Was she pulling my leg? Hadn’t the woman just admitted that she was a fraud? I looked deeply into her black eyes, searching for a sign.

“Don’t stare at me like that. It makes my blood itch. I said I was sorry, didn’t I? And I meant it.”

“Did you?” I asked rather haughtily.

“Spare us the pout. There’s enough lip in the world without you adding to it.”

She was right. In spite of my turning them down, the corners of my mouth flickered, then began to rise. I laughed and the Gypsy laughed with me.

“You put me in mind of that creature that was in the tent just before you. Regular thundercloud. Told her there was something buried in her past; told her it wanted digging out—wanted setting right. She went white as the garden gate.”

“Why, what did you see?” I asked.

“Money!” she said with a laughing snort. “Same as I always see. Couple of quid if I played my cards right.”

“And did you?”

“Pfah! A bloomin’ shilling she left me—not a penny more. Like I said, she went all goosey when I told her that. Scampered out of my pitch as if she’d sat on a thistle.”

We rode along in silence for a while, and I realized that we had almost reached the Palings.

To me, the Palings was like some lost and forgotten corner of Paradise. At the southeast angle of the Buckshaw estate, beneath a spreading tent of green and leafy branches, the river, as though twirling in its skirts, swept round to the west in a gentle bend, creating a quiet glade that was almost an island. Here, the east bank was somewhat higher than the west; the west bank more marshy than the east. If you knew precisely where to look among the trees, you could still spot the pretty arches of the little stone bridge, which dated from the time of the original Buckshaw, an Elizabethan manor house that had been put to the torch in the 1600s by irate villagers who made the wrong assumptions about our family’s religious allegiances.