You never saw her. If you had, you’d have borne a share of what I suffered when I wept for her, and frequently suffer now from the thought that I remember but can weep no more. Though I’m stripped of self-esteem and assailed by the cutting blasts of self-reproach, the single leaf of your regard still hangs on my naked branches. Lively thoughts often give birth to unguarded words – I’m sorry that I’ve already said too much, but too much demands still more.

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Solham had always been quiet because of its physical situation, surrounded on three sides by a bend in the River Flumen and on the fourth by a road which ran straight to noisier places, a bypass long before such things were thought of. It had always been quiet but since the 1844 act had grown increasingly so, even as its surroundings altered. As a part so detached that it was overlooked by an act to eliminate detached parts, it became an enclave not of its county – which was in any case itself soon annexed by the spreading city – but one out of time and separated from the rest of the world. Not quite literally, but in effect, an island. One by one the families of Solham left, having said yes to some or other opportunity, until finally just one man remained, the last resident of the last enclave in England, the Revd William Braithwaite.

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