The boy will come home soaked, she thought, by the time he’s collected all that from the water. He’s not really up to such work. That agile Paulo has done much more in the time.

The boys, gratifyingly intent on their work, did not see her and she passed on and up the slope and through the gate. As she approached her cottage she was glad to see a thin line of smoke going up from the hole in the Plowrights’ roof. If there was a fire there, there would be some warmth, and if Small Sarah had any sense, which Marion doubted, there would be bread of some sort baking, or a pot of some sort of stewing beans simmering. How these feeble-minded neighbours nagged at Marion’s mind, but she knew in her secret heart that Small Sarah had long since given up trying – and there, but for my better health, go I, she thought.

At what she still thought of as the Shepherds’ cottage, she turned in and looked over the half-door. The fire was smoking away comfortably and Lisa was crouching beside it grinding barley in the round stone quern with Alice at her knees playing with some fir cones. The floor, bone-dry even in this weather, was neatly swept of all straw and bits of twig and the feather broom was leaning against the wall under a shelf of pots and small buckets. It was all as orderly as was the Mill house. Lisa was certainly her mother’s daughter, and Marion felt proud of her niece.

‘Alice has been as good as gold, but she seems to sniff a lot and her nose is running,’ said Lisa, putting down the stick with which she had been turning the upper grinding stone in the quern, and picking Alice up.

‘I hope you’re not getting a cold too, lovey,’ said Marion, taking an indifferent Alice from Lisa’s arms. ‘Come along, we’ll get home and see to our fire.’

‘Your voice sounds rough, Aunt. Would you like some honey? Mother gave me a little tub of her new honey last week.’

‘M’Dame gave me some comfrey for my cold,’ said Marion, glad to pause in the warmth of the cottage.

‘I’ve got some warm water here. Give me the leaves and I’ll put some honey in, and you drink it here and now.’

It was a luxury to be cosseted. Marion put Alice down, and sat on a little stool while Lisa busied herself. She gave Marion a pot of sweet, scented, hot drink – how comforting was a hot drink – and she drank every mouthful gratefully. She thanked Lisa, enquired after Martin, picked up Alice again and went home.

The three green logs that she had put on the hearth that morning were now alight. Stuffing a new bit of hollow cow parsley stick into the neck of the bellows, she gently worked the lungs and got a little blaze going. She lifted her three-footed iron pot, already half full of soaked beans, on to the fire. She fetched some new-dug leeks from a pile outside the door, roughly cut off the roots and the muddied part of the tops, and dropped them into the pot as well. There, there was sufficient food for when the others returned.