‘Come, Alice, into the pot with you. We’re going to the village.’

Being swung along in a pot was a novelty which Alice relished though it was an awkward and heavy burden for Marion. As she crossed the bridge she could see many of the village dogs tied up under the oak tree, trembling and snapping at each other, and on the other side of the path most of the village wives were collected in a semi-circle round the drinking trough. In their midst stood Chris Foxcap, his laden donkey drinking and his brindled lurcher bitch with mad yellow eyes and uncertain temper, circling his legs uneasily.

Chris Foxcap was an itinerant tinker who arrived in the village sometimes twice a year, sometimes only once in two years. His approach was always from the steep forests above Rockwell. No one else ever came or went that way – the way to the rest of the world lay down the valley to the known village of Rutherford and thence on and on to the other end of the world. But to come from over the unknown forested hills – that in itself added strangeness to Chris Foxcap. The villagers hardly ever saw anyone who was not born in the village. He was an alien, a stranger, intriguing, frightening, but also an entertainment.

To Marion people were a natural part of the earth. As the deer that lived in the forest, the hares that ran in the fields, the thrush that sang in the ash tree, the spiders that hid in the cottage thatch, so to her thinking were people, a product of the earth, sustained by it while they lived, returned to it when they died. These particular fields and woods around her, had, to her mind, produced these particular people, the villagers whom she knew and saw daily. Beyond, all was chaos and unknown.

It was against these unifying feelings that Chris Foxcap struck. It was almost horrific that he was attached to no land, had no rights to any harvest, owed no man any dues. He was free from all obligations, unprotected by any community, adrift in the world, an orphan of nature, and yet, extraordinarily, he did not mind. He always appeared cheerful and whistled as he worked. Marion could only think of him with an unusual mixture of revulsion, pity and curiosity.

Physically, he was revolting. His peculiar jogging gait, not running, not walking, but suitable for moving easily over rough heath and ferns in the pathless woods, leading his trotting donkey, made him stand out among the slow-trudging villagers, whose gait was geared to the pace of their oxen. His face was blackened, the skin pitted with innumerable scars from flying sparks as he bellowed the charcoal fires. His beard, a wiry brown, was patchily singed the same way. His eyes were dark and quick, his glance over the village audience eager and appraising, so unlike the steady cow-like stares of the villagers. The way he would whirl his cloak around his shoulders covering up the bundles on his back, so deft, so quick, made him strange to the villagers who hunched their shoulders and bowed their heads as they pulled their cloaks around them against the cold.