All domestic problems seemed to be interrelated, one increasing another. In spite of all her chilblains healing, Marion did not feel well herself, but then feeling well was so rare a state that she did not regard her unease as important. She put her nausea down to eating the last of the quarter of bacon which had hung in the smoke all the winter, gradually lessening in size over many weeks as slices were cut from it. The last few slices had tasted decidedly rancid. No doubt the melting snow, dripping on it through the ill-fitting roof-hatch, had helped to turn it. She had been chatting, in a brief dry spell, to Molly who had told her that she and her mother had had the bellyache after eating the last of their bacon.

‘Everything upsets Mother these days,’ she told Marion, ‘what with missing Marge. No one to argue with all day now. They’d had a lifetime arguing together, mostly about nothing. It wearied me, I can say – bicker, bicker, bicker – and now she complains to me all the time instead. The bacon was very reasty in parts, not that there was much left. I put the last bit in the pot with beans and we had it. Not good, but what could we do but eat it? And we both had the bellyache and squits and she was sick all one night, and I had to throw the rest away – waste of beans. Teaches you to eat while things are good, can’t save everything,’ to all of which Marion agreed, and this confirmed to her the cause of her own sickness.

But there it was, the bacon was finished, and there would now be many months before any meat could be eaten. Some fools killed a pullet or two at this time of year and so deprived themselves of eggs and flocks of little chickens that could have come in spring.

Peter worked hard, and when he got home of an evening he was silent from exhaustion and cold. His cloak, heavy enough when dry, was almost as much as Marion could lift, sodden as it was with rain. One of the Hall’s ox carts needed new sides and Peter was sawing thick planks of elm wood and fitting them on to the cart’s structure. This meant going backwards and forwards from his workshop to the Hall’s cart-shed in the yard, always through pools of muddy stinking water. It had always been thus in February.

On this particular day in late February, Marion had woken early, still in the dark night and not a glimmer of dawn above the top of the door. They had gone to bed the previous evening to the sounds of the wind whooshing in the ash tree and rattling its ivy, and the rain falling heavily outside and the roof dripping. But now, as she lay awake, all was silent – no sound of wind, no dripping, and if it were still raining it would be a soft steady drizzle, the sort that the thatch absorbed.