What rain we need, Miss Mayfield thought, pulling her leg out of the sucking mire and, with difficulty, moving it forward six inches and plunging it in again. And suddenly the very weather was part of the enemy, to be faced, scorned, tramped down. The thought made her move more sturdily, and after a few more difficult steps the mud and the water grew more shallow. She was on the high-road again, between the beech woods. And the rain was easing off.

Well before she reached the first house, she turned from the road, taking to the fields on Maverick’s side of the road. She had walked this way three times before, marking the course in her mind: here a gate between two fields, here a stile, in another place a ditch crossed by a plank and in yet another a ditch one must step across. Towards the end of her detour she passed quite close to the edge of the wood where Puddler Pond lay, and farther on she was near enough to have seen, had it been daylight, the back of her own house. As it was, she could see the lights in the houses on the Green; and she wondered in how many of them people were looking forward to this evening’s celebration, and with what feelings.

She now bore towards the village and emerged at last in the lane where the school and the church stood.

She had hunted down Mrs Baines in order to ask where the All Hallowse’en coven was held, and Mrs Baines had refused to tell her. Then she had said, ‘That’ll be the end of you. It’ll look neat and simple. Poor Miss Mayfield, weak heart, too much kneeling.’ And that kind of death could only overtake one in church. Actually, she had suspected the church all along, but she needed to be sure.

She moved towards it cautiously. In the shadow of one of the enormous yews she stopped and stood and held her breath and listened. She crept on as far as the porch, and there listened again. When she lifted and turned the heavy iron handle, it made a noise which set her heart jumping and perspiration leaking from every pore. After that, still holding the handle, she waited for what seemed a long time. Nothing happened, there was no sound, and at last she plucked up courage and pushed the door open, inch by slow inch.