Alys was pale with exhaustion, her hands and arms scratched from hugging the stooks, her apron filthy, her hair falling loose under her working cap, walking in the line with the other women, bending and gathering the cut wheat, straightening up, tying it, stacking it, bending again. She was working alongside women from Sealsea Island that she had known from childhood; but there were also day laborers come from inland, and half a dozen women were travelers, a harvesting gang that went from one farm to another through the summer. They were paid by the job, not by the day, and they set an exhausting pace that Alys had to match: she was struggling to keep up.

Alinor waited at the gate and was joined by half a dozen other women who had the gleaning rights to the mill fields. They stood together, commenting on the richness of the crop and the heat of the day until Jane rang the bell in the mill courtyard and everyone in the field turned from their work to the shade of the hedgerow and the dinner break. The gleaners went into the field, some to meet husbands or children with their dinner. Alinor walked across the spiky stubble and wordlessly held out the pitcher of small ale to her daughter. Alys drank deeply.

“Thirsty work,” Alinor said, looking at her beautiful daughter with concern.

“Filthy work,” the girl said wearily.

“Nearly done,” her mother promised her. “Come and sit.”

The men gathered into one group, passing around flasks of ale, eating the food they had brought from their homes. The women gathered at a little distance. One woman untied a swaddled baby from her back and put him to the breast. Alinor smiled at her. It was one of the babies that she had delivered in the spring.

“Is he feeding well?” she asked.

“God be praised, he is,” the woman replied. “And I still name you in my prayers for coming to me in my time. D’you want to see him?”

Alinor took the baby into her arms and gently pressed her lips to his warm head, marveling at the warmth of his skull, and the tiny plump hands.

No one else spoke as they drank and ate their first food since breakfast. When Alys had finished the thick slices of bread and the last of the smoked fish, Alinor returned the baby to the young mother, and she and Alys shared the plums from Ned’s plum tree.

“I’m surprised at you eating fruit in the sunshine, Mistress Reekie,” one of the women remarked. “Aren’t you afraid of the gripe?”

“These are from my brother’s garden. We’ve eaten them every summer and never taken ill,” Alinor explained.

“I’d never eat fruit with the sap in it,” one of the older women declared.

“I stew most of them,” Alinor agreed. “And I pickle some, and make jam, and I dry a lot of them.”

“I’ll buy two jars of your stewed plums,” one of the women offered. “And a jar of dried plums. We had your dried gooseberries at Christmas and everyone wanted more. How much’ll they be this year?”