Portia walked briskly, swinging her arms, humming to herself to keep up her courage. When she could, she walked parallel to the roadway, concealed behind hedgerows. A lone woman was easy prey for anyone with hostile intent, not to mention the troops of soldiers who regularly crossed her path. Fortunately, tramping feet, the fluting of martial pipes, and the steady beat of the drum heralded the latter’s approach in plenty of time for her to seek concealment.
She ate some of her small store of food at noon and rested for a while, but it was too cold to sit for long on the hard ground, even with a hedge as windbreak at her back. She passed a few hamlets and several isolated cottages, gradually becoming aware that the shadows were lengthening as the light was slowly leached from the sky. She’d been walking since eight that morning, and each step was becoming an effort. She had no idea how much farther she had to go, and once it was dark, not only would she never find her way but the already freezing temperature would plummet. She would have to find shelter. Some cottager would surely take her in.
The countryside had so far borne few signs of war, but that changed just after Portia had reached her decision to seek shelter. She had been walking down a narrow lane with high hedges on either side. A faint smell of lingering smoke was in the air, but she put it down to a farmer’s bonfire or late stubble burning, until the hedge suddenly gave way to open fields on either side of the lane.
The fields were burned to the bare earth; trees, so painstakingly planted as windbreaks against the vicious gusts blowing off the hills and the moors beyond, were scorched skeletons against the darkening sky. The skeleton branches had rags dangling from them, and as Portia approached she saw that the rags were corpses, hanging from nooses, twisting in the freshening wind. They had been there for several days, and they bore the insignia of Lord Newcastle’s royalist troops.
Portia turned aside, retching in disgust at the stench of corruption, the eyeless sockets, and the great flocks of black crows circling and cawing around their carrion feast.
A pathetic whimpering came faintly from the ditch alongside the gallows field as she stumbled away from the atrocious sight. She tried to ignore the sound but it went on, pathetic and yet insistent with a kind of last-chance desperation, and finally she turned back, averting her eyes from the gallows as she tried to trace the sound.
Its source proved to be a puppy, not more than five or six weeks, Portia judged. Not old enough to be motherless, certainly. It lay in the ditch, liquid brown eyes staring up at her from beneath a matted curly fringe. Its coat, in a most improbable shade of mustard, was a tangle of burrs and knotted curls.
“Oh, what an unprepossessing little thing you are,” Portia murmured, feeling an instant bond with the abandoned waif. She bent to pick it up. It shivered against her, all skin and bone and wet hair. A scrap of material fluttered around its scrawny neck. It was a piece of a royalist flag.
Portia glanced involuntarily to the killing field. Had this puppy been a troop mascot? It seemed likely. A mascot left behind to starve in the aftermath of atrocity.
“Come on, then, pup. For some reason, I get the impression you and I are two of a kind.” She tucked the creature under her cloak, against her heart, and felt the rapid fluttering of its own heart and the involuntary tremors, which slowly died down as the puppy warmed up.
Now she had to find shelter for the two of them. It was almost full dark, and what little warmth there had been in the day had fled under the rising wind. Portia trudged down the lane, even more wary now. The barbaric troop of parliamentarian soldiers who had committed that atrocity could still be around, and even if they were long gone, the local inhabitants would be afraid and more than ordinarily suspicious of a stranger.
She came to a hamlet about two miles farther down the road. The cottages were shut up tight, only the thin plumes of smoke from their chimneys indicated habitation. She chose the cottage nearest the small church and, with a boldness she didn’t feel, knocked on the door.
There was no answer. She knocked again and waited. No sound, no sense of life. And yet she knew someone had to be sitting before the fire whose smoke curled from the roof. She knocked again and called softly, reassuringly. Maybe if they heard a woman’s voice, they would open up.
Nothing. She walked back into the lane and surveyed the house as it squatted in a bare vegetable patch. The windows were shuttered, showing not a speck of light.
Portia shivered. She had never before felt so completely alone, and she was very frightened. She was as frightened of the cold, of the impossibility of spending a brutal February night without shelter, as she was of human attack. The puppy whimpered. The animal must be starved. Was it old enough to eat bread and meat and cheese?
But first they had to get out of the night. The sky was black with cloud, utterly lightless, and the wind was rising. The church would offer sanctuary. It would be cold and hard, but they would be out of the wind and safe from human interference.
She opened the lych-gate and trod up the path to the church door. It was a small Norman church, a huddle of gray stone, with a rose window over the arched oak door. Portia lifted the latch and pushed, praying that it wouldn’t be locked. The door creaked loudly as it yawned open onto the dark, damp chill of the vestibule.
She stood accustoming her eyes to the darkness, and slowly the font, the long rows of pews, the glimmer of the altar, took shape. Maybe there were priest’s vestments in the sacristy, something at least that she could wrap herself in. There was the altar cloth, but that seemed somehow sacrilegious.
She approached the altar and sat down on the top step against the communion rail, unwrapping her cloak to lift out the puppy.
“So, what sex are you?” It was too dark to see, but her searching fingers found the answer quickly enough-definitely female. The little creature licked her hand and whimpered again.
Portia set her down and opened the cloth package of food. The puppy scrabbled frantically against her knee as she smelled the meat. Portia took her knife from her boot and cut the meat up into the smallest pieces she could and laid them down on the altar steps. The puppy seemed to sniff and the offering disappeared.
“I have a feeling your need is greater than mine,” Portia murmured, cutting some more. She fed all the meat to the puppy and drank the wine, feeling it warm her on the inside at least. She contemplated lighting one of the altar candles but decided that showing a light would not be wise. She had no idea what kind of reception she’d receive from the hamlet’s inhabitants, but from what she’d seen of the shuttered cottages, it was wise to assume that it wouldn’t be friendly.
The puppy, its belly full, trotted off into the darkness. Portia, guessing what she was after, scrambled up hastily. “Wait… you can’t be uninhibited in a church.” She scooped her up and carried her back outside. In the churchyard, behind the shelter of a yew tree, they took care of nature’s needs, then returned to the church.
Portia found a threadbare cassock in the sacristy and wrapped herself in it. She sat with her back against the altar and closed her eyes. The puppy crawled up onto her lap and dived under her cloak and cassock, seeking her warmth.
“It’s all right for some,” Portia said, shivering. The trip outside had undone all the good of the wine and she had only a swallow left.
It no longer seemed sacrilegious to make use of the altar cloth. She couldn’t imagine God would be offended if it would save one of his creatures from freezing to death where she sat.
Even with the altar cloth, it was too cold to sleep. She was bone weary, every muscle tensed against the deep ache of the cold. “You know something, Juno, if that ill-tempered bastard of a Decatur is in the least ungrateful after what I’ve been through, I shall take my knife to his throat,” she muttered into the puppy’s neck, finding some comfort in talking aloud even to an animal who couldn’t talk back.