I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop, fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say “What jolly fun!” What I wanted to do, actually, was to leap to my feet, strike a pose, and burst into one of those “Yo-ho for the open road!” songs they always play in the cinema musicals, but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.

News of my abduction would soon be flying everywhere, like a bird loose in a cathedral. Villages were like that, and Bishop’s Lacey was no exception.

“We all lives in the same shoe,” Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying, “just like Old Mother ’Ubbard.”

A harsh cough brought me back to reality. The Gypsy woman was now bent over double, hugging her ribs. I took the reins from her hands.

“Did you take the medicine the doctor gave you?” I asked.

She shook her head from side to side, and her eyes were like two red coals. The sooner I could get this wagon to the Palings, and the woman tucked into her own bed, the better it would be.

Now we were passing the Thirteen Drakes and Cow Lane. A little farther east, the road turned south towards Doddingsley. We were still a long way from Buckshaw and the Palings.

Just beyond the last row of cottages, a narrow lane known to locals as the Gully angled off to the right, a sunken stony cutting that skirted the west slope of Goodger Hill and cut more or less directly cross country to the southeast corner of Buckshaw and the Palings. Almost without thinking, I hauled on the reins and turned Gry’s head towards the narrow lane.

After a relatively smooth first quarter mile, the caravan was now lurching alarmingly. As we went on, bumping over sharp stones, the track became more narrow and rutted. High banks pressed in on either side, so steeply mounded with tangled outcroppings of ancient tree roots that the caravan, no matter how much it teetered, could not possibly have overturned.