The Missalonghi rooster woke her about an hour before dawn, screeching his clarion from the beam right above her head. She leaped up, confused, then subsided against her living pillow in a fresh agony of pain and bewilderment. She wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t thirsty. What to do? Oh, what to do?

But by dawn she had made up her mind what to do, and rose then to her feet with purpose in her movements. Pulling comb and brush from the carpetbag, she tidied herself as best she could, but at the end of her efforts was dismally aware she smelled strongly of cow.

No sound of stirring life came from Missalonghi as she crept past it, and faintly from out her mother’s window came a series of little snores. Safe.

Down once more into John Smith’s valley, not with the dreamy enchantment of yesterday, nor with the irrepressible happiness of yesterday, when nothing had seemed impossible and everything had seemed bound to end well. This time Missy marched with little hope but iron determination; he would not say her nay again, even if it meant she had to spend every night of the next year in her mother’s shed with Buttercup for a bedmate, and every day marching down to the bottom of John Smith’s valley to ask again. For ask again she would, and tomorrow if he said nay today, and the day after, and the day after that...

It was going on for ten o’clock when she came at last to the clearing and the cabin; there rose the same rippling blur from the chimney, but, as yesterday, no John Smith. Down on the tree stump she sat to wait.

Perhaps he too had passed beyond hunger; when noon came and went without a sign of him, Missy resigned herself to waiting the whole afternoon as well. Indeed, the sun had long gone behind the great walls above, and the light was fading rapidly, before he came home. More seriously than yesterday, but just as blind to Missy sitting on her stump.

“Mr. Smith!”

“Bloody hell!”

He came across immediately to stand looking down at her, not angrily, but not pleasantly, either. “What are you doing back here again?”

“Will you marry me, Mr. Smith?”

This time he didn’t put his hand beneath her elbow and walk her across to the cabin; he turned to face her fully as she rose to her feet, and looked down into her eyes.

“Is someone putting you up to this?” he asked.

“No.”

“Does it really mean that much to you?”

“It means my life, literally. I am not going home! I’m going to come here every day and ask again.”

“You’re playing with fire, Miss Wright,” he said, lips thin and tight. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that a man might resort to violence if a woman refuses to leave him alone?”

She smiled up serenely, sublimely, seraphically. “Some men, maybe. But not you, Mr. Smith.”

“What do you really stand to gain? What if I did say I’d marry you? Is that the sort of husband you want, a man you’ve worn down until he doesn’t know what else to do for peace than give in – or strangle you?” His voice dropped, became very hard. “In this big wide world, Miss Wright, lives a malignant thing called hate. I beg of you, don’t uncage it!”

“Will you marry me?” she asked.

He screwed up his mouth, blew air through his nose, and lifted his head to stare above hers at something she couldn’t see. And said nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Then he shrugged, looked down at her. “I admit I’ve thought a lot about you since yesterday, and even the heaviest work I could find didn’t stop my thinking about you. And I started to wonder too if maybe I was being offered a way to atone, and if my luck might disappear because I ignored the offer.”

“A way to atone? Atone for what?”

“Just a figure of speech. Everyone has something to atone for, no one is free of guilt. In forcing yourself on me, you’re creating a cause for atonement, don’t you see that?”

“Yes.”

“But it makes no difference?”

“I’ll take whatever comes to me gladly, Mr. Smith, if I can take you along with it.”

“Very well, then. I’ll marry you.”

All of Missy’s pain and numbness flew away. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Smith! You won’t regret it, I promise!”

He grunted. “You’re a child, Miss Wright, not a grown woman, and perhaps that’s why I’ve given in rather than strangled you. I can’t honestly believe there’s woman’s guile in you. Only don’t ever give me reason to change that opinion.”

And now his hand went under her arm, the signal to walk.

“There’s one thing I must ask, Mr. Smith,” she said.

“What?”

“That we never refer to the fact that I’m going to die, nor let it influence our behaviour. I want to be free! And I cannot be free if I am to be perpetually reminded by word or deed that I’m going to die.”

“Agreed,” said John Smith.

Not wanting to push her luck, for she sensed she had gone about as far in that line as was prudent, Missy entered the cabin and went to sit quietly in one of the kitchen chairs, while John Smith swung round inside the door and stood staring out of it at the beginnings of a thin blue night’s ground mist.

Silently she watched his back, which was long and broad and, at the moment, extremely eloquent. But after about five minutes she ventured to say, her voice very small and apologetic, “What happens now, Mr. Smith?”

He jumped as if he had forgotten she was there, and went to sit opposite her at the table. His face in the gloom was full of shadows, heavy, deadened, a little daunting. But when he spoke, it was cheerfully enough, as if he had decided there was no point in making himself more miserable than the situation called for. “My name is John,” he said, and got up to light his two lamps, both of which he placed on the table so he could see her face. “As to the main business, we get a licence, and we get married.”

“How long will it take?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, if banns aren’t called. A couple of days? Maybe even sooner, with a special licence. In the meantime, I’d better drive you home.”

“Oh, no! I’m staying here,” said Missy.

“If you stay here you’re likely to start your honeymoon prematurely,” he said, hope blossoming. What a good idea! She might decide she didn’t like it! After all, most women didn’t. And he could be hard about it, not rape her exactly, just force her a little; a virgin of her age was bound to be easy to frighten. At which point he made the mistake of looking at her to see how she reacted. And there she was, poor little dying thing, just gazing at him with blinded foolish affection, like a puppy awash with love. John Smith’s sleeping heart moved, felt a bitter and unaccustomed pain. For indeed she had haunted him all day, no matter how hard he worked to drive out her image and replace it by emptiness hacked out of physical labour. He had his secrets, some of them buried so deep he could tell himself in all truth that he had never suffered those secrets, that he was reborn in all the newness and nakedness of a life begun again. But all day things had nibbled and whispered and gnawed, and the utter pleasure he had found in his valley had vanished. Maybe he did have to atone; maybe that was why she had come. Only he honestly didn’t have one thing to atone for so large, so depressing. He didn’t. Oh no, he didn’t, he didn’t!

Maybe she wouldn’t like it. Take her to bed, John Smith, show her what it’s like in the wasteland of the body, fill her with yourself and with disgust for it. She’s a woman.

But Missy liked it very well, and demonstrated a surprising aptitude for it. Another nail went thudding into John Smith’s coffin, as he wryly admitted to himself about three hours after he and Missy had retired dinnerless to bed. Wonders never ceased. This ageing spinster virgin was made for it! Though dreadfully ignorant at first, she was neither shy nor shamed, and her affectionate responses warmed him, touched him, made it impossible for him to be cruel or unkind to her. The little baggage! None of your lying there passively with your legs open for her! And how much life there was in her, just waiting to be tapped. Suddenly the thought that the end of her life was imminent shocked him; it was one thing to pity someone he didn’t know, quite another to face the same dilemma with someone he knew intimately. That was the trouble with beds. They turned strangers into intimates more quickly than ten years of polite teas in parlours.