moral tale
-
A Pictish chief faces an impossible choice when Anglian raiders violate his daughters and threaten his settlement. An origin legend of the carved stones at Dunnicar, told through the bloodline that survived.
-
In 1780s Shropshire, a parish midwife watches a man called Odd Man Dodd move between three townships. Three people die. The children learn a rhyme. Nobody asks where the words came from.
-
In St Barrow’s, Mistress Grimshaw’s charity opens her purse only for those who beg aloud before the parish. Judith Cox, widowed and cornered, finds a way to make the purse answer the want it knows best.