I shared his smile. ‘You’ve been friends for a very long time, Fergal says.’

Daniel nodded. ‘We have. Twenty years, more or less.’

‘You must both have been young when you met.’

It was a rather clumsy way of asking him how old he was, but Daniel didn’t seem to mind. Through the smoke of his pipe his eyes smiled at mine. ‘I was fifteen, and Fergal a few years above that, when both of us came near to being pressed into the navy in Plymouth.’

My mother, with her love of history, had once painted me a vivid picture of the roving groups of rough men hired to forcibly recruit or ‘press’ unwary locals into hard military service, coercing when they could, using violence when they wanted. The strength of Britain’s navy had owed much to countless lads who’d woken up from one too many drinks to find themselves aboard a ship and far from land.

‘Myself, I was too green to do much but fight with my fists,’ Daniel told me, ‘but Fergal is quick in his mind and his speech and he got us both out of the way of the press gang and onto a fishing boat, and these years later he still thinks me fully incapable of taking care of myself. That, I suspect, is why he does not leave.’ His smile grew more reflective as he looked at me, and then he added, ‘Fergal does not easily attach himself to people, and his loyalty, once won, is won for life.’

‘Then you are fortunate to have it.’

‘I was not speaking of myself.’ His tone was patient, like a tutor’s. ‘If you find that Fergal seems more out of temper, you should know ’tis not from anger, but because he has been worried for your welfare and is far too proud to tell you so.’

I was touched by the thought, and I promised to keep it in mind. ‘Have I really been gone two days?’

‘You have.’

I hadn’t figured out the workings of travelling in time yet, beyond the fact that I appeared to leave my own time and return to it seamlessly, so however long I spent here I went back to the same moment I had left, to find that nobody had missed me.

But the rules seemed rather different at this end of the equation.

Daniel must have seen me frowning, because narrowing his gaze against an upward waft of smoke he asked, ‘What is it?’

I explained, as best I could. ‘It makes no sense,’ was my complaint. ‘It’s just not logical, it’s—’ Then I saw that he was laughing at me and I stopped. ‘What?’

‘You will forgive me, but you’ve come across three centuries and what concerns you most is that the times will not be matched?’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘Well, if a pig came up to me one day upon the road, full dressed and wearing boots, and asked the way to Plymouth,I can promise you it would not be the colour of his buttons that would interest me.’

I saw his point, but couldn’t help but add in my defence, ‘It’s only that I’d like to understand what’s going on.’

‘I know.’ His eyes acknowledged that. ‘Like yours, my mind would seek to know the science. But there are things in life that lie beyond our understanding. Why they happen, we may never learn. And yet they happen.’

In his eyes the light of laughter was now fading into something more like quiet curiosity. ‘What would it change,’ he asked me, ‘if you understood?’

‘I don’t know. Likely nothing.’

‘You would still be here.’

I had no argument for that, and so I didn’t offer any.

Daniel’s pipe was dying and he knocked the ashes from it. ‘When I meet a wind I cannot fight,’ he said, ‘I can do naught but set my sails to let it take me where it will.’

I knew that he was right. Some forces could not be controlled, and that was just as true for hearts, I thought, as for a ship at sea. I met his gaze and said, ‘I’m not much of a sailor.

‘Give it time,’ was his advice. ‘Mayhap you’ll learn.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There were a lot of other things I had to learn before that.

Fergal had decided that, to guard against the chance I might come back again one day and find myself alone as I had done before, I ought to know the workings of the house and its surroundings, from the little plot of vegetables that sheltered in a terraced garden up behind the stables to the well close by the yard where they drew water.

Leaning over the lip of the stone well, I looked at my rippled reflection below. ‘Is it any good for drinking?’

‘Ay, if you and I were horses, maybe. Me now, I would rather meet my thirst with ale and cider.’

I’d have happily poured him a big glass of cider to soften his mood at the moment. He’d been brusque and short-tempered, as Daniel had warned me he might be, and if I hadn’t known it was his way of showing worry I’d have taken it to heart. As it was, I found it touching, even flattering, that this fierce man had taken on the role of my protector so completely.

Turning from the well, he said, ‘This water will not harm you, but you’re best to keep to ale for drinking, anyway. You do remember where the ale is kept?’

I answered back obediently, ‘In the cask beside the cellar steps.’

‘And if the ale runs dry, the cider is …?’

‘To be protected at all costs,’ I quipped, to see if I could make him smile.

He did, a little. But he wasn’t fully satisfied until I’d answered properly and told him where the kegs of cider that he prized so much were hidden. Having done that, I asked, ‘Does Jack really not know where they are?’