Katherine is feeding the pigs. She is wrapped in an old cloak, a scarf around her head, with battered boots on her feet. Her fingers are cold and red and they poke out from some old mittens. The snow has thawed but the ground is still iron hard and there's a real chill in the wind.
She taps the pail but the big boar will not come out of his sty to feed. He's lazy and irritable, an ugly brute, but he's the father of many a fine litter and that's why she bought him.
Katherine puts down the pail and blows on her fingers and then raises her eyes to see Guy standing there watching her.
How coarse he must find me now, she thinks and feels ugly and embarrassed.
Guy is wrapped up warmly, everything still slightly too big for him, but he is filling out now, eating regularly, even saying the occasional 'please' and 'thank you'. She notices that, as ever, he has his injured arm thrust deep inside his cloak. Vasey, who seems to have taken quite a liking to Guy and now tries to sleep on his bed whenever Guy will allow, is sitting at his feet.
She attempts some conversation, asking Guy if he has managed to get to the stable to see his horse. He nods and she thinks she sees a smile.
‘I am very fond of her after what she did for me,’ Katherine says, eyeing him warily, ‘She is a good horse Guy. She will have been pleased to see you.’
He simply nods.
Silence, and then he abruptly asks, ‘Could Martha or Robert not do this?’
‘Yes, yes they could. Between the four of them they could run the farm. In fact, before I moved here they did so for a while. But I like to be busy and outdoors.’ She smiles bleakly. ‘It stops me from thinking too much.’
He nods. ‘You still do not care for needlepoint?’
She laughs and feels a sudden rush of warmth that he has remembered their conversation from so long ago.
Guy watches her laugh and wonders how it can be that although she is dressed like a vagrant she still has the power to make him ache for her. She has filled out since the last time he saw her but that is not surprising. Then she had been hunted for weeks; hunted and brought down. Now she looks strong again, in control. And in delicious full bloom too, he thinks, especially that mouth.
Even during those long months when he hated her for consigning him to life as a cripple, he could not stop himself from thinking of that mouth. It had tortured him to think she might be kissing someone else, lying in the arms of another man.
He screws up his eyes and pretends to concentrate on something on the ground.
Katherine tries again with the boar, tapping the pail with her foot and clapping her hands.
Then she calls out, ‘Come on Gifford you lazy brute.’
Guy cannot help but laugh and as he does so Gifford the boar lumbers out and over to his trough.
