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so that her eyes never dropped during chastisement or argument. Her mother noticed this too, felt her face being eaten by the look as she chided her daughter for the carelessness with which she brought filth into the house. Often she bit her lip and clenched a hand at her side as if preparing to slap the stare away, though Ella had never laid an ill hand to her child. The pair butted heads like two rams on a narrow bridge as they met in conversation. Janet would not swallow God like her daily liver oil. She wanted to be shown His evidence, as if He were worms in the ground that would come up through loose soil seeking solid during the rain. She wanted her proof, a telescope to locate Him in the darkness. Ella warned her against false idols which she would find in such looking, and against straying too far, against fearlessness. An uneasy tension grew between them, as if they were both in themselves too charged, too magnetic to be in a room together. As if their forces would push against each other like invisible gravity from separatepoles and damage the delicate balance of the known world. So their time together took the form of brief intervals, both understanding this to be the only way.
    That morning, of Samuel’s remembering, Janet had wanted to come to move the cows as she usually did, but she was running a slight fever. Measles was spreading through the children of the adjoining Shap and Bampton valleys and her mother was worried it had now reached Mardale. Ella was acquainted with fevers of many varieties and the ones heralding trouble came with characteristics gently different from those of a simple head cold. A slight discolouration in the sweat along the temples, the eyes labouring between focus and vacancy. Influenza and child-killers made subtle alterations within the body’s subtext of massive heat. But the girl was up and dressed at five o’clock and would not hear of going back to bed and riding the fever out in comfort. She would not be talked into sickness. She would not be nursed. In truth, it may have been only exasperation over her daughter’s stubbornness that allowed her mother to let her go. Git out of mi sight then, lass, she said, turning from the bold gaze of the small fevered face. And the maternal anger was stored away for a later time.
    It was more than just a blustery autumnal morning, her father remembers, because the wind in the leaves of the great sycamores by Measand Hall was threatening sombre repercussions in the brown darkness. There were invisible ills going on, he knew it. Slates being loosened. Fencing being rocked out of its foundation. The roses newly planted in front of the cottage must have been coming away from their crutches. He could hear foliage creaking and bending, the land of the valley itself was distressed.
    Samuel held a lantern, which was flickering and threatening to blow out and would probably not last for the duration of the task. So he set it back in the shed, extinguished. Without the distraction of light, the surrounding murk became accessible to the eye. His daughter came out of the farmhousetowards him. She had on a pair of boys’ breeches, which suited better the work of these early mornings. She was dressed warmly, but as he laid a hand on her head he found her hair was damp with sweat along her brow and she may have been shivering. He asked her again, would she go inside? No. She would not.
    With the absence of a lantern, navigation of the path down to the paddock would be a question of relied-upon familiarity and concentrated vision. The daylight that morning was faltering, the clouds were racing across the sky. They set off down the lane. Samuel had with him a rope, wound in coils over his shoulder. Heavy wind in the valley often sent cattle and horses wild, they would take off in whatever direction the gusting force propelled them, filled with a frantic spirit. If this was the case, they would need to be bound round the neck and calmed, kept close. His