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The manservant cast him an injured glance and showed it: A Compleat Geography of the World.

Mary smirked to herself over the stocking she was darning. Let him look at pictures all he liked, the fellow clearly hadn't the stomach to get him any farther than Abergavenny. He'd had a face like a basset-hound for a fortnight now; he was beginning to get on her nerves.

The master gave a respectful whistle at the title. 'Compleat,, eh? Not a South Sea island left out?'

Mrs. Jones made a little clucking with her tongue.

'Quite right, my dear, whistling's a vulgar habit,' said her husband. 'I must leave it behind me if we're to advance in the world. You won't grow up to be a whistler, will you, Hetta?'

The child shook her head and writhed on her mother's knees. Mrs. Jones bent over the child to neaten her tangled white curls and sang under her breath:

Migildi Magildi hei now now,

Migildi Magildi hei now now.

'What does that mean?' asked Mary.

Mrs. Jones's eyes went wide as if reading the words on the air. 'I couldn't rightly say, Mary. I had it from my mother.'

Nothing had a reason, in this part of the world, Mary thought irritably; things were as they were simply because they were set that way a hundred years ago.

Hetta pulled free of her mother's fingers and climbed up into her father's asymmetrical lap. 'Fafa,' she began conversationally, 'where did your leg go?'

Mary pricked up her ears.

'It's here in my breeches,' Mr. Jones told Hetta with perfect gravity.

'No Fafa,' the child squealed, pounding his thigh, 'your other leg.'

'Mercy on me, it's gone!' Her father tugged at the fold of soft cloth in shock. 'I must have dropped it in the river.'

'You didn't.' She let out her soprano laugh.

His face furrowed in thought. 'Well, maybe I left it behind a hedge and it was gone when I came back for it.'

'No.' Hetta crowed in delight.

'Well then, it must have come off when your mother pulled off my boot last night.'

'Is it in the boot still?'

'I suppose so.'

'Where's the boot then, Fafa?'

'I must have dropped it in the river.'

Hetta squealed again.

She was still wide awake at eight, after her father had gone off with a lantern to his Tradesmen's Club. ('Gossip and cheap port upstairs at the King's Arms,' confided Mrs. Jones to Mary.) The child pulled at Mary's sewing, and kept asking to try a stitch, till the older girl itched to stick her needle into the creamy-blonde head.

'Come here now, cariad, till I tell you a story,' said Mrs. Jones, pulling the child out of Mary's way. Hetta sat down on the end of her mother's skirts. Daffy, snoozing glumly in his chair, moved his feet to make room for her. 'There was once an old couple—'

'What were they called?' demanded Hetta.

'Huw. And Bet,' said Mrs. Jones, licking her thread into shape. Mary, watching her over the hillock of darning on the little table between them, wondered if the woman was making it all up as she went along. 'And they went to the winter fair at Aberystwyth, so they did, and hired themselves a serving girl.'

'What was—'

Mrs. Jones interrupted her daughter's question. 'Elin.'

She sounded so sure of that name, Mary began to wonder if this were a true story.

'And a very good maid she was.'

Mary's lip curled. She hated stories about good maids. At school the teachers used to talk about virtuous servants whose rewards awaited them in the Hereafter. They made the Mighty Maker sound like the kind of master who was always years in arrears on the wages.

'And the three of them,' Mrs. Jones went on, 'lived happily all through the winter in their farm in the shelter of the hills.'

How did anyone know they'd been happy, thought Mary? How could anyone be sure that Elin wasn't dreaming of the city, with its lights so vivid she could taste them on her tongue?

'When summer came,' Mrs. Jones went on, 'every evening Elin used to take her spinning-wheel down to the meadow and sit beside the stream, singing as she worked. The master and mistress were delighted that Elin spun so much, and they used