Mercy mission

Frith, a shy village girl, has brought an injured goose to the deformed and solitary Philip Rhayader who lives alone in a lighthouse on the Essex marshes. A cautious friendship has begun to develop between them.

It was a little more than three weeks before Frith returned to the lighthouse. May was at its end, and the day, too, in a long golden twilight that was giving way to the silver of the moon already hanging in the eastern sky.

She told