the wind whispering around the church tower and swooping among the gravestones of the churchyard-as if confiding the latest news, “Sarah” thought, turning the old horse toward his stable.
I’m so weary, I’m imagining things.
She glanced for the hundredth time at the woman beside her. Her eyes were still closed, but she wasn’t asleep.
“We’re home,” she told her friend gently, trying not to startle her. They were wet through, hungry because they’d been reluctant to stop along the way at the rough pubs or places where decent travelers stayed. They had been afraid of being seen, of being recognized. Of someone remembering that they’d been on the road from Glasgow, where they weren’t supposed to be.
“Yes.” She opened her eyes, saw the churchyard, and shuddered. The cold white stones seemed to be pointing fingers. “I wish I were dead too!”
Following a path through the stones with her eyes, the younger woman murmured with infinite sadness, “So do I.”
2
The letters began to arrive in the middle of June, hardly more than a few words scribbled in cheap ink on cheap paper.
Fiona never discovered who had received the first of them. Or even-in the beginning-what had caused the coldness toward her. It seemed over the course of the month that one by one the women who were her neighbors found excuses not to hang out their laundry or weed their gardens when she worked in the inn yard. The friendly greetings across the fence, the occasional offer of flowers for the bar parlor or a treat for the child, stopped. Soon people no longer nodded to her on the street. And failed to speak in the shops. Custom fell off at the bar. Men who often came in for a pint in the long summer evenings avoided her eyes now and hurried past the inn door. The coldness frightened her. She didn’t know how to fight it because there was no one to tell her what lay at the bottom of it. She wished, for the hundredth time, that her aunt were still alive.
Even Alistair McKinstry, the young constable, shook his head in bewilderment when she asked him what she had done to offend. “For it must be that,” she told him. “Someone’s taken a word wrong, or I neglected to do something I’d promised. But what? I’ve tried and tried to think of anything!”
He had seen the looks cast her way behind her back. “I don’t know. Nothing’s been said in my hearing. It’s as if I’m shut out as well.”
He smiled wryly. Half the town must know how he felt about her. “It may be a small thing, Fiona. I’d not take it to heart.” Which was no comfort at all. She had already taken it to heart, and wondered if that was the intent, to give her pain. But why?
On the first Sunday in July, the old woman who invariably sat in the back of the church hissed at her as she came in with the little boy, leading him to their accustomed place. The single word was lost in the first hymn, but she knew what it was. Wanton. It made her flush, and the woman grinned toothlessly in grim satisfaction. She had meant to hurt.
The shunning had been supplanted by attack.
The sermon that morning was on Ruth and Mary Magdalen. The good, faithful woman who had kept her place at her mother-in-law’s side and the wanton whose sins Christ had forgiven.
The Scottish minister, Mr. Elliot, made no bones about which he’d have favored, in Christ’s stead. His harsh, loud voice made it clear that good women were jewels in the sight of God. Humility was their shibboleth-such women knew their place and kept their hearts clean of sin. It would take Christ Himself to forgive a sinful woman- they were beyond redemption, in his personal view.
You’d have thought, Fiona told herself, that Mr. Elliot knew better than God Almighty what ought to be done about sinners-stone them, very likely! He had a very Old Testament view of such matters, a cold and self-righteous man. She had never been able to like him. In three years, she had not found an iota of generosity or compassion in him, not even when her aunt was dying. He had thundered at the ill woman, demanding to know if all her sins had been confessed and forgiven. Reminding her that Hell was full of horrors and demons. In the end, he had had no comfort to give. Fiona had simply shut him out. She found herself wondering if Mr. Elliot had forgiven her for doing that.
As he warmed to his theme now, she felt eyes moving toward her surreptitiously, a merest glance cast from under the brim of a hat or from under pale lashes. She knew what they were thinking. The point was being made publicly that in Duncarrick she herself was Mary Magdalen. A wanton. Because of her child?
That made no sense: they’d all been told when she brought the boy here that she had lost her husband in the war. Even her aunt, a stickler for propriety, had held her and cried, then taken her around the town to meet everyone of consequence, lamenting the tragedy of a lad growing up without his father, and the wicked fighting in France that had killed so many good men.
Fiona wasn’t the only young widow in the town. Why had she been singled out in this fashion? Why had people suddenly-and without explanation-turned so strongly against her? She’d never so much as looked at another man since 1914. She had never wanted another man in place of the one lost.
On the following Monday morning, outside the butcher’s shop, someone shook a letter in her face and demanded to know what Fiona meant by walking boldly amongst decent folk, putting all their souls in danger.
Managing to reach the letter in the red, waving fingers of the woman who did washing for a living, she took it and smoothed it enough to read it.
Have you taken in her washing? The sheets soiled by her wickedness and the linens that have touched her foul flesh? Have you no care for your own soul?
It wasn’t signed The shock turned Fiona’s heart over in her chest. She read the lines again, feeling sick. Mrs. Turnbull was watching her, something avidly nasty in the set of her face, as if she relished the pain she’d caused.
“You don’t do my laundry-” Fiona began, bewildered, and then realized that it didn’t matter.
But who could have written such a thing?
It was vicious! She was speechless with the cruelty of it.
… sheets soiled by her wickedness… her foul flesh…
There were no names mentioned Then how had Mrs. Turnbull settled so quickly on Fiona as the intended target of such venom? She wasn’t a clever woman, nor one overly endowed with either imagination or vindictiveness. How had she picked Fiona out as the evil woman? Because Fiona hadn’t lived here all her life? Because her aunt was dead now and she had to run the inn alone, without proper chaperoning-it hadn’t occurred to her that she needed any! Was that it, the impropriety of a respectable young woman serving men in the bar? Since the war, the inn hadn’t paid well enough to keep a barmaid…
“This is malignant nonsense! Where did you get it?” Fiona demanded.
Mrs. Turnbull said, “It was under the mat by my door. And I’m not the first. Nor the last! Wait and see!”
… not the first, nor the last… There had been other such letters. Fiona tried to absorb that and couldn’t. Had all the people who shunned her now received malicious, unsigned messages like this one? But how could they believe such things? Surely someone could have warned her-a friend, a neighbor The washerwoman snatched the letter from Fiona’s hand and strode off, self-righteousness in every line. She was a simple woman known for her stringent faith and her narrowmindedness. Both had given her the courage to speak out in her own anger. And fear.
Like the old woman at the back of the church, Mrs. Turnbull had found the bravado of the mob.
IN LATE JULY there was a policeman at Fiona’s door. Constable McKinstry stood on the step, uncomfortable and flushed, stiffly in uniform.
“Don’t shut the door in my face,” he said placatingly. “I’ve come to ask- It’s about the lad. There’s- Well, there’s been talk going around, and I don’t know what to make of it.”
Fiona sighed. “You might as well come in. I’ve seen one of the letters myself. They all say the same, do they?
