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sugary. My mother had a sweet tooth and bought herself a weekly quarter of pear drops, but I wasn’t usually very partial. Now, however, I drank down the tall glass bottle of lemonade like water and went back to the counter to buy an iced bun. The man who took my money nodded his approval.
    â€œI like to see a lady enjoy her food,” he said.
    I smiled but put a defensive arm across my stomach, though I knew I didn’t show much in my new coat.
    I changed trains at Swindon, and though it was hardly the countryside, I fancied the air smelt different from the fresh-cut grass smell of London’s parks. It was earthier, with a hint of fresh manure that I found I quite liked. The branch line train was rickety and slow, stopping so regularly that it never gathered any real pace. Unlike the deep cuttings of brick the Victorians built to buryLondon’s railway tracks under the terraces above, here we trundled through on high, the rails snaking along the ridges of lush valleys.
    Finally we came to a jerky standstill at Stonehouse, where I’d been told to get off. The small platform soon cleared of people, with no one left looking for me, so I made my way out to the front of the station. A single battered van idled there, its driver sound asleep, and a couple of boys were sitting on the curb next to their bicycles, which they had flung down carelessly.
    I was just wondering what on earth I was to do when a clopping sound made the boys look up. I followed their gaze. A horse pulling an open carriage was approaching in unhurried fashion. Holding the reins was a weather-beaten man wearing a flat cap low over his forehead. As he turned into the station forecourt, I realised with a start that he had come for me. The boys, also realising this, grinned over in my direction. I wondered bewilderedly what else awaited me.
    The driver introduced himself simply as “Ruck” before swinging my case into the footwell and helping me up onto the narrow seat. Behind us the carriage’s seats were covered in sacking and strewn with an assortment of tools, but it would have been quite grand when it was new.
    We processed silently through a series of small villages, the iron-shod hooves of the horse muffled by the earth road. The honey-coloured hamlets, where the cottages invariably cleaved towards an exquisite church, were even more picturesque than postcards and packets of fudge had given me to imagine—and much more so than I had noticed as a tiny girl. After Paddington’s tired terraces, grubby streets, and draughty terminus it was almost obscenely pretty.
    I knew nothing of the local topography then, still accustomed as I was to an orderly kind of nature, bound within the tidy perimetersof London’s sprawling suburbs; the bright squares of lawn and plump hedges tended by office men after hours. I found out later that these villages, so sturdily set amongst the lanes and luxuriant pastures, are in fact balanced on a narrow ridge that runs between two deep valleys. This upthrust of land marks the place where the Vale of Berkeley meets the Cotswold escarpment. Beneath the rich loamy soil two distinctly different types of bedrock have been fused together, evidence of some ancient geological cataclysm of which there is no sign on the surface.
    About an hour passed before we began our descent into the narrower and deeper of the two valleys, the very last of the Cotswolds’ combes to the west. As the land fell away, I reached for the handle of my case to stop it tumbling off into the dirt, and braced my knees against the front of the carriage. My other arm lay protectively across my lap. I saw Ruck’s eyes flicker over me as I moved, and I wondered if there was a smirk on his weather-cracked lips.
    â€œWon’t be long now,” he said, his voice loud in air that had grown stiller yet. “Though you won’t find a deeper bottom in these parts.”
    I blushed at these last words, feeling