hers it was impossible to make herself invisible. Joan spotted her and pushed through the women towards her. Her lips were pursed as tight as the cat's arse- hole before she even reached Elena.
Shrinking from whatever spiteful remark she knew was already in Joan's mouth, Elena's grip faltered and the greasy calf's stomach slipped out of her swollen fingers and plunged to the floor, where all the liquid gushed out over her shoes. Elena tried to struggle off the keg to retrieve it, but Joan snatched it up.
'Such a wicked waste! The stomach can only be filled six times afore its juice is too weak to use. And you've already lost the first and strongest filling through your clumsiness.'
Marion took the stomach from Joan's hand and deftly poured more blackthorn water into it.
'Stop mithering the poor lass, Joan. There's no harm done, bag's not even been put to soak yet.' She winked at Elena, who smiled gratefully.
Joan's face flushed with indignation.
But Marion ignored her. 'How goes it, lass? You bearing up? Not long to go now, I'm thinking. Last weeks are always the worst, but it'll be worth it when you hold your own babe in your arms. You'll be cursing your Athan to Norwich and back when the pains are on you, but the moment they put that bairn to your breast you'll not remember a thing about sore backs or birth pains, isn't that so, girls?'
The other women smiled, murmuring their agreement.
'But you make the most of these last weeks, lass,' Marion said. 'Once the bairn comes, that'll be the end of a good night's sleep for years to come, 'cause even when they're weaned, they'll still keep you awake worrying about them.'
'My poor son hasn't had a good night's sleep since that girl moved in with us,' Joan snapped, still smarting from Marion's intervention.
Marion raised her eyebrows, grinning. 'Is that right? Keeping his pike well oiled are you, lass? Good for you.'
'No she is not!' Joan spluttered furiously. 'In her condition, I'd never allow it. I know my duty to protect my grandchild, even if its own mother doesn't. No, it's her dreams keeping us all awake. Night after night, moaning in her sleep. I've scarcely been able to close my eyes these past months. It's a miracle I've not been driven to my grave.'
'Bad dreams, is it, lass?' Marion asked sympathetically. 'Every woman gets those, 'specially with the first one.'
'Not like hers,' Joan said tardy. 'Same dream over and over she gets, or so she says. She hears her baby crying and goes to pick him up, only he won't stop so she dashes his brains out.'
Several women gasped and spat three times on their forefingers to ward off the evil that might follow such words, and even Marion looked troubled.
For a moment no one spoke, then Marion said with a forced cheerfulness, 'I used to dream I'd put the baby down in the field and when I came back he'd turned into a mushroom, with eyes and a mouth bawling fit to bust. Put me in mind of the lad's father, dead spit of him, now I think on it.'
Several of the women chuckled. Every one of Marion's brood had a different father, but none of them ever stayed around long enough to discover they had offspring.
'I dreamed I dropped mine in the wash pool,' one of the other women said. 'Sometimes I wish I had. Might have knocked some sense into the little brat.'
The women murmured their heartfelt agreement. Her son was the torment of the village. His mother wore herself out with scolding him, but if anyone ever went to her cottage to complain about him, she stood up for him more fiercely than any sow-badger defending her cubs.
Marion nudged Joan with her elbow. 'You had dreams too when you were carrying your Athan. I remember you telling me. Didn't you dream you baked your babe into a pie thinking it to be a hare?'
The women exchanged sly grins and Joan flushed. 'Maybe I did, but I've never harmed so much as a hair on my dear boy's head.'
That wasn't entirely true and the whole of Gastmere knew it. Athan could still painfully recall the sting of his mother's switch which she had wielded vigorously on numerous occasions, whenever she fancied he was in danger of turning out like his feckless father.
'There, you see,' Marion said, patting Elena's shoulder heartily, 'every woman has these strange fancies when they're with child, and nothing comes