‘Hardly anybody goes there except relations.’ She held the candle above her head to light our way down some wet slippery steps into a place of cavernous darkness which was full of cobwebs and the rustle of bats and which had a queer damp smell. At the far end of it was an oaken door with a heavy padlock; she nodded towards it and said: ‘I’ve never been through there; but I know what’s in it. Can you guess?’

We said we couldn’t.

‘Coffins,’ said our young hostess. ‘But I expect they’re not worth seeing. They are all the dull ancestors. Robert, the exciting one, is here.’

She lifted the candle to show us a small recess in the stone wall, where there stood, not a jamjar, but a beautiful urn, greeny-bronze in colour and very delicately fashioned. Hanging on the wall beneath it was a framed inscription in neat old-fashioned handwriting:

‘This Urn contains the Heart and Viscera of Robert La Bruère who fell at the Siege of Acre in 1191.’

Craning our necks we read above it another and later inscription:

‘There is a tradition that Robert La Bruère distinguished himself in the Third Crusade, and was at one time a sort of aide-de-camp to Richard Coeur-de-Lion, and eventually met his death in combat with Saladin himself. His embalmed heart and viscera were brought home in 1194 after the failure of the Crusade. Having suffered various vicissitudes they were interred here in 1790.’

‘What’s viscera?’ we asked.

Jane gave us a superior look.

‘Insides,’ she said. ‘But his heart’s there as well. For all we know it might actually have a hole in it, where Saladin struck him with his scimitar.’

It was our turn to be superior.

‘Scimitars don’t stick,’ we said. ‘They slice.’

‘Well, then, with a slice out of it,’ said Jane, tossing her head. ‘Like a melon. Naturally we haven’t looked. But I was allowed to hold the jar in my hands once. It was awfully light; but my father said: “Hearts weigh surprisingly light when courage and fear have left them.”’

We began to think very highly of Jane. ‘Well, that’s that,’ she said, in a businesslike tone. ‘Goodbye, Robert.’ She seemed to be on excellent terms with her ancestor. Then she held up the candle again and a bat’s opening wings threw a huge and grotesque shadow on the roof, like that of a vampire; and Jane with scarcely a glance at it led us up the steps which were wet with green slime and showed us the way back through the garden gate. Another wonder was added to Brensham, which was surely the only village where you could find the heart of a crusader.

Wild Wormës in Woodës

We had peopled the quarries with adders; and sure enough among plenty of grass snakes and blindworms and a few swift darting lizards we found before long the exquisite poisonous creature with the yellow V behind his head. We never had any fear of snakes and I even tried the dangerous experiment of picking up an adder by his tail, and cracking him like a whip; thus, Pistol, Bardolph, or Nym had told us, you snapped his neck and he couldn’t possibly hurt you. But my adder’s neck was made of tougher stuff; he whipped back towards my hand like a piece of Mrs Doan’s cattie-lackey, and I dropped him only just in time. After that we cut ourselves forked sticks when we went adder-hunting and used them to pin our victims to the ground. It was easy then to catch them behind the back of the neck and hold them prisoner while the forked tongue flickered out and the tail lashed back like a steel spring. One day as we held a snake thus we were astonished to discover that its belly was porcelain blue instead of the usual yellowy-white. In other respects it looked like an adder; but we had never heard of a blue-bellied adder and we accepted it as another of the marvels of Brensham. We let it go, and afterwards searched through our nature books in vain for some account of it. Many years later, in an essay by W. H. Hudson, I read how the great naturalist had found just such a snake in the New Forest and how he too had let it go rather than slay it and coil it in a bottle for the learned consideration of the herpetologists whom he despised.

The Sugaring Expedition

Blue-bellied adders, brown jackdaws, merlins, fallow-deer - what more could we ask of Brensham? Certainly there were no Camberwell Beauties, but there was a Convolvulus Hawk Moth, which visits Britain rarely from North Africa and has a wingspan as wide as our largest native moth, the Death’s Head.