Page 54 of She, Wolf, Him.

Margot comes into the square already talking.

She's flushed from hurrying, a basket riding her hip loaded past sense, her father's cups, two loaves, a parcel of tallow dips, and, knowing Margot, somebody else's errand taken on between her door and here. "Make way, make way," she's calling, laughing, before she's properly arrived. "These cups are my father's, and he'll count them. And the loaves are Perrine's, and woe betide me if one's short." She fetches up at the tower first to catch the newest boy at the rope. "Let it be now." She hauls it out of his fists, laughing even while she scolds. "It's rung all it knows. You'll have it off its beam, and then it's your own father goes up after it, and then you'd best be off to another parish entire." The boy grins at her, because everybody grins at Margot, and bolts.

She sees me and comes straight over, and the square is the brighter for it, or I am.

The bigger half of a broken loaf is in my hand before any greeting, because that's the order Margot does things in, gives first and talks after. Her fingers brush mine, cold as well-water on a day the sun is doing its best. Then the talk comes tumbling, her free hand going with all of it. The Berthou littlest was carried up at first light to be shown the wolf, she tells me, and studied it a long while, grave as a bishop at a visitation. Then she handed down her judgment before the waiting line. Ugly as Lent. "Ugly as Lent!" Her laugh goes up over the square, the laugh nobody in this parish has ever learnt to hear and not join, and I'm laughing with her, and the child's poor mother wanted the ground to open under her. "And the youngest Vidal girl asked could she touch it," she says, "and when they said she could, she wouldn't. Too proud to be afraid, too afraid to touch it. You'd have paid to watch it." For as long as the story lasts, Margot is every good day I've ever had in this village, quick and warm, her face open all the way, drawing the child's solemn verdict on the air for me.

Gaspard comes over from the trestles with his cup.

The quickness goes out of Margot between one word and the next. Nothing so plain as coldness. She gives him a nod, a civil word on the wolf, wishes his arm mending well. All of it is correct, and there's no Margot in any of it. Then she fills the little silence the way she fills a basket, past what it holds. "The weather's going to break," she says, too quick. "And the wine won't see out the night. And my father's cough's better, and then worse, then better again in the same day. And the Vidal girl still won't touch it. And the Berthou littlest has told everyone twice."

"You look happy," she says to me, when the basket runs out.

She means it kindly. That's what I can't get under. She means it kindly and she means it from a long way off. I never saw her go the distance.

"I am," I say. "Stay. Celebrate with us."

"If I stay, my brothers will eat through the whole basket and call it Christian thanksgiving." It has the make of one of her jokes and none of the mirth in it. She says it to the basket, not to me.

"Margot—"

"I've things to do." She's turned already, the basket up, three steps gone. The last of it comes back over her shoulder, one flat word.

"Good."

The word stays where she left it and goes on working in me the rest of the afternoon.

I stand with her bread in one hand and my wine in the other and watch her go, straight-backed through all that gladness, the one person in the square with somewhere else to be. The wrongness of it is nowhere I can take hold. Margot and I have quarrelled twice in twenty years, and both times I could have told you the cause before the quarrel finished happening. Here there's nothing. Or worse than nothing. The hurt I've dealt her since the hunter came is mine. I made it, I know its weight, I've watched her carry it. This is other. I go hunting reasons, because a hurt without a reason frightens worse. She's tired. It's been an autumn to empty anyone, and all the village is strange today, drunk on its own relief. None of the reasons fits her. I carry the likeliest anyway, the way I'd carry water in a cracked pail, quick, so it lasts the distance.

We leave the square at dusk in front of anyone who cares to see, and nobody cares to see. I walk the lane beside him at an even pace, learning what that's like.

My house holds the warmth of the morning's fire, and for once there's no work waiting inside it. No wound wants dressing tonight, and there's nothing on the hearth but supper. The quiet inside my four walls is new company, and we both take a moment learning how to sit with it.

We eat what the square pressed on us as we went. "It's only bread and cheese," I say, setting it out.

"It's bread and cheese in a warm room," he says, "with company that isn't buying anything. You'd be surprised what that trades for, on the road."

The feast is on my skin. Spit-fat and smoke, the wine somebody spilled down my sleeve, the whole loud day of it, and I want it off me before I sit down in my own house with him. I set the big pot on, and while the water heats I take the basin down off its peg and set it on the hearthstone close to the fire, as my mother did before a Sunday, with the door barred and the shutter over.

"I'll step out," he says.

"No."

He waits for me to take it back. I don't, and I find I mean it.

"Stay where you are," I say. "Watch, if you're going to. I'd sooner be watched by you than pretend there's nobody in the room."

He stays where he is.

I've undressed for him once, in the dark of a rented room, with the village's fear in the lane outside. This is my own house and my own fire, in what's left of the light, and I'm the one who chose it. I do it plain, the bodice, the skirt, the shift over my head and laid on the stool. The cold of the room comes at me all at once and I let it. Then the water. I wring the cloth and put it to my neck. Across the room his breath changes, and I don't look round. I wash as I've washed the dead, in order, neck, arms, breast, the hollow under the arm, the belly, down, thorough, unhurried, and the body under the cloth is nobody's work and nobody's property. It's mine, warm, and looked at.

When I come to my back I hold the cloth out behind me without turning.

"Here," I say.

His step comes up behind me. He takes the cloth in his good hand. The warm of it goes down the length of my spine, slow, with more care than anyone has spent on my back since I was small, and I close my eyes and stand in it. He doesn't hurry, and his hand goes nowhere it wasn't sent. When the cloth goes cold he dips it hot again and finishes what he started. He passes it back over my shoulder and steps away. I hear him sit down.

I dry myself at the fire. I put the shift back on and nothing over it. When I turn round his eyes are on me, as open as he was beside me at the well-head this morning with all the day's light on us.