The silence, except for the daytime dripping, persisted, sometimes broken by a blackbird’s chatter. That afternoon, Marion, returning from her unwelcome visit to the midden, felt a stirring wind on her face and looking up, saw the tree tops against the sky were slowly waving about and the clouds of a now uneven grey were sliding up the valley from the west. The air was cold and penetratingly raw, but it was not freezing, and after listening all night to the steady dripping and the occasional rush of sliding snow and a thump as it hit the ground, she looked out next day to see large patches of the garden earth exposed and in the patchy ground in front of the cottage dark holes full of water where their feet had passed to and fro to the midden.

The thaw continued all day. By noon the cottage roof was clear and most of the garden was bare earth with lumps of dirty white here and there. She had endured the pain of pulling on her boots and had gone round to Lisa and Martin’s cottage. They had survived much as she had, and Lisa gave her some goose grease to rub on her toes. She had skirted the Plowrights’ but had observed a little smoke coming from their roof, and she went down to Molly’s.

Molly had met her with eyes more red than with just hearth smoke. Weeping, she told Marion of how on the first evening of dense snow her aunt, Old Marge, had gone down to the water-place, fallen there, broken or sprained her ankle, and fainted. How long she had lain in the snow no one knew, and Old Agnes, dozing, and with very little idea of the passage of time, could not help. Molly had eventually heard Marge calling.

‘I found her,’ Molly said, ‘with her foot all twisted and like a bone sticking out of her ankle, and blood on the snow, and more dead than alive. I got her by the shoulders and lugged her up the path in the snow, she crying out with pain. It was almost dark by then. I kept looking out to see your Peter come by to spread the news, but he never came. I got her in and we bound up her foot and Mother got her something warm to drink, but she couldn’t get warm and she just lay there faint and quiet and come morning I saw she was dead. Well, one couldn’t be surprised, seeing her age. That morning the snow was piled up against our door to the roof – no hope of getting out – so we laid her on the ground by the wall, and now the snow’s gone I’m off to the village to tell Father John. D’you think the Common path is clearing?’ and Molly’s weary face crumpled into fresh grief.

Marion remembered with relief that Sir Hugh had, as always in winter, arranged for several graves to be dug before the ground got too frozen. Marion felt no shock, she expected old people to die of cold, nor really did she feel grief.