Before the steady rain had started there had been gales. The wind blew up the valley and lashed all its westerly violence, Marion felt, on the cottages of Down the Common. She had listened to it all one night, roaring in the thinning leaves of the ash tree and rattling the ivy round its trunk. Lisa and Martin’s cottage would perhaps suffer more than hers, but for hour after hour she heard her cottage walls groaning and squeaking in the buffeting wind, and in the morning she found that most of the dried moss which had been so laboriously stuffed into the wattle to make it as windproof as possible, had been blown in and lay about in dark tufts on the blanket.

On top of this damp misery, Marion had had a cold for several days. The worst of it was over, but she knew she would have to summon up her habitual courage over the coming days. Lying in bed, disturbed by the constant dripping in the corner, she moved her head to ease her aching neck, and pulled the heavy blanket over her head. Even in the dark her eyes smarted, and one nostril felt as if it were filled with flame, yet it dripped a cold fluid which ran down her cheek on to her supporting hand. Her lips were dry and stiff, yet her mouth seemed to pour saliva, and every swallow made her aware of the prickly lump, like a small teasel, in her throat. She lay there suffering.

She knew she should pull out, from under the bed, the loose woollen shift that she had worn last winter and which Peter had scorned so. It had come about when one of the Rockwell girls, come to help Joan in the Hall’s weaving shed, had told them how at Rockwell they had made a cloth with loose-spun wool, just twisted enough to take the loom weights, and had spaced the warp much wider than usual, and then they had run the shuttle backwards and forwards but never pressing the weft together so that they made a sort of net fabric. Then they had brushed both sides with teasels so it was all a soft fluffy light mass, the tangled fluff holding the threads in place. Marion and Joan had experimented, and Marion had made herself a shift with the resulting fabric. It only reached down as far as her knees and it had no sleeves but she had been amazed how warm and, when she had got used to the tickles, how comfortable it was. She had shown it to Peter, taking off her outer gown and demonstrating the quality of the new.

‘But there’s no wool in it – or hardly any,’ he said, fingering it. ‘It’s all holes. That won’t keep you warm.’

‘But it does.’

‘It can’t. Look, wool keeps you warm, doesn’t it? So more wool’d keep you warmer, wouldn’t it?’

Marion had to agree, reluctantly.

‘So it follows that less wool’d keep you less warm. Stands to reason, woman.’ He usually addressed her as ‘woman’ when he thought she was silly.