The Complete Ingo Chronicles: Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, The Crossing of Ingo, Stormswept. Helen Dunmore

our cottage and Mary’s. Our cottage will have lights on in the windows by now. It gets darks early in November. Granny Carne knows her way in the dark. I’m glad that I don’t have to walk past there and see other people living in my home. I wonder if the curtains are the same? Those red checked curtains that Mum made when we were little. They always looked so welcoming with the light shining through them when we came home from school on winter afternoons.

      I wonder if the people who are living in our cottage ever go down to our cove? I wonder if they will ever catch sight of Faro or Elvira sitting on the rocks by the mouth of the cove, where Conor and I first met them? I hope they don’t. I’m not just being selfish in hoping that. If they see the Mer, their lives won’t ever be the same again.

      But Granny Carne’s cottage is at least two miles from the sea. I don’t know how far inland the power of Ingo can reach, but Granny Carne’s cottage definitely belongs to the Earth. Maybe that’s why Sadie is sleeping so peacefully by the stove. I don’t feel peaceful, though. I’m going to stay because of Sadie, but I wish I didn’t have to. I’m not at home here.

      It takes a long time to get ready for the night at Granny Carne’s. I help her to carry in more wood from the stack in her woodshed, and fill the scuttle full of coal. The stove’s got to be kept going through the night. Before Granny Carne goes to bed, she riddles it out with an iron poker with a hook on its end. By the time Granny Carne finishes, the hook glows red. I help to shovel out the hot ash into the ash pan. Granny Carne says ash is good for the earth, and she’ll spread it on her vegetable patch tomorrow, when the ash is cold. She stokes up the stove with logs and a thick layer of fine coal, and closes the damper on the front.