one who found the horse, is that right?”

“I did. Up by that bog.” I shuddered. “I only hope he didn’t come a cropper there. Not an end I’d want for myself.”

“If he got stuck, why didn’t he yell?” Darcy said. “Sound carried rather well today. I could hear the hounds when they were miles away.”

“That’s true,” I said. “And I was up there, quite close to him. I would have heard.”

“You don’t gradually sink into a bog and do nothing,” Darcy said. “Surely there would be some sign of a struggle.”

“Not necessarily. I’ve known a bog to swallow a Highland steer in a few minutes, although the poor thing did bellow a lot. By the time we reached it it was too late and nobody could do anything.” I shuddered at the memory of it, watching those terrified eyes as the huge beast finally disappeared beneath the surface with a horrid sucking sound.

“Everyone said he was a good rider, and he certainly knew the area well,” Darcy said. “What would have made him go near the mere he’d warned us against?”

“Something could have spooked his horse,” I said, and I told him the story of the white flapping thing that came up at me and how it had taken a while to regain control of Snowflake.

“A swan, you think?” Darcy nodded thoughtfully. “They can be quite aggressive, I know, but when a man is riding his own horse, he should be able to calm it down right away.”

“There was one other thing,” I said. “I saw Wild Sal up there. She looked like a pale flapping thing too. She stepped out right in front of my horse and stopped me from going in the direction of the bog. She showed me the right way back to the road.”

“Wild Sal, eh? What was she doing wafting around on the high moor?”

“Doesn’t she have a cottage somewhere up there?” I asked.

Darcy shook his head, smiling. “This village is too much, isn’t it? Wild women and village idiots and aged spinsters . . . it’s almost like a caricature of ye olde English village. Hard to believe it’s real.”

That’s it exactly, I thought. It’s hard to believe it’s real. Even harder to believe that every day somebody dies.

“You know what they’d say, don’t you?” I turned to him. “They’d say it was the Lovey Curse taking a person every day until the end of the year.”

“Now that,” Darcy said with a smile, “is definitely hard to believe.”