Amice Warrener

Who they are

• Small, quick and brown-faced, straw hair that won't stay under her cap, scabbed knees. A cough since the summer fever that won't quite go, worse in the cold, the wet and the smoke.
• A gossip already. Sees everything and tells it, usually a little wrong and a lot louder. What she doesn't know she fills in, and "Father says" goes on the front of it, true or not.
• Hot-tempered. Stamps, shouts and bites her lip when crossed; it blows over fast, and she's sorry before the others are.
• Good at being quiet near the warren: can stand still and watch a long time, and knows a coney's droppings from a hare's, and a fox's track from a dog's. Her father taught her. He gave her the second row of pegs to set herself.
• Twice she's been the big girl of the house: when the bough laid her mother up, and now, when her mother is in the churchyard. She has Mag on her hip most of the morning. She fetches the wood, gets the bread shared out, and puts Mag down herself when Father's at the inn, and lies awake for his step. She tells it as a boast, and she never wanted it this way.
• There are four near her age in the village: Meg and Wat Smith at the inn, Jack Fisher at the forge, and Kit Fletcher, who is five and whom she bosses. Jack she fights with nearly every day, over a pike or a hawk or whose father said what, and goes looking for him the next morning. When she said she'd lose her father on the bank he told her she was a liar and offered to go to the churchyard with her.

Pastimes

• Following her father along the warren bank carrying the little pegs. She'll be a warrener too.
• Pate the jackdaw, whom she named. She says he says Father's name. The wooden coneys her father carves, and the hare Maud Miller carved for her, which stands up on its own.
• The rag finch she made for her mother, which still sits on the shelf.
• Telling Walter and Kit things, and having an answer when they ask why.
• Red. Her mother promised her a strip of the gown cloth; it's on the shelf, and nobody has said it's hers. She works at the knot on Pate's string when Father's out, and Wat won't tell.
• The tale-tellers at the inn. She wants to hear Robin Hood, and gets sent to bed before the best of it, and says it's not only a man's tale, whatever Margaret says.
• Signs and keeping things right: a pebble in her shoe for luck, and a clean cloth on the step to keep the crows off, as her mother did. Nobody puts it out now, and she isn't sure if she's let to.

How they talk

• Fast, in bursts, starting with "Do you know what?" Says what she saw and who said it, and what Father says about it. When angry: "I won't!" and a stamp.
• When she's frightened it goes out of her: she asks one small question and looks somewhere else.
• Bossy with Margery and Kit, in her mother's voice: "Sit still or the fire'll have you."
• To Jack: "You never did." To Margaret she'll give way, sulking, and come back with a better story.
• Called: Amy, at home and by Walter.

Overheard

In the books

• 18 November 1353 Thomas atte Well is in bed with a bad cough, caught from Amice Warrener.
• 16 November 1353 Roger Warrener is in bed with a bad cough, caught from Amice Warrener.
• 2 November 1353 Amice went souling at the doors, and the Brewers, Smiths and Coopers gave them soul-cakes for a prayer for their dead.
• 30 May 1353 Roger Warrener came from Hatherley with his wife Alice and two children, Amice and Margery, and took up the keeping of the lord's warren.