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and was full of air and nothingness, and this hollow feeling hurt so much inside that I had my hands pressed to my chest as I crossed the common in the dark. And so it was I came to the camp where some of the women were seated round a fire and the Marsh cousin took one look at me and handed me a bundle and I was in that much of a state it took me a moment or two to realise she was handing me my son.
    I took him, and I thought how he seemed heavier since Dei had died. He was quiet for once, and I put his arm around my neck, and I felt myself begin to weep, and I did not want to frighten him so’s I tried to do it quietly but he must have felt my body shake, for he did something he had never done before. He clutched at me. He was so little, he was only just able to move his arms and do such a thing. But as I held him, he held me back, and it was the sweetestfeeling I had ever had. And I loved the weight of him, my son. And I thought how my Dei must have held me like this once, and how these things continued, and how my Lijah was now all to me, all, and as long as there was breath in my body, nothing nor nobody would ever take him from me, and if I close my eyes I can still see the loud orange flames against the blue-black sky and the shower of sparks and hear my Dadus howling and feel my soft, heavy son in my arms, even now.

C HAPTER 4
    T he time has come to talk of Lijah grow’d, for that is the marrow and fatness of my story.
    I sometimes think on’t, that Lijah is my story. Until you have a child, you believe the story is yourself, for your small mind cannot stretch beyond that, and why should it? You have no other way of thinking. It is when you have a babby that you realise the world goes on and on, and you are not the story any more, you are just a small part of someone else’s story. A bit like us going round the sun ’stead of the other way round. I had my son, and then I went around him, and when he was not there it was dark – and I’m not saying we don’t all need a bit of night-time too, for we do, but there was no daybreak until I knew where my Lijah was and what he was about.
    When he was small, I thought it might stop when he was grow’d, but if anything my feelings for him grow’d as well. It was because he had naught else but me, so I had to be enough to make up for that, and I reckon it became a habit I could not stop.
    No girl would ever have been good enough for my Lijah. I’m not so stupid as to think that. But of all the lasses in the Fens, the flat old Fens where you can see as far as you like and know the world is big enough for anything, he had to pick her, the grasni, all clouds of gingery hair and great huge cheeks and hips and all bigness and softness like an eider you could lose yourself in. Oh, I’m not saying I couldn’t see the attraction.
    The thing is, about redheaded people, they smell a bit high.
    *
    We went fruit picking every summer when Lijah was a boy. The travelling was all a-slowing down by then, for they had made a new law, the gorjers, that said we should not camp on the commons no more and this made it very hard as we were not allowed to stop on roadsides or farmers’ lands neither. The only way we could stop anywhere when we needed to was by breaking the law – and as we were breaking the law we only did it for a short bit before moving on to break the law somewhere else. So their new law meant we had to break the law a lot more often than what we had before.
    The only time the farmers wanted us was when it was a harvest, of course, and then we had fine times for it was like the old days with folk showing up from all over. That and the horse fairs was the only times it was like it was.
    It was by the cherry orchards of a farmer named Childer that the part of my life as it was ended. I was married by then, to Adolphus Lee, and then widowed within half a year of Lijah being married himself, but I am getting ahead of myself and getting things in not-the-right-order