Wakenhyrst

by Michelle Paver

She helped Cole in the garden and he taught her how to put four seeds in every hole: One for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow.

‘All things bright and beautiful,’ she sang, ‘the Lord God made them all.’ Presumably, the Lord God had also made the malaria which had killed nine of the blacksmith’s children in Wakenhyrst, prompting his desperate wife to smother the last one in its cradle, ‘to get it over with.’