Marion’s forequarter of pig, duly salted, now hung from a beam over her fire where the smoke was slowly drying it. She must be sure to keep the smoke-hatch shut when it rained, for rain on half-cured bacon rotted it quickly. Halfway down the plaited leather thongs on which it hung was a large thin wooden disc with a hole in it through which the thongs went. This prevented mice running down the thong and eating the bacon, for as they ran on to the disc it tipped and dropped the mouse off into the fire below. Yes, the bacon was there, the product of many months’ nurturing, a promise of many tasty salty meals in the coming wintry days, and there were two more cockerels in the coop being fattened – but she must not waste much corn on them, they must be eaten soon. There were also several large cheeses made from her goat’s milk on the shelf by the corn jar. It was a pleasure to think of all this.

The October rains had filled the millpond and Simon had ground half the sack of corn she had brought him in July, so now the oak chest in the cottage was full of flour. On the shelves over the goat’s stall were several other sacks of the new harvest’s wheat and barley, and between the sacks, on some hay, lay dozens of sweet rough-skinned apples. Other sacks, swinging on cords from the beams, all with anti-mouse discs above them, were filled with dried beans and peas, and outside under the eaves hung many bunches of orange-brown onions. Under them, piled high against the house wall were stacked the cut logs, and round the corner of the cottage was an even higher stack, piled almost to the thatch, adding strength and wind shelter to this more exposed side of their home. With Peterkin’s help, Marion had replaced most of the moss that the wind had blown from the crevices in the wattle.

Peter had begged Sir Hugh for a couple of days off to mend his own cottage, and, picking a short spell of dry weather and with Ned Fletcher’s help, he had pulled off all the sodden thatch above his door, prised out the two bent rotting rafters (which were now drying out under the eaves for firewood) and put in two new straight rafters. ‘You don’t have to be too accurate, Ned,’ Marion had heard him say. ‘As long as it is all quite rigid it doesn’t matter if these rafters are closer together than in the old work.’ They had then rethatched it with their new straw, and there had been plenty of straw over for the bed, and for the goat’s stall for the coming winter.

It was all as satisfactory as possible – food, warmth and fuel for the coming winter. How that phrase ‘the coming winter’ kept filtering into all Marion’s thoughts. She was aware that every autumn, she had felt a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and while indulging in it, had forgotten the true horrors of winter. It was like forgetting the agony of one childbirth when preparing for the next. But surely this winter she would be better prepared, better equipped, more sensible, more enduring than in previous winters? And she had, she reminded herself, now only two children to feed and care for. ‘Yes,’ she said to herself, ‘you’ve felt like this, all pleased, every autumn, and yet every winter, come February, you’ve felt as though you’d reached the end of your endurance.’ But this self-knowledge did not weaken her present optimism.