“There can be no objection to dancing at harvest home,” James interrupted. “Oliver Cromwell himself does not object to a glass of wine and godly merriment.”

“Not pagan dances,” Ned said stiffly. “And harvest home with the Harvest King and Queen is both pagan and monarchical.”

James tried to choke back a laugh but Ned was red to his ears and looked angry. “My sister’s situation is awkward.” Ned turned on him. “You wouldn’t know, Mr. Summers, but this is a small island, and nobody has anything to do but gossip.”

“No one says anything against me,” Alinor argued. “And everyone knows that Alys is your niece and a godly child. She can dance with her friends, Brother. Surely she can!”

“As you wish,” he said sulkily. “But you should both leave before the harvesters get drunk.”

“Of course. You know I always do.”

They had set up trestle tables laden with dishes in the mill yard. Sir William stood at the head of the table and the miller and his wife stood at the foot. “Will you say grace, Mr. Summer?” he invited.

James had to leave Alinor without another word, take his place, put his hands together, and say a prayer.

Ned listened suspiciously for any old-fashioned doctrine, but James Summer recited the grace in simple comprehensible English, as plain and unvarnished as any army preacher.

“Amen!” said everyone, and seated themselves all in a jumble, on the benches and the stools, except for Sir William, who took the great Carver chair, brought from the house, at the head of the table. The miller sat on one side of him and James Summer on the other. Rob was seated farther down the table opposite Walter, Mrs. Miller at the foot with her daughter at her right hand. Sir William drank a glass of the Millers’ ale, but did not dine. He sat for a little while and then nodded to his groom for his horse. “So, you have my good wishes, and I will leave you,” he announced. He glanced at James Summer. “The boys can stay to dance if they like,” he said.

“I’ll bring them home in good time,” James promised him.

Sir William closed one eye in a knowing wink. “Let them have a cup of ale or two and a dance with a pretty girl,” he said. “Maybe a kiss and a romp behind a haystack if the fathers are looking the other way!” Some of the nearby men guffawed at the bawdy suggestion, but most were coldly silent.

James did not dare look towards Ned, who was bristling with indignation. “No, no, they will behave themselves,” he said repressively.

His lordship laughed, as if to say that he did not care about good behavior at harvest home, and stepped up on the mounting block to wait for his horse. His groom brought his charger to the block and held it while his lordship heaved himself into the saddle, gathered up the reins, and nodded to the Millers and the diners in the yard. “Good Harvest!” he said, and smiled when they raised the cups and mugs and repeated the toast. Then he turned and rode away, his groom following him.

Alinor felt her brother’s eyes on her. “What’s the matter?” she demanded.

“It makes my blood boil, how he speaks,” Ned exclaimed. “He lost the war, his king is in our keeping, and yet still he rides around as if he owns the place—because he does still own the place! How can everything change and nothing change? How can he say that Master Walter can take a girl behind the haystacks, as if the girls are at his bidding! As if they are as light as that old goat’s mistress in London town?”

“Hush,” Alinor said swiftly. “Don’t spoil it.”

“It’s spoiled for me already,” he said furiously.

“Why the long face, Ned?” the blacksmith from Birdham called to him. “I’d have thought you’d have been pleased with the news from the North?”

Ned’s head went up like a hound hearing the hunting horn. “I’ve heard no news from the North,” he said. “What’ve you heard?”

A number of men turned to the blacksmith. “And how d’you know anyway?” someone demanded suspiciously.

“Because I shod the horse of a man carrying the newspapers, and he gave me one. He was carrying the Moderate Intelligencer for sale. Showed it to me and read it to me. Gave it me in payment.” He brandished an ill-printed twice-folded paper.

“Read it!” someone exclaimed.

“I don’t read so very well,” he confessed. “But he told me it was good news for parliament.”

“I’ll read it,” Ned said impatiently. “Give it here.”

The men gathered round him as he spread it flat on the table and, ignoring the dishes as they were brought from the mill kitchen, spelled out the words.

“From Warrington, 20th August,” he said slowly. “A godly victory.”

“Victory to the army?” someone asked.

“God be praised. Wait, wait, I’m reading it. Yes. It looks like a true report. Someone reporting from the battle. It says that Oliver Cromwell joined with John Lambert’s Horse—they mean his cavalry—in time to catch the Scots at Preston and split them in two. It’s a victory. God has saved us: the Scots are broken.”

“God bless us: we’re safe?”

“Does it say how?”

“Many dead?”

“Bad weather, hmm hmm, listen . . . I’ll read it . . .”

After a tedious and weary march, enduring many difficulties and pressures, through the unseasonableness of weather and extreme badness of ways: Lieutenant General Cromwell joining with the Northern Brigade, came on Thursday, very early in the morning, our army marched towards Preston, where the enemy lay all about, both Scottish and English. The enemy was sufficiently alarmed by the resolute going on of our men who thereupon drew up on a Moor two miles Eastward from Preston. Our forlorn—

“What?” demanded one of the women reaping gang.

“Our ‘forlorn hope,’ our men in the front, with the hardest job to do,” Ned explained, and went on reading:

. . . with gallant courage, notwithstanding the deepness of the ways and the enclosures which were much to our disadvantage, still pressed on, charged several of the enemies’ bodies, routs them and gains their ground.

“They were fighting alone?”

“Desperately,” Ned said, his brow knotted.

Our forlorn had several encounters and behaved themselves gallantly, and about 4 of the clock in the afternoon, as soon as the narrowness of the lanes and passages would permit, our Infantry comes up to the relief of our forlorn and to the heat of the battle with an extraordinary cheerfulness.

“At Preston?”

“So it says.”

“Isn’t that a long way south for the Scots to come?” someone asked nervously. “Isn’t that far south? Nearly to Manchester?”

“Yes,” Ned answered dourly. “It’s dangerously far south. We can all thank God that He sent General Cromwell to stop them there. Before they got even closer.”

“He did stop them? It says, for sure, that he did stop them?”

“I’ll read you the rest . . .”

The contention was sore and desperate, some of our men being wounded and the horses slain, for we gained hedge after hedge, which they had strongly manned and one part of the lane after the other with abundance of hazard as well as gallantry—