Page 71 of She, Wolf, Him.

And into the choosing walks Agnès.

She comes through them with her shawl crossed tight, and the crowd parts for her without being asked, as it parts for her everywhere this autumn. She doesn't stop at the edge of it. She comes the whole way, puts her hand on my forearm above the rope's writing, in front of the parish entire, and turns to face them with it still there. It's steady. Steadier than anything else this square has to offer.

"He was with me." Her voice is the one she used the first time she stood out of a crowd for me, level, carrying, with nothing in it for the fear to catch hold of. "The evening before you took him, till close on first light. He saw me to my own door, and stood in the cold at the head of my lane till my fire was lit. If your watcher had kept to her shutter a while longer, she'd have sworn to that too. That's where his nights have gone. To standing guard over this village's sleep while it dreamt up reasons to hang him." She lets that sit. Then, quieter, which carries further, "I'll swear it on Margot's grave. There's no oath that costs me more, and I'm not spending it on a lie."

No answer comes back to her. What would it stand on. She has washed every one of this autumn's dead and buried the better half of her own life doing it, and the village long ago decided her grief was the nearest thing to holiness it had left. Her word settles onto the square with a weight the register itself couldn't argue against, and the Devil-talk dies where it stands, ashamed of itself in the daylight.

She believes every syllable she's spoken. That's what carries it. She stakes what's left of her good name on me and doesn't so much as glance down to watch it spent.

Cleared twice in one morning, then. The village scatters to its grief and its barred doors, the women gathering their own as they go. "Home now," they're saying. "Home, while there's light." It leaves us standing at the well in the grey, her hand still on my arm. Of everything I might feel, what arrives is the one feeling I'd never have predicted the day I rode into this valley with a rifle and a fraud. I've been believed. It cost a good man his life and her the better part of her name, and I'd hand the whole of the believing back in a breath to undo either.

"Go and sleep," she says, low, only mine. "You look like your own ghost."

"I'll sleep when you're behind your bar." The crossroads has burned the last of the showman out of me, so the rest comes too, quiet, against her hair, where only she can keep it. "Whatever this is, it isn't finished. Until it is, where you are, I am. It had its one night of me tied to a post. It won't be given another."

Her hand tightens on my arm, once. Her face gives the square nothing. It gives me a little more, and the little is enough.

I walk her home through the waking village, past the well, past the church door where the women have begun the singing over the best man this parish had. At the head of her lane the sun has been over the ground before us, and the clay tells nothing at all. This morning that suits me. I see her through her door. I hear the bar come down, and I stand a while in the daylight where the whole parish can see where I've chosen to stand.

38

A WOMAN, A SINNER

AGNÈS

When the Beast would not be caught, they sought a witch instead, for where the Devil walks, a woman has surely opened the door.

— FOLK SAYING OF THE MARGERIDE

There's talk at the well when I come up the lane, quick and low, with a name inside it. I know the sound. I've been the name in it often enough to tell it at fifty paces, and better yet I know the silence that follows, the one that drops over a knot of women like a lid onto a pot when the wrong ears come near.

It drops now. Berthe finds a sudden interest in the bottom of her pail. Two of the young wives study the frost on the trough, needing an answer from it. Nobody greets me, and nobody turns away either. There's a gap at the well-head the width of one woman, and I step into it and let my bucket down.

The rope has frozen overnight and pays out stiff, complaining through my grip. Behind me the talk picks itself back up, softer, in pieces. They're careless, or they've decided grief has stopped my ears. Words come through the creak of the windlass, one and two at a time. The old one. Unnatural. The Father said as much years ago, God rest him.

Not my name, then. Relief arrives before the shame of it can, and the shame comes close behind, the pair of them old company by now. I swallow both whole and go on hauling.

It's Perrine Vidal who gives it to me straight. She and I hauled half-pails between us before either of us could carry a full one, and she has never in her life gone the long way round anything. She sets her jug on the well-head next to mine, red-knuckled, square-built as her father's gate, and speaks low, for me alone.

"They're saying Pétronille called it. Some bargain, struck years back, and the dying now is the price come due."

"Pétronille." The name lands flat in the cold. "She sat two nights with the Berthou boy's fever last winter."

"She did. He lived. Nobody's forgot she knew how." Perrine looks at me steady over the jugs. "A village that's caught nothing has to catch somebody, Agnès. They gave the hunter back his neck three days ago and the fear didn't go home with them. It's bedded down in every house in this parish, and it wants a face it's allowed to hate. Hers is old and odd, and she lives where nobody would hear her call out."

"And so they've chosen her."

"Fear does its own choosing." She takes up her jug and settles it against her hip. "Stay wide of it, that's all I'd say to you. A crowd that's been cheated once is twice as quick the next time."

My mother had a teaching she gave me small, along with my prayers. When the milk sours, she said, when the lambs die and no reason will show itself, count the women who live alone, and God grant your name is never on the count. I took it for a story meant to frighten girls toward marrying. Standing at this well today, it sounds like plain instruction.

I carry my water home, the yoke biting through my shawl, and I ask nothing of anyone. Before I've passed the church I can hear the talk knitting itself closed again behind me. A scrap of it follows me, not meant kindly and not much hidden, a night in the hunter's room, and the widow he lodges with for the telling, before the well swallows it.

Past midday the lane outside my window fills with feet, more of them than the hour has any use for, and every pair going the same way. Boys first, at a run. Then men, walking fast and pretending they aren't. The road they're taking runs past the last gardens and gives out at the furze, and there's one house at the end of it.

I put down the mending and go.

Pétronille's cottage sits where the village stops pretending to be one, low under its turf roof, the eaves hung with her bundles, thyme, tansy, herbs I've no name for, all gone silver with frost. Smoke stands off her chimney straight as a plumb-line into the cold.