It was the first day of a new century and in East Dereham the Christians were going to church. Amongst them, but not of them, was an old man, William Cowper, who believed in Christ and his infinite mercy, although he was also convinced that God hated him personally and was intent on sending him to hell, soon. For all eternity. That the belief and the conviction contradicted each other he understood clearly. He understood, too, that he was completely insane, or rather almost completely, but not quite. In the same nearly perfect way, he was sure that he had always been too contemptible to be loved by any living creature, but that loving him had destroyed the lives of four women, three wild hares and a linnet. These were passive destructions, but he had once actively killed something — he had cut the head off a big snake with a garden hoe. Apart from that, he had never been physically violent, except to himself.

The jangling bells of the church of St. Nicholas were falling over each other as if in a hurry to welcome in the new era. Newness, however, did not sir easily on Dereham. It was a pretty little town in Norfolk, but even in 1800 it was considered old-fashioned — the streets were unpaved and some of the houses were still roofed with thatch. Cowper, too, although he was elegantly dressed in knee-breeches and a linen chamber-cap, looked like something left over from an earlier age. As he was a recent arrival to the town and rarely left his lodgings, only a few of the churchgoers knew him by sight, and even fewer — such is literary fame — that he was a famous poet. One of these was a broken-nosed army officer called Borrow — he had occasionally glimpsed Cowper peering from the upstairs window of a house in the market square, and recently he had seen the death-like figure one frosty dawn in the churchyard. Now, when the hulking captain saw the spectral poet shuffling along the pavement, clutching the arm of his young cousin, the Reverend John Johnson, he tipped his hat in respectful salute.

Cowper saw a hand raised against him. He broke free from Johnson and hurried out into the middle of the street,

'What is it, Mr Cowper? What is the matter?'

'That man is mocking me.'

'What man?'

'The brute in the red coat. He's been following me now for weeks.'

‘Captain Borrow following you? How could he? You haven't been out of doors this past month.'

This was not quite true. Some days before Christmas he had stolen out of the house and gone to the church to mark a private anniversary. There, under the slabbed floor of a side-aisle, someone he had known intimately was buried. But, of course, the doors of the church were barred against him, as always, and not just because of the early hour. So he had stood outside, bowed and mourning, in the sun-dial shadow of the docker, which is what the locals called their bell-cower.

'And as for being a brute,' Johnson said, 'really, he is the gentlest of men.'

'What did you say his name was?'

'Borrow. Thomas Borrow.'

'You amaze me, sir. '

But why he was amazed he would not explain. Instead he abruptly turned round and followed the crowd into the church. Johnson was himself amazed — they had only come out to take the air, and his cousin, though a saintly person, had not set foot in a church for more than twenty years. But a sudden conversion, or re-conversion, to religion, much as Johnson had long wished for it, was not the reason for Cowper's about-turn: all he wanted to do was to take a closer look at the Captain Borrow who had gone down to London to fight with Big Ben Brain, the champion of all England. There, in Hyde Park, after an hour of combat the exhausted boxers had shaken hands and declared a draw. And four months later when Big Ben had died, worn out by the dreadful blows he had received throughout his career, he had done so in Borrows arms.

So, Cowper thought, this was the man they have sent to follow me even unto the edge of my Marys grave. A hero!

But what else, apart from spying, had the captain been doing in the cemetery? The blood-splash of the red coat had startled Cowper and he had shied off like an arthritic deer and hidden behind a yew-tree. But Borrow had stood scaring at the ground for a long time before putting on his tricorn hat and going away.

Cowper had waited until he was sure the churchyard was empty and then he had hurried back to his lodgings, merely glancing at the spot where the captain had been standing: it was a grave, not quite fresh, marked with a crude wooden cross bearing the name Jean de Narde. The previous summer this lieutenant in the army of Napoleon, along with a score of his compatriots, had been held captive in the Clocker awaiting transportation to the prison camp at Norman Cross.

There was history in the name of Norman Cross. Ancient history and new fatality. After more than a thousand years the Normans had again come to a divide in the English road. Love your country, beat the French and never mind what happens next! That was the cry of all England, and it was Cowper's cry too. The French were a despicable people, lawless and unlovable. But, he thought, that is my own fate and condition: to be despised is my destiny.

What a funereal sight the camp at Norman Cross had been! A monumental collection of five or six immensely tall wooden casernes, and in each one a thousand Frenchmen, starving, fed on rotten carrion flesh and bread the hounds would not eat; and the guards, battalions of them, were constantly searching their quarters at bayonet point in case the prisoners had somehow procured for themselves any of the comforts of existence, the which being found they burned in great bonfires in the barrack square beneath the glaring eyeballs and the cursing mouths of the captives. But worst of all was that the buildings, high as they were, had no windows. The walls were blank. And the prisoners in the attics had removed tiles and protruded their heads through the gaps, looking like what in truth they were — the terrible brain-blossoms of war.

Had he really seen that himself? No, it was merely a rumour, a report, the sideways talk of Norfolk, and then it became a dream which he could not sleep for the dreaming of.

Perhaps news of the horror of Norman Cross had reached Jean de Narde in the clock-tower, or perhaps it was simply that, being only twenty-six-years-old, he imagined escape was an escapade, an adventure, but whether for dread or for daring he had been shot to death while fleeing through the cemetery on a warm midsummer night. And now he was buried there.

It is extraordinary, Cowper thought, that I lay awake in my bed just one street away and did not hear the musket thundering forth the bullet that ended a man's life. Shivering in a pew at the back of the church, he felt, yet again, the amazement of revelation, a joy indistinguishable from an agony, a sensation in his chest like a wick torn out of wax. Captain Borrow had slain Lieutenant de Narde — that was the revelation he had now received.

But had the English hero gone to keep a vigil at the grave of his French victim out of remorse, as he had gone to Marys? That was a question that could neither be asked nor answered, if only because since the day she had died, Cowper had never once uttered her name.