Which beavering time alows their toil at noon

Without opening her eyes, Marion rolled over and stretched. Her foot encountered Peterkin’s back, but he did not move. Automatically her right hand swung out to the cradle and felt Alice’s warm sleeping body. Her left hand, equally automatically stretched out to touch Peter, but it encountered nothing but cool crumbling straw. This woke her properly and she opened her eyes. The grey gloomy dawn of this late August day was visible over the half-door and it dimly lit the interior of the cottage. The familiar lump which was Peter, was not there and she remembered with a pang the events of two days ago. Peter had been chosen to be one of the small group of people to go with Sir Hugh to Rutherford to enquire about, and if possible, to bring back, salt.

The unease that had slowly been building up in the village since June over the nonappearance of the men from Rutherford with sacks and jars of salt to be exchanged for spun wool had come to an audible climax at the Harvest Supper. Not that the harvest was really complete – there was much gleaning to be done everywhere, some strips of corn were still to be cut and carried, and all the threshing was yet to do, but the bulk of the corn harvest was over, and as the weather had mainly been satisfactory, the villagers had by and large a feeling of achievement and less anxiety of a meagre winter diet. But at the Harvest Supper, held this year in the Hall as the weather looked too threatening to have it on the Green, Tom had started the salt discussion.

Sir Hugh, by long tradition, had provided a young bullock for the feast, and Tom had dismembered it and prepared a good fire in the Hall. The large joints had been roasted, with Joan and Ed-me-boy taking turns with the longest wooden ladle to pour the running fat over the meat.

When Milly had brought in the ale and Hilda had gone round the tables with her basket of small loaves, and all the villagers, exhausted by the long toil of harvest, were silently eating the thick slices of roast veal that Tom had smacked down on their bread, then Tom had said loudly, ‘It’s fresh meat today, men, and it will be fresh meat next week if we kill the other bullock, but after that there will be no meat from the farm all the long winter through if we have no salt.’

Marion suspected this raising of the subject had been rehearsed. An uneasy murmur resulted, mixed with sounds of mastication.

Then Rollo spoke. ‘The salt men from Rutherford have never been so late – after harvest now – in all my memory.’ This too sounded rehearsed.

‘Between hay-cutting and corn-cutting’s their time,’ added Tom.

This studied introduction, coinciding with the first satiation of appetites, was followed by a general release of talk among the villagers, all expressing their previously concealed anxiety about the nonarrival of the salt men. Rollo, sitting at the end of the table on the dais, looked towards Sir Hugh and told him he should consider sending a party of men to Rutherford to investigate and bring back salt.