Throughout no one thought to ask Joan her opinion on the matter. She had also lived and worked at the Hall all her life. She was older than Tom, and it was widely known that she was the bastard daughter of Sir Hugh’s father, and was therefore half-sister to Sir Hugh and Rollo, but being a bastard, and the child of old Mavis, another domestic servant who was still shuffling about half alive, Joan was allowed no taint of social superiority, rather the contrary: utter servility was to be her lot in life. She was everyone’s drudge and Magda always disdained her particularly. No one blamed Tom for not marrying her.

The villagers tolerated Joan, but it was Milly, her companion in servitude, that they all disliked, and no one had ever tried to get Milly married. She was a short, bandy-legged woman, a little younger than Marion, with lank hair greyed by the amount of wood ash which had settled in it over the years, round black eyes too close together, reddened nostrils, a grumpy mouth and a heavy jaw, a woman without any grace, but with a wiry strength that had got her through her onerous life. She grumbled, she complained, she deceived, she remembered all slights, she exaggerated evil gossip (when she had not invented it in the first place), she was never to be trusted as a witness – it was no wonder that the villagers disliked her. As the years passed and the dislike grew, so did her malice, which was expressed in her thin down-drawn mouth.

These were the Hall’s proper servants, people tied for life to the Manor, with no land or possessions and no prospect of freedom. None of them ever questioned, even to him- or herself, this servitude. Hard as it was, they had their sure places, and their sure places were beds in the straw under the benches in the Hall and shares of whatever food was going.

In addition to them was Loppy Lambert, who was usually around in the Hall or in the sheds round the yard. He was the son of Old Lambert who lived up at Rockwell. Loppy was perhaps thirty years old but had the mind of a child and a body neither of a child nor a man. His grating voice was largely incomprehensible, his manual skills nil. He was of no use up at Rockwell where everything was so orderly and shipshape, so Old Lambert had given him to Sir Hugh to make whatever use of him he could. That was not much. Loppy needed constant watching. He could not be entrusted with the simplest jobs and no one forgot the time when he had been told to keep an eye on some goslings on the Common and had been found hours later swinging on a low bough of a hawthorn with a baby fox in his arms and no goslings in sight.

Dame Margaret woke everyone in the Hall by calling out, ‘Tom! Close the shutters, I feel the night air coming in.’