Cast Out
Verity pushed back the quilts, rolled off her straw mattress onto the floor, felt for the poker, and stirred the ashes. The embers glowed. She wouldn’t have to go fire-borrowing again.
Her chilled hands were clumsy. One glowing bit of wood rolled from the hearth and across the earth floor in the direction of her mattress. She beat at it with the poker until it was completely extinguished. Then she raked the ashes back over the coals, crawled back under the quilts, and breathed out hard, trying to make a warm place with her breath. Slowly her body relaxed toward sleep…
And stiffened. The mattress was warm again. Was it too warm? That ember had rolled toward it. What if a spark had flown into it when she wasn’t looking and was smoldering in the coarse cloth, about to ignite the dry straw inside?
She’d wake when the mattress caught fire, and she’d put it out.
With what? The water in the pail was frozen.
There was a clear foot of snow on the ground. She would throw snow on the mattress… if she woke in time. But such a fire might smoke heavily. What if the smoke choked her in her sleep, and the fire devoured first her cabin and then the whole settlement? That was hardly likely, she told herself. A woman in her right mind would not think of such a thing.
A woman not in her right mind may be more of a danger to her neighbors than she knows, she answered herself. Best take precautions.
She wept as she hauled the mattress out the door, rolled it in snow, hauled it back in cold and sodden, slung it over her one good wooden chair, set the chair as close to the hearth as she dared (not very close), poked the fire back to life, and wrapped herself in quilts to watch the night out.
She woke to gray light filtered through the oiled cloth of the window, to bone-crunching cold and a dead fire. She tried to shrug off her quilt. The pain in her scalp stopped her. Her hair was frozen to the quilt with mucus and tears.
Verity held her hands to her belly until they thawed enough to work the scissors and hack her hair off on one side. She pulled her coif on tightly, but still felt ragged edges of hair sticking out. She couldn’t go fireborrowing like that. If she was lucky the neighbors would know her for a daftie, cluck about her to each other, shun her even more markedly than they already did; if she was unlucky (and what else had she ever been?) they’d take her for a witch, and then… She smelled smoke again, tried to think of something else.
She spent most of an hour struggling with flint and tinder before a spark caught. It was another hour before the fire burned hot enough to do any good. She’d meant to make soap, but the day was lost. Again.
She’d forgotten that eleven-year-old Prudence Carlyle was coming to make soap with her. When Prudence knocked at the door, Verity considered pretending she wasn’t home. Then she reflected that Prudence could see the smoke of her fire. She opened the door, saw Prudence staring at her face and hair, at the soggy lump of the mattress.
“You’re ill?” Prudence asked.
