The aching stiffness in her neck awoke her. Alice lay still in her lap, heavy and damp. The air was filled with the shrill singing of birds. Marion dozed, listening. The song of one bird, a thrush, probably in the ash tree above the roof, dominated the mingled clamour of a thousand other songs. Marion imagined the wooded hillside that rose steeply at the end of her garden. It was thickly covered in a mesh of brown twigs, motionless in the grey dawn, and scattered all through, like brown fruit on branches, were these little feathery ovals, so light, so weak, yet each filling the vaults of space with its piercing song. She wondered how they did it. She knew how tiny they were, once the feathers were off there was only a little dangling lump, smaller than Alice’s fist, one mouthful to crunch and not really worth catching and plucking. Pigeons were fine, even rooks were worth the bother – but these little ones … Her thoughts strayed back to the thousands of voices singing away up the hill. She wondered why they did so, like this, all together, so vehemently, of a spring morning. She imagined the hills beyond her own familiar hill, where in other trees in the never-ending forest, millions of tiny birds were at this moment singing away, unheard, unremarked.

Marion was recalled to full consciousness by a renewed boiling in her stomach and a griping pain accompanied by a feeling of fluid weakness in the bowels. Catching her breath against the pain, she pushed Alice off her lap into the straw, felt around hastily to make sure the child was not touching the hearthstone, rose as quickly as her stiffness permitted and took two steps to the door. She pushed back the wooden latch of the lower half, bent down and crept out. No one in the cottage stirred. A grim grey light showed her the frosty grass at her feet, the plaited wattle of the garden fence, and the lumpy midden. The birds still sang wildly. She had no time to go further and squatted down at the edge of the midden and with tufts of frozen grass tickling her buttocks, she relieved herself of much poisonous liquid. Though her head felt faint and time seemed suspended, the icy cold in her bare feet kept her conscious and she raised herself. She pulled a handful of frozen grass, managed to get enough to wipe herself with, threw it on the midden and crept back to the cottage.

As she closed the half-door behind her, Peter whispered, ‘What is it, Marry?’ The diminutive conveyed concern. She explained. The straw rustled and he was close to her.

‘You’re shivering. Here, wrap this round you, get well into the straw. I’ll take Alice into my blanket.’

Marion wrapped herself in Peter’s warmed blanket and rolled herself into his warmed straw nest. It seemed heavenly. She heard him feeling around the floor for Alice, Alice’s little whimper, his shushing murmur and then the rustle and thud as he lay down beside her with Alice, asleep, in his arms. Marion stretched out her numb feet, hard with the cold, and touched Peterkin through his blanket. He slept on obstinately. She lay, trying to control her shivers. Peter was warm against her back; he seemed to sleep again very soon.