‘Yes, I’ve come to spend Christmas with my family.’

‘Hop up and I’ll give you a lift.’ He jerked his head towards the cart. ‘You can sling your bags in the back.’

‘Thank you, that’s very kind.’ Grace had no trouble hurling her suitcases over the tailboard of the cart. Her father always said she was as strong as any of her older brothers. ‘I don’t want to take you out of your way, so if you could drop me at the crossroads—’

‘It’s not out of my way. I’m going by your place, as it happens. I can drop you at the door.’

He put out a hand to haul her up beside him. He was in his early forties, a couple of years younger than her father, but there was not a thread of grey in his jet-black hair. Her sister-in-law Jessie reckoned he used boot blacking on it.

He jingled the harness and set the horse plodding again. Grace sat next to him, jolting from side to side with the steady sway of the cart. It was all she could do to hold herself upright and stop bumping against his shoulder.

They were both silent. Grace looked around her, admiring how the wintry sun made the frost on the bare tree branches sparkle like diamonds.

‘You’ll have heard about my wife?’ Noah’s gruff voice suddenly broke the silence, startling her.

‘Yes. Mother wrote to tell me. I was sorry to hear about it.’

‘Influenza.’ He kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him. ‘It’ll be four months come January.’

Grace nodded. She barely remembered Mrs Wells. She was such a quiet, inoffensive little woman. ‘It’s a terrible shame.’

‘Ah.’

They carried on, the silence stretching awkwardly between them. It was a relief when the cart finally turned off the lane and made its way up the stony track that led to the Duffields’ farm.

Grace heard the farm before she saw it. The squawk of the hens mingled with the sound of the dog barking and the low moo of the cows in the byre. Then there were the shrieks of her younger brothers and sisters, and the clatter of metal on cobbles as they chased a hoop around the yard, and the sound of a baby crying.

And rising above it all was the high-pitched sound of her sisters-in-law arguing.

Grace smiled to herself. Anyone who thought the country was a peaceful place had never been to Ezekiel Duffield’s farm. But how she had missed it!

Grace’s father was proud that his family had lived and worked on the same land for more than two hundred years. But with Grace’s brothers away at war, and only her father and younger brothers to take care of the place, the old farm was starting to show its age. The muddy farmyard was edged by an untidy collection of ramshackle barns and outbuildings no one had ever quite got around to fixing. The yard was littered with rusty old bits of farm machinery.