Just ahead, like the neck of a great green swan, the mossy branch of an ancient beech tree bent down in a huge arc across the road. There was scarcely enough space to pass beneath it.

“Robber’s Roost,” I volunteered. “It’s where the highwaymen used to hold up the mail coaches.”

There was no response from the Gypsy: She seemed uninterested. To me, Robber’s Roost was a fascinating bit of local lore.

In the eighteenth century, the Gully had been the only road between Doddingsley and Bishop’s Lacey. Choked with snow in the winter, flooded by icy runoffs in spring and fall, it had gained the reputation, which it still maintained after two hundred years, of being rather an unsavory, if not downright dangerous, place to hang about.

“Haunted by history,” Daffy had once told me as she was inking it onto a map she was drawing of “Buckshaw & Environs.”

With that sort of recommendation, the Gully should have been one of my favorite spots in all of Bishop’s Lacey, but it was not. Only once had I ventured nearly its whole length on Gladys, my trusty bicycle, before a peculiar and unsettling feeling at the nape of my neck had made me turn back. It had been a dark day of high, gusty winds, cold showers, and low scudding clouds, the kind of day …

The Gypsy snatched the reins from my hands, gave them a sharp tug. “Hatch!” she said gruffly, and pulled the horse up short.

High on the mossy branch a child was perched, its thumb jammed firmly into its mouth.

I could tell by its red hair it was one of the Bulls.

The Gypsy woman made the sign of the cross and muttered something that sounded like “Hilda Muir.”

“Ja!” she added, flicking the reins, “Ja!” and Gry jerked the caravan back into motion. As we moved slowly under the branch, the child let down its legs and began pounding with its heels on the caravan’s roof, creating a horrid hollow drumming noise behind us.