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echoes suggested the intruder was turning his head, looking up and down the walkway.
    The spy tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword, his muscles taut. The blood pulsed in his head, the familiar rhythm of his life, the music of impending death.
    After a moment, the footsteps padded away. Will waited a few heartbeats and then stepped out into the shadowy walkway. He glimpsed a figure disappearing around the edge of the backstage, too indistinct in the gloom to tell if it was devil or man. Silently, he followed, keeping close to the wall, and low.
    When he turned along the rear of the stage, he came up hard. The figure waited for him. Instinctively, Will swept his sword up ready for a fight before he had even registered the identity of his opponent.
    It was Jenny. His long-lost love.
    The spy reeled from the shock. Long-dammed emotions flooded up, his incomprehension washed away by the plangent yearning of all those desperate years without her, followed immediately by a pure joy that he was seeing her again, not a hazy, half-formed memory, but Jenny, really and truly there. He lowered his rapier, his lips silently forming her name.
    She looked exactly as she had done the last time he saw her all those years ago, when she had disappeared from his life, in full view, in that Warwickshire cornfield on that hot summer day. When she had walked out of life and into mystery. Still wearing the same blue dress, the colour of forget-me-nots. Her hair still a lustrous hazel, tumbling across her shoulders, her features pale and delicate yet filled with strength of character and intelligence.
    Questions flashed through Will’s mind, each one dying in the heat of her glorious return.
    ‘Jenny,’ he murmured. The word fell close to him with the dull resonance of a pebble dropped on wood.
    The woman held out a hand to him, and he wanted to feel her fingers in his more than anything in the world; it was all he had thought of, for years, since that awful day.
    Sheathing his rapier, Will stepped towards his love, unable to take his gaze from her face. All around him, the world fell into shadow until there was only the moon of her presence, drawing him in.
    Jenny’s face remained still and calm. Will watched her lips for the familiar ghost of a wry smile, but it was not there.
    ‘Speak to me,’ he whispered.
    And then Will looked deep into his love’s eyes. They were as black as coal from lash to lash, not the green eyes of his Jenny; devoid of any of her warmth, empty of all her love and her compassion. These were the eyes of a devil. In them, Will saw his own pale,desperate face reflected, and he realized he had been tricked. But there was no time to feel the bitterness of hope dashed, or the anger of the cruel blow that had been struck at him. The hands of Jenny-that-was-not-Jenny clamped on the sides of his head and pulled him in until those black eyes were the only thing he could see. His vision swam, and any thought he had of fighting free was washed away. With barely a murmur of protest, he tumbled into deep waters that were beyond his understanding.
    He stands under the cold eye of the full moon. Pearly mist drifts across the silver grass of a meadow, the swirling snowy tufts parting to reveal a sable slash of woodland in the distance. Glancing up the slope of the grassland, Will sees a scarecrow silhouetted against the white orb of the moon, its angular form topped by a wide-brimmed hat. He thinks that this chiaroscuro world is not England, perhaps Scotland, or the Low Countries, though he does not know why he feels that .
    The scarecrow troubles him, oddly. Will has passed many like it, rough figures made from a timber frame and straw-stuffed old clothes, but this one feels like something more. It feels, he decides with a note of mounting dread, like the judge of all his life .
    In a dreamlike state, the spy draws closer to the stick figure. The shadow thrown by the brim of the hat cloaks the face. Though his heart pounds