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know them no more until Christmas time. The last day was nearly over, and the next four years stretched ahead very drearily, lit by only the short holidays at Christmas and Harvest. The one consolation was that they would be in it together. Nothing was quite unbearable so long as they were in it together, not even school.
    ‘Oh, I
wish
we were sixteen!’ said Amias, plucking up a grass stem and biting it savagely.
    ‘Four years,’ groaned Simon. ‘Oh well, they’ll pass, I suppose; and then I shall come home and help Father farm Lovacott, and you’ll be prenticed to
your
father. You’ll make a mighty funny doctor.’
    ‘I shall make a very good doctor,’ said Amias, with conviction. He took the grass stem out of his mouth and squinted at the bitten end. ‘Only I should like to have a few adventures first. Run away to sea or something. I’d have my long bright rapier, andgo and fight people; Barbary Pirates, perhaps—or I might
be
a pirate.’ He warmed to his theme, with a kindling eye. ‘I’d do things like Sir Walter Raleigh did: go looking for gold in the New World, and sacking Spanish cities and things; a red beard I’d have, and I’d be the Terror of the Spanish Main!
Then
I’d come home and be apprenticed to Father. You could come too, and be my trusty Master Gunner.’
    ‘Ye-es,’ said Simon.
    If Amias turned pirate, then Simon would certainly be his Master Gunner, because where Amias led, Simon followed, loyally digging him out of the trouble his brilliant ideas so often got him into. But all the same, he thought, it would be good, when one was through with the Spanish Main, to come home to Lovacott.
    From where he lay, up here in the high orchard, he could look down through the dipping branches of the old cider trees and see Lovacott: the house and outbuildings, the home paddock and his mother’s beloved garden close, like the heart of a flower of which the three petals were the three big demesne fields, Sanctuary and Salutation in the valley, and Twimmaways joining the orchard just behind him and sloping over the hill-top towards the village. His father had once tried to change the names of Sanctuary and Salutation into Easter and Wester Meadows, but tradition had been stronger than him, and the two fields remained Sanctuary and Salutation, as they had been when they were held from the shaven-headed monks of Fris’tock Priory. The Careys had held Lovacott and the village of Heronscombe, first from the monks and then in their own right, from the days of Agincourt, and the place was in their blood. Back in Elizabeth’s reign, when so many of their kind had built themselves grand new houses and left the old one to become the farm, Simon’s grandfather had refused to do any such thing, merely adding a kitchen door and more windows to the house-place, and building a range of farm buildings on the south side, so that the courtyard need no longer have the midden and the pigs in it. So the Careys had remained at Lovacott, fitting into it as perfectly as a nut fits its brown shell; and at the thought of tomorrow’s leave-taking, a stab of homesickness shot through Simon. All thesame, if Amias wanted a Master Gunner, of course he had only to say the word.
    ‘Lovacott would make a splendidly good fortress,’ Amias said, after they had chewed grass in silence for a bit. ‘I mean, the way it’s built solid all round the courtyard, and with Diggory’s gatehouse and all. Of course we’d have to stop up the kitchen door and all those outside windows, so that the enemy couldn’t climb in through them.’
    ‘Who’d be the enemy?’ Simon asked.
    Amias considered. ‘Of course if this was up north, we could have the Scots, like last year when they came over the border and all down through Northumberland.’ He sniffed. ‘Them and their old Covenant!’
    ‘Well, I think it would be very exciting to have a Covenant, and sign it in one’s own blood, and meet out on the Moors with a Bible in one hand