“Dearest,” Charlotte said, reaching for her, but Sasha broke away, hands balling into fists.
“I hate you!” she cried at Mrs. Armstrong, the surrounding villagers, the visiting farmers, every adult in the shop. “I hate all of you! I hopeyouget lost in the forest!”
“Sasha,” Jonas said, sounding panicked, but Sasha shoved past an old woman and ran off. The bell over the door jingled in her wake. Charlotte’s heart twisted.
“Go after her, love, will you?” she said to Jonas. “Make sure she gets home all right. I’ll catch up.”
They nodded and went. With the children gone, everyone stared at Charlotte instead. Her skin prickled, but she drew herself up and gazed icily at Mrs. Armstrong.
“Thank you for checking on that telegram for me. Good day.”
Mrs. Armstrong looked surprised. “Don’t you want your kerosene?”
Charlotte left without responding. She’d meant to buy several things, and she’d have to come crawling back later to get them. Right now, she couldn’t stand people staring or take another casually cruel comment.
She wanted to shout at them and cry as her daughter had. All that kept her from doing it was the fact that she was thirty-six years old and a mother. Suddenly, being a grown-up felt intolerable. No wonder Arthur spent so much time daydreaming.
Outside, in the square, temporary stalls and carts offered mollusks, small and scanty fish, minimal squid, apples, lamb, grouse, and berries. Charlotte staggered past without stopping, grateful for her cane.
A man with a flat cap raised his hand in greeting; she blinked, not recognizing him, then realized it was Elspeth McIntire. She nodded back but was relieved when Elspeth returned to her shopping.
Since she no longer had the children with her, Charlotte stopped to check on Jean Crawford, a skittish newlywed expecting her first, then Rosie Young. Mrs. Young was out front, tending the chickens and weeding around the stoop.
“Reckon she’s all right now,” she said, when Charlotte askedafter Rosie, “but I’d not say no to you taking a look. That cough did linger something fierce. I never seen anything like it, leastways not in a hearty girl like our Rosie.”
Charlotte had; her own illness back in February had been like that. Mrs. Young nodded her inside. Charlotte thanked her and went, hoping she wouldn’t find Rosie laid up in bed like she’d been for so long.
She needn’t have worried. Rosie was at her father’s feet in the sitting room, with a fluffy chick asleep in her arms, nattering on about what her mother had brought back from the market and what the chick might look like when it grew up. In his chair, repairing a fishing net, Cormac nodded at her periodically. His lips twitched.
At six, Rosie talked more and faster than anyone Charlotte had ever met; she hardly drew breath between words. Her color was better than it had been in church on Sunday.
Charlotte smiled. “Feeling better, I see,” and what a relief that was, in a week during which nothing had gone right.
Scrambling to her feet, Rosie presented the chick, which peeped sleepily at the disturbance. One of its feet was deformed.
“This is Pippin,” Rosie said proudly.
“She’s lovely.”
“He.”
“Rosie, lass,” Cormac said, “take Pippin and help the boys out back, eh?”
“Nuh-uh. They’re mean to him.”
“Help Mam out front, then. He ought to be around other chickens anyhow.”
“Okay.”
Rosie skipped from the room, hugging her chick.
Cormac huffed a laugh. “Back to her old self, as you see.”
“I’m glad of it. She seems fond of her new pet.”
Cormac’s smile faded. “It’ll be a trick getting that chickaway from her. We would’ve culled it, its foot being how it is, but she’s hardly let it go since it hatched. One of these days she’ll have to learn.”
Charlotte’s eyes prickled foolishly; it wasn’t as if she weren’t used to such things. The episode at the general store thorned at her, making her emotional. That was all.
