So they had married, and had settled in the cottage Down the Common next to Marion’s. Old Annie had sulked, but not more than usual. A year later there was more drama. Wilf had been cursing and muttering for months and had been lurking about Down the Common when Dick was up in the hills. Marion and Peter had seen him several times and had told him to be off and find a wife among the village girls, but he had only cursed them and swore he would be all square with Dick one day.

Then rumours reached Dick, who came down from the hills one evening and found Wilf hiding by the fence under the big ash tree, and shouted at him, and Wilf swung a big club at Dick but missed. Dick picked him up by the shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides with his great hands, and shook him, like a dog with a rat, and threw him down in a patch of nettles and shouted if he ever came round Hilda again he would break every bone in his body. So Wilf crawled away back to the village, cursing, and Dick chopped the club into firewood that evening.

Then Wilf started more rumours, much assisted by Annie, that the baby Hilda was carrying was his baby, let Dick think what he liked. This story was repeated so often that the villagers came to wonder if it were true. Then Meg was born, with her head covered in orange fluffy curls and Wilf was the laughing stock of the whole village, and that did not improve his temper.

These reminiscences had entertained Marion as she sat. She eased her position on the log and lay back against the cottage again. It was so peaceful. How she relished this unusual idleness.

The thought of the orange curls of Dick’s daughters and his own brassy mop brought to Marion’s mind the long familiar story of how this golden hair had arrived in the village. She had heard the story often in her childhood from her mother, and at times entertained herself with retelling it in her mind or to her children, using her mother’s phrases, and with her mother’s intonation resonating in her memory. It was the story of Golden-haired Osyth.

It was a long time ago, Marion’s mother would begin, before any of us were born, in the time of Sir Hugh’s grandfather (or sometimes his great-grandfather or even Sir Hugh’s distant forebears), that the Lord of the Manor fell sick. He had two sons and the elder, Crispin, said he would look after the farm, and his mother and care for his father while he lived as all good sons do. But the younger son, Will the Tall – a wild, unsteady boy they all thought him – would go off to seek his fortune in the wide world. (Here in the story there was often a diatribe against impetuous and foolish youth.) One fine spring morning he put on a new pair of boots straight from the tanner, and his mother gave him a loaf of bread and half a cheese, and with scarcely a wave to the old people or his brother, off he went on foot down the path by the stream towards Rutherford. (All journeys from the village went to Rutherford, any alternative was to go into the forests and lose your way before nightfall.)