Martha was naturally skinny but she became even thinner. Alfred was still getting taller, like a weed growing in shallow soil, and he became lanky. Agnes ate sparingly, but the baby growing inside her was greedy, and Tom could see that she was tormented by hunger. Sometimes he ordered her to eat more, and then even her iron will yielded to the combined authority of her husband and her unborn child. Still she did not grow plump and rosy, as she had during other pregnancies. Instead she looked gaunt despite her swollen belly, like a starving child in a famine.

Since leaving Salisbury they had walked around three quarters of a big circle, and by the end of the year they were back in the vast forest that stretched from Windsor to Southampton. They were heading for Winchester. Tom had sold his mason’s tools, and all but a few pennies of that money had been spent: he would have to borrow tools, or the money to buy them, as soon as he found employment. If he did not get work in Winchester he did not know what he would do. He had brothers, back in his hometown; but that was in the north, a journey of several weeks, and the family would starve before they got there. Agnes was an only child and her parents were dead. There was no agricultural work in midwinter. Perhaps Agnes could scrape a few pennies as a scullery maid in a rich house in Winchester. She certainly could not tramp the roads much longer, for her time was near.

But Winchester was three days away and they were hungry now. The blackberries were gone, there was no monastery in prospect, and Agnes had no oats left in the cooking pot which she carried on her back. The previous night they had traded a knife for a loaf of rye bread, four bowls of broth with no meat in it, and a place to sleep by the fire in a peasant’s hovel. They had not seen a village since. But toward the end of the afternoon Tom saw smoke rising above the trees, and they found the home of a solitary verderer, one of the king’s forest police. He gave them a sack of turnips in exchange for Tom’s small ax.

They had walked only three miles farther when Agnes said she was too tired to go on. Tom was surprised. In all their years together he had never known her to say she was too tired for anything.

She sat down in the shelter of a big horse-chestnut tree beside the road. Tom dug a shallow pit for a fire, using a worn wooden shovel-one of the few tools they had left, for nobody would want to buy it. The children gathered twigs and Tom started the fire, then he took the cooking pot and went to find a stream. He returned with the pot full of icy water and set it at the edge of the fire, Agnes sliced some turnips. Martha collected the conkers that had dropped from the tree, and Agnes showed her how to peel them and grind the soft insides into a coarse flour to thicken the turnip soup. Tom sent Alfred to find more firewood, while he himself took a stick and went poking around in the dead leaves on the forest floor, hoping to find a hibernating hedgehog or squirrel to put in the broth. He was unlucky.

He sat down beside Agnes while darkness fell and the soup cooked. “Have we any salt left?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “You’ve been eating porridge without salt for weeks,” she said. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“No.”

“Hunger is the best seasoning.”

“Well, we’ve plenty of that.” Tom was suddenly terribly tired. He felt the crushing burden of the piled-up disappointments of the last four months and he could not be brave any longer. In a defeated voice he said: “What went wrong, Agnes?”

“Everything,” she said. “You had no work last winter. You got a job in the spring; then the earl’s daughter canceled the wedding and Lord William canceled the house. Then we decided to stay and work in the harvest-that was a mistake.”

“For sure it would have been easier for me to find a building job in the summer than it was in the autumn.”

“And the winter came early. And for all that, we would still have been all right, but then our pig was stolen.”

Tom nodded wearily. “My only consolation is knowing that the thief is even now suffering all the torments of hell.”

“I hope so.”

“Do you doubt it?”

“Priests don’t know as much as they pretend to. My father was one, remember.”

Tom remembered very well. One wall of her father’s parish church had crumbled beyond repair, and Tom had been hired to rebuild it. Priests were not allowed to marry, but this priest had a housekeeper, and the housekeeper had a daughter, and it was an open secret in the village that the priest was the father of the girl. Agnes had not been beautiful, even then, but her skin had had a glow of youth, and she had seemed to be bursting with energy. She would talk to Tom while he was working, and sometimes the wind would flatten her dress against her so that Tom could see the curves of her body, even her navel, almost as clearly as if she had been naked. One night she came to the little hut where he slept, and put a hand over his mouth to tell him not to speak, and pulled off her dress so that he could see her nude in the moonlight, and then he took her strong young body in his arms and they made love.

“We were both virgins,” he said aloud.

She knew what he was thinking about. She smiled, then her face saddened again, and she said: “It seems so long ago.”

Martha said: “Can we eat now?”

The smell of the soup was making Tom’s stomach rumble. He dipped his bowl into the bubbling cauldron and brought out a few slices of turnip in a thin gruel. He used the blunt edge of his knife to test the turnip. It was not cooked all the way through, but he decided not to make them wait. He gave a bowlful to each child, then took one to Agnes.

She looked drawn and thoughtful. She blew on her soup to cool it, then raised the bowl to her lips.

The children quickly drained theirs and wanted more. Tom took the pot out of the fire, using the hem of his cloak to avoid burning his hands, and emptied the remaining soup into the children’s bowls.

When he returned to Agnes’s side she said: “What about you?”

“I’ll eat tomorrow,” he said.

She seemed too tired to argue.

Tom and Alfred built the fire high and gathered enough wood to last the night. Then they all rolled up in their cloaks and lay down on the leaves to sleep.

Tom slept lightly, and when Agnes groaned he woke up instantly. “What is it?” he whispered.

She groaned again. Her face was pale and her eyes were closed. After a moment she said: “The baby is coming.”

Tom’s heart missed a beat. Not here, he thought; not here on the frozen ground in the depths of a forest. “But it’s not due,” he said.

“It’s early.”

Tom made his voice calm. “Have the waters broken?”

“Soon after we left the verderer’s hut,” Agnes panted, not opening her eyes.

Tom remembered her suddenly diving into the bushes as if to answer an urgent call of nature. “And the pains?”

“Ever since.”

It was like her to keep quiet about it.

Alfred and Martha were awake. Alfred said: “What’s happening?”

“The baby is coming,” Tom said.

Martha burst into tears.

Tom frowned. “Could you make it back to the verderer’s hut?” he asked Agnes. There they would at least have a roof, and straw to lie on, and someone to help.

Agnes shook her head. “The baby has dropped already.”

“It won’t be long, then!” They were in the most deserted part of the forest. They had not seen a village since morning, and the verderer had said they would not see one all day tomorrow. That meant there was no possibility of finding a woman to act as midwife. Tom would have to deliver the baby himself, in the cold, with only the children to help, and if anything should go wrong he had no medicines, no knowledge…

This is my fault, Tom thought; I got her with child, and I brought her into destitution. She trusted me to provide for her, and now she is giving birth in the open air in the middle of winter. He had always despised men who fathered children and then left them to starve; and now he was no better than they. He felt ashamed.