“And the water springs up fresh and clear every day. Isn’t it the sweetest water you’ve ever tasted?” Catherine said eagerly.

But Osmanna shuddered and turned away, her arms wrapped tightly round herself, like an abandoned child. I tried to hug her as you would any motherless waif, but she recoiled as if she thought I was going to strike her.

Pega lifted a thick swathe of cut hay and rubbed some of the stalks through her fingers. She grimaced. “It’ll be the Devil’s own job to get this dry, but we’re late haymaking as it is, for it was such a piss-poor spring. We daren’t leave it any longer. This heat’s near to breaking.”

The sky was hazy, the sun a pale primrose disc, as if a veil of gauze had been drawn over it. You need either a good scorching sun or a stiff breeze for drying; we had neither, just this suffocating steamy wash-tub heat.

“Let’s hope it’s not a hard winter,” I said. “If the hay goes mouldy, we’ll start to lose beasts this winter, especially if it’s a hard one.”

Pega shook her head. “It’ll be wet, not cold, by my reckoning. Wet winters always follow a bad hay crop. But that’ll be a blessing, because I reckon it’ll be a bad harvest all round again.”

“You think a wet winter’s a blessing?” I asked in surprise.

“You’d rather a cold one?” Pega bound a swathe of hay deftly and dropped it for Osmanna to collect, before walking on to the next. “A freeze may be nothing when you’re tucked up in some cosy town in Flanders, but you don’t want to try it here with a sea wind cutting you in half.

“One year when I was a bairn, the river froze solid. Marshes too, even the edge of the sea. Freeze went on for weeks. We were living then at the forest end of Ulewic. Wolves came out of the trees right up to the edge of the village. Biting and scratching at the door they were, made your blood run cold to hear them. Mam clattered a stick against some pots to drive them off. Not long after, we heard screams like a girl was being murdered, though none of us dared go out to see. In the morning there was blood and hair all over the snow, with great paw prints trampled all round, and one of the Manor’s goats gone missing. Wolves had got her.”

“Thanks be to God it was only a goat,” I said, crossing myself.

“You might think that, but my brother was goatherd to the Manor then. He was only a bairn, no match for a pack of wolves.” Pega raised her voice and looked over her shoulder to see if Osmanna was listening, but she didn’t look up. “The bailiff tied my brother to the byre near the forest and gave him a right good thrashing. Then he left him tied there all night-D’Acaster’s orders. Next morning I sneaked along as soon as it was light to take him a bite to eat. I found him fainted clear away. He was near dead with the cold and terrified that the wolves might come back. Poor little reckling.”

She glowered at Osmanna as if she held her personally responsible, but Osmanna continued collecting the swathes of hay, and refused to look at Pega, though she must have heard her.

I wandered over to Osmanna, saying loudly, “Pack the swathes well down. If you just toss them on they’ll start sliding off as we take them down.” Then I added more softly, “Take no notice of Pega. She’s got a tongue as tart as lemon, but a good heart. She doesn’t really blame you.”

Osmanna stared at me, her face expressionless as if she didn’t understand what I was saying. Then she bent and wedged the swathe down in place. “Like that?” she asked.

I nodded and, defeated, turned away.

“Thank you, Beatrice.” The whisper behind me was so soft I thought I might have imagined it, for when I turned round again, Osmanna was stooping over the hay giving no sign she had spoken at all. I smiled to myself.

Pega took a long deep swig from a skin of ale before handing it to me. Then she picked the big basket of griddle cakes that Kitchen Martha had instructed a scrawny little village child to bring up to us. Grain was running low in our barns, but Kitchen Martha still continued to bake undaunted.

“Here.” Pega thrust the basket at Osmanna. “Make yourself useful, lass, take these to the bairns.”

Catherine and Osmanna wandered off after the children. Pega gazed after them, an expression of disgust on her face.

“Osmanna’s her father’s daughter all right. You’ll not get more than half a dozen words out of her and those as cold as a beggar’s arse in winter.”

“Healing Martha says she’s shy.”

“Healing Martha wouldn’t hear a bad word said about the Horned One himself. But I say if a fish is stinking, it does no good to pretend not to smell it, else it’ll poison the whole stew. Osmanna’s no fool. She deliberately makes a cowpat out of anything she doesn’t want to do so that she’s not asked to do it again. Yet, she’ll happily sit all day with her books, and Servant Martha only encourages her.”

She flashed another look of loathing at Osmanna. She was well out of earshot, but she was still watching us as if she knew we were discussing her.

“Just look at her.” Pega scowled. “She looks like she’s got the stink of the midden under her nose. Not that she’s got any cause to look down on the rest of us. I heard tell that her father turned her out of his gate for whoring. I could almost kiss the little cat, if it was true, but I don’t believe it. She’d freeze the cock off any man who tried to bed her.”

Pega had an easy way of talking about the couplings of men and women that I could never match. She’d known all breeds of men. I saw it in her face when she spoke of this man or that, vicious men who hurt her and gentle ones whose memory brought a look of mother softness to her eyes. And then there was the one who even after all these years still brought a sleep-smile to her mouth and a soft escape of breath. Once I asked his name, but she shook her head and turned away. “They don’t have names, nor faces neither.”

A woman who has tasted many men has no more curiosity. But when you have known only one and his bed was cold and cruel, then you wonder constantly if another man might have been kinder to you or if it really was your fault, as your husband constantly told you.

His mother and the priest and the physician, they all blamed me. They all said it was my fault that I was childless; my fault that my husband did not love me; my fault that I made him angry. They all said it so many times that I knew it must be true. The forsaken marriage bed and the empty crib beside it, I had only myself to blame for those things.

Sometimes I looked at men and imagined what it would be like to be loved by them. But even to imagine was a sin; the thought was as wicked as the deed. I’d been taught that with my catechism at my mother’s knee. But it was the pain which bound me to the sin, a dull empty ache that gnawed away inside me. Sometimes it lay so still that I thought it had gone. Then I would see a woman standing just so, her hand rubbing the swelling of her child-ripe belly, or I’d hear the branches of the yew tree in the churchyard rasping together in the wind as if a wailing baby was wombed within its wood. That is when it stirred again and I knew that the desperate longing to hold my own child in my arms would never leave me, not even if I lived to be as old as Abraham and Sarah.

Pega was staring intently over my shoulder at the clump of elms higher up the hill. The rooks, disturbed by something, were wheeling down and out as if trying to drive off a hawk or a cat. Their raucous cries shattered the still air. Pega stood up and shielded her eyes, then quickly crossed herself. I scrambled to my feet too, alarmed by her sign, and followed her gaze.

A young girl was standing motionless under the trees. A tangle of flaming red hair tumbled loose about her shoulders. Though she appeared to be about twelve years old, she wore nothing more than a thin dirty shift, ragged and short enough to show that her pale legs were bare.