Marion filled up the hens’ drinking butt, an old wooden bucket half-sunk into the earth. She threw down some rough husky meal for them, then fastened her door with a leather thong and collected Alice. They walked past the cottages again, down the slope and out through the little gate on to the Common. The path was hard earth, trodden bare by their passing feet but each side of it was edged with clumps of cow parsley, thistles with little mauve tufts on them and sorrel with reddish spikes. Marion watched Alice, stumping along on her bare feet, out-topped on both sides with the abundant greenery. When they emerged from the area of small birches, the path was edged with tall grass, lush green below, and interlaced with blue vetches and pink convolvulus, and above them the grass flowers, paler and browner, bending a little to the breeze that brushed over them. A few clumps of marguerite daisies and tall buttercups stood amid the grass, and white bladder campions, with their hollow ovals of whitey green, swayed with the grass.

‘Er-er,’ demanded Alice, pointing to buttercups.

Marion picked one and gave it her saying, ‘Buttercup.’

‘Buckercuck,’ said Alice.

Marion corrected her but Alice’s attention was already on carefully destroying the flower. She pulled off each petal with delicate movements of her tiny fingers until there was just the little green spiked Hercules club at the end of the long stalk. Alice, highly pleased with herself, went trotting on ahead. A little further on they met their goat, tethered by a long rope to a tree and in reach of the stream and plentiful browsing. Marion spoke to it and rubbed its shoulder. Now that the kid was weaned the goat was more tame.

As they approached the bridge Marion picked Alice up and carried her up the log steps and across the planks. She paused to look down on the barely moving water below her, again delighting in the mild air and the prospect of the festivities. She remembered also that she would meet the Rockwell families again and that she had not seen much of them, except briefly after Sunday Mass, for some time, not since her niece Lisa, from the Mill, had married Martin Rockwell the previous year. She knew that both families would walk down through the fields from Rockwell Farm, Wat the Tall and Nancy, his wife, Martin of course with Lisa, and the other son whom Marion hoped would marry her next niece, Ellen, and all their other children, mostly strong, good-looking young people. And then the other family: Edward, Wat’s younger brother and his wife, Red Mary, who was Dick’s sister – she would not have missed a shearing for anything – and all their small children, and possibly they might bring Old Lambert, Loppy Lambert’s father, if they could get a cart down the path for him. She hoped so, as her father and Old Lambert always liked a good natter together.

Anticipating great activity in food preparation once she had joined the crowd at the Hall, Marion continued to pause on the bridge, looking down at the still water the other side of it, and thought of the Rockwells. She had heard stories of the origins of the farm at Rockwell all her life, and mused over them now.