Milly pushed Marion away from her warm seat in order to get at the wide bucket of dough, rising under a bit of old cloth.

‘Your voice sounds funny,’ she said. ‘Got a cold?’

‘Yes, had it many days.’

‘You ought to get some comfrey or camomile from M’Dame. She’s got all sorts of stuff hanging up drying, back of the Hall. That Hilda does it with her. Says Hilda knows a lot about such plants. Hilda’s down the yard now, weaving shed, I believe, with Joan.’ Marion did not want to go down the dirty muddy yard. She could see a huge puddle round the drinking trough, churned up by the feet of the horses and cows. Nor did she want to be confronted with more of Hilda’s strange misery. She had enough to cope with by herself, she thought.

Dame Margaret came out of the Hall again carrying a pile of folded sacks and followed by the orange-haired Mary and Meg, who looked subdued compared with their bouncing laughing selves that Marion had always seen when the children were her neighbours. A number of children had been gathering outside the Hall, one of them leading a donkey which was harnessed to a sledge. Dame Margaret organized them.

‘Now, Andy Fletcher, you are in charge. There are ten sacks here and I want them all filled – beechnuts – just beechnuts, and no sacks full of old moss and leaves and a handful of beechnuts on top – are you listening, Harry? Yes, I mean you – you’re off to work, not play. Go through the orchard and up into the woods there, it’s mostly beech trees. Take Loppy with you and watch him – Yes, take Hoddy too and keep him out of mischief – No, no other young children. They only get in the way. This is work, not baby-caring – you can shelter under a yew if it comes on to rain hard – Izzy Fletcher, have you got the bag of bread safe? Well, don’t come back until the sacks are full. They’re only little sacks – you’ll easily carry them when full. So off you go.’

The group of children moved off, following Andy with his hand on the donkey’s bridle and the sledge bumping over the rough ground – quiet, subdued children in their damp heavy tunics, peering out of their damp heavy hoods, their muddy bare legs dragging through the rain-sodden grass, their dirty red hands every now and then steadying the pile of sacks on the wobbling sledge. It was not a pitiful sight to Marion, it was too usual. Every autumn children had to gather acorns and beechnuts for the pigs. It was unskilled work – what else could the children do?

Dame Margaret was about to re-enter the Hall when Marion asked her for a remedy for her cold. She was taken in and up on to the dais where on the back wall between the two great leather-curtained beds were hanging neat rows of dried herbs.