There were goblins who had been far more real than those she read about in books and even now, when she was grown up and, she told herself, sensible, she still found herself thinking there must be dragons in the great fir woods that lay to the North.
‘If I cannot go into the woods,’ she asked herself, ‘then where can I go?’
She felt a surge of anger against the new Earl that was a culmination of everything that had gone wrong ever since William had been killed.
Deep in thought, she was suddenly aware of a knock on the back door.
Knowing that Nanny was still out and there was no one else to answer it except herself, she hurried down the passage into the kitchen and, opening the door, found outside one of the women from the village.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Bell!” she said. “I am afraid, i
