The year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown, the corn stooked in rows; Ann was with child and the ridge of her stays was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. Fruit dropped from the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the hunt swept over the field. Christmas came and went, and then a child was born to the Cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened Juan.
“He was a kind chap, that man,” said Ann, “and we’ve no relations to please, and it’s like your name—and your name is outlandish!”
Jan’s delight was now to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever mused upon chickens, lambs and calves. “O, ah!” he would say, popping a great finger into the babe’s mouth, “O, ah!” But when, as occasionally happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of suspicion.
Snow, when it falls near spring upon those Cotswold hills, falls deeply and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. Sickness, when it comes, comes with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. Contagious and baffling, disease had stricken the district; in mid March great numbers of the country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were harried from one dawn to another. Jan would come in of an evening and recite the calendar of the day’s dooms gathered from men of the adjacent fields.
“Amos Green ’ave gone then, pore o’ chap.”
“Pore Amos,” the pitying Ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.
“And Buttifant’s coachman.”
“Dear, dear, what ’ull us all come to!”
“Mrs. Jocelyn was worse ’en bad this morning.”
“Never, Jan! Us’ll miss ’er.”