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emerged screwed up with pain, then the red handkerchief was used to scrub away the remaining drops of tears. ‘Oh, don’t you worry none, Lil’. You don’t mind me calling you that, do you? Only I feel as if I know you already, him doing naught but talk about his darling Lily. I know you loved him. But I loved him too. As a dear friend, you might say. He were right kind to me, even though he telled me over and over that you were his girl. D’you see?’
    Lily wasn’t too sure if she did see, or if she were missing some vital piece of information. But the girl had evidently cared for Dick, or Dickie as she affectionately called him, and clearly grieved, as Lily did, over his death. Well, perhaps not quite as she did. The girl had made it plain Lily’s own relationship with Dick was special.
    She was right. However would Lily manage without him? Then it was she who was weeping, sobbing and hiccuping as if her heart were broken, for surely it was, and the girl was holding her close against a chest even flatter than Lily’s own. Patting her shoulder as if she were a young child.
    ‘There, there, don’t take on so. I didn’t mean to upset you, lass. Dick wouldn’t want you making yourself ill, now would he?’ When the red handkerchief had been pressed into further service and the tears were all mopped up, the two girls exchanged tremulous smiles.
    ‘I’m Rose. Rose Collins.’
    ‘Hello, Rose. I’m Lily Thorpe. Oh, how silly. You already know that.’ And they grinned at each other.
    ‘Well, we’ve summat in common, anyroad,’ Rose said. ‘Our mothers must have thought we both looked like flowers.’
    ‘I’m no pale and peaceful lily.’
    ‘And I’m no pretty pink rose.’ Rose grinned widely. ‘But then, we both loved that great daft cluck who’s gone to his untimely end. If in different ways of course.’ The huge dark eyes, almost too large for her small pointed face, narrowed into slits of anger. ‘I don’t know about you, love, but I’d like to see someone swing for what happened.’
    ‘Me too,’ Lily admitted, realising on the instant it was true. ‘Steaming along in their great yacht without a care for other folk.’
    ‘Aye. Bloomin’ toffs,’ Rose said with feeling. ‘Think they own the lake, they do.’
    Arms about each other, the two girls began to walk down St Margaret’s steps and along the shingle to the old boathouses, sharing the damp handkerchief from time to time. Swept along by the emotion of the day Lily opened up her heart to this sympathetic stranger.
    ‘Dick was the love of my life.’
    ‘Aye, I know.’
    ‘We were going to be married. Happen sooner than we planned, what with me mebbe carrying his bairn.’
    Rose stopped in her tracks. ‘Nay. Ee, you poor lass. Dickie told me how you was to wed, but he never said aught about that.’
    ‘He didn’t even know.’
    Intrigued, Rose linked arms with Lily. ‘Tell me all about it? Happen I can help. You never know.’
    As dusk gathered and a breeze filtered down from the high fells, cooling the deep wooded valley and gently ruffling the slate surface of the lake, Lily poured out the pain of her longings and secret fears about the things her own mother had never fully explained. As Lily talked, she plainly revealed her naivety, and the gaps in her patchy knowledge.
    ‘So when did you last see the curse?’ Rose asked, bewildered, as well she might be, by Lily’s tale.
    ‘What curse? Curse of what?’
    When this was explained, which took a good long time, tied up as it was with more intimate facts of life with which Rose was easily familiar but which held more surprises than Lily was prepared for, she learned the full extent of her ignorance. It turned out she was in no danger at all of having anyone’s baby. Not only because she and Dick had never actually done anything likely to bring one about, but because so far as Mother Nature was concerned, Lily’s malnourished body was still that of a child. Somehow this upset