The flood was no immediate threat, nor was there anything to be done about it, so when the excitement it caused and the interest in the two drakes calmed down, Marion had to settle to an ordinary routine. Peter went off to the village, the Common path being nowhere under more than six inches of water. He had plenty of work waiting for him. His measuring stick was safely over his ear.

The stock of flour was getting low, and Marion saw little prospect of getting to the Mill – where Simon had half a sack of her corn newly ground – or of getting the flour home dry. She must watch the weather, but this morning there were still dark grey clouds, looking as though they had been roughly torn apart, slowly sailing up from over the valley. No, she could not risk going to the Mill for her flour. Too many sacks of good flour had been wasted by being rained on in the wheelbarrow.

She went to the fire and turned over one of the flat hearthstones on which a pot often rested or on which scones were baked. On the other side of it was carved out a shallow depression. From under the bed she retrieved a cylindrical stone of a rare flintlike hardness. She filled the depression of the one with a large handful of wheat, and kneeling before it, pressed and pushed and rolled the cylindrical one over the corn. This was the ancient method of grinding corn in a quern, and as it was forbidden by Sir Hugh, because home-grinding deprived the miller of his lawful and paid job of grinding at the water-mill, it was something to be done in secret. Marion, being a miller’s daughter, had ambivalent feelings about using her quern, but as she told herself, one must eat and eating is more important than the law. Sometimes Rollo, when in particularly litigious mood, had been known to go round the cottages and catch out women with querns. Marion knew well enough how to conceal hers: turn the quern stone upside down and put a cooking pot on it by the fire, and roll the grinding stone – which looked like any old bit of whetstone when separated from the quern – under the bed. Grinding corn in the quern was hard work. Very great pressure was needed and one’s knees hurt after a time. No woman would do it for pleasure, but it was essential sometimes when milled flour was scarce and the children hungry. Most cottages had their secret querns and every one knew about them. Even Rollo had been known to wink at the practice, particularly when a drought prevented the mill from working.

Recently the ‘Rockwell’ type of quern had come into Marion’s life. This was Lisa’s circular quern, one flattish circular stone placed on top of another, which Martin had brought from his mother at Rockwell and which Marion had watched Lisa using. She put the corn in the lower, saucer-shaped stone, lifted the heavy, slightly smaller stone on top, pushed a stick vertically into the hole near the circumference and twisted it round. Lisa maintained you could grind more corn that way, but it was not really easier work – at least that was what Marion thought when Lisa let her try. ‘You won’t tell Father, will you, Aunt?’ she had said, but laughed as she spoke.