I went to John and told him just what I thought. I told him I would not allow children towork for him in school hours, that it was wrong toupset their education just for the few pence they earn, and that if the parents did not accept that, I would go and see them myself. I told him if it was so necessary to have further hands working on the garden that I would see Mr. Angelfield and employ aman. I had already made this offer to get extra staff, both for the garden and the house, but John and Mrs. Dunne were both so against the idea I thought it better to wait until I was more acquaintedwith the running of things here.

John's response was toshake hishead anddeny allknowledge of the child. When I impressed upon him the evidence of my own eyes, he said it must be a village childjust come wandering in, that it happened sometimes, that he was not responsiblefor all the village truants who happened to be in the garden. I told him then that I had seen the child before, the day I arrived, and that the child was clearly working. He was tight-lipped, only repeated that he had no knowledge of a child, that anyone could weed his garden who wanted to, that there was no such child.

I told John, with a little anger that I cannot regret, that I intended to speak to the schoolmistress about it, and that I would go directly to the parents and sort the matter out with them. He simply waved his hand, as if to say it was nothing to do with him and I might do as I liked (and I certainly shall). I am sure he knows who the boy is, and I am shocked at his refusal to help me in my duty toward him. It seems out of character for him to be obstructive, but then I suppose he began his own apprenticeship as a child and thought it never did him any harm. These attitudes are slow to die out in ruralareas.

I was engrossed in the diary. The barriers to legibility forced me to read slowly, puzzling out the difficulties, using all my experience, knowledge and imagination to flesh out the ghost words, yet the obstacles seemed not to impede me. On the contrary, the faded margins, the illegibilities, the blurred words seemed to pulse with meaning, vividly alive.

While I was reading in this absorbed fashion, in another part of my mind entirely a decision was forming. When the train drew in at the station where I was to descend for my connection, I found my mind made up. I was not going home after all. I was going to Angelfield.

The local line train to Banbury was too crowded with Christmas travelers to sit, and I never read standing up. With every jolt of the train, every jostle and stumble of my fellow passengers, I felt the rectangle of Hester's diary against my chest. I had read only half of it. The rest could wait.

What happened to you, Hester, I thought. Where on earth did you go?

DEMOLISHING THE PAST

The windows showed me his kitchen was empty, and when I walked back to the front of the cottage and knocked on the door, there was no answer.

Might he have gone away? It was a time of year when people did go away. But they went to their families, surely, and so Aurelius, having no family, would stay here. Belatedly the reason for Aurelius's absence occurred to me: He would be out delivering cakes for Christmas parties. Where else would a caterer be, just before Christmas? I would have to come back later. I put the card I had bought through the mail slot and set off through the woods toward Angelfield House.

It was cold; cold enough for snow. Beneath my feet the ground was frost-hard and above the sky was dangerously white. I walked briskly. With my scarf wrapped around my face as high as my nose, I soon warmed up.

At the clearing, I stopped. In the distance, at the site, there was unusual activity. I frowned. What was going on? My camera was around my neck, beneath my coat; the cold crept in as I undid my buttons. Using my long lens, I watched. There was a police car on the drive. The builders' vehicles and machinery were all stationary, and the builders were standing in a loose cluster. They must have stopped working a little while ago, for they were slapping their hands together and stamping their feet to keep warm. Their hats were on the ground or else slung by the strap from their elbows. One man offered a pack of cigarettes. From time to time one of them addressed a comment to the others, but there was no conversation. I tried to make out the expression on their unsmiling faces. Bored? Worried? Curious? They stood turned away from the site, facing the woods and my lens, but from time to time one or another cast a glance over his shoulder to the scene behind them.

Behind the group of men, a white tent had been erected to cover part of the site. The house was gone, but judging from the coach house, the gravel approach, the church, I guessed the tent was where the library had been. Beside it, one of their colleagues and a man I took to be their boss were in conversation with another pair of men. These were dressed one in a suit and overcoat, the other in a police uniform. It was the boss who was speaking, rapidly and with explanatory nods and shakes of the head, but when the man in the overcoat asked a question, it was the builder he addressed it to, and when he answered, all three men watched him intently.

He seemed unaware of the cold. He spoke in short sentences; in his long and frequent pauses the others did not speak, but watched him with intense patience. At one point he raised a finger in the direction of the machine and mimed its jaw of jagged teeth biting into the ground. At last he gave a shrug, frowned and drew his hand over his eyes as though to wipe them clean of the image he had just conjured.

A flap opened in the side of the white tent. A fifth man stepped out of it and joined the group. There was a brief, unsmiling conference and at the end of it, the boss went over to his group of men and had a few words with them. They nodded, and as though what they had been told was entirely what they were expecting, began to gather together the hats and thermos flasks at their feet and make their way to their cars parked by the lodge gates. The policeman in uniform positioned himself at the entrance to the tent, back to the flap, and the other ushered the builder and his boss toward the police car.

I lowered the camera slowly but continued to gaze at the white tent. I knew the spot. I had been there myself. I remembered the desolation of that desecrated library. The fallen bookshelves, the beams that had come crashing to the floor. My thrill of fear as I had stumbled over burned and broken wood.

There had been a body in that room. Buried in scorched pages, with a bookcase for a coffin. A grave hidden and protected for decades by the beams that fell.

I couldn't help the thought. I had been looking for someone, and now it appeared that someone had been found. The symmetry was irresistible. How not to make the connection? Yet Hester had left the year before, hadn't she? Why would she have come back? And then it struck me, and it was the very simplicity of the idea that made me think it might be true.

What if Hester had never left atall?

When I came to the edge of the woods, I saw the two blond children coming disconsolately down the drive. They wobbled and stumbled as they walked; beneath their feet the ground was scarred with curving black channels where the builders' heavy vehicles had gouged into the earth, and they weren't looking where they were going. Instead, they looked back over their shoulders in the direction they had come from.

It was the girl who, losing her footing and almost falling, turned her head and saw me first. She stopped. When her brother saw me he grew self-important with knowledge and spoke.