‘Don’t think you did much,’ said Peter.

‘Yes, I did, she said I’d helped with all the hurdles and I must take the basket back in the morning.’

‘Well, let’s have it before it gets any staler,’ said Peter.

‘Did you come back with the Shepherds?’ Marion asked through a mouthful of crumbs.

‘No, they’re still at the Hall, sitting outside, with Sir Hugh and all, eating the overs, like this.’ Peterkin took another scone. ‘I hung about to see if they’d give me a bit, and Dick saw me, and told Joan, like I said, and they were talking about sheep – nothing but sheep – all day.’

So the three of them sat there in the bronzing dusk and finished off the remains of the feast.

JULY

Beneath the pastures willow shade

Whose foliage shines so cool and grey

Amid the sultry hues of day

As if the mornings misty veil

Yet lingered in their shadows pale

Marion was woken as if by a thud of grief falling on her heart, and instantly attendant anxieties fluttered round the grief. Her sleepy mind likened the feeling to the thud of a new log falling beneath the saw, and dust and shavings flying up in the air where it landed. The image persisted and her dreaming thoughts struggled to separate log from grief and shavings from anxiety. Lying still, eyes shut, body relaxed, she realized that she was fully awake, that a dream was a dream, but the grief was real and terrible – for Dick Shepherd was dead.

His death had caused in Marion and in everyone else in the village, an unusual state of shock. They, so well used to death – deaths of so many of their babies, deaths after brief illnesses of so many of their children, the expected deaths in winter of the old, the not infrequent deaths of young women in childbirth – had nevertheless been shocked and frightened by the death of Dick. He had been a man in his prime, a man with kinglike strength, their father figure, although he was only Sir Hugh’s servant. Marion, in numbed surprise, had been trying to get used to this terrifying deprivation. She remembered, more sharply, that she once had been a bit in love with him.

She went over in her mind the events of his death. It had been soon after the sheep-shearing was finished. The sheep had not returned to the hills but were pastured in Sir Hugh’s orchard, when it was decided that the grass in the largest pasture field was almost ready for cutting, and the weather as propitious as could be hoped for. Sir Hugh dithered, Rollo advised waiting a week, Sir Hugh dithered again until Dame Margaret told him to take Simon Miller’s opinion – which he did, and issued a general order for hay-cutting. This meant almost every able-bodied man in the village must present himself, scythe in hand, at the Hall. The weather had remained dry all that week, not hot and often cloudy, but the rain held off and with every scythe in the village working, after three days of unceasing effort the greater part of the hay-making was completed. Only men scythed; women and children raked and tossed. It was a sight familiar to Marion from her childhood, the row of men, mostly with misshapen straw hats on, many wearing only their loin cloths, but with boots as well, as the hay stubble was prickly even to hardened feet, swaying slowly from side to side as they swung their scythes, and intoning in unison the sing-song repetitions of