This was defeat. Despair and misery and self-reproach rose like a wave and swamped her. Dear God, you can’t let it end like this. She’s borne so much and been so brave. I know I’m a fool, but I . . . I did try! Please, God, help me now. I’d die, most willingly, if it would save Ethel.

‘We must go down. You first,’ she said.

Ethel went nimbly down the stairs. Miss Mayfield followed, more slowly. Her right arm was now on the side of the wall and she had no support. She felt sick and dizzy and afraid of falling. Ethel, having reached the floor, turned and directed the beam of the torch upon the stairs, and as the elongated cone of light swung round, it shone upon the bell rope.

‘One tweak,’ Canon Thorby had said, ‘and every able-bodied adult would come running to deal with the fire or the flood.’

‘The bell,’ she said. ‘We must ring the bell.’

‘One tweak’ had been an understatement.

‘You take hold of the tassel in both your hands, Ethel, and I’ll put my good one over yours. Now, together, pull!’

The rope gave a little, but no sound resulted. Raising and exerting her sound left arm increased tenfold the agony in her injured one. Sweat sprang out on her forehead and about her lips, and she had to set her teeth in order not to cry aloud.

‘If you’d leave it to me,’ Ethel said, ‘I’d do better on my own. I could sort of jump at it.’

Miss Mayfield backed away and sat down on the stairs and cupped her right elbow in her left hand. Relieved of the weight of her arm, the broken bone responded by a slight decrease in pain.

Ethel jumped at it literally. Ignoring the tassel, she took hold of the rope as high up as she could reach and then jumped, so that the rope bore, for a second, her whole weight.

‘Shifted it,’ she said; and repeated the performance. And suddenly, with a noise which in the enclosed space seemed to shake the very stones of the floor, the bell spoke.

‘Easy once you’ve got it going,’ Ethel cried, her voice lost in the vibrating boom. Hauling away, she threw Miss Mayfield a smile of triumph and – yes – pure pleasure.

She’s a child still, Miss Mayfield thought, and children are, thank God, very resilient. If she can get out of here alive and escape their toils, she’ll be all right yet.

Ethel no longer needed to jump. The great bell swung of its own momentum, helped by her regular plucks at the rope. The noise of it, like the very spirit of the violated church made vocal, cried its outrage into the November night, so that as far away over the marshes as Renham people stirred uneasily in their sleep.

24