On Sunday morning I stand up in church before the whole of Upton and Barrow End or near enough, all in their best coats and hats, folding their umbrellas and herding their children into pews as if they were penning sheep, and then, once they are seated in silence, offering me one unified, watchful, level stare. The kind of stare that asks a man what he is made of. In the event it is Meg Sutton who comes to my rescue: the child is hardly baptized before she’s raring to be released, preferably into the font, and laughter and joyfulness breaks out in the Sutton family and spreads down the aisles. We celebrate Meg—Meg, and all the other children who will take us onward into a future we can’t imagine. O God our strength in ages past, our hope in years to come: this hymn is roared out, three basses in the choir making a fine drone, underpinned by an organist who can keep time. Not bad, not bad at all. At the door, smiles and wringing handshakes and “Fine job, Mr. Acton.”

Mr. Acton, it is fair to say, is thoroughly bucked up.

—

The following morning, guilt propels me to my typewriter. Frobisher’s letter is still unanswered. I get as far as typing Dear Archdeacon when I hear a vehicle draw up outside.

A van has been maneuvered expertly into the narrow slot between my heap of a car and the low wall by the road. The driver gets out. She’s a diminutive, high-shouldered, energetic-looking woman with dark hair and equally dark, unsmiling eyes.

“Mr. Acton? I’m Lucy Horne,” she says, wiping her hands down the front of a dilapidated canvas jerkin. “I work up at the kennels with my dad.”

There’s a hound pup going spare at the kennels, Lady Brock had said. I can get my friend Lucy Horne to give you a ring. My heart begins to sink.

“How do you do, Miss Horne.” I shake her proffered hand. “Lady Brock said you might telephone.”

Instead of turning up without a by-your-leave. If she knows what I’m thinking, she doesn’t show it. In fact, she’s already opening the back doors of her van and lifting out a cardboard box with the words TOP DECK CIDER SHANDY emblazoned on the side.

If only it did contain Top Deck cider shandy.