“It’s a year. It’s nearly a year.”

“Who is it? Mr. Miller?”

“No!” Alinor exclaimed.

“That horrible man who has the physic stall at Chichester market?”

“No, of course not.”

“Mr. Tudeley, who’s getting Rob his apprenticeship? Is that why Rob gets his chance?”

“No! No! Alys, I won’t be questioned like this!”

“You will be!” The girl rounded on her mother. “This is nothing! Don’t you think the parish will question you like this as soon as your belly starts to show? Don’t you think you’ll have to name the father and then stand before the congregation in your shift, in your shame? Don’t you think Mr. Miller will ask you, all the churchmen will ask you, they’ll demand that you say, and they’ll bring in a midwife from Chichester to put her dirty hands all over your belly, and peer at your privates like you were a whore suspected of the pox?”

Alinor shook her head, her golden hair falling around her white face. “No, no.”

“They’ll go on and on and on at you until you give them his name and then they’ll find him and make him pay his fine to the parish. And you’ll go to the workhouse, and when the bastard is born they’ll take him off you and send you back here as a named whore.”

“No,” Alinor said. “No, Alys, don’t say such things.”

“Back here!” Alys gestured wildly at the interior of the little cottage and the vast desolate mire outside. “Back here, as a named whore. Who’s going to give Rob an apprenticeship then? Who’s going to marry me? Who’s going to buy anything from you but magic and love potions?”

“I’m going to be sick,” Alinor announced. She stumbled to her feet and got to the open front door. She vomited on her own doorstep, sobbing at the pain of her empty belly heaving on nothing.

Like a blessing, she felt a cold cloth scented with lavender oil laid gently on the back of her neck. “Thank you,” she said, and wiped her face and hands. She stepped back and sat on the bed, looking up at Alys as if her daughter were her judge.

“Were you forced, Ma?” the young woman asked more gently. “Is that what happened?”

Alinor turned from the temptation of a lie. “No.”

“They won’t stop asking. You’ll have to tell. Did you not think of this?”

“I didn’t think . . . till this very moment . . . that I was with child. I hadn’t thought—” She broke off. There was no way to explain to this new challenging Alys that she had thought her sickness was heartache, that her inability to eat was pining for the man she loved, that she had embraced it, like a penance, as he too might be fasting as punishment for his love for her. She had thought the two of them were working their way to be together, he fasting in Douai, and she here, on the edge of the mire, aching for him too, eating only bread and small ale, sick for love.