She pushed the wheelbarrow in through the big door, and as she stood, looking round, the dusty corny smell from her childhood filled her nose. It was all as it had ever been: the three huge oak posts slanting from the floor to meet together at the ceiling, on whose combined tripartite strength the millstones above were supported; the massive shelves along two walls, now carrying only some piles of neatly folded sacks, a row of shallow sieves of woven osiers, and a row of cylindrical measuring pots hanging on their wooden handles from pegs on the edge of the shelves; the long wooden shovels and scoops leaning against the wall beneath them and the pale dusty floor. Marion looked at the ladder in the corner. Each rung was worn into two slight dips by the millers’ feet treading up and down for decades. The bottom rung had a knot in it, towards the left side, which being harder, had not been worn away but stood up as a smooth shiny lump. Marion remembered when this lump had been level with her face and she had sucked its hard smoothness. How near to the ground it now was! Yet she knew exactly the feel of the knot in her mouth and the slightly bitter dusty taste.

The meal bin, a solid wooden box built into one corner, had been emptied and swept out and its lid, hinged with two thick leather straps, was propped open. On the floor and on the shelves above it were rows of fat sacks, each identified by a sprig of hawthorn, a wreath of goosegrass or a lump of wilting vetch. Each villager had his own identifying plant.

She could hear shuffling on the floors above, but otherwise the building was quiet, none of the creaking and groaning that the structure emitted when water poured on to the water wheel outside and the millstones rumbled and crunched and sighed with the effort of heavy work as if they were human beings.

‘Simon,’ Marion called up the ladder.

‘Oho!’ came Simon’s voice above.

‘It’s Marion. I’m coming up.’ She felt the lumpy knot, cool, smooth and bruising under her instep as she went up. She emerged through the ladder hole into the gloom of the stone room, as it was called, where the grinding stones and the wooden mechanism were. Only a small window, its shutter almost closed, let in a shaft of light, laying a bright finger across the thick wooden wheels. Motes of dust strayed around in the beam and as Marion approached, the motes thickened and whirled in the light. It was quiet, not a drip of water from the great wheel outside, only the shuffling feet above.