Well, nothing more was heard of him all that year.

When spring came again his mother mourned him afresh and his father’s hair whitened further and his elder brother worked unceasingly in the fields and never complained and no one noticed how thin and worn he was getting. And when the next winter came on the old man could not stand the cold and just before Christmas he died, and was buried in the churchyard, just to the east near the path, and all the village mourned for him.

Now the January that followed was the coldest anyone could remember. The snow came down like daggers of ice, freezing where it landed. Sheep died frozen to the ground in caves of snow, birds’ feet were frozen to the branches, and as the wind blew in the willows the lumps of ice along every twig crashed together. You never heard a sound like that before. One morning the Dame, still mourning her husband, saw that Crispin had not returned at noon and the whole village went out searching in the snow and they found him lying across a ditch with his beard frozen to his hood, quite dead. Ah, there was lamenting in the village then.

Then when spring was coming, one sunny morning a jingle of harness was heard along the path by the orchard, and behold, there came two horses with two riders on each, and the first rider jumped down at the door of the Hall and called out, ‘Father! Mother! Crispin! Here’s Will back at last.’ When only his mother came out to greet him and told him of the deaths of the others, he wept.

But not for long. ‘See, Mother,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought home a lovely wife,’ and he lifted her down from the horse – and she was lovely, no one could deny that. She was almost as tall as Will and she had a green gown down to the floor of such soft wool no one had seen the like, and she wore a gold ring on her finger that shone in the sunlight, and she had a sweet face like a hedge rose. As she pulled off her hood, her golden hair, all curls, fell below her waist. No one had ever seen the like.

And on the other horse, a small pony, was Will’s servant, a nice fresh-faced boy who later proved the best bow and arrow maker we’d ever had, and the young wife’s little sister, a girl of twelve or thirteen with the same lovely hair, yellow as gorse.

While all stood round gaping with surprise, Will took the tall lady by the hand saying, ‘Mother, this is Osyth, my wife. She and I will look after the Manor and the Hall and care for you all the days of your life, and this small one is Edith, her sister, who will be as a little daughter to you,’ and he was right.

And his mother said, ‘Where have you been, my son Will, all these two years and where did you find this golden girl?’