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pushing something terrible at your back which you don’t turn round to for fear of seeing it.
    I heard steps behind me and I was halfway across the yard.
    It was Anne. She was panting. The cows followed her, nudging. She held herself tight and looked up at me, fierce but frighted.
    ‘What rings?’ she said.
    Thomas Walters was in the door, in the shadows.
    I shrugged as a man does when he is at the fair and offered a low price.
    ‘What rings?’ she said, real fierce.
    The poor cows were nudging her but she was stone, like.
    ‘I’d say he brought them back for you and the farm. He’ll be a sad man but it’s no one’s doing. He was a boy. He fought for the kingdom of God on earth, and shook General Cromwell’s hand. He’ll set hisself up.’
    ‘He had nothing,’ she said.
    ‘Maybe,’ I said.
    ‘Nothing. And he never did. He was never good for anything but what he went and done. He left me,’ she said, and she was shivering.
    ‘He did,’ I said. I made to move but she held my arm like a jaw round a bone.
    ‘Nothing,’ she said, between her teeth, that were half of them gone already, and she only thirty or so.
    She was nevertheless a handsome woman.
    I thought of telling Ruth but I didn’t. She would only grumble that it was none of my business and there would be trouble. So I watched her go to sleep that night after prayers without talking, as we sometimes did, both staring at the thatch above our beds and wondering in between the words how we would fare when the other went under and there was only the rats rustling, not a body you had touched. We never talked that night and I didn’t tell her.
    Then the lambing started and I were sleeping out, but I thought of Gabby all through the lambing. He had left a silence where I heard my own whispering, that was many things going round and round in my head. I took up a Bible and heard the parson’s words as I read because I couldn’t read the letters, but always the whispering came on the wind and the taste of bitterness like the smoke that would blow sometimes out of the coomb across my scarp. And I shook my head but the whispering grew louder. I thought I might be going mad like half the old shepherds went up there all on their own.
    I thought of how he had shook hands with General Cromwell in all the smoke and all the women and children of Drogheda spilled like empty sacks that Gabby had helped empty. And I saw Ruth among them, I don’t know why. She had her legs wide open like the times we made a babby or like a ewe ready for a ram. And there was General Cromwell shaking hands with Gabby and both smiling while Thomas Walters clacked his teeth together next to them and turned round and saw me looking on my damp log, and shot me.
    These were dreams but I was awake. I shook my head free of them and took to making dolls out of straw but always they had their legs wide open and they smiled like General Cromwell or Thomas Walters. And sometimes as I was lifting out a lamb I thought of Anne with my hand inside her which was really Ruth and the ewe kicking out its legs as the lamb came out in a slither, all new.
    It was on account of guilt, I reckoned, and one day in April I went to the church and left the boy with the flock and the church was empty. It still smelt of whitewash where all the old paintings had been covered over by the soldiers and the parson looking on nodding all the time, though he cried that night as I remember. I must say that I could remember all the paintings and when I looked at the white walls they were there anyway, particularly Noah and the funny old sheep that were clambering up in a pair to the only ship I had ever seen, rocking on those little blue waves that was the beginnings of the Flood, I suppose.
    I stood in the middle of the church and looked round slowly at the walls and saw all the paintings from Creation to Judgement Day, and in my mind heard the parson’s words, and the rim on my hat was fair crumpled up I was that nervous