What had happened, though Verity didn't know it, was that shortly after she had left on her walk, Baby Henry had thrown himself in the stream.

Why he did it no one knew, except Baby Henry, and he never told. But he did do it. And it was Neil who had jumped in after him for his rescue. The stream was fast-flowing, faster still for the week of rain, and both boy and man were exhausted and wet when Neil finally managed to clamber back up the slippery bank to land, with the struggling toddler under one arm.

"Mouillé, mouillé," Baby Henry cried plaintively. "Mouillé."

"Oui, tu es mouillé," Mrs Prothero snapped at him. She looked around for Mr Prothero, but he and her mother-in-law had gone for a walk in the forest, and were too far away to have heard her screams. Only her younger sister remained in the meadow, hovering anxiously at her elbow to see if she could help.

She could not. There was no help to be had but a hot bath and dry clothes, and they were only to be had some ten miles away.

"We're going home," Mrs Prothero told her in French. "Tell George that we've gone home in the black carriage, to get dry."

Her sister promised to pass on the message, and, seeing she could do no more, returned to the picnic rug to re-read a letter she had received that morning, analyzing it for any possible hidden messages. A few minutes later, she distantly registered the sound of horses' hooves, but did not look up to the road to see the carriage go.

As the carriage rolled away, with Neil and Mrs Prothero and Henry inside, Neil couldn't help but suspect that Baby Henry, though weeping angelically, was secretly pleased with himself. Neil wasn't in the mood to blame him, for Neil was also secretly pleased with Henry. It had occurred to him, once he was back on the bank with Henry in his arms, that he had been quite the hero to rescue him, and though he had noted Verity was not around to see it, he thought hopefully that she might be impressed when she heard of it.

At four o'clock, when the storm had started up again, Mr Prothero and his mother- and sister-in-law had packed up the picnic things and decamped in the second coach.

"Where is the English man's little wife?" Prothero's mother-in-law asked him, as he took her hand to help her into the carriage.

"She went back with him, Mama," his sister-in-law said tetchily, from her seat. "She is his wife." For the main argument between the two women was that the sixteen-year-old girl wished to make a match of it with a man her mother thought quite unsuitable.

The girl spoke with such conviction that neither Prothero nor her mother considered for a moment that it might be assumption, not fact. And as for the driver of the carriage, who might otherwise have been trusted to count heads, he had been seeing double all afternoon. It came upon him, sometimes, this strange and wonderful affliction, and he was very quiet as his two masters directed him to start the drive home, lest he betray it to either of them.

His affliction was also responsible for the little accident the company experienced on the road home, doubling the length of their journey by the dreary wait under a drizzling awning in the village while two men, who were not seeing double, fixed the dislocated wheel.

It was grey, chilly dusk when the second carriage finally arrived at the manor, driven by Prothero, who had fired his drunken carriage man. Neil went down to the front door to meet it, attired in silk robes and slippers, as befitted a hero of his standing.

His smile faded as Prothero opened the carriage door, and only two ladies descended from it.

"Where's Verity?"

*       *       *

At that moment, Verity was huddled on the stone throne of Bastien's castle, damp in body and damp in spirit. She had waited some time for the carriages to return, and just as she had decided to walk the ten foreign miles back home, the drizzle had intensified once more to rain, leaving her with no option but to take shelter, and wait to be rescued.

Now, in the last, fading light of the fragile day, the rain stopped, this time, with an air of finality. The forest began to drip dry, and marsh frogs, in this new silence, began to croak and cackle to one another.

Verity shifted in her position, the stone grinding under her boot sole. One of her legs had gone numb. She was cold from her toes to little white ears, a cold that seemed to sink bone deep. She was no longer scared, or angry. She was only miserable, and resigned to her misery. She wanted, more than anything, to sink into the soft plushness of her bed, and draw the warm quilts over her body. But bed was hours and miles away yet. And the softest pillow she had for her head was her knees, clutched up against her chest.

Night fell. Outside, the dark clouds thinned, and a faint moonlight shone down through the smoke hole, reflecting in glimmers across patches of mired floor, and casting just enough light to make the darkness seem deeper. Still, the frogs croaked, and somewhere an owl screamed.

Eventually, by increments of worry and distrust, Verity became sure that no one was coming to rescue her tonight. She had been there hours, and now it was dark, and surely no one would come for her in the dark.

She left the hut, and stared upwards forlornly at the sky. The clouds still blocked the stars, but they were thinner now, and seemed to hold no threat of rain. It was that, coupled with her conviction of abandonment, that made her decide to walk back, late and dark and cold though it was.

Besides, she reasoned, as she walked briskly down the road, I'll die of cold if I stay there all night. I need to walk, to warm myself up.

At first, the black forest seemed by comparison a more pleasant place than the gloomy little hut. But during the intervals when the moonlight was snuffed by a patch of thick cloud, it was very black indeed, and the strange rustlings from the undergrowth, or cries of distant foxes, seemed sinister, and awakened within Verity a sort of animal caution. A falling leaf from a tree, brushing wetly past her cheek, made her jump and scream, and when a beech marten ran suddenly past her feet in pursuit of a mouse, she was panicked enough to take flight, and run.

It was possibly during that run, or possibly during one of the times when the moon was behind thick clouds, that Verity took the wrong fork in the road.

She didn't realize she had done so until it was far too late. She hadn't even realized there was more than one real road through the forest, when she had ridden throuh it in the carriage earlier that day. And she was half right. The road she was on was not a real road, as it terminated suddenly at a broken wooden bridge. Water rushed blackly in the gully beneath, and she shuddered as she realized that, had it not been for the faint light of the reappearing moon, she might have walked straight off the bridge and plunged into it. Her footsteps echoed hollowly as she backed off the wooden bridge, and the sound made her remember that the bridge she had crossed in the carriage earlier that day had been made of stone.

She sat down on the road in the dark for some moments, resting, and trying to think what to do. To walk all the way back, and find where she had gone wrong, seemed impossible. Her legs ached with exhaustion, and she had blisters on both heels. It was equally impossible, and furthermore pointless, to return to the stone hut, and her miserable waiting. But to stay here, to fall down in exhaustion at the end of the useless road with its broken bridge, and sleep in the dirt, was a defeat Verity's pride could not bear. She had amused herself, on her long walk, by imagining the look on Mr Armiger's face when she presented herself at the front door of the manor at midnight, like a Cinderella who had not bothered to wait for her inattentive Prince. After that pleasant image, she could not bear to think of his look of pity if he or a search party found her forlorn in the dirt.

No. She would keep going. Besides, she could not be far from the little French village now, for the stone bridge that crossed the river led nearly right onto the high street, and the stone bridge could not be far from this wooden one. All she had to do was follow the river until she met it.

She stood up, and began to clamber through the undergrowth, sending nocturnal forest creatures fleeing from her crashing footsteps. She made sure to keep the river within earshot on her right, for her journey was not easy. Every few feet she had to duck under a branch, or divert around a tree trunk or bush. Thorns scratched at her bare hands and face, while weeds tangled graspingly at her ankles.

Soon, she thought to herself, soon I'll be at the bridge – and out of this damned forest!

But soon never came. The stone bridge did not eventuate, not after ten minutes, nor twenty, nor thirty.

She had almost decided to give up and turn back when suddenly she put her foot down in an awkward hollow beneath a tree root, and twisted it. She fell to the ground, grating her hands against a tree trunk as she tried to catch herself, and sat there some time, clutching herself, and rocking with pain. When it subsided enough for her to attempt walking again, she found she could barely limp, and certainly could not push on over the uneven ground and clawing undergrowth.

Tired, frustrated, and near tears, Verity crawled to the same roots that had cruelly tripped her. There was a sort of depression beneath the tree, that was not quite so cold, nor quite so damp, as the stones of the miserable castle, and she curled herself up in it, and waited for the awful night to be over.

Eventually, she fell into a shallow sleep, full of unfriendly, fragmented dreams. The cold kept waking her from it, and showing her glimpses of the night sky above her, through trees – now cloudy, now clearing, now full of stars – and now, light!

Dawn.

Verity gasped in pain as she sat up, for her back was cramped, and her legs stiff, after the damp night in her uncomfortable bed. But with the return of light, the forest and her predicament could not seem so unconquerable. She shook the dew off her skirts, and levered herself to her feet, leaning heavily upon the low branches of the tree.

Just ahead of her, down the hill a short way, she could see that the forest was thinning to an opening of some kind: patches of bare sky showed through gaps between the trunks of trees.

Gingerly, she tested her weight on her ankle. It held, but it hurt. She limped forward, her hip bones aching in their sockets, her knees protesting. A few minutes later, she emerged from the trees and saw before her a valley scored with vineyards, and at the far end of it, a farmhouse manor, rooves glowing gold in the early morning light.

She cried out and then laughed in frustration and relief.

They were Prothero's vineyards, and it was Prothero's house.

Late update, because I accidentally deleted all my progress on this chapter, and then had to rewrite it, and it took me about five rewrites before I finally got it right again. The next five or so chapters have been written for a week or two though, it was only this one that's been troubling me.