After a while Dame Margaret went up the yard with Joan and they came back carrying a board with bread and lumps of cheese on it and a bowl of new milk and there was a pause in the bellowing and hammering while they all sat down round the mounting block and ate. Milly filled up a tall earthenware pot from the bowl and passed it round and all the women and children had drinks of fresh cow’s milk. It was a lovely change from the routine drudgery of their lives to sit about like this, chatting among themselves, they and their children entertained by the rare sight of the tinker at work, and having bread and milk brought round to them.

Marion’s old cooking pot had been mended, or at least it had been treated, and it remained to be seen whether, when it cooled, the crack in the base had indeed been closed. Alice became restive so with the warm pot in her hand and Alice on the other arm, she told Peter she was going home.

‘Yes,’ he said, closely watching Chris hammering out one of his nails with short deft strokes. She realized his mind was elsewhere, and she departed.

Pausing on the bridge, she looked back. The crowd of people, heavy brown-clothed people, still stood round the mounting stones. Their conversation had returned to its usual sluggish speed. The dogs, tired of inactivity, had mostly lain down in the oak’s shade and were sleeping. Still the sound of Chris’s hammer, striking hot iron on stone, rang out, filling the whole valley.

Back at Down the Common Marion met Hilda.

‘Chris Foxcap’s come,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Hilda, ‘I heard the hammering. I was up in the woods with the girls. You know that big oak that we saw last year – with the top all dead? A bit beyond the big clearing? Well, lots of the dead top has fallen off. I dragged back as much as I could. I wish the girls were bigger, but if your Peterkin went up he’d get lots more.’

Marion asked if she had any iron for mending.

‘No – but I could do with a new knife or two. I don’t know if Dick heard the hammering – he didn’t come down.’

Marion went into her cottage, leaving Alice outside. She wondered if the fire were out. She put down a hand and could feel a faint warmth in the ashes, but felt too tired to bother with it. She looked up at the sooty beams above the fire and knew she should get a knife and scrape the soot off, letting it fall into … what? Some dish, if she had one – and take the soot out to put round the pea plants in the garden. ‘I’m too tired,’ she said aloud to herself, and sat down on the log which made a seat outside the cottage door under the overhanging eaves, and stared down the garden and up into the forest beyond. The beech trees were now in new leaf and the lower branches shifted their broad plates of foliage one over the other, in and out of the sunshine, as the soft wind moved them.