As they found their places near the back of the church, Peter took heavily sleeping Alice from Marion’s arms, so that she could lean against one of the thick wooden posts which were built into the stone walls. The rough earth floor hurt her feet through the old boots. She looked at the lumpy backs of her neighbours, broad, bowed shoulders heavy in grey cloaks, the men’s hoods pushed back revealing scraggy necks through straggly hair, women’s caps covered again with extra cloaks which sheltered babies in arms while longer cloaks hanging to their ankles sheltered little children whose dirty red feet stuck out below the shelter like chicken’s claws below the mothering feathers. The damp cloaks steamed slightly and the air smelt of damp wool, long unwashed bodies and the tallow candles.

Sir Hugh and his family, standing on the chancel platform at the east end of the church – a structure recently built by Peter after Sir Hugh had seen a similar one in the church at Rutherford down the valley – could be seen above the villagers’ shoulders. Sir Hugh, so tall, so thin, his black hood hanging down his back and the sharp light shining on his pale bald head, his pale thin nose and his pale long beard. How sad his face is, Marion thought, how weary, how without any hope.

Beside him stood Dame Margaret, always called M’Dame, a small woman wearing her tall white fur Sunday cap, coming up only to Sir Hugh’s shoulder. Her sharp profile was intent on Father John at the altar. With tense eyes and tightly pressed lips, hers was a face of long endurance. Her body was wrapped round in a dull green cloak which almost covered her dark brown dress. Her bare hands, with a chilblain on every finger, were pressed together in prayer.

In front of her stood Magda, their eldest and only surviving child, an undergrown twelve-year-old, whose thick brown hair poured out round her face from under a small white cap, too small, but as like her mother’s as she could make. Marion could see Magda was not attending. Her eyes strayed round the villagers, the building, the wall paintings round the window over the altar, and her hands twisted and untwisted the leather belt with red stitches that held her cloak around her. However much her eyes wandered, her lips joined in all the responses with her parents.

Behind them was Rollo, Sir Hugh’s brother, a man disliked and feared in the village as an efficient steward of the Manor’s affairs, a tireless rememberer of who owed what, and when, a persistent nagger of defaulters, fair, accurate, merciless, humourless – everyone knew that Sir Hugh, had he really been in charge would have been easier to handle, easier to persuade, easier to deceive. Rollo stood, hood off, his brown cloak reaching his boots, his nose sharp and thin like Sir Hugh’s, but the rest of his face lost in his hair, which hung over his bushy eyebrows, and in his great beard which concealed all expression in his face. ‘You can’t ever tell what he’s thinking,’ Marion had complained once to Peter, who had answered, ‘You wouldn’t like it at all if you could.’