Mr. Rail, a large imperturbable man, had pressed a business card into my hand. “Just in case.”

The weather on this mid-November day is fine and dry. The sun’s warming my face as I lever out a crumbling slab of tile, more lichen and moss than clay. I tut at the exposed batten, pull out a penknife with foreboding. But the batten is sound and dry and so is the rafter underneath.

“A woman in a what?” I lent Tom the binoculars so he could view Beacon Hill. Not spy on our neighbors.

“In a tree.”

I straighten up. “What’s she doing?”

“Picking apples. You’d better not look, Dad. Think about it. ‘Vicar in rooftop ogling incident. I was only replacing my tiles, protested the Rev. Jim Aitken, 78—’ ”

“Really, Tom. It’s a tree, not a bathroom window.”

“And it came to pass in an eveningtide,” recites my atheist son, “that David arose from off his bed—”

“And walked upon the roof of the king’s house.” I take up the verse. “And from the roof he saw a woman bathing, and the woman was—”

“—very beautiful to look upon.”

The last five words we speak in unison. The second book of Samuel, chapter 11. I’m glad he hasn’t forgotten. “Is she beautiful?”

He shades his hand. “Can’t see. Long hair, though.”

“What color?”

“Blond. The tree’s near a huge square building. At the end of a track.”

He hands me the binoculars and gets back to work. After a second I sling them around my neck and climb the attic ladder. Carefully I point them in the other direction, admire the rampart of downland that I now know as Beacon Hill. It is bald and sere under the autumn sunshine, the recumbent flank of a lion. But then I find myself swooping northward over a dizzying rush of hedgerow, pull up sharply to rise above a meadow bordered by woodland. There’s the track. It leads me over the rough grass to a high-walled block of a building. It’s Parr’s Mill, of course. My heart thumps. Next to the mill is a cottage, a garden, an apple tree. I let the lens swing over the crown of the tree and down. A flurry of leaves, a blurred mist of hair; a figure leaps down from the lowest branch. It’s a burly young man with a long strawberry-blond mane and a sack of apples carried on a shoulder strap.

“This woman of yours, Tom? It’s Colin Bowyer. He manages the mill with his father. His hair’s even longer than yours.”

Tom finds this very funny. But my pulse is racing with shame. Supposing it had been Ellen? I’d have been . . . I’d have been ogling her, just as Tom said. I’ve been thinking of her all week, wishing Margaret Dennis hadn’t buttonholed her. Reliving the encounter: her extraordinary creed, her smile.