Marion looked round and wondered again at the rich orderliness that surrounded the Mill. Parsley, the Millers’ red cow, was lying in the shade of a clump of willows, chewing slowly, her half-grown calf grazing nearby. The grass here, close to the stream, was already growing soft and green again after the hay harvest, and further up the field and towards the woods, some haycocks still stood in ordered rows in the sunlight. She thought of the rich meal they had all had, the plentiful bread, new butter with droplets of water in it, scooped up with a broad wooden blade and spread on the bread so thick that you could see your teethmark in it, the cold meat, so juicy and tender to bite off the little ribs, the cool water to drink, the lavish long drink of fresh cow’s milk that Alice had had, the honey-bread – all taken as a matter of course. Marion thought of the neat productive garden, the swept yard, the orderly wood pile, the six buckets all to be scrubbed and filled, the cool of the holly cave with the logs ready for sitting on. She looked at peaceful Parsley, she thought of the geese plucking grass under the apple trees, the sow and her five piglets fed on sweepings from the Mill, and the bees droning away round the straw skeps in the orchard. It all bespoke a wealth that brought ease with it.

It had not always been thus, she realized. In her own youth when the Old Man was Miller and her mother, Elinor, ran the house, a certain cheerful slapdash attitude had prevailed. Elinor was not orderly. Houses were not swept, straw blew about the yard, vegetables grew, sometimes. If a fox got the goslings – well, what could you expect? Marion remembered how Simon and her other brother, Hughie, who had died young, used to grumble to each other about their feckless mother and their father, who, though careful and skilful in the mill, tolerantly left all domestic matters to Elinor. But Simon had married Betsy the year after Elinor died, and Marion knew that the comfortable orderly life at the Mill was mostly Betsy’s doing. Betsy had strength and to spare, she had a love of routine, she foresaw what would be needed, she organized her family – she did all this, as Dame Margaret did, but Betsy did it with a laugh, with a generous enjoyment of whatever went right, and when disasters came, such as the cow breaking a fence and trampling beans, or when storms caused the millpond to overflow and drown the hens, Betsy coped. She mended the fence, she cleared the sluices, she had other stores to replace the lost beans. She did not wail, she did what was necessary and she ruled her five children, making them work for the benefit of all. She also saw to it that Simon, however he might have criticized his more self-indulgent father in his youth, now attended to the Old Man with exemplary tenderness.