Alice’s cries became more intense, as though they were being squeezed out of her twisting body, and then there was more choking and Marion felt the warm wet of another flood of vomit down her front.

The blanket dragged on her shoulders as Peter heaved himself up and edged past her on the bed. ‘Want a light?’ was all he said, and then she heard his feet in the straw and his fumbling under the shelf for the bellows. Tibtab, who usually slept on the shelf, was wakened, and fled with a tiny mew. Peter began to explore with puffs from the bellows some places on the logs which might be brought to incandescent red.

The vomit seemed everywhere. Marion, wiping in the dark with little bits of straw, tried to hush Alice’s cries. She wondered how the little body on her lap could have contained so much. The bellows puffed, Alice moaned, Peterkin lay still, determined not to wake.

In time Peter’s bellows blew an area of glowing red on a log. He reached out in the dark and found a branch with dead leaves on it which he kept for tinder, stuck into the cottage wall above the shelf. Propping this twig up in the ashes with a leaf against the red glow and continuing to bellow, he got the dried leaves alight. They flared up, lighting the whole inside of the cottage for a moment. Peter grabbed at the little rush candle that he kept in a block of hollowed out wood on the shelf. But the flaming leaf had died down and he had to blow again and press more leaves against the glowing scrap of wood before he finally managed to light the candle.

It made a tiny area of faint light but it was enough for Marion to see Alice’s white glistening face surrounded by mess. Alice’s cries had lessened and the flame took her attention. She drew in each breath tremblingly and then Marion saw her lower lip quivering, so adult a show of grief, so unlike the outward rolling of the lip of a crying angry infant, that Marion was filled with compassion for her child. With Peter holding the light, she laid Alice across her knees and pulled her hooded robe over her head. The folds of the hood were filled with vomit and she dropped it on the ground. Alice’s body was wrapped round with a broad strip of woollen cloth, its upper part smeared with vomit, its lower part sodden and stinking.

‘I’ll sit by the fire with her for a bit,’ said Marion. ‘She’s shivering. Put the blanket round me, then you get back to bed and get warm again.’

An ancient crescent-shaped log, half circling the hearth, was their usual seat, and Marion moved to it and sat down close to the remains of the fire, leaning back against the log. She undid the front of her robe, itself wet and slimy, and pushed cold Alice in. Peter put the blanket over her shoulders, this action blowing out the candle’s flame. In darkness she heard the bed boards creak and the straw rustle as he got back in. Except for the red glimmer from the fire, they were in darkness again.