The noise still went on outside, but the child seemed less afraid now. She wrinkled up her smooth brow as if trying to remember. ‘The man who made me a shrimpin’ net – I don’t remember his name.’

Esther said quietly, ‘You mean J— Mr Godfrey.’ To herself, she added, and he’s the reason that mob’s outside yawping their heads off. Thank goodness you can’t understand what they’re calling your mother!

Suddenly the noise ceased. The woman and the child sat up, glanced at each other, then Kate slid to the floor and Esther got up. Hand in hand they tiptoed out to the back door. Making as little noise as possible in the silence that followed the din, Esther slid back the bolts and lifted the latch. They were still there, the lanterns swaying, feet shuffling, but they were quiet. All the banging of pans and whistling and chanting had stopped. In front of them stood the huge, avenging figure of Tom Willoughby.

‘. . . Get away to yar homes. Ashamed of ya’sens, y’ought to be. As for you, wife – if you ever, ever, do this sort o’ thing again to this lass and her bairn, I’ll tek off me belt to ya. Aye,’ he wagged his finger in the faces of those grouped behind Martha and Flo. ‘Aye, and then you’ll have cause to ran-tan-tan me as a wife-beater, won’t ya?’

‘She’s a bad ’un, Tom, is Esther Hilton,’ came an unidentifiable man’s voice from the back. ‘No better than a tramp when she came and—’

Tom knew the speaker. He raised his voice. ‘Oh, aye, young Percy Souter. Does yar ma and pa know yet that you’m got a lass in Lynthorpe in the family way, eh?’

There was a ripple of embarrassed laughter amongst the crowd, but no answer from the youth. Tom was not finished yet. ‘And what about you, Joe Bridges? Why, I remember when we was lads together . . .’

‘Eh, steady on, Tom lad. Fair’s fair, no need to rake up a young feller’s wild oats, not when he’s a respectable married man.’

‘Respectable married man!’ Tom threw back his head and let his roar of laughter ring out into the night. ‘Eh Joe, that’s the best yet!’

‘All right, Tom, you win. We’re off home. Come on, lads, let’s get away afore he ses any more. You know a mite too much, Tom Willoughby, a mite too much.’

‘That I do,’ Tom said, his tone grim now. ‘There’s not one here amongst you that has the right to cast the first stone at her. Not one!’

It was as if the biblical reference finally shamed them all, for one by one they melted away into the blackness until only Tom was left to take a none-too-gentle hold of his wife and sister-in-law and march them off up the lane back towards Rookery Farm.