“Eight weeks. Not got your range started yet, I see. I know that stove of old, when we used to do Christmas carols. Such a bugger, it was. We used to end up with lukewarm tea.”

She gives me a grin and I realize that her teeth are false. I’m reminded of a young armorer of 6 Squadron who’d had all his teeth pulled before he was posted; they were already more trouble than they were worth. During dust storms he used to take his dentures out and button them into the front pocket of his overalls. Neither he nor Lucy, I suspect, saw a dentist in all their childhood.

The milk comes to the boil. Lucy mashes some baby rusk into the milk and dabs tiny gobs of this mixture onto the edge of the puppy’s mouth. This tempts his tongue out, and he feebly licks his lips. “I doubt you’ll have to spoon-feed him more than a few days. Look.” Lucy stands the puppy over the bowl so his front paws are astride it. He blinks, looking around him with misty eyes, comprehending nothing. Lucy pushes the spoon under his chin before lowering it into the bowl. His nose follows the spoon down into the pap. “Just sniffing for now but soon he’ll be licking it up himself. He’ll need four meals a day, mind, spoon or not. Won’t you, you little brute.”

I’ve never heard such affection behind the word brute.

“Four meals,” I echo. “How on earth am I going to manage that?”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way, Vicar. Oh—have you spotted your ancient relics yet?” Lucy puts down the bowl and spoon and carries the puppy toward a corner of the room. She kneels down and runs a finger over one of the filthy terra-cotta tiles that pave the floor. “Here’s one.”

Lucy’s freestyle mode of conversation, the way she hops from one subject to the next, is keeping me on my toes. I go and join her, intrigued. The shape on the tile can hardly be seen through the impasto of grease and dirt. It’s an inch and a half long, the color of butter against the terra-cotta ground. An animal, running? A curved back, perhaps? Are those legs, below?

“Look at his ears,” Lucy prompts. “And his mouth, open like that. The way he’s leaping. There’s three, four more on this tile alone. A pack of them. Hounds.”

“Oh yes!” Now she says it, I see them. Eager, lop-eared, high-tailed, they leap all over the tile she shows me and the neighboring ones too. Excitement rises inside me. I’m no expert but I’ve trodden the floors of many of our oldest cathedrals.

“But these are ancient, Lucy!”