Alinor smiled. “Tuppence a jar, for them both. I’ll bring them to you with pleasure,” she said. “It’s been a good year for gooseberries too.”

“I’ll take a pound of them,” another woman offered.

The women stretched out their weary legs. Some of them lay back on the prickly stubble.

“Tired?” Alinor asked her daughter quietly.

“Sick of it,” the girl said irritably.

The bell, warning them that rest time was over, clanged in the mill courtyard. Mrs. Miller was a strict timekeeper. The men got to their feet, cleaned their sickles, and started to walk to the mill yard. They would bring the wagon, fork up the stooks, and take them to the barn for threshing.

Alinor handed a bag with a shoulder strap to Alys. The women who held gleaning rights on the mill fields formed themselves into a line at the foot of the field. They were careful to spread out fairly so that no one woman was given a broader sweep than another and they looked jealously down the line to see that no one was taking an advantage. Mothers and daughters, like Alinor and Alys, took care to stand wide apart to give themselves the maximum area. The line moved forward.

Wearily, the women who had worked all day for cash, now labored for themselves, bending to the ground to pick up every fallen ear of wheat, even individual grains. In some strips an inexperienced reaper had missed a stand of wheat, or crushed it down as he stood, and there the gleaners could snatch handfuls of grains. Slowly, they moved like an advancing line of infantry across a battlefield, never getting ahead of each other, holding their advance, holding the spacing between them. Alinor, her eyes fixed on the ground, bending and picking, bending and picking, was almost surprised to come to the blackthorn hedge at the end of the field, and realize that they had finished. Her bag was filled with ripe pale heads of wheat.

“Both ways,” one of the older women declared.

Alys muttered resentfully, but Alinor nodded. Nothing should be wasted, nothing should be missed. “Both ways,” she agreed.

The women changed the line, as well as turning the direction, so those who had been on the hedge at the left and those who had been on the extreme right were now at the center, so that no one would walk the same part of the field twice. Once again, they edged forward, their eyes on the ground, their hands snatching at heads of wheat, even scraping individual grains, pressing everything into their gleaners’ bags, some of them filling their upheld aprons. Only when they came to the hedge at the end of the field again did they straighten their backs and look around them.

The sun was low in the sky, sinking into drifts of gold and rose clouds. Alinor looked at Alys’s heavy bag and her own. “Good,” was all she said.

They walked together to the mill yard. Mrs. Miller had the scales out in the yard and was weighing the gleaners’ wheat, and marking the weight on a tally stick, as a record. Alinor and Alys tipped the contents of their bags into her scale and snapped off the few stalks. Mrs. Miller added weights on the scale until she said begrudgingly: “Three pounds two ounces.” Her daughter, Jane, marked the hazel stick with three thick gouges around one end and two small cuts at the foot and then sliced it in half with a little hatchet. Alinor took their half with a word of thanks, and put it in her bag. Jane Miller tossed the other into the tally stick box as a record of what the Reekie women were owed in flour, when the wheat was milled.