‘But I do feel warmer, much warmer, with this loose one,’ Marion protested. ‘You should try it, Peter, you’d feel the difference.’

‘Of course it couldn’t,’ he said, but when he took her to him that night he had to agree she felt unusually warm. But, he said to himself, no doubt women’s bodies were as irrational as everyone knew their minds were – it was, after all, natural that irrationality should overflow from the mind to the body. Peter continued to wear his own tightly woven thick woollen shift, which was damp, and to shiver.

But now, on this wet October night, Marion shivered and snorted before eventually dozing off, in spite of the pitty pat drips. Then a gnawing sound woke her. Marion was at war with mice and rats. They wanted her family’s food, and it was the life of her family against the lives of the vermin. It was a perpetual war. She leant out a hand to the ground and felt around for a stone and threw it to where the noise came from. Her family stirred but slept on. Then she heard the soft plop of Tibtab jumping down from the shelf where he slept. He gave a quiet interested mew and she could hear him creeping about. Soon she heard his mews of triumph. He wanted to show her what he had done. She guessed he had the still living mouse in his jaws. How he managed to mew like that through a mouthful of mouse, she never knew. He was quite likely to let it go again, into the bed, where it could shelter in the tangled straw till morning and then quietly depart through some slit in the wattle walls. Marion put out her hand again. ‘Good Tibtab, clever puss,’ she whispered. He had come close and was arching his back under her hand. She pushed him away, always fearful he might jump into the cradle to sleep on warm Alice and smother her. She would never forget how one of her babies had died thus.

‘Go and eat it,’ she hissed, and a few minutes later she heard his neat jaws crunching it up, and then the plop as he returned to his patch of hay on the shelf. Marion slept again.

It was grey morning when she dragged herself up. Pushing open the top half of the door, she looked down the garden. It had stopped raining. The ground outside the hut was thick with pale fallen leaves from the ash tree, though when she looked up at its branches they seemed still as thickly leafed as in summer. She slid her arms into a sheepskin jacket, but it was too damp and chilly. I must get a fire going, she thought, woke a reluctant Peterkin, and sent him round to Molly’s with the little earthenware pot from Rutherford and with a request for a lump of glowing charcoal.

Peter left, grumbling about his wet cold boots, but Marion knew he was off to the Mill to do some repair work for Simon and she was sure Betsy would have a fire going and there would be a pot of warm ale with sprigs of sweet cicely in it for Peter as soon as he arrived. Peterkin came back with a bit of incandescent log and emptied it out on to the hearthstone.