I swing the linen parcel at my side, walk as fast as I can up the hill, though the rub of these shoes and warmth of my clothes hinder me. News of my day, my new life, brims, waiting to burst from me.

My timing is good, they’re all sitting around the table, though it’s sparsely covered. I’ve eaten more food today than they have to share between them.

Annie jumps up, runs to me and throws her arms around my waist, buries her head in my petticoat.

‘All right, little cub,’ I say, crouching so that I’m face to face with her. ‘What news today?’

‘Seth comed, he didn’t need a cure but brought buttermilk and crammings, and he swinged me round and round and round.’

‘Until the buttermilk and crammings returned,’ John says.

‘And the babby spadgers are learning to fly,’ she says, skipping back to the table.

I follow her, placing down the parcel and unpacking the food. ‘That’s sweet,’ I say.

Mam presses her toothless mouth to my cheek.

‘See you’ve come just in time to eat our food,’ John says, grinning.

‘I brought my share.’

‘Well,’ Annie says, reaching across the table for a chunk of bread. ‘It is sweet for the foxes when the birds learn to fly because they eat the ones that have falled.’ She takes a huge bite, pushes the mat of hair from her face, continues talking around the food bulging in her cheek. ‘And today the one flapped and called, even while it was in the fox’s teeth.’ She uses both hands to shove the remaining bread into her already-full mouth, says something that I think is, ‘And the mammy bird flapped around it and called and called.’ Impossible to be sure, muffled as her words are.

She continues to chew, swallows, picks her teeth, oblivious to our stares. ‘Can I have the cheese?’ she asks, and I push it down the table to her.

When the meal is done I bring the gifts from my pocket, hesitant now to pass them out, as though I somehow set myself above them in doing so. Annie cups both her hands to take the pendant, full-moon eyes and mouth opened.

‘It’s so pretty,’ she says.

‘Here.’ I place it around her neck. ‘Like this.’

She dips her head, lifting the little fox to look at it. ‘I’ll wear it always and forever, and never not once take it off.’

John whistles through his teeth as I pass him the case, turns it in his hand. ‘’Tis not such a bad thing to have a worker in the family after all, then, even though it cannot be me.’

‘Cannot yet be you,’ I say.

He snorts in reply, reaches for his knife and slips it into the case. I can smell the leather from across the table.