Marion crouched there holding shaking Alice against her breasts and shivering so violently that every shiver made her arms squeeze and shake Alice. Though her bare feet were on the hearthstone, she felt no warmth from the pile of ashes. Alice’s breathing slowly quietened and Marion, guessing she slept, did not dare move for fear of waking her. Though she was sitting on a little straw, her bottom ached with the cold and the hard ground. Marion endured. Her head felt heavy and the hot boiling in her stomach increased. Once or twice she feared she would be sick herself, for the smell was nauseating. There was still no pale line above the door. How endless the winter nights were. She would have liked to rest her head somewhere, but the log was too low, only high enough to rest her ribs against. Peter was silent; she did not know if he slept or not. Alice, she guessed, did sleep. Her thoughts turned from Alice, this wretched little life, lying against her body, to all her children – how a mother gave and gave and gave to each child, its being, its birth, its food, its shelter; how all her days and nights were spent in giving to her children; how the children took and took, and how, even so, she could not give enough and so many babies had died. Alice, fortunately, had been a hearty baby and was growing into a strong child. ‘My poor little girl,’ Marion whispered, putting her head down to where Alice’s was under her dress, ‘my poor little girl.’

Her thoughts drifted to her most recently dead child, Margery, who had died two months ago. She had been twelve years old, an age by which, having passed through the dangers of childhood, children could be expected to survive. Margery’s face came sharply to mind, thin and narrow, hung around with lank dark hair, her anxious dark eyes, her half-open mouth too full of teeth for her lips to meet easily, her lower lip scaly and cracked, her breathing guttural. She had always been a skinny silent child, undersized, with little strength and no vitality. Marion had often compared her with her brother, Simon’s, two girls, Ellen and Kate, one four and the other two years older than Margery. So different were they, bouncing busy young women, both advanced in their adolescence while Margery still had the slight body of a child.