Francis held her in his arms until the panic subsided, replaced by feverish, muted confusion.

He'd brought in a scuffed leather wing chair that she recognised from his bedroom and placed it near the window. There were blue pages of writing paper by its side, covered with her own handwriting.

'I'm never going to let you go again,' he breathed into her hair.

Chapter 32.

Legs lost all sense of time. Her fever seemed out of control. At its height, she thought she might die. Incoherent with pain, she was vaguely aware of ranting deliriously about her childhood, her family, Farcombe and the Protheroes. The early hours were the worse, the suffocating claustrophobia of battling for breath, her throat and chest on fire. She begged the darkened room around her to turn into a nice clean hospital ward.

By day, a super-efficient Indian nurse called Gopi tended to her every need.

'You don't want to go hospital. Dirty places. Come back very sick.'

At all other times, Francis did everything for her. He bathed her face and hands, helped her clean her teeth, and he even brushed her hair.

Ironic, she thought in a more lucid moment, that her bedhead mop had never been silkier and sleeker than when bedbound. The feverish torpor of being an invalid appalled her, but she had no voice to argue nor the strength to do anything for herself; the shame of letting him carry her into the bathroom and lower her onto the loo before retreating discreetly behind the door broke through her delirium, making her cry.

Most of the time, she was too ill to think straight. She soon developed a cough that ripped through her hour after hour, bringing up phlegm and even blood. She'd never felt this weak in her life. Just the tiniest of efforts left her reeling with fatigue. Thankfully, she slept a lot of the time. She had no idea when or if Francis slept at all. He sat up with her night after night, moving from his chair to the bed to hold her when she started to panic. She could never remember what she raged about afterwards, but she raged a lot.

Francis allowed no visitors. Legs had no idea where her phone was. London could have been washed away in a tsunami in the past week for all she knew. He wouldn't even let her have a radio in the room.

'You need complete rest,' he insisted, and for a while she was content to surrender to the order. He was so kind and attentive, reading her poetry for hours, telling her what was happening on the estate, the last of the hay being baled, the lambs being weaned onto aftermath grazing, the preparation of shearlings for the sales. She guessed he might be avoiding the topics of the festival and the family, but she was too wiped out to care. Her sense of reality flitted back and forth from their long years together to the muddled present, which she couldn't work out at all.

When it became clear that the first course of antibiotics and analgesics weren't taking effect, the doctor pumped her full of a more potent mix, but it was still two more days before she felt strong enough to sit up and tackle anything more ambitious than a sip of water. Even then, she needed Francis's steadying hand to stop the glass of juice she was holding from shaking everywhere.

As soon as she had drunk it, she threw up everywhere.

He made no complaint as he changed the bedding while she shivered and shook on the wing chair beneath the window, noticing her letter still beside it, now acting as a bookmark in a volume of twentieth century poetry.

'Why are you doing this for me?' she asked groggily.

'Because you wrote the truth about us and I love you for it,' he said. 'I'm going to look after you for the rest of your life.'

Sick as she was, Legs could feel panic join the infection in her veins, stoking the coals of her lingering fever. As she lay sweating on her crisp, clean bedding, she tried to piece together the clues through the fog of nausea and tremors. She'd sent him that letter a year ago. Surely even by the GPO's occasionally wayward standards that was a very long delivery time. It was possible she had forgotten to add a stamp after all. Or had he kept it all along and not read it until now? It felt like it had been written in a different lifetime and language. She couldn't even remember exactly what she had said in it. She longed to read it again.

That evening, while Francis recited W. H. Auden, she spent a long time plucking up the courage to risk the bathos of saying: 'Could you read my letter to me?'

He seemed amused. 'Why?'

'I want to talk about it.'

'Wait until you feel better.'

She started coughing as she struggled to sit up, 'we must talk about the letter, Francis.'

'Listen to you; you can hardly speak, my poor darling. Wait until you feel better.'

The more wound up she got about it, the harder she found it to express herself. Eventually, when she was left so raw from coughing she couldn't speak at all, Francis gave her a double dose of codeine linctus.

He settled down in his wing chair to recite Auden again, then stopped as he noticed she was crying.

'Please carry on,' she croaked. 'It's a beautiful poem. It was so perfect when John Hannah's character read it in the film.'

'What film?'

'Four Weddings and a Funeral.' Legs and Daisy had been to see it together three times, and both now kept a DVD version on standby in the cupboard in case of crisis like chocolate, white wine or Lemsip. Francis had always refused to see it, thinking Richard Curtis far too asinine.

Now he closed the book. 'Let's revisit a text we both adore.'

That evening, the volume of twentieth-century poetry was replaced by Ulysses, which he read aloud as a special treat.

'I know how much you love it.'

Oh how she regretted her pretentiousness now, remembering through the foggy soup of analgesia that when he'd been set it as a text at university, she'd lovingly taken the James Joyce classic out of the library at home, immediately telling him it was her favourite book of all time and then battling to get beyond the first few pages. They'd had long, stimulating conversations about it during the Christmas holidays, largely based upon her mugging up with York Notes and agreeing with everything Francis said. He'd even taken her to Dublin on Bloomsday the following summer as a birthday treat.

Tonight, she fell asleep after five minutes.

The next day, feeling stronger, she tried to get at the letter again, but Francis was insistent that she needed more rest. It became like a mad circular poem: 'I want to see the letter.'

'When you're feeling better.'

Her mind kept telling her there was something really big at stake now, a life-changing event, a birth or a death, and a mammoth change of heart. But when she tried to concentrate on what exactly it was, all she could see were fictional characters: the Mad Hatter, Ptolemy Finch, the Wizard of Oz and even Toto the dog kept walking through her head, the latter with a strange limp. Her dreams featured endless battles and sword-fights, and the alarming repetitive theme of Hector Protheroe riding a unicorn into the Book Inn wearing nothing but a kimono. And then there was Byrne, the man with the coal-furnace eyes, playing constant tricks with her memory and trust. Was he fact or fiction? She half believed she'd dreamed him.

Asking Francis about Byrne bought the portcullis down even faster. 'Let's concentrate on getting you well again, darling.'

He read out another long tract of Ulysses that evening, focusing on the affair Leopold Bloom's concert-singer wife Molly has with her sleazy manager, Blazes. Legs could see exactly what he was doing. He was quoting at her instead of talking as usual, but at least his message was being spelled out as clearly as those York Notes she'd once read instead of the book itself. She was Molly to his Bloom. Discuss.

Her year-long affair with Conrad was dead in the water, she knew that much as fact, but every time she thought about Conrad she started crying, which didn't help. Hardly pausing in his narrative, Francis handed her a box of tissues.

She blew her nose loudly.

He'd skipped ahead to Penelope now, the final episode of the impenetrable book, far beyond anywhere Legs had managed to reach in her school days. Known as Molly's Monologue, it was a series of long unpunctuated sentences in which Molly's stream of consciousness is let loose.

Legs' mind, meanwhile, was stuck on the same page. With Conrad out of the picture and Kizzy given the kiss off, there was nothing to stand between her and Francis reconciling amid great family approbation, she realised, hysteria mounting. God, what had she written in that letter? Her own stream of consciousness had none of Joyce's timeless lyrical brilliance, but Francis had obviously taken it very seriously indeed.

She found she couldn't shake the melody from Kate Bush's 'The Sensual World' from her head. Had Kizzy sung it as part of her clifftop medley? She wondered, her thoughts jumping randomly around the page now as her mind tired and lost concentration.

I am so shallow, she thought wildly. If someone quotes Eliot at me, I think of Cats. If it's Ulysses, I think Bush. God forbid Francis starts reciting Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan' because it'll be Olivia Newton-John and sweatbands all the way.

She found laughter catching in her throat, making her cough more, tears running even faster.

On Francis droned. He'd adopted a Dublin brogue, trying to capture the essence of Molly with jaunty banks-of-the-Liffey cadences. Legs couldn't follow it at all. His Irish accent was very strange indeed, she realised. He sounded like a cross between Graham Norton and Mrs Doyle from Father Ted, which was fitting given that she still sounded like Father Jack. It was nothing like Byrne's lovely deep, peaty burr.

The giggles were digging in; her coughing was ferocious.

'What's the matter, darling?' Francis looked up and saw the tears on her cheeks, his face suddenly contrite, thinking she was sobbing her heart out. 'Oh, Legs my poor darling. I'm a brute. Do you want some more water?'

She shook her head, unable to speak or look at him.

Closing the book, he tucked her up in bed, kissed her wet cheek and returned to his chair to read in silence. She could hear the pages turn while she shuddered and convulsed beneath the covers, coughing between giggling spasms, imagining the camp Craggy Island voice still twittering on in his head. At last her laughter subsided and, to her dismay, she found panic and fear still lying beneath the silliness like sharp rocks beneath a high tide, just waiting to rip the heart from her hull.

Sleep was her refuge. The high emotion had already exhausted her. She couldn't believe it possible to feel this tired. Dosing fitfully, she dreamed that she was sitting on a chamberpot on the main stage at Farcombe Festival while Francis and Kizzy duetted 'Islands in the Stream' accompanied by Hector on the bassoon.

For hours Legs' butterfly-light sleep was punctuated by the pages turning on Francis's book like wings slowly unfolding, the dreams and thoughts alternating in her mind. Her memory was scatter-gunned all over her head by the infection, and her short term memory had been shot to bits more than the rest, but gradually she was starting to piece together more fragments, although not necessarily in the right order.

Her first real breakthrough that night was that it suddenly seemed terribly important to tell Francis that she had seen Kizzy.

'She came to see me in London,' she ranted in the early hours. 'She's alive! Isn't that great?'

'Calm down, darling,' Francis leaped up, assuming she was delirious again.

'She told me how you two tried to make a go of it. She seems so perfect for you. Much better suited than me. It's so sad. So sad. It's a sad, sad situation.'

'Shh.' He hugged her. 'I don't need to hear this.'

But on and on she blustered, coughing and spluttering, desperate to get her point across, although she really only succeeded in repeating Elton John lyrics and saying how pretty and clever Kizzy was. Somewhere in the midst of her pitch probably when she thought about Conrad lusting after the ravishing redhead, if the truth was to be told she began to cry. Soon she was saying one word for every two nose blows, eight hiccups, ten coughs and twenty shudders, still struggling to get her point across. No longer listening, Francis gave her a slug of something in a tiny cup that tasted salty. Whatever it was knocked her out for hours.

She opened her eyes the next morning to see Gopi reading a book with a familiar-looking cover.

Her head was still so soupy with sleepiness it took her almost a full minute to register what it was.

'It's out!' She heaved herself up onto one elbow, then sank back down pathetically as it gave way beneath her.

'What is out?' Gopi looked up in alarm, casting a professional eye across her patient as though anticipating a ruptured hernia.

'Ptolemy Finch and the Raven's Curse.' She wriggled up the pillows, trying not to cough.

'My husband queued all night in Newton Abbot to purchase a copy,' Gopi informed her, already a third if the way through the book's six hundred pages. 'It is quite marvellous. The writer is so clever.' She set it down and went about checking her charge's vital signs, making her drink lots of fluids and take her antibiotics.

Because Gopi hardly ever spoke, Legs had assumed her English wasn't very good. Now she felt ashamed, guessing that, as patients went, she'd been far too ill and deranged to want to strike up a conversation with. She was determined to make amends. She was equally determined to get her hands on that book. Suddenly her year-old letter paled into insignificance. It was lightweight tinder compared to this incendiary device to speed her recovery.

But Gopi was far too engrossed in Ptolemy's latest adventure to be drawn on any subject for long. Yes, the book was very good thank you. The Protheroe family seemed very nice from what little she had see of them, yes; and housekeeper Imee was a lovely woman who had made her feel most welcome. Nothing major had happened in the world, no. The weather had been fine since the terrible storms a week earlier. The Royal scandal was still being talked about. Gordon Lapis's identity was still a hot topic.

'My money is on Salman Rushdie,' she said, eagerly turning a page.

Legs coughed so much at this that she thought her lungs were going to turn inside out, and Gopi gave her a draught of Galcodine, telling her she was talking too much.

Letting the nurse read on undisturbed, she sagged back and studied the book's jacket again. It was the collector's edition. Ptolemy Finch's ambiguous trouser bulge had been cleverly disguised by the illustrator adding in his sword Lenore, she noticed groggily, the linctus making her drowsy. The author's gold embossed name swam in front of her eyes the letters that made up Gordon Lapis rearranging themselves into Prodigal Son before darkness descended.

Although Legs still felt hellish, she was no longer sleeping for great tracts of time. She napped for just a few minutes before her mind was alert and clanking again, trying to add up dates and memories. The Gordon Lapis launch had already happened. That means I must have been in bed for over a week, she realised in shock.

She started to piece together recent events in the right order at last. Kissing Francis on the clifftop. Kissing Francis in the Book Inn. Kissing Francis behind one of Poppy's sculptures. She and Francis had done a lot of kissing, she realised in alarm. No wonder she'd given him the wrong impression, letter or no letter. And oh hell her mother and Hector were no doubt still shacked up at Spywood Cottage, nakedly discussing their favourite opera productions and indulging in aphrodisiacs. In Kew, her father would have let all those ready meals pass their sell by date as he pretended he was fine, wasting away in denial in front of BBC Four. Was Ros looking after him at all? Legs wondered. Had she discovered the doggy pee patches on her seagrass in the basement flat yet? Was she still stressing about the rent now that her tenant was jobless?

She closed her eyes, remembering that she had attacked Conrad or rather the ceiling above him with an umbrella in the boardroom. There might be charges pressed.

But all the time that her head was racing with a kaleidoscope of recent memories, one face eclipsed the rest, a face she had only seen a few times in her life but which had now stamped itself and its deep, compelling voice in her consciousness so strongly that it was the one she'd been reaching out to touch and hear in her sleep all week. Byrne.

Jago Byrne was Gordon Lapis, the Prodigal Son. She had kissed him too.

Legs was suddenly maddened by the need to know where he was. Sitting up in bed like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, only just stopping her head from spinning, she quizzed Gopi frantically. 'There's a man staying in the house a dark-haired man. Have you seen him? He has a long-eared dog with a sad face.'

'I know of no such man.' She eyed her warily. Francis paid her very well, and she had strict instructions to say nothing, although she felt bad that the girl was sweet, and had been very ill indeed. 'I may have seen the dog.'

'Is he OK?'

'He has a wet nose and wags his tail. I think that is an indication of health and happiness in such species. I have not seen the man.'

Easily defeated in her weakened state, Legs slumped back into bed and stared out of the window at the scudding clouds.

She heard another page turn followed by an intake of breath.

'Is it exciting?' she asked.

'It is very exciting, yes, but I do not like what he is doing with young Ptolemy.'

'Tolly's immortal,' Legs reminded her. 'He'll be fine.'

To her frustration Gopi said no more until it was time for her next dose of drugs.

'Who's it dedicated to?' she demanded after she had knocked back her pills, tinctures and the usual gallons of water.

Gopi checked, 'A woman called Ann.'

'May I see?'

Jealously, Gopi handed the book across, marking it with her dark eyes. Legs felt its weight in her hands like a newborn baby that she longed to nurture. Turning the pages made her weightless with the butterflies of anticipation.

For Ann O'Nymity 'A lover, you think?' Gopi asked, already pulling the novel back into her care.

'An old friend,' Legs watched it disappear into a big handbag as Gopi prepared to clock off her shift. 'Can you ask Imee a couple of things for me?' she asked urgently.

'Of course.'

'Can you ask her where the basset hound is sleeping? Also does she know where my iPhone is?'

That evening, when Francis produced a fat, dog-eared collection of the Romantic poets, Legs closed her eyes and feigned sleep, shamed by a desire to ask him if he had any meaty crime thrillers in the house.

'Sleep tight,' Francis kissed her forehead.

Suddenly her eyes snapped open as another memory was triggered so sharply it seemed to pinch at her skin.