I seize it, bear it into the kitchen, and tear away the brown paper like a schoolboy on his birthday.

“Looks like you were expecting that,” observes Mr. Kennet.

“It’s from my son. I don’t know why he’s posted it. He’s coming to stay on Monday.” I have the train time noted down in my diary—I’ve got round to buying a modern four-foot-wide bed for the spare room (recently swabbed down) with a good deep mattress.

The parcel contains a folded sweater in dark blue wool. It’s thick, close-knitted, wonderfully heavy. I admire the hem, the sleeves. I can’t quite believe that Tom is so skilled. I put it on. It fits very well.

Bailey is scratching at the back door. I let him in and he scampers toward me. When I bend down to put food in his bowl, he snuffles at my sleeve with intense interest.

“Tom made this sweater, Bailey,” I tell him. “Now let Mr. Kennet and me do some work.”

“You’ll have to take that off, Vicar. This is a sooty job.”

I do as Mr. Kennet says, and between us we lift the chimney off the stove. It takes a few shrewd knocks with a hammer to dislodge it. “See if you can get that front plate loose, Vicar,” William says. “That’s the way. I’m not having this range defeat us. You and I, we’ve had to contend with mechanicals of all sorts, most of them far bigger and a damn sight deadlier. Oh, yes. Lady B told me about your doings in North Africa.”

Lady B has been equally forthcoming on the subject of his war, and I know that the missing half of his hand was lost to shrapnel at Dammstrasse before the Battle of Messines in 1917.

“I was lucky,” I tell him.

“We were both lucky.” With a brief emphatic sniff, he deploys the remaining finger and thumb of his mutilated hand as pincer, grab, and hammer claw in as many seconds, retrieves the broken damper, and starts to insert the new one. I am put in my place.

—

“There now,” he announces, after we’ve replaced the chimney. “Let’s see how she draws. I must say, Vicar, you have cut it very fine. Mrs. Harper will be here tomorrow morning expecting this cooker to be running at full crack.”

“Right you are,” I say airily, putting kindling into the firebox. “I’ve heard there’s another coal range in the village. At Parr’s Mill.”

“It gets a great deal of care, that one, of course.” He wipes dust off the flue damper plate with deliberate strokes. “She’s been baking on it since the war.”

“That would be Mrs. Parr, of course.”

“It would.”

He bends to adjust the damper. A very promising sound, like the roar of a distant and powerful engine, issues from the chimney.