‘Bersaba!’ I cried again. The creature stopped, halted by the sound of my voice. It turned uncertainly and came lumbering towards me. I could not see its face—perhaps that was fortunate—but I knew that I was in the presence of something not quite natural—something baleful, evil—and that I was in acute danger.

I heard Bersaba scream: ‘Run, Angel …’

Then almost immediately there was the sound of a gun’s being fired. The figure swayed and I saw its huge arms rise as it staggered and fell on to the grass.

Bersaba was beside me. She had her arms about me, holding me tightly.

‘You’re all right, Angel,’ she murmured soothingly. ‘It’s all right now. I thought I saw Richard down here … so I came … and it was that. He saw me and …’

Mr and Mrs Cherry were running out of the house, and as she came to the figure on the grass Mrs Cherry did a strange thing. She knelt beside it and laid her face on the fallen body.

It was like a nightmare: the coldness of the night and Bersaba and I standing there clinging together as though one feared she would lose the other; the body lying on the grass and Mrs Cherry rocking back and forth on her heels incoherently murmuring in obvious uncontrollable grief.

Grace and Meg came out with Jesson, and Grace knelt down and said: ‘He’s dead.’

Mrs Cherry wailed, ‘Cherry shot him. He shot our son …’

Cherry laid his hand on his wife’s shoulder and tried to comfort her.

‘We ought to get him into the house,’ said Jesson.

The sight of the blood sickened me. Bersaba put her arm about me. ‘You should go back to bed, Angelet,’ she said. I ignored her. I had to know what was happening.

They put him in the weapons room and as he lay there on the floor I caught a glimpse of his face. It was strange and terrifying. Thick and wiry hair grew low on the brow; hair covered the lower part of his face, but there was something evil about that face which had not been put there by death.

Grace took Mrs Cherry away and we were left with Cherry and Jesson in the hall. I said: ‘What does this mean? Who is this man? You shot him, Cherry?’

Cherry said: ‘Yes, I shot him. You heard Mrs Cherry. It’s true. He is our son.’

‘Where did he come from?’ asked Bersaba. ‘How is it that he has appeared here suddenly?’

‘He escaped, my lady. He escaped once before. It has been a great trial to us. He was in a madhouse … He has the strength of two men … and he was dangerous. I couldn’t have him in the house. He caused such damage before. There didn’t seem nothing else to do … I knew I’d have to … if ever he came back.’

Bersaba took control of the situation. She went to the kitchen and brought something from Mrs Cherry’s cupboard, poured it into a goblet and made Cherry drink it.

‘You must control yourself,’ she said. ‘What you did you believed to be for the best.’

‘’Twas a terrible trial to us … all these years … for we never knew when he might break out again.’

‘There’s nothing you can do now,’ said Bersaba. ‘He is dead. Tomorrow you must take him out of the house and bury him.’

Cherry nodded.

‘Jesson shall take you to bed.’

‘I did it to save you, my lady. I did it to save the house. There’s no knowing what he would have done. He goes mad, see. He would have burnt the place down. I had to do it. I had to. Mrs Cherry must see it. But he’s her son and …’

Bersaba turned to Jesson. ‘Take him to his room, Jesson,’ she said. ‘Stay with him and Mrs Cherry, I’ll look after my sister.’

She led me to my room and she stayed with me. We talked for a long time.

‘He did right,’ she said. ‘You could see that he was mad … even as he lay there on the grass. If he had got into the house he might have murdered us all. Cherry must have known how desperate he was.’

‘To shoot his own son …’ I began.

‘He is better dead.’

Though the children had slept peacefully through the disturbance, there was no sleep for any of the adults in the house that night. In the morning Cherry and Jesson took the body away and buried it on the edge of the paddock, and they put a stone these on which Cherry engraved the words ‘Joseph Cherry’ and the date.

He talked to us afterwards more calmly than he had on the previous night. Bersaba was wonderful, for she made him realize that in sacrificing his son he had saved us all, for the story Cherry had to tell was horrifying. His son had been born abnormal; during his childhood he had become violent. As a boy he had found a special delight in torturing and killing animals and later he had had an uncontrollable urge to do the same to human beings. He had had to be taken into a madhouse and chained. He had escaped once before and some instinct had brought him to his parents. So he had come to Far Flamstead. Then his presence had only been discovered when he had entered the house. He was stopped in time before he had set it on fire. Then his father had shot him through the leg. That was what he had aimed to do on this occasion, but the shot had entered his heart.

‘You are a brave man, Cherry,’ said Bersaba, ‘and I think everyone in this house should be grateful to you today!’

Of course the incident had changed the household. Before we had been on the alert for soldiers who might destroy our home and kill us. Now we had been brought face to face with an equally terrifying situation. Both Bersaba and I trembled at the thought of what might have happened if that madman had entered the room in which the sleeping children lay, and we couldn’t be grateful enough to Cherry.

Mrs Cherry had changed. Her grief possessed her; she made a wreath of leaves and laid it on her son’s grave. I was glad that she bore no resentment against her husband, for she seemed so lost and bewildered that she might well have done.

Her colour had changed; the network of veins was more visible. She was more silent than she had been. I thought how strange it was that people harboured secrets of which we were unaware. I couldn’t forget her round rosy face which seemed to match her name, and to discover that all the time she was nursing this bitter secret made me see her in a new light.

As the weeks passed we returned to the wartime pattern. We were alert as ever for approaching enemies, but we were all aware that the most ardent Parliamentary soldiers could not have been more terrifying than the madman who could so easily have entered the house while we slept.

It was November—a month of mists and bare trees, green berries on the ivy and spiders’ webs festooning the hedges.

My baby was due to be born in three months’ time, and I longed for February and the first jasmine and snowdrops. It seemed long in coming.

It was during this month that the terrible conviction came to me that someone was trying to kill me.

There were times when I laughed at my fancies, and I could not bring myself to talk of them … even to Bersaba. I kept telling myself: Women have strange fancies, don’t they, when they are in this condition? They are said to be irrational, crave strange things, imagine things are what they are not.

And here was this fancy within me, an eerie conviction that I was being watched and followed. When I went into the quieter places of the house—the Castle Room, the chapel on the spiral stairs with its steps which were so narrow on one side—I would be aware of danger. ‘Be careful of that staircase,’ said Bersaba. ‘It could be dangerous. If you tripped on that … it could be disastrous for the child.’

Once when it was dusk and I was coming down the staircase I had the feeling that someone was watching me from behind. I fancied I could almost hear the sound of breathing.

I stopped short and said: ‘Is anyone there?’ and I thought I heard a quick intake of breath and then the faint rustle of clothing. I hurried down, though taking care with every step, and went to my room to lie on the bed to recover. I felt my child move within me then and I laid my hands on it reassuringly. I was going to make sure that all was well with it.

Later I admonished myself. What was I thinking of? I believed I knew what had happened to me. The memory of that madman creeping up to the house had unnerved me. I couldn’t get it out of my mind—how could I, when Mrs Cherry looked so sad and poor Cherry behaved as though he carried a load of sin on his shoulders? My imagination kept presenting me with pictures of what might have happened. I could imagine myself waking up to find him in my room. I pictured his creeping into the children’s room and looking down on those innocent little faces.

I could hear Cherry’s voice: ‘He took a pleasure in torturing and killing animals … and later he wanted to do the same to human beings.’

He is dead, I reminded myself.

But such an incident was bound to have its affect on anyone as nervous as I had become, and the feeling of being watched persisted. I gave up going to the Castle Room. It was a climb up the stairs and I was getting unwieldy, I told myself. But it was not really that. The place seemed so isolated and I was fearful of being alone.

Then one night I was sure.

Bersaba had brought in my milk. I dozed and then fell into a disturbed sleep. I dreamed that a figure came into my room, stopped by my bed, slipped something into my milk and then went swiftly and quietly from the room.

I awoke with a start and my hair really did stand up on my head, for as I opened my eyes I saw the door closing.

I called out sharply: ‘Who’s that?’

The door shut. I distinctly heard it. I got out of bed, went to the door and opened it, but there was no one in the corridor.

I returned to my bed and looked at the milk. I could see that something had been put into it because it had not yet completely dissolved.

I sat on the edge of my bed and thought: Someone is trying to harm me. It is not my imagination.

I lay on my bed, fighting the impulse to go in to Bersaba.

I had told her how uneasy I felt and she had brushed that aside. ‘It’s your condition,’ she had said. ‘And you were always inclined to be nervous.’

She would say that I had dreamed it.

I picked up the milk and smelt it. There was no odour.

For some time I looked at it and then threw it out of the window.

I had made up my mind that the next time someone came into my room I was going to be awake and speak to whoever came to tamper with my milk and ask why they wanted to harm me and my child.

It seemed to me that I had lost contact with Bersaba. She was preoccupied. Sometimes she talked about Richard; she wanted to know about our relationship and that was something I found difficult to discuss with her. There were other times when she did not want to speak of him.

We were all of us nervous. ‘I reckon this war’s doing something to us all,’ said Meg. ‘You never know when soldiers are going to come running over the grass.’ Then she clapped her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, it won’t happen, my lady. It couldn’t here. They wouldn’t dare … not in the General’s house.’

I knew that she had been warned not to alarm me.

I wasn’t sleeping very well. I never drank the milk which was put by my bed, but I did not stop it. I wanted to catch the one whom I suspected of putting something in it. I thought with alarm that if there was no milk they might try some other method. Of course I was wasting milk. We had two cows which Cherry milked each day, so there was plenty of fresh milk at that time, but we did not know when the countryside was going to be laid waste and what we should do for food then.

Then I moved into a phase when I told myself that nothing of this was happening. I had not seen the door close. I had dreamed the whole thing. If I told anyone, they would smile and soothingly say I must take care.

Then I began to think about the house and the strangeness of things here, and how different people were from what one had believed them to be. I thought particularly of Mrs Cherry who had seemed so rotund and contented when all the time she had had a son who was a dangerous lunatic, who had broken free from his madhouse and come to Far Flamstead and tried to burn down the place. I had discovered that that had happened more than fifteen years ago, and all that time the Cherrys had been watchful lest he should escape again and return.

I began to wonder about the door in the kitchen and whether it was really just an ordinary cupboard in there. It had somehow not looked like one. I was surprised at Bersaba’s attitude. She had always been so adventurous, but when once more I tentatively mentioned the cupboard, she changed the subject and showed quite clearly that she didn’t want to talk about it.