Betty was determined to keep the lid on the cauldron for as long as possible, which might just — the way she’d been feeling lately — mean for ever.

The arrival of the old box was no help.

It turned up on the back step at St Michael’s only a few days after they had moved into the farmhouse and a week after Betty turned twenty-seven. It wasn’t her kind of present. It seemed like a direct threat — or at least confirmation that their new life was unlikely to be the idyll that Robin expected.

For Betty, the first inkling of this — if you could call such experiences inklings — had already occurred only minutes before on that same weird evening.

The new year had been blown in, battered and dripping, and the wind and the rain still bullied the hills. Tonight, though, it looked like being clean and still and iron-hard with frost, and Robin had persuaded Betty to come with him to the top of the church tower — their church tower — to witness the brilliant winter sunset.

This was the first time she’d been up there, and the first time she’d ever been into the church out of daylight hours. It wasn’t yet five p.m. but evening still came early to the Radnor Valley in late January — the dark side of Candlemas — and Robin was leaning over the cracked parapet to watch the final bloodrush over an otherwise unblemished sky.