As everyone ate and drank, Tom’s monologue ceased, for there was nothing left to say. Families crowded round each other, feeling for the wooden spoons most of them had tied to their belts. Peterkin had recently been given a spoon, carved by his father, and was proud to use it. They bent over their family bowls, spooning up the soup before it got cold, glad, so glad of the hot air and the comforting food. The soup finished, the groups fell apart and each person ate his hard bread and awaited his turn for a swig from the ale jug. There were grunts and sighs but little talk. Marion’s brother, Simon, from the Mill, and his bouncing family were there, seated opposite. They waved to each other and continued eating. Marion had Alice on her knee and tried her with a spoonful of soup but Alice turned her head away. Marion put the spoon to her own mouth and swallowed the warm, gritty, bacon-flavoured liquid with distaste. She could not endure the valuable fat which floated on the surface. She could not attempt another spoonful. Peter and Peterkin finished the bowl between them. She leant her head against Peter’s shoulder and closed her eyes, and many others did so too. The bean soup was heavy in their hungry stomachs, the heat from the burning logs glowed on their faces, the ale was stronger than that they usually drank. Idleness and warmth, both so rare, and rarer still in combination, induced a delicious drowsiness. An important ceremony – Mass followed by dinner at the Hall, so familiar, so vital to their survival – completed, what should they do but doze in a rare sense of satisfaction?

Tom gave the fire logs a careful shove and Marion opened her eyes and watched him. Tom was a broad strong man with curly dark hair and a short curly beard and between them a pleasant expression. He had a way of narrowing his eyes when he smiled which always reminded her of Simon. She wondered at this, not realizing that everyone was related to everyone else in the village, and though everyone knew their siblings, uncles and aunts, and some were aware of first cousins, more distant relationships were mostly ignored. Tom had lived all his life at the Hall. Years and years before he had married a village girl, and it was said they were very much in love. She had died when their son was born and Tom had always been devoted to his child, bringing him up single-handed in the Hall and so constantly addressing him as Ed-me-boy that the child was known by this name by all the village. Ed-me-boy was a thin tall youth, helpful to everyone, bullied by Magda, guarded over by Tom, who did not like to let the boy out of his sight.

When Ed-me-boy was still a baby, Sir Hugh had arranged a marriage between Tom and Joan, also a servant in the Hall, but Tom had objected. ‘I couldn’t do it, sir,’ he had said, ‘really I couldn’t. There’s my Lucy waiting in Heaven as faithful as ever she was, and I must go to her the same way, saints willing. Don’t ask me to do it, sir, I’m sure it is not God’s way,’ so when Sir Hugh, who had jurisdiction (by law or custom) over his servants in matters of marriage, said he would allow Tom his widowerhood until after harvest and then he and Joan should marry, Tom’s eyes had filled with tears and he had been seen that very day in the graveyard putting daisies on Lucy’s grave. All this had been reported to Dame Margaret, who must have had a word with Sir Hugh in private for the subject of Tom’s remarriage had not been mentioned again.