Mrs. Rail makes her way over to her bed and sits down on it with a sigh. “She was never a teacher. School assistant at best. That was before the war, of course. Then she met the miller. Her luck changed then, by golly.” She gives a high, clear whistle, like an urchin, from between her teeth. “But they never had kids. You got kids, Vicar?”

“One grown-up son,” I reply promptly.

“Thought so. I took you for a family man.”

I look back at her. She’s nodding, satisfied with her own good guess. Then she holds up a forefinger. “No, hold on,” she says next. “She had that little girl, didn’t she, during the war.”

I’ve lost the thread. “Who did?”

“Ellen. She had a girl who stayed with her and Mr. Parr. Who made friends with my son Bobby. Bobby was my last, I was gone forty when I had him, the little tick, he had nephews older ’n him.” Mrs. Rail leans back against the wall. “Where’d she go, that child? What was she called?”

I say, “I don’t know,” for form’s sake, and she dismisses it with a little flap of her hand, her pinpoints of eyes roaming far into the distant years.

“I should go, Mrs. Rail,” I say. “Keep warm.”

“Ha. ‘Keep warm,’ he says.” Her voice is soft, nine-tenths of her mind elsewhere. “Like we ever needed telling.”

—

I return to the camp and deliver the lorry to a relieved Matthew Dodds. “You did the right thing, Matthew.”

“Maybe.” He fingers his chin. “But what if you’d gone off with the lorry? What then?”

One thing is clear. Matthew Dodds is not cut out for the army.

—

I pass by Lady Brock, to make sure she’s still above the flood line. She is, but has no power, and is dressed in boots, a trench coat bulked out with woolens underneath, and a sheepskin hat with earflaps. “The head is the most important thing,” she declares. “A bare head leads to hypothermia, then derangement. Death may follow soon after, not from cold, but from fatal decisions. Leaving the main path for illusory shortcuts, for example . . . Oh!” She stops short. “But then you know that. Clive told me you were in one of those camps at the end of the war. What an ass I am, for even mentioning it. Come in for God’s sake and have a whiskey.”

We drink it standing in her kitchen. “No tutting, if you please,” she admonishes me, when I glance at the near-empty bottle. “It’s the only warming thing in the house.”

I don’t know how Clive came to mention that I’d been a prisoner of war. I’d far rather he hadn’t.

She sets her glass down, much refreshed. “Now. Tell me about the residents of Church Walk. I’m assuming the army did their bit?”