Page 74 of She, Wolf, Him.

When a village begins to speak gently to a soul it once passed in silence, let that soul set its house in order. Gentleness is how a parish grieves ahead of the bell.

— HIGHLAND PROVERB, THE MARGERIDE

Iwake to a pale, wrong light in the shutter seams and know it before I've risen. Snow in the night, the first of the year. It lies over Saint-Élie thin and clean, a winding-sheet cut to the size of a village. I stand in my doorway with the cold reaching down my collar and watch the smoke go up from the other chimneys into a sky the colour of nothing at all.

By the time I reach the well, I understand that more than the weather changed in the night.

Women I've known since girlhood give me the middle of the lane, stepping up onto the frozen margin to do it, their eyes anywhere else. Berthe waits until she believes my back is turned and crosses herself, small and quick, a thumb-flick of a blessing, the kind you'd make at a magpie or a passing bier. At the well-head the talk doesn't stop as it stopped yesterday. It changes. Softer. Pitying.

I let my bucket down. My grip isn't all it should be this morning, and the bucket knocks the stone twice going up, loud in the hush, and nobody so much as glances. You'd think a marked woman's bucket had a right to knock.

A voice behind me, not lowered enough, in the tone kept for the dying. "Poor soul. All of hers taken, one after another, and never a scratch on her own skin. It walks behind her, that one. It'll have her before the thaw."

"She should be churched," another says, gentler. "There's rites for the followed. If we'd a priest."

Not witch. Gaspard stamped that word out at an old woman's gate yesterday, and it hasn't the nerve to come back so soon. What they've found for me instead is gentler, and it goes in deeper. There's no spite anywhere in it, and I can't get my breath around that. Spite I've worn before and know the fit of. This is mourning. They've begun grieving me early, quietly, the sensible way, so that when my turn comes the grief won't catch them unprepared.

I carry my water home through a lane that empties itself politely ahead of me. At my own door I stop and look back. The snow has already taken my footprints at the far end, where the wind works, and as far as the village could swear to it, I might have come from nowhere at all.

Everyone I've buried this year, I buried closer to home than the one before. I've carried that sum half-finished for days now, a debt I didn't dare total. The village has been doing the same counting on its fingers all season. This morning it finished first, and the answer is me.

The weeping reaches me in the afternoon, while I'm splitting kindling in the yard.

I know every kind of weeping this village makes. I've stood inside most of it with my sleeves rolled. Grief is low and has a floor to it. This one is higher. It climbs. It comes from the square, and it's fear.

I go. That kind of weeping needs another woman standing near it, and I've stood near worse.

The snow in the square is trodden to grey slush. In the middle of it the crowd has made a ring, and in the ring is the Chazal girl. Seventeen, simple, about as much danger to this parish as its own well-rope. She talks to herself, that's the whole of her strangeness, keeps up a soft running patter at her chores where other girls hum. Half the village has heard her at it past the pens at dusk and smiled about it for years.

Nobody's smiling at it now.

"Talking," a man says, loud, to the ring in general. "Every evening, out past the fold-wall, talking away at the empty dark. Answer me who she talks to, then. Answer me who talks back."

"She's simple," a woman says, from the edge. "She's simple, is all. She's talked to herself since she could talk."

"And who's she talking to," the first man says. "That's the question. Who answers her."

Her kerchief has been torn loose already. It lies in the slush, a cleaner white than the snow's. Her hair is down in her face, and she's weeping in that high climbing way, looking for a gap in the ring. A man has her by the arm, wrenching it half behind her, a man whose kin I've washed, whose face I last saw at a graveside, bare-headed, his hat in his two hands. He was gentle then. The same fingers are white with gripping now, and I look at them and can't find the man who held the hat anywhere.

I've moved before I've decided anything, and I own it. Near that ring is the last place in this parish a woman with my name should stand, and I take another step all the same. The girl tears loose just then, blind with her hair and her crying, and blunders straight into me. I catch her by the shoulders and hold her up. For one breath she clutches at whatever's nearest, which is me.

A woman at the edge of the ring pulls her daughter back. "Come away," she says, sharp. "Come away from them." From the girl, or from me, two kinds of ill luck in the one patch of trampled snow.

"Enough." Anselme's voice, with its old dryness, from the church side of the square. He comes through the ring with the parish register held against his chest, and the ring gives way in front of it. That book is the whole village written down in one man's careful hand, every birth, marriage, and grave. Not a soul here wants their name read out of it today. "Loose her." The gripping man's fingers open. Anselme looks at him, then round the ring, taking his time. "You all stood at the crossroads. The offer I made there holds today. Any man who wants his name in this book over a girl's arm, step forward and I'll write it fair." He doesn't wait for an answer. "Go and be ashamed indoors. It's warmer there."

The girl bolts, home to her mother, her feet throwing up snow. Nobody follows. The ring comes apart, men finding their boots suddenly urgent. "You," Anselme says, quiet, to me, as it goes. "You've a talent for standing where you'll be seen, girl. See less. Live longer." I stand where I am with the print of the girl's fingers still in my shoulders while the square empties around me.

They didn't take her. That's tomorrow's comfort. Today's truth is that for the length of ten heartbeats, men I've known all my days were only a ring of coats and winter breath with one frightened child inside it. There is no Gaspard in sight. Anselme's shame did the standing today, and one old man's ledger is what this village has left between its fear and its hands.

One of these days shame won't be enough to stop it.

At dusk he steps out of the dark at the lane's fork before I've heard him at all. Fear starts through me like a hare breaking cover, then settles, because it's him.

"Not my room tonight," he says, low. "There's a shutter on my lane that watches. I'll not hang your name beside mine on that woman's tongue for nothing."

So we go instead to the ruined byre out past the last garden wall, half its roof down these ten years, and the winter sifting through the gap in a slow fall of white. The old hay smell still lives in the corners, sweet and grey. It's a poor place, cold past cursing, and nobody on God's earth can see us in it, which makes it the best room in the parish.

He puts his back to the standing wall and opens his coat. I stand into him, and the coat comes round me. For a long time neither of us spends a word. Above us the wind works at the broken slates. His heartbeat comes steady through his shirt, slower than mine, a working man's pace, and the warmth of him is the one warmth anywhere in the world that's mine to stand in.