Jane left the note on the table, went to find the dried cat-food for Ethel and grab a handful of biscuits from the tin. No time for eggs and toast.

What about school?

What about not going?

She didn’t remember ever bunking off before. But some things were too important for delays, and anyway school was winding down now towards the long summer break.

Trying to open the biscuit tin, she found she was still gripping The Old Straight Track, having brought it down with her like a talisman. On the front was a misty photograph of a perfect Bronze Age burial mound swelling behind a fan of winter trees.

Yesterday evening, at sunset, she’d seen – and she must have been around there a dozen times in the past without spotting it – what must surely be the remains of a burial mound, or tumulus, or tump, on the edge of the orchard behind Church Street. The magical things you could so easily miss, bypass, ignore… or destroy.

Jane felt this swelling sense of responsibility towards a man who had already been dead for well over half a century when she was born.

You and me, Uncle Alfie.

3

For the Views

Must have been in one of Jane’s pagan books that Merrily had read how, in primitive communities, the local shaman was often a social outcast, both feared and derided. Being a female exorcist in the Church of England gave you some idea of what this must have been like.

‘ Deliverance Consultant.’ The Reverend Spicer was shaking his head wearily. ‘What exactly does that… you know…?’

She’d watched him moving around, pulling down tea caddy, mugs, milk and sugar from strong, beechwood units. He knew where everything was. After what Sophie had told her in the office, she’d been half-expecting some kind of desperate chaos in the rectory kitchen – unwashed dishes, layers of congealed fat on the stove – but it was clean and functional, if not exactly cosy.