“I know,” Alinor replied.

“You look strange,” the girl told her mother. “Different.”

Alinor turned her face to her daughter and smiled. “In what way?” she said. “I’m the same as yesterday.”

Alys saw the deceit in the way her mother’s eyelashes veiled her gaze. “You look as you did in my dream. Where did you go?”

Alinor gathered up the empty bowls and stacked them on the table. “I went to the church to pray for your father.”

The girl nodded. She knew very well it was Midsummer Day. “And did you see him?” she asked, very low.

Alinor shook her head. “Nothing.”

“So perhaps, he’s still alive? If you didn’t see him, then he’s not dead. He could still come home.”

“Or perhaps I have no sight.”

“Perhaps that. Perhaps you met a black cat and he truly saw you.”

Alinor smiled. “Don’t speak of it,” she reminded her daughter. She thought of the priest, waiting for his gruel in the net shed. She wondered if he had truly seen her, like the black cat of her daughter’s dream.

The girl ran her fingers through her thick fair hair and pushed it back from her face, then pulled her cap over the golden plait. She sat down to put on her boots. “I wish to God we knew,” she said irritably. “I don’t miss him, but I’d like to know I can stop looking for him. And it’s not fair on Rob.”

“I know,” Alinor said. “Every time a ship comes to the tide mill quay I ask for news of him, but they say nothing.”

The girl lifted up a boot and poked her finger through the hole in the sole. “I’m sorry, Ma, but I need new boots. These are through at the toes and the sole.”

Alinor looked at the patched uppers and the mended soles. “Next time I have money, next time I go to market,” she promised.

“Before winter, anyway.” The girl pulled on her worn boots. “I might bring a rabbit home tonight. I set a snare yesterday.”

“Not on Sir William’s fields?”

“Not where the keeper ever goes,” she said mischievously.

“Bring it home and I’ll stew it,” Alinor promised, thinking of the extra mouth to feed if the priest did not leave till the evening ebb tide.

The girl knelt before her mother and Alinor rested her hand on the tender nape of the girl’s neck. “God bless you and keep you safe,” she said, thinking of her daughter’s young prettiness, and the miller and his men who watched her as she crossed the yard and joked of the husband she would have in a few years’ time.

The girl smiled up at her mother as if she knew her fears. “I can fend for myself,” she said gently, and went out, shooing the hens out of the door and out of the gate so that they could pick their way down to the shoreline.

Alinor waited till she heard the crunching sound of footsteps on shingle recede, as her daughter walked along the shore to the ferry crossing at the rife. Only when she could hear nothing outside but the calling of the seabirds did Alinor spoon the warm gruel into the spare bowl, her missing husband’s bowl, and take his carved wooden spoon and his own wooden cup filled with small ale, and carry them back along the bank to the net shed.