The panniers had all been packed the night before with tightly pressed in spools of wool, covered with half-skins of leather firmly tied down to the wattle. As they came opposite Marion at the top of the bank above the stream, they all three waved to her and she waved back. They called out messages, nothing that had not already been said. She woke Alice up and made her wave too and Peter called, ‘Goodbye, Alice. Be a good girl,’ and then the path entered the thick forest and they were hidden from sight.

Marion resolutely put Alice down, filled her bucket with water and laboured back up the path with it, with Alice slowly following. As she approached her garden, Alice came running up behind her.

‘Alice found a fairy’s poppy,’ she announced.

‘Don’t you go touching the fairies’ things,’ said Marion, automatically using the common phrase, her mind on Peter.

‘Look, Mam.’ Alice held up a scarlet pimpernel flower, no bigger than her little finger nail. There was no tradition in the village that this was a fairy’s flower, so Marion could only smile and wonder at her child’s invention.

Back at her cottage she put down the bucket and sat on the log seat under the eaves to rest and to summon up her spirits to deal with her solitariness. She knew she was not really alone, for Molly and the two old women, Agnes and Marge, were at home. Marion had seen Molly in her garden as she was coming up from the water-place. The cottage where Dick and Hilda had lived, now that Hilda was settled in the Hall with her two little girls, had been taken over by Lisa and Martin Rockwell, and she knew Lisa was busy tidying up and cleaning out the cottage after it had been left empty for the ritual weeks following Dick’s death there. She sat, resting, looking down the garden. Peterkin would be at the Hall all day. Rollo had engaged him the evening before to work in the Hall’s pea fields, picking the ripe pods, and, no doubt, One-eyed Wat, Dobbin’s son, would be working with him. This was considered to be unskilled work, suitable for boys with some disability. Wat had, as a baby, fallen on to the boot-drying stand in his cottage and put out one of his eyes, and was now a scar-faced skinny boy of twelve. His inability to judge distances did not prevent him from picking peapods – so Rollo reasoned.

Perhaps Marion should start harvesting some of her own garden pea crop. She would go down the garden and look at the plants, although crops grown in the more open sunny areas ripened sooner than in her garden.

Her speculations were suddenly arrested by the realization that Alice was not with her. She jumped up and called her. There was no answer. She ran round the corner of the cottage, under the ash tree and on to the rough grass, the highest point of the hamlet and called again. No answer. She went left to what she still thought of as the Shepherds’ cottage. She could see Lisa down the garden and called to her, but Lisa had not seen Alice. She went down the slope to the Plowrights’. A group of lousy children were leaning against the wall of the cottage doing nothing, but they, as far as anyone could understand what they said, had not seen Alice. She went to Molly’s cottage and saw Molly coming up from the pig shed. Molly had seen the procession go along the path the other side of the stream and had waved, and had seen Marion and Alice at the water-place waving, but then she had gone into the pig shed and had not seen them again.