Hoddy looked at his brothers for an answer, but their faces were blank in anxiety.

‘You could put a stick in the fire and stir it round and watch the flames come.’

‘Yeth – yeth – ’ Hoddy was enthusiastic and bounced about.

‘A stick with dead leaves on it makes lovely flames.’

Hoddy remembered his delight and a wide smile spread over his round red face. ‘Oh yeth. Harry got a thtick with d’yed leaveth and puthed it into the fire and it wath all flameth – ’

Harry lunged forward to assault his little brother, but Rollo had him by the hair.

‘And waved it about?’ Dame Margaret went on.

‘Yeth, an’ it wath all thparkth,’ said Hoddy, gesticulating suitably and ecstatic at the recollection of so much fun.

Harry roared at him.

‘Well, Harry,’ said Sir Hugh, ‘is that what you did?’

Harry was silent.

‘Edwin, is that what happened? Answer me.’

‘Don’t know,’ said Edwin, sobbing hopelessly, and the urine ran down his legs as he spoke.

Hodge, who had overheard this interrogation, turned to vent his anger on Cecily. They were parted by Tom, and Hodge sank down on the lowest rung of the ladder and buried his face in his hands. ‘What have I done to have such villains for sons,’ he moaned.

‘Beat them, Rollo,’ said Sir Hugh, and while Simkin pulled up their tunics and held them with their arms over their heads, Rollo took off his rope belt and beat the two older boys on their bare buttocks. The boys screamed with fear and pain. It was a long beating.

‘Hoddy too?’ Rollo asked Sir Hugh.

‘Yes, Hoddy too,’ said Sir Hugh. ‘He can’t learn too young.’

Released from his beating and yelling loudly, Hoddy rushed to his mother for protection. She was sitting on the grass weeping over her stinking burnt blanket, and roughly pushed him away.

‘You’ll have to come to the Hall,’ Dame Margaret said to her, ‘and stay there until we can get this place mended. But you must keep an eye on those boys of yours.’

Next day, Tom meeting Peter at his workshop, described how when he had been pulling out the benches in the Hall and arranging the straw for the night, he had come upon Hoddy still shaking and sobbing under one of the benches curled up with Magda’s dog, Trover.

When Marion and Peter were walking home over the Common, Peter complained of the weight of the empty bucket and queried its broom handle. Marion explained, and it seemed the right moment to remind him that she needed another bucket. ‘I’ve nothing even to fetch the water in tomorrow morning,’ she said. He agreed she needed another, but he spoke absent-mindedly and she could see his thoughts were elsewhere.

After a while he said, ‘What did M’Dame think she was doing, barging in like that, questioning the littlest chap when Sir Hugh’d been talking to the others?’

‘She questioned better than he did.’