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.
Why had she decided to call this unprepossessing scrap Juno? The question flitted through her brain without stopping for answer. Her mind began to play tricks. She thought she was back in her bed in Cato’s castle. Then she was back in St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh listening to Jack curse her up hill and down dale because she hadn’t brought him enough brandy to keep the demons at bay. Then she was in a sunny meadow along the river Loire. The sun was hot on her back, baking her bones, and Jack was sitting a little way away from her playing dice with a pair of itinerant peddlers who were only just beginning to understand that the man they’d thought would be an easy mark was going to take them for everything they possessed, right down to the boots on their feet.
She brushed at her cheek where a fly was buzzing her, disturbing the glorious lethargy of the sun’s heat, the lovely crimson-shot blackness behind her closed eyes. The buzzing continued. Annoyed, she slapped at it and something nipped her finger hard enough to jerk her back to grim reality.
She stared blankly at Juno, who stared back with her liquid brown eyes filled with anxiety. The puppy had been licking her cheek, sensing that she was slipping away into some landscape from which she might not return.
With a violent shiver, Portia leaped to her feet, dragging the altar cloth tightly around her as she began to walk the nave, up and down, up and down, until she was wide-awake and the blood was moving, if sluggishly, in her veins. She was still colder than she ever remembered being, but she was awake and alive.