‘Not very much,’ Pilgrim said. ‘The text is outdated, the illustrations are clumsy and coarse, and there is considerable foxing on the forepages.’

‘Find more like it,’ Noble Seatree said, and slipped the book into the inside pocket of his black fur coat. ‘And next time I want to see some real progress here.’

‘He bootlegged the mushrooms I collected this morning,’ Gentle said after Pilgrim had told him about the confiscation of the book. ‘And that snow hare I was marinating in its own blood.’

‘Did he take his fee, too?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I should have told him what that book was really worth, and asked for it to be set against what he claims we owe him.’

‘Probably not a good idea,’ Gentle said. ‘Grace says he has a short way with people he suspects of trickery.’

Gentle had turned out to be more sensible and practical than Pilgrim had hoped. He foraged for firewood and edible plants and fungi in the forest and trapped small birds with birdlime streaked on branches baited with dabs of fat, was a fair cook, diligently scoured pots and washed clothes and kept a fire burning day and night in the kitchen in a futile attempt to keep out the cold and damp. He had also befriended the old caretaker by making himself useful to her, fixing loose or leaking windows and putting up storm shutters, sweeping chimneys and helping her look after her charges. In return she had taught him a good deal of local lore and introduced him to a pair of her cousins, who took him on deer hunts. He broiled some of his share of the meat with herbs he’d discovered in an abandoned garden, and sold the rest to the chandler’s and bought candles and lamp oil and other necessaries. Every third or fourth day Pilgrim accompanied him to the beach at Windy Bay, the two of them riding a mara borrowed from Grace. After Gentle had set his trotlines in the surf they fossicked for mussels and limpets, and collected driftwood and stalks of giant kelp that could be dried for kindling, and coal extruded from a seam somewhere out to sea and washed up along the strandline.

The beach was more than a league long, backed by the mud flats and tidal creeks of the marsh which had given Pilgrim’s family and tribe their name. Waves detonated against stumps of rock out at sea and rolled in and crashed onto the beach and withdrew in a boil of foam and tumbling pebbles. Big white seabirds sailed above the waves on winds that had bent and scalped the thorn trees strung along the back ridge of the beach and threshed the reeds that crowded the margins of the marsh’s creeks.