Peter and Peterkin had just arrived, having had bread and ale at the Hall as before. She told them what had happened. Before sleeping they had stood at their cottage door looking across to Dick’s. No sound came from it.

‘Perhaps he’s sleeping now,’ Marion said. ‘Perhaps I did get most of the poison out … ’ Perhaps – perhaps – all might still be well.

Peter looked at the sky. ‘Thunder clouds gone – sky’s clear now. We could still get the hay in in the dry.’

At dawn Marion woke because she heard steps outside. She opened her eyes and in the square of light from the half-door, open all night, Hilda’s dark silhouette of head and shoulders appeared.

‘I think he’s dead,’ she whispered. Even in whispers her voice was not recognizable. Marion had immediately gone to Hilda’s cottage with her. It was too dark to see anything inside but Marion recalled Hilda’s trembling hand on her wrist urging her forward, pulling her down to the bed, guiding her hand to the corpse. She remembered with horrid vividness touching the taut skin of the swollen arm by mistake before her hand was guided to his body. The tunic had been pulled open and she could feel under the curly hair on his chest the damp and unresponding skin. She could feel no movement of breath or heart.

‘Have you a candle?’

‘I’ve no fire.’

As Marion knew, there had been no fires in their cottages these last few days when everyone had been in the hay fields. ‘Open your shutter then,’ she said.

The little shutter was pushed open and a faint glimmer from the eastern sky made the rafters of the cottage just visible, and anything of pale tone – the sheepskin hood hanging on a nail, the milk in a scrubbed wooden bucket, the two half-grown chickens huddled together on a log – slowly became apparent to Marion’s eyes, but in the shadow of the bed she could see nothing.

‘Did he cry out?’ she asked.

‘No. He groaned and gasped most of the night since you left. He didn’t speak, didn’t seem able to speak.’ Hilda’s whispered words took away Marion’s own powers of speech. After a moment she went on even more quietly, ‘I don’t think he knew anything – just lay there with his breathing between groans getting rougher and rougher – and then it – just – stopped.’

Marion had gone back to her cottage, woken Peter and Peterkin, and sent the latter off to the Hall to fetch Sir Hugh and Father John. She failed to persuade Hilda to leave her dead husband but collected the two terrified little girls, who had dozed all night under a shelf with Janty between them, and had taken them home and given them bread and milk.

Peterkin returned with Sir Hugh and Dame Margaret all out of breath and anxious, and Father John followed them with some candles, in a very ill humour at having been wakened so early. When he reached the Shepherd’s cottage he had to send Peterkin back to the village for a red-hot log in an old iron pot, having forgotten that there would be no fire at Down the Common to light the candles. It was therefore full daylight before two candles were lit at the head and foot of the bed, carelessly pushed into knot holes in the woodwork so that Marion feared one might tip out and set fire to the straw on which Dick lay. She had put a little salt on an ivy leaf, (having no dish to spare) and placed it on Dick’s chest. They had all knelt while Father John recited the Latin words, incomprehensible to them all, that he always said over a death bed, then they had all left, leaving Hilda and Father John sitting on logs beside the corpse.