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She looked at the ground, not wanting him to see that she was smiling with pleasure.

“Maybe you’ll manage,” she suggested in pretended doubt.

“Manage!” He outlined every detail of the fulling mill to her, explained how the heavy timber was being brought down from Godefroi’s estate to make the huge hammers, the turning mechanism with its cogs and ratchets and the huge water wheel. “It’ll be like the mill at Downton,” he proclaimed, “but I’ll run it even better.”

She turned her eyes on him for a moment.

“I shouldn’t think much of you if you didn’t,” she challenged him.

He had known her all his life; how was it that a few words from her could still send such a thrill of excitement through him? He would prove himself and then, in a year or two, as soon as he had made a success of the mill, he would marry her. The prospect had been one of the secret but fixed points in his imagination almost as long as he could remember, and as he saw it coming nearer he felt a glow of warmth and anticipation. “In a year, I’ll ask her father,” he promised himself.

She was a neat little figure with freckles and reddish brown hair which she wore cut short at the neck like a boy’s. She was light on her feet: when he was a boy, he had been able to outrun her, but she was never far behind, and when the children of the area had gone swimming in the broad pools near Wilton, she was like a fish in the water so that not even the boys could catch her. Her only brother, Walter, was many years older and so she had come to take his place like a second son to her father, whose calm authority she admired. “I’m not a boy,” she had told Peter when she was seven, “but I’m as good as any boy.”

How long ago that seemed. Walter was now a successful royal official at Winchester, where his father’s influence had obtained him the post of aulnager, and in the last two years Peter had watched Alicia grow up and ripen so that now it was no longer his childhood sweetheart who walked beside him but a new, only half familiar young woman, about whom there was a sense of mystery and excitement which sometimes made him tremble when he thought of her.

It was her eyes above all that he loved. They were not like any others he knew. At one moment they seemed to be hazel, though flecked with green and blue around the irises; a moment later, with a change of light, or perhaps a change in her mood, they were an astonishing violet. It was an inheritance from her mother.

“Let’s go to the market,” she suggested.

The big, irregular area was filled with sound and activity.

On the west side stood the squat new church of St Thomas à Becket, which served as parish church for the trading area; though the town was expanding so fast that soon another church might be needed. Near the church was a cheese market. At the opposite, east end, were pens for livestock. Near the centre, a reminder of the bishop’s authority over criminals, stood the stocks. And along the south side, in several rows, were the stalls.

There were the wheelwrights’ stalls and next to them Bottle Row, where not only bottles, but crockery and pewter were busily traded. There was Fish Row, Ironmonger Row, Cooks’ Row, and Cordwainers’ Row – this last being where a motley collection of shoemakers and cobblers stitched and tapped behind their tables. There were butchers, bakers, cloth-sellers, tailors, silversmiths, carpenters, leatherworkers, bellows-makers, glovers, hatters, yarnmakers, rabbitsellers, spicers, greengrocers, garlic sellers, and poultry merchants. There were coopers, with their barrels piled in tiers, coalsellers, salt merchants, oatmeal-sellers, dealers in hogs; and by a cross at the south east corner, the all-important wool merchants held their own market. The place was alive with all the colourful profusion of specialist trades that made up the medieval world – and which, at this time, gave family names such as carter, cooper, butcher, or tailor, to so many of its people.

They spent an hour wandering amongst the brightly coloured stalls. The crowds