‘Ooh, I’m that glad. Thank you, Mum. And thank Uncle Tom, too, won’t you?’

‘You can thank him yourself when you start tomorrow morning. As the job helping your dad is little more than a casual thing, I reckon you needn’t give formal notice to Albert Beveridge – they’ll still have Gina helping out and it won’t do her any harm to work a bit harder – but you might just want to go up to the house and mention it. It’d be only polite, like.’

‘I will. And I’m to start tomorrow! We can walk to Grindle Hall together of a morning. It’ll be fun.’

Dora smiled. ‘I don’t know about fun, lass. The gardening will be hard work, and Uncle Tom will expect you to make the same effort as if you weren’t his niece, but I’ll be glad of your company on the walk.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘Where’s Gina?’

‘She was watering the garden earlier.’

‘I didn’t see her. Mebbe she’s gone off somewhere. She’ll be back at teatime, no doubt.’

‘I’ll just nip up to see Mr Beveridge now, Mum.’

As Ellen turned into the lane to go to the farmhouse, she looked for Gina over the hedge but there was no one in the garden. She remembered the frightening moment by the gate and that ugly, mad look on Gina’s face. All that talk about witches and spells had been horrible, but now the sun was shining again and, with the good news of her job raising her spirits, the unpleasantness of the incident was receding. Already it seemed like an absurd imagined moment, almost as if it was something she’d read about in a library book.

Ellen thought about her difficult younger sister. Gina could be so wilful and immature. They were very close in age, with Ellen only fifteen months the elder, and they were very alike in appearance, both with long dark brown hair and unusual violet-blue eyes. They were also identical in height and figure, being tall and strong looking, so that they were sometimes mistaken for each other around the village. However, one subtle difference was that Gina had an odd little birthmark behind her ear, hidden under her hair. It looked like a tiny crescent moon. Ellen had long thought it must be a family thing, because Uncle Tom had exactly the same birthmark on the inside of his forearm …