They moved toward the sea. The country was not populous. Avoiding as they did all beaten ways, taking cover where they might of wood or hillside, they seemed to have come into a realm of security. They were faint with hunger. Before them rose a solitary cottage bowered in trees. After weighing it this way and that, they went forward soft-footed, and peered from behind a stout hedge of thorn. A blue feather curled from the chimney, the door stood open, and on a sunny-space of grass three young women were spreading linen to bleach. They hummed and chattered as they worked; they were rosy and comely, and looked kind.
Aderhold spoke with his hands on the top of the gate. “Maidens, will you give two hungry folk a bite and a sup? We can pay a penny for it.”
The three looked up and stood in doubt; then one ran to the cottage door. An elderly woman, tall and comely, appeared, hearkened to her daughter, then stepped across the bit of green to the gate. “Be you vagrants and masterless men?”
“No,” answered Aderhold. “We are honest folk seeking work, which we look to find in the port. We are not far from it, good mistress?”
“Less than three miles by the path, the lane, and the road,” said the woman. “You can see the roofs and towers and, if you listen, hear the church bells.”
They were, indeed, ringing, a faint, silver sound. Aderhold listened; then, “We are very hungry. If we might buy a loaf of you we would eat it as we walked—”
“Nay, I’ll give you bread,” said the woman. “I or mine might be hungry, too, sometime—and what odds if we never were!” She spoke to one of the three standing amid the bleaching linen. “Alice! get the new-baked loaf—”
Alice turned toward the cottage. The two others came nearer to the gate. The church bells were still ringing, fine and far and faint. They seemed to bring something to the woman’s mind. “They say they’ve taken the Hawthorn folk who ran from prison.”
“Where—”
“Two men came by and told us. A miller and his men and dogs took them last night. They fought with fire and Satan was seen above the mill-wheel. But they took them all, the two men said, and gave them to the nearest constable, and so now the countryside can rest.” She stood with her capable air of strength and good nature, looking over the green earth to the distant town. “There must be witches because God wrote the Bible and it cannot be mistaken. Otherwise, of course, there are a lot of things.... I used to know Hawthorn when I was a girl. And Roger Heron. More years than one I danced with him about the maypole—for then we had maypoles.”