The reason Sally and Bob knew about Edna was because they’d been told about her by Fleur, whose family the horse had once belonged to. Fleur was the one who’d sold the little river house to Bob. It was because of Sally’s work as Fleur’s piano tuner that Bob found out about the house being for sale and was able to buy it before Fleur decided to advertise it with an estate agent at a price Bob could not have afforded. Sally continued to tune Fleur’s piano – even though she suspected Fleur didn’t use the piano between each tuning, and asked her to tune it mainly because she enjoyed the company – and Fleur became a close friend of hers and Bob’s, telling them stories about what life was like in the river house during the previous century, when Fleur’s mum, Daphne, had lived there. Fleur called Daphne ‘an indomitable woman’ and ‘Queen of the Combe’. The Cavendish family owned the field back then too, but allowed Daphne to keep Edna there. During this period, Daphne, who abhorred slothfulness, would ring a bell at half past six every morning to make sure everyone who lived in the other five cottages on the lane was awake. Fleur said that back then the combe was mostly home to alcoholics, that something about the way the light leaked grudgingly down into it sent people organically in that direction. When Daphne died, just a week after Edna, Fleur went to live in the river house for a few years but found that the noise of the water got inside her mind and began to play tricks on it, so she let it to tenants for several years before selling it to Bob. ‘It can be a dastardly, opinionated beast,’ she said. ‘The river, I mean, not the house. The house does not force itself on anyone. It allows you to live the way you want to.’