We found the carriage without any trouble, and the driver, an elderly man with a foul-smelling pipe, was more than willing to take us to Vixen Hill. We were soon on our way through the village of Hartfield. It was prosperous enough, with cottages and houses leading into a street of shops and an inn. I could see the tower of a church up a side street, and farther along, I glimpsed the doctor’s shingle on a house facing a small shop selling dry goods.

Several people turned to stare, but I thought that had more to do with the fact that I was a stranger than with Lydia’s bruised face and blackened eye. Still, she kept her gloved hand raised, as if to keep her hat from blowing off.

I heard her murmur, “I knew this would be an ordeal.”

“It will be over soon. There’s the end of town in sight already.”

We came to a slight bend in the road just before the outskirts, and I turned to my left, aware of someone watching us. My gaze met that of the village constable standing there.

I was used to the constable who walked past Mrs. Hennessey’s house each evening and paused to pass the time of day with her. And to the constable in Somerset whose children brought us fresh strawberries from his garden every spring. Comfortable figures who kept order and were a part of the fabric of our lives.

This man was cut from a different cloth, and I thought perhaps he’d been in the war, wounded and discharged, for his face was hard, his eyes cold, as if he remembered too much and had no way of forgetting.

And then Hartsfield was behind us, and the heath, encroaching on the outskirts, as if lying in wait, quickly surrounded us. I was used to the moors in Devon and Cornwall. But this was dramatically different, low, black twisted branches of stunted heather and gorse filling the horizon now as far as the eye could see.

The land was sour, bare in places, in others dotted with blighted shrubs and what appeared to be the struggling remnants of grasses and other vegetation that had given up long ago.