Bea pushed the last scrap of the loaf at her again, then turned to send the other women off to their duties. The youngest girl who had retrieved Nan’s knife was too young to do the work of the older women, and her role was to clean and fetch and serve. Nan tried not to think how one day she’d likely become a whore like the rest of them. Not for the first time, she said a silent prayer of thanks for Aunt Mary. If her aunt had not insisted on finding Nan a good place to serve, there was no knowing what might have become of her.

When all the others were gone and she was left alone with her sister again, she asked one of the harder questions.

“Did our father do well by you with the money he gained from selling me off?”

The weaver had paid the equivalent of six years’ wages to take her into service. Nan had gone gladly, knowing the coin was meant to feed her sister. It had seemed a fortune to her, and an even greater fortune that she’d gone to live and work in a place where her own belly did not grumble and ache every day.

“He bought me shoes.” Bea smiled fondly, remembering. Then a hardness came into her face. “But you must know he drank it, no matter that he tried to do right. It was Mary who wrested a few coins from him and gave it to the miller so he would put aside a bit of something for me every day.”

That was the best that could be hoped for, from their father. He had never been the same after that terrible year when their mother died. Nan counted it a blessing he was only weak and useless, and not cruel. She listened to her sister tell the story of what had happened after Nan was gone. It was all just trying to find work in the fields where they could, as they’d always done – but now their father drank even more, and there was little work to be had. After a few years, Bea had found a kindly alewife who had given her a place to sleep and enough work to keep her in one place.

“Then I took up with the candlemaker’s son and we run off here to Lincoln. I went round to the shops once to ask after you, but you weren’t nowhere to be found.”

By that time, Nan calculated, the weaver had died and she had been sent to Chester – or maybe on to Rhuddlan to serve in the king’s hall. If things had happened differently, if a depraved lord had not sent her life in a new direction or if she had thought to go looking for Bea sooner, then it might all be different now. She might have kept her sister from resorting to this whore’s life.