This is my place, she thought, my earth making my peas grow, my apple blossom making apples for me; my cottage for shelter and sleep; my child sitting at my feet scooping up the little mud-free stones that lie in a line under where the eaves drip; my child, and all of this is hers too. And in the village is strange Chris Foxcap who has nothing – no place that is his home – nothing. His donkey is old, his bitch hasn’t much life left in her – but what are they? He has no place to rest in – ever.

Marion’s lassitude persisted. She leant back against the cottage’s wattle wall, uncomfortable as it was, contemplating her own unusual weakness and wondered if she were pregnant again, but her thoughts wandered off that subject to more immediate ones. When Peterkin came home she would send him with a rope up to the wood to the old oak and its dead branches left there by Hilda.

Thinking of Hilda quickly took her thoughts to Dick somewhere up on the moors with the sheep. She never forgot that she had once been in love with Dick, perhaps only a little in love but it had been such a new experience. Though that was a long time ago and she was, undoubtedly, a faithful wife to Peter, thinking about Dick was always a private recreation. Bringing to her memory the vision of his broad red face, his sky-coloured eyes and his orange curls was always a consolation on dull hard days. That he had always wanted Hilda for his wife she knew well, and she went over in her mind their strange courtship many years ago.

Childhood marriages were not formally made in the village – the number of infant deaths would have made this a vain practice – but mothers, chatting together, would agree that if little Ned and baby Jilly survived, it would be nice if they married, providing always that Sir Hugh agreed. For those who survived until adolescence the question would be discussed again and fathers would concern themselves and talk to other fathers, and as such matters were publicly spoken of, by the time the children reached maturity there was a general understanding of who would marry whom. The young couples grew up knowing what was expected of them, and rarely objected. They all knew full well what a limited choice there was.

Such an engagement, loose but publicly known, had existed between Hilda and Wilfred from Down Mill field. Wilfred was the elder surviving son of Widow Annie, and the brother of violent Dobbin, a man in possession of good land in the village. He lived with his mother and had reached the age when he should marry. He was a gangly, dark-haired man with a lumpy nose and a wide crooked mouth, surly in manner and uncertain in temper, like his brother. Hilda, then about sixteen, was the only child of Hal, a widower, living on the Green and depending since his wife’s death on the services of Hilda. He had always been a quiet man and in widowerhood had become withdrawn and hardly spoke, working ceaselessly in field and garden and in winter making willow baskets of marvellous strength and neatness.