“Course she did,” Alys breathed to her mother. “She’s got a bad word for everybody.”

“Mrs. Miller, of the tide mill,” she announced unnecessarily to the neighbors who had known her from childhood.

“And what did you allege before this court?” the minister asked her. “Briefly,” he reminded her. Everyone knew that Mrs. Miller, once started, was hard to halt.

“I said that I had seen her at gleaning go behind a hedge with a man of this parish and come out with her dress disordered and her hair down.”

There was a mutter of speculation around the church as to who might be the “man of this parish,” but clearly his identity was going to be kept secret. The sinful woman would be denounced, her partner would maintain his reputation. Besides, it was hardly a sin for a man; it was his nature.

“And before that,” Mrs. Miller continued, “she traduced her husband, calling him an old fool, and on market day at Sealsea market she took his purse from him and gave him a buffet and told him that she would learn him.”

“Did anyone else speak against her in court?” Sir William asked.

“I did.” One of the Sealsea Island farmers’ wives stood up. “She came to my house on my night for spinning with my friends, and she called me a doting fool for letting my husband keep my money from my spinning. She slapped my face and she pulled off my cap when I said that her child was not of her husband’s begetting, which everybody knows.”

“I spoke against her, sir.” The Peachey cook, Mrs. Wheatley, rose to her feet from behind the Peachey seats. “She came to the Priory door and she was four eggs short of her tithe, and she said if there was no king, and no bishop, then there was no lord either, and she need pay no tithes and you could do without your eggs.”

“And then there was the ride,” a voice called out from the back of the church, from where the poor tenants stood. “Don’t forget that!”

“There was a skimmington ride,” Mrs. Miller explained to Sir William. “The boys rode a donkey backwards, past her house, with a lad wearing a petticoat over his head, to show that she was unchaste and a disgrace to our village.”

Sir William looked so grave that anyone could have believed that he did not keep an expensive mistress in rooms near the Haymarket in London. “Very bad,” he said.

“And so the church court sentenced her to stand before this congregation in her shift holding a lighted taper to show her repentance for the rest of this day till sunset,” the minister said rapidly, bringing the summary of the trial to an end and moving to sentence.

The church wardens, Mr. Miller among them, opened the door of the church and Mrs. Whiting came in from the porch, in her best linen shift, holding a lit candle in her hand, barefoot and with her hair down to show her penitence. She was a woman in the middle of her life, broad at the hips and the belly and her long hair was streaked with gray. She was ashen-faced with misery.