Turning the car off the road Kate found they were bumping along an unmade track through a wood. Before them the sky, laced with shredded, blowing cloud had that peculiar intensity of light which denotes the close proximity of the sea.

‘I hope we don’t have to go far down here,’ she commented, slowing to walking pace as the small vehicle grounded for the second time on the deep ruts. Winding down the window she took a deep appreciative breath of the ice-cold air. It carried the sharp, resinous tang of pine and earth and rotting leaves.

‘I’m afraid it gets worse.’ Bill grimaced. ‘And you’ll have to leave your car at the farmhouse. Roger or Greg will run all your stuff up to the cottage in their Land Rover.’

The track forked. In front of them a rough wooden gibbet held two or three fire brooms – threadbare, broken. She brought the car to a standstill. ‘Which way?’

‘Right. My place is up there to the left – about half a mile. The farmhouse is down here.’ He gestured through the windscreen and cautiously she let in the clutch once more. The track began to descend sharply. They bounced again into the ruts as the wood grew more dense. Pine was interspersed with old stumpy oaks, hazel breaks strung with ivy and dried traveller’s joy and thickets of black impenetrable thorn.

The farmhouse itself stood at the edge of the woods, facing east across the saltings. Behind it a thin strip of field and orchard allowed the fitful sunshine to brighten the landscape before another wood separated the farmhouse gardens from the sea. There was no sign of any cottage.

She halted the car beside a black-boarded barn and sat for a moment staring out. The farmhouse was pink washed, a long, low building, covered in leafless creepers which in the summer were probably clematis and roses. Even in the depths of winter the place looked extraordinarily pretty.