She did not come to him, though that night he lay wakeful on the bare floor of his house, and waited for her, certain that she was out in the forest, waiting for him. At dawn he lifted the wooden latch on his new door and stepped out into the forest, already singing its way into morning, and looked around, expecting her to emerge from the trees and come to him. She was not there.

He went down to the river, half-expecting to see her surface from the icy water, with a knife in her hand and a handful of freshwater mussels in her little purse; but the water was grey and ruffled only with the morning breeze.

John thought with a pang of cold fear that maybe she was tormenting him, to repay him for the delay, to make him wait for her as she had waited for him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, speaking to the indifferent trees, to the blithely singing birds in the high branches. ‘As soon as I got home I found my father was dead and there was much for me to do. My children needed me, and I had to work –’ He hesitated. Even speaking before nothing but thick woodland, he was conscious of the lie of omission when he did not mention Hester. ‘I never forgot you,’ he said. ‘Even when I was at war and fighting for my king I thought of you every day and I dreamed of you every night.’ That part at least was mostly true.

He waited. From the river behind him came a loud splash. John whirled around. But there was only the spreading ring of water where a salmon had leaped or an otter broken the surface in a dive. She was not there. Not in the river and not in the trees.

John shrugged his coat a little closer around his shoulders and went into his house.

John opened a new sack of cornmeal and put his pot on the embers of the fire. He heated up enough water for a wash, a drink, and to make suppawn porridge for his breakfast.

‘I must hunt this evening,’ he said to the empty house. ‘I can’t live on this swill.’

He washed his face but did not trouble to shave. ‘I shall grow a beard and a moustache like my father,’ he said to the empty room. ‘Who is there to see me after all?’ He poured half the hot water into a beaker, threw a spoonful of the cornmeal into what was left and stirred it till it thickened. It was warm and he was hungry. He tried to ignore the fact that it tasted of nothing.