The goat got up in the end. She got up at first light on the second morning, after a whole night in the frost beside the milestone with Tamsin’s coat over her back and Tamsin’s voice going thin and then hoarse above her. Harrow had been awake for most of it. He had sat with his back to the milestone and counted the stones of the road, because counting was what his hands did when he could not sleep, and he had heard the singing change its pitch somewhere around the middle of the night, and he had not stopped counting. A Mason who stopped counting in the cold would lose the line of a wall by morning.
The nanny rose with a grunt and a shake of her collar. Tamsin laughed, a cracked, delighted sound, and then cried, and then said she had not meant to, and then went on singing, very quietly, the same low hush she had sung over the goats in the pens. The line of goats stirred and stood. The old billy looked back at the Hold’s gate, which was out of sight now over the first ridge, and then he set off up the road as if he had never once thought of stopping.
