The Pesthouse

Eleven

Margaret needed to bully for milk three more times before her fortunes changed. For the better and for the worse. She valued these trips away from Andrew and Melody, and she knew they were glad to be free of her for a while. It was their chance to rest and recover their strength, as well as an opportunity to talk and complain freely behind her back. Having Bella entirely to herself, helping the baby to stand for a moment, rolling stones for her to crawl after, allowing her to explore her mouth, ears, and nose, tickling her — all that mothering was a joy.

Margaret had promised to reward the girl with milk, so over those few days, by trial and error, her begging and beseeching skills improved. She’d tie her scarf, put Bella on her hip, and head for anyone with goats or cows. She was ready to exploit the twin forces of a hungry and appealing child and what could be taken by the fainthearted as a diseased skull to get her way and get her milk and any other food that might be going spare.

The least neglected habitations were the best for begging. Untidy homes, she found, and homes with little to boast of were unlikely to part with anything as prized as milk unless someone was holding a blade at the owners’ throats. But tidiness suggested composure and respectability. Tidy people were more easily coerced. They had more to lose. They evidently had more to prove. Why else the public display of houseplants or painted fences or trimmed hedges on their land?

Men were easier to browbeat than women, Margaret soon discovered. For men, a child was a mystery. She had only to tell a man, “Look at my poor girl’s dry lips — that’s thirst. And look at her skin. Those blotches on her nose, you see? That’s hunger rash. My darling’s only got a day or two to live, just feel her bones,” and he would rather part with his big toe than stand accused of heartlessness. How Margaret loved her newly invented, inventive self, and how powerful she could be with certain, tidy men. But a woman, and especially one who’d been a mother, would know that just a little redness around the nose was common to all children of that age. Some kids are red around the nose for fifteen years and never hungry once.

So Margaret chose her victims carefully. Once she’d seen a man on the land, preferably near a well-kept house with livestock, she would approach, first greeting him in the old American way, then showing him the child (her beauty first, her hunger next, and then the red nose and the dry, chapped lips), and finally, if all of that had failed, dragging off her blue scarf to show the evidence of flux. This last act always had the greatest effect. Men everywhere fear illness more than women do, she supposed. But it was more complicated than that. She could not know — especially now that Franklin was not around to tell her — that as the days passed and her hair grew a little longer, she became more strikingly unusual. In the first days after the shaving, she would have seemed ugly to most men. Her color was not good. The illness bleached her. Her lids and brows, though, were red from where each pinch of hair had been plucked out by the women in her family — her mother, her two sisters. But except for the scabs where her grandpa’s shell razor had nicked her skin, her scalp had been oddly white and ailing from never having been exposed to light before.

But now her color was a healthy one. Since Ferrytown she’d had good exercise in open air, if not good food, and she had what country people call “ripe cheeks, sweet enough to pick.” Even if she did not remove her scarf, anyone could see she was a handsome woman. Her eyebrows were light and thin as yet, but that need not declare her as a recovering invalid and possibly contagious. The black-haired people of America did not expect those rare, unlucky redheads among them to have the forceful facial hair of normal folk. But with her scarf off and her history of contagion clearly on display, her attractiveness was enhanced instead of betrayed. By the fourth day of her begging her regrown head hair had become tufty enough to hide her scalp entirely under a soft, springy carpeting, but not long enough to hide the good shape of her face, the candor of her forehead, the set of her mouth. Her great green eyes, which might not see too well over long distances, looked to any observers — and there would be many — as if they were the largest eyes they’d ever seen. They’d wonder whether they would dare to sleep with her. Was such rare beauty worth the risk? It was.

So on her last trip into the final farmlands of America in search of milk, on the morning before she and the Boses expected to reach the salty, giant-pumped river, the man she found mending his harnesses outside his neat wood cottage, with its pen of three fatly uddered cows, was easily — excessively — seduced. When Margaret arrived with Bella and called out her greetings from the boundary fence, the man, like all the others before him, took hold of something with which to defend himself (in this instance, a weighted leather strap) and ordered her to stay exactly where she was and state her business unless she wanted to be driven out of the county with blood on her back.

Margaret was used to these immoderations. The man — as old as Margaret’s father by the look of him, and not as tidy as his house — did not seem alarmed. Just aggressively cautious. She gave her name. She smiled. She was polite. She introduced “her” child. She said how hungry they both were. She asked if there were any chores, anything at all, that she could do in return for a little milk and some food, and then, before he could actually suggest any suitable work, she pulled down her scarf and let the blue material puddle on her shoulders.

She saw the startled look on his face and expected him, like all the others (at least once their wives had shown their faces), to order her to keep away from the house while he brought milk and then to feed the child and leave his land immediately, or else. But this man stepped toward her, calling out to someone in the house as he did so. And then she realized, not from experience but from base instinct, that pulling down her blue scarf, together with her smiling offer to do “anything at all” in return for milk and food, had been taken by this man to be an invitation to advance and put his hands on her. Her hair was not short enough to scare him off. “You’ll have the milk,” he said. “You’ll have it twice.” Another man appeared behind him at the door.

When Margaret and Bella had not returned to their rendezvous tree by late afternoon, Andrew Bose acted out of character. Anxious, fretful, and exasperated by Melody’s demands that he “do something on his own account for a change” rather than just cussing their misfortune and feeling sorry for himself, he volunteered to do exactly what she suggested and risk “a little scout” into the nearest fields.

He left his wife in charge of all their possessions. She would, she said, make as much smoke as she could if the missing couple were to return in his absence and as much noise as she could if a stranger approached and offered her “any inconvenience.” She was pleased with herself for sounding so spirited in such worrying circumstances. In fact, she had discovered, and liked herself for it, that she could be tougher—steelier, to use the older word — than she had expected. Acton first. Now Bella. She still felt strong and calm and ready to be tested further, although she acknowledged in her heart that the prospect of Andrew’s being the third loss to the family was one that was mildly amusing to her imagination only so long as it didn’t actually happen. He was thin water, though. No denying it.

Her husband set off across the strips of field toward the wood cottage that Margaret had identified, just before noon, as promising. Andrew, whose distance eyesight was still sharp despite his age, had clambered onto the same tree trunk as Margaret and agreed that, yes, her eyes were not deceiving her, that was a man outside the house and those were cattle, though he could not specify whether they were shes or hes.

“Take your knife,” Melody instructed him, but he thought it better to arrive at the dwelling empty-handed. He doubted that the inhabitants would want any nets mended — they hadn’t passed a decent river for days — and knew for certain that he would not be able to use a knife effectively for any other purpose. He had no plan in mind, other than to take no great risks. He’d satisfy his wife’s challenge and no more. He would walk as quietly as he could, keeping to the shade and to the low ground as much as possible, and see what he could see from a safe distance.

He did not approach the house directly by its path but followed a line of trees and then a highish loose stone wall that provided good cover. The only sound he could hear, apart from the entirely natural disharmony of birds and wind and branches, was the half gate of an abandoned hut that was swinging noisily on the last of its leather hinges and repeatedly banging its jamb. But by the time Andrew Bose had reached the end of the wall a dog had begun barking. You can’t creep up on a dog. Andrew waited. There was no point in running away from a dog. He expected it to arrive with its inquiring nose at any moment. He would do his best to charm it. Perhaps he should have brought that knife. Stabbing a dog would be no more difficult, surely, than gutting a good-sized fish. But not only did the dog fail to arrive, it also stopped barking after a while.

Andrew counted to a hundred before he dared to stand a little and look over the wall toward the house. There was a dog, its head between its paws, safely leashed at the side wall, but no one was looking out across the land to discover why his guard had been making such a din. The only movement Andrew could spot was from the back of the house, where there were at least three cows in a deeply slurried pasture. For a moment he was tempted just to stand up and call out Margaret’s name. If he shouted loud enough and then ducked behind his wall, he would be able to hear any reply but no one would be able to see who’d done the shouting or where from. But they might untie the dog. And, as he had seen, the dog was a large one. Even if they did not release the dog (and a clear sense of they had already formed in his imagination: they were the same group who had already taken Acton), if they decided to chase after him, what chance would an old, tired man like him stand? No, he would stick to his current policy and stay both quiet and hidden. He skirted the front of the house, still pressing close to fences, walls, and hedges, until he reached the boundary of the cow paddock, on the opposite side of the house from the dog. There he could hope that his odor might be masked by stronger ones.

He waited for another count of a hundred, watching for any movement. There was nothing. He felt reasonably satisfied that unless the rooms were occupied by drunks or men without legs or hostages tied up, the only living creatures within the grounds of this house were the cattle and the dog. So, thinking not only of the heroic tale he would be able to tell Melody later that day but also of how he would never forgive himself if this first chance of finding his granddaughter was refused, he walked across the pasture, using the cows as shields as much as possible, and pressed himself up against the rear of the cottage. Again he waited and listened. Nothing, other than the sounds that empty houses make. So, with his heart racing and his mouth dry, he peered between the shutter boards in the larger of the two windows into the long, single room, half expecting to find Franklin, Acton, and Margaret trussed in ropes, with little Bella crawling in the dust. But all he could see was a table with a pair of leather boots on it and two bed boards covered in a tangle of blankets. Otherwise the house was unfurnished and certainly not permanently inhabited.

Now he was confident, though disappointed. He walked around to the front of the house by way of a side gate, and — this surely was courageous for an aging net maker — went inside. Other than a damaged harness and a leather strap that somebody had dropped on the doorstep, there was nothing more to see than he had noticed from the rear window. Just leather boots and bedding. But fresh hoofmarks in the earth outside suggested that horsemen — only two or three, so far as he could tell — had recently departed, probably only that afternoon. There was nothing to suggest that Bella and Margaret had even reached the house or that there was anything there to be feared, other than a tethered dog that now, for reasons of its own, began to bark again. Andrew thought he heard shuffling and a voice, a baby’s cry, perhaps. A bird? It was time for him to flee.

It was dark by the time Andrew found his wife again. She was shaking and hardly able to breathe. Her period of mild amusement on her husband’s departure had been short-lived. As soon as he was out of sight, she could no longer admire herself as tough and steely or ready for greater tests. Without her husband’s timidity to measure herself against, she soon felt unprotected and exposed. Even though there had been no strangers to offer any “inconvenience,” every bird and every cracking branch terrified her. Every shifting shadow made her jump. She’d never known such fear and anxiety before. What if neither her husband nor her granddaughter came back to her? That would be worse than losing Bella’s mother. That would be worse than losing Acton. It was not that she loved Andrew better than her son (indeed, she did not) or was so deeply attached to her granddaughter that the thought of life without her was impossible. It was rather that she was alone.

Melody was relieved to see her husband fit and well, despite the dreadful fates that she had imagined for him, and to know that she herself would not be left entirely on her own in the middle of a hostile land, a widow and a destitute, with not a hope in the world. But she was still distraught when he returned and she saw that he was unaccompanied. She listened to his account of finding only an empty house and no sign of their granddaughter or Margaret. She kissed him and embraced him, glad of his warmth, but she was annoyed with him again. “Did you call for her? Did you shout her name?”

“I did everything. There’s not a sound. There’s no one there.”

“A woman and a baby just don’t disappear without a trace. Something bad’s happened, I’m sure of it now…”

“There were horsemen there.”

“There were horsemen? Andrew, you never mentioned horsemen. Did you speak to them?”

“I didn’t see them. Just fresh marks.”

“They’re lost. I know it in my heart. They’re lost.” We all of us are lost, she thought, unless we make it to the boats.

Margaret hadn’t had to run like this for years, not since she’d been a girl and dodging boys in games of free ’n’ freeze or taking part in races to and from the lake. She’d never had to run with a baby in her arms, taking care not to let the child’s head bang against branches or walls but still not slowing down to pay attention to her distress. But she was younger than the two giving chase and marginally more desperate.

Before the first man at the front of the building had managed to grab hold of her arm, she had instinctively run forward and to the side of him. If she had turned and run away, he would have caught her at the gate and hauled her back onto his land. Then what? But he was not expecting her to rush toward him and then take off just out of reach. Now he had to waste a few moments of advantage to turn himself around and take stock.

Margaret headed for the cottage door. The second man, a little younger than the first and simpleminded to all appearances, or maybe half asleep, just stood and watched. He hadn’t any idea who she was or why his elder was now calling out, “Bring her down!”

Margaret veered again and took the path that led around the east side of the house and into a horse paddock. A dog, which had been sleeping, shot out at her on its leash and missed her calf with its teeth by the thickness of a reed. She felt its breath. A moment later the first man cleared the corner, too, but snagged his ankles in the leash and hit the earth. The simpleton followed after, just sauntering, in time to see his buddy rolling on the ground, the dog beside itself with fury, and the fur-haired woman climbing the back fence, already too far gone to hear him say, “Blue devils, Charlie, what’s goin’ on?”

Charlie soon explained. “You’d better wake up, boy. We missed our chances there. We’ll get her, though. She owes us now.”

“She’s got a kid.”

“So it won’t be nothing new for her.” Any woman was a rare commodity for squatters like them. A beauty was too good to lose. They wanted her.

It did not take them long to saddle up their horses, equip themselves with cattle prods and rope, and ride around behind the house in search of Margaret. The men spread out, riding fifty paces or so apart, close enough to shout out to each other and to control a wide stretch of the land. Margaret, with Bella wailing, more frightened by the dog than by anything else, had scrambled through a choke of rocks and ended up above the house, looking down on the roof timbers. She was breathless, and angry, mostly with the men but partly with herself for having been so dangerously and laughably ambiguous. “Anything at all.” Not the wisest of remarks. She’d cracked her knee during the climb and caught the back of her hand on a thorn. She sucked the blood away, quieted Bella with a little finger in her mouth, and tried to think what she should do.

It was tempting, actually, to pick up several rocks and see if she could put some holes in their thin roof, or even damage their milk cows. She thought that probably her danger would prove to be brief and somewhat comical. Perhaps her only problem now would be getting back to the Boses by a circuitous route, though the thought of trying to amuse them with an account of her adventures was not promising.

It was only then that Margaret saw that the two men had mounted up and armed themselves. They had not spotted her yet, but a golden rule of hunting said that nothing from a bee to a buffalo could evade two mounted men for long, except three mounted men. Her first thought was to try to reach one of the other habitations in the neighborhood and beg for help. A young woman with a child, escaping from two likely rapists, could surely expect the offer of help and safety from any normal home, if there were other women, anyway. She could see the roofs of two small steads within easy reach, though no sign of people. If she could see another woman or a child, then she would head that way. But there was no one. There wasn’t even any smoke. For all she knew, these places might be abandoned. Most places were abandoned nowadays. Perhaps these two men were simply passing through. Their high-tacked horses seemed to suggest so. Maybe they had rustled their three cows and moved into the empty cottage for a day or so of butchery. Salt beef would see them and their dog safely and fatly through the winter. Perhaps the other buildings were harboring similar men, from the same band of riders possibly. Margaret did not need reminding how cruel and murderous such groups could be. She’d seen them take her Pigeon away. She’d seen the woman on the highway, raped and stoned to death. No, Margaret dared not take her chances at another house. The best thing she could do was get away from humankind and horses altogether. She had her breath back now. She made a sling out of her blue scarf, wrapped it around Bella, and tied the child to her back. She’d carry the baby the way Franklin had carried her down Butter Hill.

This would be a game of hide and seek. Margaret’s best plan was to avoid open ground entirely. A stand of trees reached into the flat land around the farmsteads and spread along the low escarpment in patchy clumps, not thick enough to frustrate horses but offering shade and camouflage. But then again, she thought, that is exactly what the men would expect her to do — run for cover. She’d do the opposite.

The countryside was undulating rather than hilly, and the undergrowth was thick though low, so it was good for riding and not so good for walking. There was an open meadow just before the trees, cleared by farmers years before but long disused. Margaret looked behind her to see if she was in sight of the horsemen, but they had not cleared the escarpment yet. She ran into the middle of the meadow and, after some long moments of panic, found a hollow big enough to lie down in. She pulled as much dry vegetation and dry foliage as she could find within reach over the two of them and lay on her side, cradling Bella. With one eye, she watched the sky for shadows. She was good at lying still and breathing silently. All she could hope for now was that Bella wouldn’t cry and wouldn’t want to play.

As she had hoped, Charlie and the simpleton kept to the edge of the trees, peering in among the trunks and pursing their lips to make those “Come to me, cat” noises that men seem to think are flirty and seductive but that are menacing for women. The nearest they came to Margaret and Bella was forty or so horse lengths away, but the baby, placated first by a finger and then by a little sweet ear wax, kept quiet, happy, it seemed, to stay in the undergrowth and watch the clouds with Margaret.

Margaret had no comfort for herself, nothing sweet to take her mind off the fear that raced her heart and cramped her stomach and seemed to want her both to weep and to belch. She could not say exactly what she feared. Rape and death were only words to her. Pain she understood a little more. But there was something in the faces of those men that she’d been born frightened of. She was shaking but could not steady herself. She held the baby far too firmly, until Bella opened her mouth to cry in protest. But by that time Margaret could hear the horses heading away, growing fainter. Their hoof treads on the snapping twigs and dry fall leaves would mask Bella’s noise, so Margaret let the baby cry a little and allowed herself to shake and weep and belch.

It was tempting to take this opportunity to break cover and run back toward the Boses. Her hide was damp, cold, and uncomfortable. But Margaret’s legs were jelly. And she could hardly breathe. Besides, she knew enough about horses to realize that a woman with a child to carry would be seen and caught up with before she had a chance to reach the hem of the meadow. Even if she did reach the Boses, that would be no guarantee of safety. Those men could knock them all aside like cornstalks if they wanted to. Andrew and Melody had only sharp tongues with which to defend themselves.

Margaret had no choice but to wait until sundown, when the light would be more on her side, and then, skirting the cottage and the cows, stumble back down to the track and the company, if not the safekeeping, of Bella’s grandparents. They’d have to move on straightaway. In these circumstances, none of them would want to spend the night in such a risky spot. They’d be dreaming horses. She could almost hear Franklin’s voice, saying to her, You’d have been better off sticking to the open highway.

Late in the afternoon, just about the time that Andrew was checking on the farm cottage, when the shadows of the trees lengthened to reach the place where Margaret had gone to ground, she decided it was time to move. She listened carefully, distinguishing the natural creaking of the trees from any human voices or horse sounds before judging it safe to make a dash with Bella for the forest edge. She peered through the gloaming down the slight incline and beyond the roof of the cottage, hoping to recognize the route she had followed earlier that day when she had left the Boses under a rendezvous tree on her usual quest for milk. The quickest way to safety, she saw, was to drop into the small pasture where the three cows were kept, pass close to the house, and then follow the shared path between the group of mostly uninhabited buildings. She held her breath and tried to steady her eyes. She was hoping to see no horses. No horses probably meant that the men had not returned, that they’d probably lost interest in their hunt for her and gone after fur of some other kind. They’d certainly be back by nightfall, so now was definitely the time for Margaret to run for it.

She and Bella had reached the choke of rocks above the house before Margaret heard a sound below and immediately took cover again. A small man, not young, was peering through the shutter boards of one of the rear windows. The light would have been too poor in the shadow of the house to see him clearly even if her eyesight had been good, but he was not large enough to be one of the horsemen, she thought. That did not mean that he wasn’t just as dangerous, however. Margaret would have to retreat. She waited until the man walked around the house and through the side gate to the front. When he went inside, she came out of her hiding place among the rocks, noisily dislodging a scree of small stones. The dog, still tied at the side of the house, began to bark. She had not been careful enough. The dog could have seen her, smelled her, heard her.

Now Bella started to protest, a cry of complaint. She had had nothing to eat or drink since the morning, her eyes and mouth were full of leaves, she hadn’t played all day, she hadn’t been allowed to crawl. There was milk to be had just a short distance away, but this was no time to be a milkmaid. Margaret hurried back the way she’d come. This time, protected by the deepening twilight, she kept to the edge of the trees, her finger in Bella’s mouth. If she was spotted by the horsemen now, she could at least disappear into the trees and hope to find a narrow trail that horses could not follow.

This was the worst night of her life, hollower even than her first night in the Pesthouse, more despairing even than the night of the Ferrytown dead, when at least she had had the company of Franklin. She had not brought her bedclothes with her, or the tarp or anything to eat. She wrapped Bella in her blue scarf and cradled her, tucking her tiny feet inside her tunic top, and waited for the time to pass.

After she saw the two horsemen returning in the last light of the day to their house, Margaret pushed as deeply as she dared into the trees, far enough for Bella’s now constant crying to be deadened by the trunks. The darkness was blinding. She could not see a star. Even the moon had been blocked out by the thick hammock and canopy. The trees were less than silhouettes. But Margaret would not allow herself to disappear. The child would not allow it, either. Margaret knew — had not the nursery rhymes told her so when she was just a few years on from Bella’s age? — that if there was no light, still she could create a candle in her heart and with that candle she could “beam her meanings/On eternity/And shine a purpose/On the Night.”

She whispered all the rhymes she knew to Bella, and when the girl finally fell asleep, exhausted by her own hunger, Margaret, too gripped by darkness, cold, and fear to sleep, forced herself to light that candle in her heart and make its meanings and its purposes envelop her in light. Now for a few moments, despite the awful immensity of her troubles, she could still pretend to be an optimist. In that imagined brightness, she could picture, beyond the nighttime and the trees, beyond the horses and the men, a place of greater safety, but not outside America. There were no saltwater boats or gulls. There was no Promised Land. Her place of greater safety was a soddy on a hill. She could envisage dying there, an ancient girl, her hair as long as the bed beneath her, with hands — more hands than she could count — in touch with her, and faces she could recognize and name, all saying Margaret, sweet Margaret, you loved us, and we loved you in return.

Her eyes were now accustomed to the night, and she could see. She could see the child’s face. She could see her own tough hands. She could see the fretwork of the trees, and finally a moon and owls for company. She could not stop the tears from flowing then, nor could she keep her hands and shoulders from shaking. She made owl sounds herself, sniffing and gasping for air. She felt expended and ashamed.

But weeping was a speedy sedative. Soon Margaret was calm enough to take stock of her situation. It had been a frightening day, certainly. But nothing irreparable had happened. As the night deepened, she ran each detail through her head. Apart from that scratch on the back of her hand, she’d hardly hurt herself. That idiot of a man, who’d presumed to frighten her and who would have forced himself on her given half a chance, had actually not even succeeded in touching her. The only body he had damaged had been his own, when he tumbled over, snared by his own dog leash. Now all she had to do was take good care of Bella, remain patient until the very first light, and then get back to the Boses and away to safety before anyone else was out of bed.

The rest of the night passed more quickly than Margaret had feared it would. She even dozed, although by the time dawn came she was so cold and stiff from standing with a tree trunk as her backboard that moving at all was difficult. Finding a sure route was impossible. It was easy to tell east from west, even before the first sun rays had penetrated the woods, but anything more precise than that eluded her. Besides, knowing east from west was not a lot of use for someone who could not precisely remember the position of the sun the previous afternoon when she had gone into the woods. She should have paid more attention and marked her route in some way.

Margaret studied the ground at her feet, expecting to find evidence of her walking, footprints and snapped twigs, but if they were there she couldn’t see them, not in that half-light, anyway. She was a town girl, not a countryman’s daughter. She’d not had to track any animal before. But still she could not stay where she was. She would, she decided, head east. That at least would take her in the direction of the ocean and ships. She would still be sharing a destination with Bella’s grandparents, even if their paths did not cross at once. As soon as she reached open ground, she could take stock of the landscape and any buildings that she found and get back to the Boses before they were sent crazy with anxiety. She could imagine their anger. But what else could she have done but make sure that their granddaughter was safe?

Margaret was oddly calm. She felt for the first time in her life as if she were impregnable and strong. There was so much evidence. Only she from Ferrytown had survived the flux. Only she of all the younger and fitter travelers of their campfire group on the highway had not been taken by the rustlers. And yesterday, unlike the woman displayed on the deck of the cart, she had not been raped. She was still alive, and only lost. What was more, she had an independent purpose in her arms, a girl too small and young to walk or talk or even feed herself. She didn’t need a cedar box of lucky things. Bella was her priceless talisman.

Margaret was so composed and certain of herself that she did not mind that she wasted the greater part of the morning reaching the edge of the woods, for they were beautiful, and that once she broke through to a clearing, nothing familiar was in sight, not a single building, not a reminiscent shape, not even any cultivated land, and only the footings of ancient walls and lines of metal spikes, rusted thin, as evidence that this had once been farmed many years before but now was wilderness. People had been there in better times, had lived there possibly, had died, but there was little chance that anyone would come again. People were becoming scarce. America was emptying. The land was living only for itself.

The clearing sloped a little to her right. She would not climb. That made no sense. The ocean was at sea level, as low as anyone could go. Even the place where the Boses had spent the night was on a track lower than these forests and lower than the group of treacherous farm buildings where Margaret had almost been attacked. She turned downhill, and even though she hadn’t eaten or slept, she had the energy and spirit to walk pretty fast, bouncing Bella as she went and crooning to her all the songs she’d ever learned and some she hadn’t. To be alone would have been frightening and miserable, but having Bella made her strong.

Margaret suspected the extent of her mistake only when she reached a low ridge with good views across the territory. Now she could see what seemed to be the rooftop outline of the cottage she had visited, but it was far away. She must have walked at right angles to where she’d wanted to go. Now she’d have to make up the distance. It could take another half day if the going was complicated. But she set her sights on the rooftop and struck out for it, determined to get back to the Boses by sundown. She had not counted on the snow. It offered only flakes at first, too wet to settle. But soon the flakes lightened and fattened and fell so thickly that it was hard to see ahead. Clear landmarks disappeared. That distant roof was whited out. The track was filled with snow, and when the wind came up in the afternoon, the open ground ahead of her changed shape. It would be crazy to labor on against the weather. And end up where? Again Margaret and Bella would have to spend the night away from the Boses. At least they had meltwater and some mashed berries for their supper, and an overhang of wind-bent conifers to give them shelter and a roof. Margaret lit the candle in her heart again, and slept.

Next day, Margaret was up and walking by dawn, feeling slightly drunk on tiredness and hunger but also exhilarated by the beauty of the snow-neatened land and the sharp cold light that gave clear views of where she had to head. It was mostly easy going, but wading through the deeper drifts was fun.

Once she reached the familiar open ground a little farther out from where she and the baby had earthed themselves the day before last, she did not even bother to keep to the shadows. She could not see any men, and she would hear if there were mounted horses. The little cottage looked asleep as she walked past. Two horses were tethered at the front, breathing steam and already sweating under their cover of blankets. The shutters were closed, and so the three men — she included the small man she had spotted from the choke of rocks — must be sleeping, she thought. The dog was sleeping, too, out of sight on the far side of the house — or, if it was not asleep, it was ignoring her. Her scent was now familiar.

If she wanted, she could probably stop to milk a cow. If she wanted, come to think of it, she could find a good-sized stick and give those men a beating in their beds and be gone before any one of them could lift a finger to defend himself. If she wanted, she could help herself to the two horses, to punish the men for their repulsiveness, and make her journey to the coast a little speedier. But Franklin had explained to her an age ago how horses were an expensive complication for a traveler.

“What, worse than a barrow?” she had asked.

And he’d replied, “When did you last see a barrow stabled? When did you last see a barrow eating hay? When did you last see a barrow rear up, or run off, or nip its owner?”

So Margaret just walked by, within sight of the cottage, leaving her deep footprints in the snow for anyone to follow, being reckless in the interests of speed, but keeping quiet. She was still afraid. It was wise to be afraid. But as she passed she saw an opportunity too good to miss. Only men could be so careless with their food. There was a cold larder on the veranda at the front of the house, with snow swept up by the wind against it. In a moment she was opening it. In the next moment she had helped herself to milk in a jug, a damp wrap of sour cheese, and, joy beyond joy, three hen’s eggs, already boiled hard and just a crack away from eating.

No one caught her stealing food, and no one heard her stealing away. Soon she had left the little fields behind and was back on home territory. There was the tree that marked the place where she had left the Boses. They would have spent the last two nights somewhere close, just waiting. Quite soon they would be reunited with their granddaughter. They would be angry. They would be shaking with anxiety. They had a right to be. But Margaret had a tale to tell. And there were eggs and cheese to feast upon.

Andrew and Melody Bose had left the meeting point only at first light that morning. They had spent two almost sleepless nights in a makeshift tent that they had rigged up, using Franklin’s tarp and Margaret’s thin blanket as weather shields and their own finer blankets as bedding. There had been nothing they could do except eat and wait and argue, once Andrew had returned from his expedition with no news of their granddaughter or “that diseased woman” to whom they had recklessly entrusted her. They’d finished Margaret’s taffies and the last gobbets of Ferrytown honey. They’d used up too much of their own salt fish, hoping to placate their nervous stomachs by constant feeding.

Once in a while Andrew had ventured out, armed with Franklin’s knife, which was larger than his own net maker’s knife, to see if anyone or anything was moving. All he had seen the previous day had been the three cows, pressing up close to the cottage walls for warmth. Then, once the snow had begun to fall, the only sign of any living things other than themselves had been a distant curl of smoke from a chimney that was out of sight.

They made up their minds, talking in whispers through the night. If the child was not returned by first light, they would be coldly sensible. They could presume the worst had happened. Waiting any longer would be pointless. It made no sense to sacrifice themselves to whatever horrors had befallen Margaret and Bella during the past two days and that had previously befallen Acton and the other men. Wise people do not stay, as the valley floods, to witness for themselves how high the waters will reach. They get away. The Boses, then, would do the same.

Margaret found her sodden blanket and the tarp immediately. She didn’t have to look around or call out any names to guess what had happened or what their reasoning had been. She could tell that the Boses had left only that morning. There were footprints in the snow, recent enough not yet to have lost their unambiguous shape. Later — indeed, for the rest of her life — she would wonder how easy it would have been to have caught up with them if she’d set her mind to it. If she had left immediately, then probably within just a few moments she would have been able to see them from the slight brow of the path. They would not have moved very quickly, especially without the fitter, younger Margaret to urge them on.

Margaret, though — could she ever admit it to herself? — was not inclined to hurry after Bella’s grandparents. To catch up with them was to relinquish the child, and that was something she was not impatient to do. It might have crossed her mind during the previous few days how joyful it would be to have a child of her own — this child. The thought of stealing Bella away might have stained her daydreams briefly. But Margaret would never actually have done it. It would have been wicked. She would have felt guilty to her grave. No matter that the immediate parents were dead or missing, or that the grandparents were selfish and uncaring, or that Margaret would provide the girl with a kinder future. The theft of a child was unforgivable, even though the ties of every family in the land were already hanging loose.

But for the moment, now that Bella seemed to have been delivered freely to her by the adversities of travel, Margaret did not feel wicked in the least. Or even compromised. She was not stealing a child. She was merely being slow. Anyway, she told herself, the grandparents had made their own decisions — good ones, possibly — and they had willingly abandoned Bella, or at the very least relinquished her. Margaret had kept to the rendezvous. Margaret had returned the child to the promised place. It was the Boses who had walked away, heartbroken, no doubt, but of their own free will. They probably had not believed that their son’s daughter would show up again after such a prolonged and baffling absence. They would have shed tears. They would have argued about what was best to do. But in the end they must have felt that they had little choice but to protect themselves and press on with their journey. Already they would be getting used to the loss of their granddaughter. They were not to blame. Hard times make stones of us all.

So Margaret did not hurry on to catch up with the grandparents. She dawdled. She persuaded herself that her first duty was to feed Bella with some stolen milk and mashed white of egg. Then she had to feed herself with cheese and Bella’s yolk. Then there was her blanket to be wrung out and her possessions to pack.

She realized at once, when she lifted up her back sack, that it was emptier than it ought to be. There was a water bag inside. There was the died-back mint, still in its pot. Her comb and hairbrush had not been touched. There was the spark stone and the fishing net, which Andrew Bose had dismissed as “the work of ten thumbs.” But her taffies and her scraps of food were missing. So was Franklin’s knife. Margaret dug into her clothes and checked each item, getting increasingly annoyed and upset when she could not find what she was looking for. The green-and-orange woven top that her sister had made for her and that she loved and wore only for best was not inside. Margaret hissed to herself. She could imagine Melody Bose wearing it as if it were her own. She muttered out loud a thought she knew was hollow, but because the theft of her clothes had come before the keeping of the child, it allowed her to feel that what she was about to do was justified, if only thinly — that her top was payment for the girl, a fair exchange. So now, in Margaret’s readjusted view, the Boses were not innocent. They were to blame, after all. They had brought this loss, this separation, on themselves. They’d crept away like thieves, abandoning their blood.

“I’ll love you, though,” she said to Bella, and pressed her own wet face against the child’s.