Page 11 of She, Wolf, Him.

Margot stands at the edge of the women and doesn't come. She's in her good blue, the Sunday wool, her hair already slipping its knot, her hands for once gone still at her sides. Our eyes meet, and for one breath I have all the hurt she meant to spare me. Then she looks down at her own hands. Margot, who couldn't hide a feeling to save her life, does it to be kind. It's near the only unkindness she has ever done me. If she let me see the hurt whole, I'd have to answer with my own, and neither of us can carry that across a churchyard in front of Reynaud. Ma mie. I snuff the word before it's finished forming.

The men don't dwell on us long. They've a graver care on their minds than a betrothal, and I hear it moving under the goodwill, low, the voice they use when they'd rather the women didn't hear. "I'll bring mine down before dark," one says. "And bar the pens while there's light," says another, and a third, lower, "I'm not standing any fold short-handed again. My spine's still cold from the last time." The shepherd barely a week dead and a man since, and the Beast still up there in the trees, so even on a wedding-Sunday the talk slides back to shutters, lanterns, who'll walk out armed tonight. The betrothal is the one small matter going the proper way. They take comfort from it like one dry log when the rest of the wood is wet. Then they set it down and go back to being afraid.

When the goodwill thins, the men gather to old Anselme, the marguillier, keeper of the parish register and, this season, the roster of who stands watch and where. Older than the priest and drier, he takes the night's watch down as he's set down every birth and burial here for forty years, licking his pencil, grave with the task.

"Thibault Lavergne," he says. "The lower pens again tonight."

"Me and Bertrand," Thibault says. "The Berthou boy, if his father spares him."

"He's spared," Anselme says, and writes it down, then two more names beneath, for no watch has stood fewer than five men since the shepherd.

"Can he hold a gun steady," somebody asks of the Berthou boy, and someone else answers, "He can hold a lantern," and that seems to be the whole of the qualification these nights.

"It's the full moon tonight," a man says, when the roster's done. "Whatever's up there will see us coming a mile off." Nobody answers him. There's no answer to give.

Reynaud leaves Anselme to it. Souls belong to the priest. The lists belong to Anselme, and a list, in a place like this, is the nearest thing the village has to a bar across the door.

Thibault's hand stays where the blessing put it, a yoke settling, not cruel, only certain, sure of its right to be there. Under my stillness the old anger comes up fast, with nowhere in the world to go. The anger is for everything, more than for him. For a morning that ties me to a man for good in the time it takes to read two names. It goes down with the rest, and I smile, because the bride is meant to smile, and my jaw aches with the holding of it.

He walks me home by the long way round, which is his way of taking me past his own house first. His hand leaves my shoulder only to find the small of my back, steering me as you would a ewe that knows the road perfectly well but might still be the better for the touch.

"You'll come and see it, after the lambing," he says. "The room. I've cleared my grandmother's. There's a window."

He says window as if it were gold. I take in the low grey house he wants me to admire, with its turf roof and the byre built onto the side so the animals' warmth carries through the wall, and I say, "It's a good house, Thibault." It is. That's the trouble of it. A sound roof, a man who'll not drink it away or raise his hand to me past what the priest allows, a window in a cleared room. Other women have prayed for less and buried husbands who gave them less. I thank God in my head for what I'm meant to thank Him for, and under the thanks the house becomes my future in my mind, decent enough to shame me for hating it.

He talks. He's not a cruel man and he's not a clever one, and he has never in his life had to wonder what the person beside him is thinking, so he doesn't. "Six ewes I'll keep through the winter," he says, "and the twins off the grey one, God willing. The byre wants a new beam before the snows. And after the lambing, once you're come over, we'll see about the rest of it. A boy first, with luck. Then another. A house full. My mother kept a good fire and six of us alive. You'll do the same." The children, said as plain as the ewes, already standing in the yard in his mind, waiting to be counted. I make the sounds a woman makes. Yes. I see. He doesn't need more than that.

When I've stayed quiet too long even for him, he glances down to see whether I'm content, which is the only question he ever puts to my face. "You'll settle to it," he says, and he says it kindly, which is the worst of it. "Once there's the house and the little ones to mind. A woman's never easy in her own skin till she's a place to be busy in." He believes it as plainly as he believes the sun comes up. My silence is a girl's nerves to him, a fret the wedding will cure. No house and no child he gets on me will ever make me easy in the skin he thinks he's buying off my father.

Then I think of the well. The stranger with his low dry voice, putting questions to me, my answer the thing that might change what he did next. I hate myself for it, here, with Thibault's palm at my back and his good house in front of me. I had three-and-twenty years of no one asking, and I was well enough. Then one man asked what was behind my eyes, and now I can't sit still inside my own life.

He leaves off the future to tell me, with a kind of pride, what he'll be at tonight. "We're five down at the lower pens," he says. "Me and Bertrand, the Berthou boy, two others. Lantern lit, guns loaded. Nothing comes past five men watching." He says it in the voice of one offering comfort, proof I should be glad to be marrying a man steady enough to sit out all night in the cold over the village's animals. Gladness should be there, and I can't find it anywhere in me, so I say, "Be careful, then," which is true, and which is the nearest I can come.

At my own door he leaves me in the middle of the day, satisfied, his mind already down the hill at the pens. He doesn't say anything tender and I don't want him to. The not-wanting is its own small mercy, and I take it.

By evening the light goes early now, the gold dragged back off the high ground long before it ought to be, and Saint-Élie sets about shutting itself against the dark. The moon comes up full and white over the firs while there's still grey in the sky, and nobody trusts it. A full moon means a man can be seen safe to his own door. It means the Beast in the trees can see too.

Up and down the lane the shutters come over the few windows that have them, and oiled cloth goes up over the ones that don't. The animals are driven in close, complaining, a goat somewhere setting up a racket at being moved before it's ready. Mothers call the small ones in out of the blue dusk by name, sharp, twice, until they come. I feel the village pull its edges up tight, like a woman gathering her skirts back from a fire.

Reynaud is on the church steps in the last of the light, not gone in yet, overseeing it all like a shepherd over a fold. When the Berthou woman hurries her children past, he stays her with a lifted hand. "Hold them to their prayers, my daughter," he says, gentle as a cuff. "A clean house and a clean heart bar a door better than any shutter. Judgment passes over the faithful." "Yes, Father," she says, ducking her head. "Thank you, Father." And she goes on faster, the little ones herded ahead of her. He's been saying it all week one way or another. The Beast is a judgment, and judgment doesn't fall on the faithful, so if it's fallen on us, the fault must be in here somewhere, in the village, in someone. His blessing on my morning and his warning on the evening are the same hand.

Thibault comes by with the others as the dark thickens, a lit lantern swinging in Bertrand's fist though there's light enough yet to walk by, the men gone quiet and close-shouldered, dreading where they walk. He stops in front of me and waits, needing, I think, to be sent off with some worry of mine, some sign that his sitting up all night in the cold will be felt by somebody. I give him the face he expects. "God keep you," I tell him. He takes it as his due and goes on. The lanterns go with him down toward the lower pens, bobbing, small, swallowed one by one where the lane bends into the dark. Somewhere below them a dog throws itself into a fury of barking and is cuffed silent. Then silence, the kind that has its ears up. The whole hill is listening, and I stand on my own threshold and listen with it.

Margot's at the corner of her father's house, a pail in her hand she's forgotten to carry in. She doesn't say a word about the morning. She only meets me across the width of the lane, her face holding more than she would ever be let to say. I meet her, and the arrangement of the day stands between us in the cold. The blessing, the weight on my shoulder, the room with the window, the life. She lifts her hand a little, not quite a wave, a reach stopped by the lane and the dusk between us. Then her father calls her. She takes the pail in, and the door shuts on the warm dark of her house. I'm left alone in the lane with my own door at my back.

Everyone is trying to be safe tonight. Everyone is trying to be good. I stand with my hand on the cold latch of my father's house and understand what I've always known and never let myself say, that goodness was only ever another door somebody else shut on me and bid me be grateful for the warmth.

Behind me the lane has emptied. Down at the pens a single lantern burns for the safety of the sheep, and the men sit up around it with their guns across their knees, good, careful, afraid.

I lift the latch and go in. I don't call him back.

7

WIDOW BEFORE THE VOW

GASPARD

Buried this day Jean Faure, husbandman, found in the upper pasture with grievous wounds to the throat and the breast. The beast unknown. May God receive him.