I could see nothing important in my future but Sarah’s face at times like these, framed by the soft honey of her hair, but I feared she was a girl whose yearnings stretched out far wider, far beyond me and this glade.

‘Doodle,’ she said, one especially fine afternoon, as we sat under the Black Tree.

‘That is my name,’ I replied.

‘If I told you something I have not told another soul, could I tell it to you, knowing you would keep it to yourself and it would never enter the ear of another?’

She had an oil beetle crawling across her forelock, but I did not want to sidetrack her, so chose not to mention it.

‘You could,’ I replied. ‘I promise it shall go no further.’

‘One day, I intend to go to Honiton, and France, and maybe even the Americas.’

It was from my father and Edward I heard about most of the legends of the moor: the black dogs and the piskies and the river sprites. Edward told me it had been many years since a flibbertigibbet had been spotted in the area but they were rife in his own father’s boyhood and, having learned of their reputation for frightening young maidens on dark lanes, I worried about what that could spell for Sarah once she made the transfer to womanhood. Because of this, I always insisted on walking her to her front door when we were out anywhere close to nightfall. Then there were the piskies to worry about, too. My father himself had never been tricked by them but Edward remembered a time when he was up the moor and the land seemed to slant half on its side as a great mist came down and every direction he walked in led him to the same locked gate, the air only clearing when he turned out his pockets. My mother dismissed this story as ‘pish and twuddle’, claiming that Edward had never had any sense of direction and could not be trusted, as a man who had once argued blind that Scarborough was in Cornwall.