Annie hands Mam the coin, earning leave to play. She scampers off, not to the woods today but through the empty doorway of a nearby shack. The weight of grass and ivy creeping over it have caved in the roof on one side, and bright spatterings of forget-me-nots and scarlet pimpernel burst between fallen stones. This is her favourite place to play at having her own home, creating food with mud to place on leaf-plates. Sometimes I hear her talking to the imagined friends she shares these meals with and I try not to think of what spirits Annie in her childish innocence might see, tethered still to the place they lived and died.

Mam runs a thumb over the coin, and her face softens a little. There’s no better feeling than returning home with an offering for her, a coin being the best of any, though she will say she expects no less.

‘Where did it come from?’ she asks, as I sit at the table with John.

‘The housemaid at the farm, you know her?’

‘Aye,’ Mam says. ‘Kind soul.’

John blows dust from the wood he carves. ‘Remember that time she gave Annie honey cake? She’d have flit and moved in with her, given half the chance.’

‘So would I, for honey cake,’ I say. ‘Mam, dust know of a new magistrate arrived in the village?’

Her head snaps towards me and she clutches her chest.

‘No,’ she says. Not in answer to my question, but a denial, a dread, that this can be so.

She yanks out a stool and collapses on to it. All colour gone from her face.

John looks up. ‘Aye. That old boater Henry Thompson got caught in the woods on May Day with his serving girl, just a young lass. New man’s here, then? You always knew he was a lecherous old dog, didn’t you, Mam? Always said so.’

‘Gone?’ Mam asks, rising again so quickly that her stool falls to the floor. ‘No, no. He kept us safe, kept his distance. Could never accuse us because I knew, knew everything he was and I held my tongue, I dealt with the girls, gave them the brew free of charge, and he was safe and so were we.’ She mutters the words, fast and quiet, so that I can barely grasp their meaning. My mind reels. What has she done, all this time? Served this beast to keep us safe? And what will become of us with him gone? Her footsteps quicken as she paces, agitated, breath ragged.

John catches my eye, his expression one of confusion and misgiving. ‘Hush, Mam,’ he says, voice gentle. ‘Happen we’ll be all right, just as now. Same law, another man is all.’

He doesn’t understand. But I do. I close my eyes but cannot hold back the memory that is always within me.