“Been a little worse this winter,” Miss Inch muttered, cheeks flushed.
Miss Rushcliff’s lovely mouth firmed in that stubborn way that Miss Inch had always—even now—admired beyond the bounds of reason. “I’m not leaving you out here alone when you can’t walk,” she said, and apparently that was that. She linked her arm beneath Miss Inch’s, and just like that the world was steady again. And warm, with someone’s body there to keep the wind from reaching her side. “Now,” Miss Rushcliff said, “did you see which way your cockerel went?”
“Unbelievable,” Harriet muttered.
Lydia could only laugh, muffling it behind her hand to keep from spooking the birds.
Unlike the others, Harriet and Lydia had gone directly to the abbey. So they were the first to find, huddled up against the stone walls, all of Bickerton’s lost chickens.
Gold-laced, silver-laced, Brahmas and bantams and Scots Dumpies, every variety had been herded up the hill and into the ruins. Lydia’s Bickerton Grey hens were patrolling the line, keeping all the other chickens within the walls by a ruthless use of pecks and clucks and scratches.
Walter was standing on a stone a little raised, looking over the enormous flock with a dim but distinctly paternal eye.
“Chickens are creatures of habit,” Lydia murmured, amusement warming her voice like brandy in coffee.
“Our hens appear to be creatures of command,” Harriet returned, shielding her eyes from the glare of sun on snow and trying to count chickens.
Soon other searchers appeared out of the wood and from the hills, as other chicken fanciers followed the trails that all converged on the abbey stones.
Mrs. Outerbridge was first to arrive, storming up the snow-decked slope like an icebreaker with Mr. Brome ambling in her wake. Miss Rushcliff helped a limping Miss Inch step by slow step—it seemed they were taking a little longer and staying a little closer than was strictly necessary—and then Mr. Finglass, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell-Cole, Mr. Kaur and his sister, and all the other Bickerton chicken fanciers that Harriet hadn’t had a chance to meet yet.
Breath steaming, they clumped together in the aisle of what had once been a church, and contemplated the milling, clucking, occasionally growling horde of birds. Walter bokked in warning as Mr. Brome took a step forward, and settled when Mr. Brome took a step back.
It was one of those rare moments where everyone there was thinking the same thing and knew it: as soon as they tried to grab one chicken, any chicken, Walter would sound the alarm cry, and absolute chaos would erupt.
“Well,” said Mrs. Outerbridge eventually, “we have to do something.”
“Do we?” Mr. Brome muttered. “I do not like the look in that rooster’s eye.”
“He’s harmless,” Lydia said.
Mr. Brome glowered. “To you, perhaps.”
“We can’t just leave them here,” Miss Rushcliff sighed.
“They look pretty cozy,” Miss Inch countered, pointing at a pile where a Pinwheel Bantam was draped in all its feathered glory over the short, squat bulk of a Scots Dumpie. Miss Rushcliff giggled.
Lydia shivered as a particularly chill wind passed over the stones.
The snow, the wind, and the ruins brought Harriet back to a bad moment from the war. For a moment her throat closed and she couldn’t catch her breath—but then Lydia tucked close against her side, and that little bit of heat seeped into Harriet’s heart and nestled there. The way she’d learned a hen returned to its home coop.
Even if that coop was a falling-down abbey in the middle of a snowstorm.
She shook her head. “How on earth are we going to get so many birds back to their proper homes?”
Lydia grinned. “Wait until nightfall?”
Harriet groaned. “You had me the first time, but I’m not falling for that nonsense again.”
“What nonsense?” Mrs. Outerbridge demanded.
Harriet flushed. “She had my friends and I out here in the dark with lanterns, hoping to catch chickens.”
But to her shock, Mrs. Outerbridge only nodded. “Eminently sensible,” she said. “Miss Wraxhall always did have a good head on her shoulders.”
“Best way,” Mr. Brome agreed. “Tired birds are more easily managed.”
“But that’s hours away,” Miss Inch said, wincing as she inadvertently leaned on her injured leg.
