Betty stopped on the spiral, looked back up over her shoulder. It was too dark to see his face.

‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘there is going to be antagonism — from some of them at least. It’s a phase we’re going to have to go through and come out the other side with some kind of mutual respect. This is not Islington. This is not even Shrewsbury. In Radnorshire, the wheels of change would grind exceeding slow, if they’d ever got around to inventing the wheel.’

‘So what you’re saying, making converts could take time?’

‘We won’t live that long. Tolerance is what we aspire to: the ultimate prize.’

‘Jeez, you’re soooo- Oh, shit-’

Betty whirled round. He’d stumbled on a loose piece of masonry, was hanging on to the hand-rope.

‘You OK?’

‘Third-degree rope burn, is all. I imagine the flesh will grow back within only weeks.’

She thought of Major Wilshire again and felt unsettled.

‘I was born just twenty miles from here,’ she said soberly. ‘People don’t change much in rural areas. I don’t want to cause offence, and I don’t think we need to.’

‘You changed.’

‘It’s not the same. I’m not from yere, as they say.’ Betty stepped out of the tower doorway and onto the frozen mud of what she supposed had once been the chancel. ‘My parents just happened to be working here when I was born. They were from Off. I am, essentially, from Off.’

‘Off what?’

‘That’s what they say. It’s their word. If you’re an immigrant you’re “from Off”. I’d forgotten that. I was not quite eleven when we left there. And then we were in Yorkshire, and Yorkshire flattens all the traces.’

Curtains of cold red light hung from the heavens into the roofless nave. When Robin emerged from the tower entrance, she took his cold hand in her even colder ones.