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“I know all that. Honestly.
We’ll be fine.”
    That’s what she said. But we weren’t.

IV.
    L ettie led
me to a hazel thicket beside the old road (the hazel catkins were hanging heavy
in the spring) and she broke off a thin branch. Then, with her knife, as if she
had done it ten thousand times before, she stripped the branch of bark, cut it
again, so now it resembled a Y. She put the knife away (I did not see where it
went) and held the two ends of the Y in her hands.
    â€œI’m not dowsing,” she told me. “Just using it as a
guide. We’re looking for a blue . . . a bluebottle, I think to start
with. Or something purply-blue, and shiny.”
    I looked around with her. “I can’t see one.”
    â€œIt’ll be here,” she assured me.
    I gazed around, taking in the grass, a
reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm
machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk
churns that sat upon it. I saw the Hempstocks’ red-brick farmhouse, crouched and
comfortable like an animal at rest. I saw the spring flowers; the omnipresent
white and yellow daisies, the golden dandelions and do-you-like-butter
buttercups, and, late in the season, a lone bluebell in the shadows beneath the
milk-churn table, still glistening with dew . . .
    â€œThat?” I asked.
    â€œYou’ve got sharp eyes,” she said, approvingly.
    We walked together to the bluebell. Lettie closed
her eyes when we reached it. She moved her body back and forth, the hazel wand
extended, as if she were the central point on a clock or a compass, her wand the
hands, orienting toward a midnight or an east that I could not perceive.
“Black,” she said suddenly, as if she were describing something from a dream.
“And soft.”
    We walked away from the bluebell, along the lane
that I imagined, sometimes, must have been a Roman road. We were a hundred yards
up the lane, near where the Mini had been parked, when she spotted it: a scrap
of black cloth caught on the barbed wire of the fence.
    Lettie approached it. Again, the outstretched hazel
stick, again the slow turning and turning. “Red,” she said, with certainty.
“Very red. That way.”
    We walked together in the direction she indicated.
Across a meadow and into a clump of trees. “There,” I said, fascinated. The
corpse of a very small animal—a vole, by the look of it—lay on a clump of green
moss. It had no head, and bright blood stained its fur and beaded on the moss.
It was very red.
    â€œNow, from here on,” said Lettie, “hold on to my
arm. Don’t let go.”
    I put out my right hand and took her left arm, just
below the elbow. She moved the hazel wand. “This way,” she said.
    â€œWhat are we looking for now?”
    â€œWe’re getting closer,” she said. “The next thing
we’re looking for is a storm.”
    We pushed our way into a clump of trees, and
through the clump of trees into a wood, and squeezed our way through trees too
close together, their foliage a thick canopy above our heads. We found a
clearing in the wood, and walked along the clearing, in a world made green.
    From our left came a mumble of distant thunder.
    â€œStorm,” sang Lettie. She let her body swing again,
and I turned with her, holding her arm. I felt, or imagined I felt, a throbbing
going through me, holding her arm, as if I were touching mighty engines.
    She set off in a new direction. We crossed a tiny
stream together. Then she stopped, suddenly, and stumbled, but did not fall.
    â€œAre we there?” I asked.
    â€œNot there,” she said. “No. It knows we’re coming.
It feels us. And it does not want us to come to it.”
    The hazel wand was whipping around now like a
magnet being pushed at a repelling pole. Lettie grinned.
    A gust of wind threw leaves and dirt up into our
faces. In the