Later, needing to urinate, she pushed aside the cover and with hunched shoulders crept out. The sky was lined with grey clouds. All was deadly quiet. The grass outside the door was greyed over with a film of frost which crunched as she pulled up her shift. She went quickly back to bed and lay with her body pressed up against Peter’s.

Eventually she dozed again. When she woke the blanket before her mouth was stiff with her frozen breath. This is real winter, she thought, colder than snow. How gladly she remembered that today was the day of the great Christmas feast in the Hall, one of the yearly celebrations, almost competing with the sheep-shearing feast – though that, of course, being held in summer, went on much longer.

That morning Peter left early for his workshop. She had wanted him to wait and to help her to the Hall with Alice, who was being peevish, but Peter had said he was making a low stool for M’Dame and he must finish it for her before the feast.

Alice had been horrible these last days, wailing at the least thing, satisfied with nothing, co-operating never. Marion had realized the cause was constipation, and no wonder, for Alice decided she was too old to be ‘held out’ by Marion, and would squat like other people, but the thick frost on the grass and dead leaves was so painful to her little feet that she with yells refused to go out. Marion had no baby shoes. She contemplated putting Alice’s feet into a pair of boots that Margery had had, but they were much too large for Alice, and Marion knew that if she put them on the child, Alice would mess them up when excreting. Marion had complained about all this to Lisa, and she, having had to go to the Hall anyway, came back with some costmary leaves from Hilda, to be made into a purging infusion. It had worked more quickly than Marion had expected and she found Alice squatting in a corner by the door. Her relief at the speed of the cure prevented her from rebuking Alice for doing it indoors.

‘I done lots,’ said Alice, standing up and looking round with satisfaction. She had indeed, and Marion had had to clear it up, but from then on Alice was cheerful and active again.

What an awful lot of motherhood is concerned with the child excreting, thought Marion. She, being the youngest of a family, had not grown up with a baby or two always around, and had not realized until she had had Margery, what a constant concern a child’s bowels were to the mother.

Feast day it might be – a day which all men, except Peter with the stool, felt was a rest day – but Marion had many ordinary jobs to be done, feast or no feast. Water must be fetched and in this she was lucky in that someone, probably Lisa, had already been down to the water-place and broken the ice. Then the goat must be fed, and some corn given to the few chickens which she was hoping to keep alive through the winter to provide eggs next spring.