‘Ah, Pheeb, but you ain’t heard the worst yet, not by a long chalk . . .’

Yes, that was Pete’s voice, sly and breathy. And Phoebe was with him, no doubt couched down in the hay of an empty stall and probably – ugh, ugh – as near naked as time and circumstance allowed. She heard her name again. ‘That stuck-up bitch Miss High and Mighty Glenys ain’t no better’n a poor man’s tart, for all that she gives herself airs. One night last winter, when the snow were down and thick, deep as me knees or deeper, I had cause to visit a sick ewe what I’d bedded down in that old cottage, the one with four walls barely a-standin’. Well, when I were seein’ to the ewe I heard noises comin’ from the next room, the one with a smashed winder. So I nips out an’ I sees someone’s hung clothin’ over the empty winder, so I make meself a spy-hole, and what d’you think I sees? Why, I sees Miss common-as-muck Glenys, nekkid as the day she were born, a-squealin’ an’ a-tellin’ the feller on top of her to do it agin, so acourse he did. And the feller was that Sam Trewin, whose wife ain’t been more’n a year or two dead, a-humpin’ an’ a-wheezin’ while she shouted at him to go faster, an’ she sank her teeth in his neck and clawed at him and yelled till ’twas a miracle they didn’t scare my old ewe to death.’

Phoebe gave a snicker of amusement. ‘I wouldn’t ha’ believed it, an’ her so prim and proper,’ she said. ‘Now what say you an’ me takes ourselves down to your cottage an’ a proper bed?’

There was a short pause, presumably whilst Pete considered the question, but then he grunted what was obviously agreement. ‘I got the rest of the food what the old woman gimme last night,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘We could have us a little party, and then . . .’ He chuckled, and even without being able to see him Glenys could easily imagine the lascivious look on his face.

The woman agreed that this would suit her fine, and with a great rustling of straw and some hoarse laughter the two trespassers left the stall in which they had been disporting themselves and headed, Glenys assumed, for Pete’s cottage. After their footsteps had faded away, there was an interval of silence and Glenys suddenly realised that while she had been listening she had somehow managed to get right across the tack room, as though physically distancing herself as far from the disgusting couple as she could get. She was crouching by the door, and could not understand how she had got there. Horror, and the lies which had tripped so readily off Pete’s spiteful tongue, must have propelled her. She had always disliked Pete the Sheep, had known that she had roused his enmity, and now she realised that the previous winter, all unknowingly, she had played into his hands.