“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.

“Bring some of your cordial when you come tomorrow for harvest home,” Mrs. Miller told Alinor, as she turned to weigh another gleaner’s load. “My back feels like it’s on fire, bending over this all day.”

Alinor nodded. “I’m coming to glean in the afternoon. I’ll bring it then,” she said.

The water in the harbor was low, the millpond brimming, gates gently bumping together, pushed shut by the dark weight of the water in the deep pond. As the weary women walked to the white-painted gate of the yard, one of the miller’s young men walked around the millpond wall, balanced like an acrobat on the top of the gates, the dark waters lapping below him. He shouted boldly: “Good night! See you tomorrow!” to Alys.

All signs of her fatigue fell away in a moment. She could have been a princess hearing a tribute. She did not answer him, but she inclined her head, smiled very slightly, and walked on. Alinor, watching her, saw her weary daughter transformed.

“Who was that?” Alinor asked, hurrying her steps to catch up.

“Who?”

“That young man?”

“Oh, I think that’s Farmer Stoney’s son, Richard,” she said.

“Farmer Stoney from Birdham?”

“Yes.”

“Handsome young man,” Alinor observed.

“I’ve never noticed,” Alys said with immense dignity.

“Quite right,” her mother replied with a hidden smile. “But I noticed, and I can tell you: he’s a very handsome young man. He’s the only son, isn’t he?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Alys exclaimed, and strode ahead of her mother along the track to the ferry, so that when Alinor came up, Alys was standing beside her uncle Ned in the ferry, one hand on the rope, waiting for her mother.

Alinor paused on the bank, as some of the other women and a few of the reapers hurried past her to take their place on the ferry to go to their homes on Sealsea Island. Alys went among them, collecting the copper coins and calling out the promises to pay to Ned. Only when the ferry was full and ready to go did Alinor go down the bank and take tight hold of the side of the craft, and she was first off at the other side. The women laughed at her. “She’d be no good as a barker for you!” they teased Ned. “Nobody would ever take your ferry if they saw your sister’s face!”

Alinor raised a hand at the old joke. “I’ll come to pick plums tomorrow before gleaning,” she said to Ned.

He nodded. “I’m always here,” he said. “The good lord knows that I am always here.”

Alys and Alinor went about their chores in the shadowy cottage in weary silence. Alys opened the door for the gently clucking hens and they hurried into their corner of the cottage to roost. Both women drank a cup of small ale, and then Alinor washed her face and hands in a bowl of water and Alys followed her, using the same water and throwing it out of the door on the lavender and marigold plants. She knelt before her mother as Alinor combed out her fair hair and then plaited it for the night, resting her hand on her daughter’s head for a blessing. Alys, still on her knees, turned towards the bed and said her prayers, burrowed in like a mole.

“Sweet dreams,” Alinor said gently, and saw her daughter’s hidden smile.

Alinor twisted her own thick locks in a knot and tucked them under her nightcap, laid her shirt and gown over her stool, and got into bed in her linen shift. They lay side by side in bed together.

“I’m as tired as a dog,” Alys remarked, and fell asleep at once, like a child.

Alinor lay silent, her eyes wide open in the darkness. Perhaps tomorrow he would come back. Or perhaps the day after. Then she too fell asleep.

Just after midnight she started up at the loud knocking on the door. Her first frightened thought was that her husband, Zachary, had come home and was pounding on the door in a drunken rage, as he used to do. Then, as she jumped from the bed and went to the door and shot the bolt, she thought, confused by sleep, that the war had started again and the soldiers for the army, or the cavalry of the king, were knocking down her door. Her last thought, as she threw the door open, was that it was James, come for her; but there, on the doorstep, was Farmer Johnson of Sealsea.

“Thank God you’re here. It’s Peg,” he said shortly. “You must come, Mrs. Reekie. Her time’s come early, I think. We need you at once. I came as fast as I could. Come now! Can you come now?”