She nodded, barely noticing that he had gone.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm. Some of the passing boat people who knew what had happened shouted encouragement to the woman on the bank sitting on her upturned bucket with a dog beside her. “Don’t worry, my duck. He’s maybe playing some’eres. He’ll turn up like a bad penny.” Others averted their eyes from her and remained silent.

She didn’t see or hear them, either. What she saw was Ulf’s naked, skinny little body struggling in Gyltha’s hands as she held it over the bath preparatory to letting it drop into the water.

It’s the river.

She made up her mind when, in the late afternoon, Sister Veronica and Sister Walburga came by in their punt. Walburga saw her and poled to the bank. “Now don’t you lecture us, mistress. Prior didn’t send enough supplies upriver to feed a kitten, and we got to go up again with more. But we’re strong again, ain’t we, Sister? Strong in the power of God.”

Sister Veronica was concerned. “What is it, mistress? You look tired.”

“Not to be wondered at,” Walburga said. “Wearied from a-looking after us. Angel, she is, blessings on her.”

It’s the river.

Adelia got up from her bucket. “I shall come with you, if I may.”

Pleased, they helped her into the punt and sat her on the stern thwart, her knees bent up to her chin with a crate of hens under her feet. They laughed when Safeguard-“Old Smelly,” they called him-disgruntledly set off to follow them by the towpath.

Prioress Joan, they said, was telling the world that Little Saint Peter had been vindicated, for when had so many been so ill and only two died, one of those elderly? The saint had been tested and not found wanting.

The two nuns took turn-and-turn-about at poling with a frequency that showed they hadn’t recovered all their strength yet, but they made little of it. “Harder yesterday,” Walburga said, “when us was poling separate punts. But we got the Lord’s strength on our side.” She could go the farthest before she rested; nevertheless, Veronica was the more lissome and economic in movement and made a lovelier shape as her slim arms pressed on the pole and raised it, hardly stirring water that was turning amber in the setting of the sun.

Trumpington flowed past. Grantchester…

They were on a part of the river left unexplored on Adelia’s day with Mansur and Ulf. Here it divided, becoming two rivers, the Cam to the south, the other entering it from the east.

The punt turned east. Walburga, who was poling, answered Adelia’s question-the first she had asked. “This? This be the Granta. This un takes us to the anchorages.”

“And your auntie,” Veronica said, smiling. “It takes us to your auntie as well, Sister.”

Walburga grinned. “That it do. Her’ll be surprised seeing me twice in a week.”

The countryside changed with the river, becoming something resembling flat upland where reed and alder fell back to be replaced by firm grass and taller trees. In the twilight, Adelia could see hedges and fences rather than dikes. The moon, which had been a thin, round wafer in the evening sky, gained substance.

Safeguard was beginning to limp, and Veronica said he should travel with them, poor thing. Once the hens stopped protesting at his presence, there was silence broken only by the last twittering of birds.

Walburga took the punt to an inlet from which a path led to a farm. As she lumbered out, she said, “Now don’t you go lifting all that stuff on your own, Sister. Get the old codgers to help you.”

“They will.”

“And you can manage it back on your own?”

Veronica nodded and smiled. Walburga curtsied to Adelia, then waved them off.

The Granta became narrower and darker, finding its way through a winding, shallow valley in which beeches occasionally came down to the water and Veronica had to crouch to avoid branches. She stopped to light a lantern, which she placed on the board at her feet so that it lit the black water ahead for a yard or so and reflected the green eyes of some animal that looked at them before turning away into the undergrowth.

As they cleared the trees, the moon reached them again to silver a black-and-white landscape of pasture and hedge. Veronica poled to the left bank. “Journey’s end, the Lord be praised,” she said.

Adelia peered ahead and pointed to a huge, flattopped shape in the distance. “What’s that?”

Veronica turned to look. “There? That’s Wandlebury Hill.”

Of course, it would be.

A tiny, twinkling star seemed to have landed on the hill’s head, deceptive in the nature of stars so that a blink sent it away and another blink brought it back.

She shifted in order to let Veronica lift the hen crate from under her legs. “I shall wait here,” she said.

The nun looked at her doubtfully, and then at the baskets still in the punt needing to be carried to the unseen anchorages.

Adelia said, “Would you leave the lantern with me?”

Sister Veronica cocked her head. “Feared of the dark?”

Adelia considered the question. “Yes.”

“Keep it then, and the Lord take care of you. I’ll be back in a while.” The nun hefted a sack over her shoulder and, gripping the crate in her other hand, set off up a moonlit track leading into trees.

Adelia waited until she’d gone, then lifted Safeguard onto the bank, picked up the lantern, raised it to see that its candle was good and stout, and began walking.

For a while, the river and its accompanying path meandered in the general direction in which she headed, but, after perhaps a mile, she saw that it would take her too far to the south. She left it to keep due east as the crow flew-except that a crow wouldn’t have been impeded by the obstacles that now met Adelia: great stretches of brambles, hillocks, and dips made slippery by the recent rain, hurdle fences that sometimes could be climbed or crawled through and sometimes couldn’t.

If human eyes watched from Wandlebury Hill, they saw a tiny, errant light straying across the dark country, going this way and that with apparent aimlessness as Adelia circumambulated one obstruction, then another. Sometimes the light paused because she fell, and fell awkwardly in an attempt to keep the lantern from hitting the ground and going out, Safeguard standing by until she got up.

Occasionally, not having heard it, she was startled by a deer or fox fleeing across her path-her own sobbing breath being too loud to hear anything else, though she sobbed not from grief nor exhaustion but from effort.

However, the watcher on Wandlebury Hill, if there were a watcher, could have seen that for all its vagaries, the little light was coming closer.

And Adelia, struggling through her valley of shadows, saw the hill slowly swell until it dominated everything else ahead. The star that had gotten entangled on its brow was no longer intermittent but sent out a steady glow.

She nearly retched as she went, sick with her own stupidity. Why didn’t I go here straight away? The bodies of the children told me, told me. Chalk, they said. We were killed on chalk. The river fixated me. But the river leads to Wandlebury Hill. I should have known.

Scratched and bleeding, limping, yet with the lantern still lit, she heaved herself up onto a flat surface and found it to be the spot on the Roman road where Prior Geoffrey had once screamed to anyone who would listen that he could not piss.

There was nobody about; indeed, it was late now and the moon was high, but Adelia was encapsulated away from time; there was no past where people lived; there wasn’t a child called Ulf, she had stopped hearing or seeing him; there was a hill, and she must reach its top. Followed by the dog, she took the steep track without recalling the occasion on which she had first taken it, merely knowing that it was the way to go.

When she gained the top, she had to look for the twinkling light, bewildered that it had led her from a distance but was no longer apparent. Oh, God, don’t let it be put out. In darkness and among this vast expanse of hummocks, she’d never find the place.