‘The baby won’t live much longer,’ she told him. ‘I’ll have to get home to my baby,’ and with great weariness she walked slowly home across the Common with the blackthorn bushes on her left like lace, and the kingcups in clumps along the stream, bright chalices of gold on her right, and the first cuckoo of the year delicately fluting up in the forest. Peace there, tumult and misery among men.

As Marion came round the corner of her cottage a flock of sparrows, chattering madly, flew in and out of the elder bush. She glanced over the half-door to the shed – the goat and her kid were all right. Down the garden she could see Peter’s bent back as he dug. Alice must be there with him. It was all very peaceful. Contrary to her resolution she milked a little milk into a small bucket, crumbed some bread into it, cut some lumps of cheese on to more bits of bread, and went down the garden.

‘Mam Mam Mam Mam,’ said Alice, holding up earthy hands.

‘Where have you been all this time?’ asked Peter. ‘Look, I’ve done all that patch till here. I’ll sow some peas tomorrow.’

‘We could still get frosts. I’ve brought some bread and cheese.’ He had taken off his hood and hung it over a branch of the apple tree, and Marion saw how very thin and stringy were his neck and collarbones above the low neck of his tunic.

‘Tchees,’ said Alice.

‘The child learns more words every day,’ said Peter. ‘Alice, what’s this?’ He held out the spade.

‘Thpade,’ said Alice, and looked round for applause.

Marion sat down on a big tussock and took Alice on her knee and started spooning the bread and warm goat’s milk into her, taking a munch of her own bread and cheese every now and then. Peter sat on the stump of a pear tree which had once grown, profitlessly, in the hedge, and Marion told him of the drama she had witnessed at the Hall.

‘They’ll beat Dobbin this evening,’ she said, ‘if he comes round sober, and if he doesn’t he’ll be tied to the oak all night.’

‘What good’s a beating going to do, stupid drunkard like him?’

‘If the baby dies he’s a murderer.’

‘Yes, and not the only one. Don’t you reckon that Plowright baby that died around Christmas was murdered? No one talks of beating Jack, but it’s more likely it was Small Sarah that let that baby die of starvation. Stupid cow.’

‘Isn’t throwing the baby against the hearthstone and breaking its skull worse than just not feeding it?’

‘Don’t really know,’ Peter admitted. ‘For the poor baby it is the same.’ They were silent, pondering the dilemma.

‘They won’t let Dobbin free this time – at the Hall they’re all so furious. Of course he’s often beaten up Jill before. D’you think she asks for it? Aggravates him?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Peter. ‘Struck me as an ordinary sort of woman, bit silly, not a nagger. Ugly as the Devil.’