It was a small shelf, since the books were wedged between a jar of crystallized ginger and the china shepherdess that Tiffany had won at a fair when she was six.

There were only five books if you didn’t include the big farm diary, which in Tiffany’s view didn’t count as a real book because you had to write it yourself. There was the dictionary. There was the Almanack, which got changed every year. And next to that was Diseases of the Sheep, which was fat with the bookmarks that her grandmother had put there.

Granny Aching had been an expert on sheep, even though she called them ‘just bags of bones, eyeballs and teeth, lookin’ for new ways to die’. Other shepherds would walk miles to get her to come and cure their beasts of ailments. They said she had the Touch, although she just said that the best medicine for sheep or man was a dose of turpentine, a good cussin’ and a kick. Bits of paper with Granny’s own recipes for sheep cures stuck out all over the book. Mostly they involved turpentine, but some included cussin’.

Next to the book on sheep was a thin little volume called Flowers of the Chalk. The turf of the downs was full of tiny, intricate flowers, like cowslips and harebells, and even smaller ones that somehow survived the grazing. On the Chalk, flowers had to be tough and cunning to survive the sheep and the winter blizzards.

Someone had coloured in the pictures of the flowers, a long time ago. On the flyleaf of the book was written in neat handwriting ‘Sarah Grizzel’, which had been Granny’s name before she was married. She probably thought that Aching was at least better than Grizzel.

And finally there was The Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales, so old that it belonged to an age when there were far more ‘e’s around.

Tiffany stood on a chair and took it down. She turned the pages until she found the one she was looking for, and stared at it for a while. Then she put the book back, replaced the chair, and opened the crockery cupboard.