Ned went hand over hand to haul the ferry across the swiftly flowing rife. They reached the other side in moments and she was off the raft and up the steps to the safety of dry land before he had even tied up. “See you tonight,” he said. “You’d best come on the ferry. No point getting soaked.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and started off down the track along the shoreline to where the mill and the granary stood beside the stone quay with the deep water lapping at the quayside.

For once, it was peaceful in the mill yard. The water wheel was stilled; there was no rushing torrent in the millrace. The millpond was quietly filling, the great sea gates pushed open by the incoming waters, the little waves lapping up the pond wall, the water level rising steadily. Inside the mill the great grinding stones were parted and the cherrywood cogs detached. The miller was bagging up flour, and the two lads were humping it to the quayside, ready for the high-tide ships of the flour merchants.

“Good day, Mr. Miller,” Alinor called as she went past the open door.

He was white as a ghost from his flour-dusted hair to the hem of his white apron. But his smile was warm. “Good day, Mrs. Reekie! Come for gleaning?”

“Yes, and I’ve brought Alys’s dinner.”

“She’s a lucky girl to have you for a mother. Will you come to the harvest supper? Shall we have a dance, you and I?”

Alinor smiled at the old joke. “You know I won’t dance. But, of course I’m coming.”

She waved her hand, and walked across the yard between the mill and the house, through the gate at the north of the yard and into the wheat fields. The fields looked shorn, the wheat stooks dotted around on the stubble. As Alinor went through the open gate, a flock of rooks rose up before her, one after another like a string of black rosary beads.

Alys was in the line of binders, working alongside the other women laborers, following the reaping gang of men. Most of the men were stripped to the waist, their backs blistered from the sun, but the others, godly men, some of them puritans, wore their shirts modestly tucked into their breeches and tied at their sweating throats. The men were working in a line across the field in a punishingly hard rhythm: grasping a handful of wheat stalks, bending and slashing at the stalks with the sickle, straightening up and throwing the bunch behind them. Alys and other women followed them, gathering the cut stalks into armfuls, tying them with a twisted stalk, piling them in a heap for the wagon. Every so often Mrs. Miller or her daughter, Jane, came out of the house, crossed the yard, and stood at the gate to the field, her hand shielding her eyes, glaring across the field to make sure that the reapers were doing their job, and not leaving uncut wheat for the gleaners.