Cruelest Month

but I couldn’t imagine approaching her. I mean, look at me.’

Beauvoir did and knew what Sandon meant. Huge, filthy, at home in the woods. Not many women would fall for this. But Odile had and Beauvoir knew enough about women, and certainly enough about murder, to recognize a motive.

Ruth Zardo walked very slowly down the path from her tiny clapboard home to the opening in the dry stone wall that led onto the Commons. Gamache and Jeanne watched. Across the village green Robert Lemieux, Myrna and Monsieur Beliveau watched. A few people were interrupted mid-errand to stare.

All eyes were on the elderly woman limping and quacking.

Ruth, her head uncovered and her short-cropped white hair ruffling slightly in the breeze, looked behind her at the ground and stopped. Then she did something Gamache had never seen before. She smiled. A simple, easy smile. Then she continued walking.

Out the opening she came, inching along. And behind her came the quacking. Two tiny, fluffy birds.

‘There’s a crone,’ said Jeanne.

‘Ruth Zardo,’ said Gamache, laughing and thinking she wouldn’t get much argument in this village.

Jeanne turned to him, stunned.

‘Ruth Zardo? The poet? She’s Ruth Zardo? Who wrote,

‘I didn’t feel the aimed word hit

and go in like a soft bullet.

I didn’t feel the smashed flesh

closing over it like water

over a thrown stone.

‘That Ruth Zardo?’

Gamache smiled and nodded. Jeanne had quoted from one of his favorite poems by Ruth, ‘Half-Hanged Mary’.

‘Oh, wow.’ Jeanne was almost trembling. ‘I thought she was dead.’

‘Only parts of her,’ said Gamache. ‘She seems to be doing it in stages.’

‘She’s a legend in my circles.’

‘Witches’ circles?’

‘Ruth Zardo. That poem, “Half-Hanged Mary”? It’s about a real woman, Mary Webster. They thought she was a witch so they strung her up from a tree. This was back in the witch-hunt days. Late sixteen hundreds.’

‘Here?’ Gamache asked. He was a student of Quebec history and while he’d come across many odd and brutal events, none would match the witch-hunts.

‘No, Massachusetts.’ She was still staring at Ruth, though so was everyone else. Ruth had progressed about a foot along the Commons, the baby birds behind her flapping their tiny wings, like vestiges, and going up on their little webbed feet. ‘Amazing woman,’ said Jeanne, almost in a dream.

‘Ruth or Mary?’

‘Both, really. Have you read her poems?’

Gamache nodded.

‘I was hanged for living alone,

for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,

tattered skirts, few buttons,

a weedy farm in my own name,

and a surefire cure for warts.’

‘That’s it,’ said Jeanne, following Ruth with her eyes as a morning glory follows the sun.

‘Up I go like a windfall in reverse,

a blackened apple stuck back into the tree.

‘Unbelievable. And yet,’ Jeanne finally broke contact with Ruth and turned a slow but full circle, ‘I can believe it of this village. Where else would people go to be safe? To get away from the burning times.’

‘Is that why you came here?’

‘I came because I was tired, burned out. Now there’s something. A burned-out witch.’ She laughed and they both turned back toward the small white clapboard chapel on the side of the hill, and walked toward it.

‘And yet you agreed to do a seance.’

‘It’s the training. Hard to say no.’

‘The training or the woman? You don’t have to be a healer to find it hard to say no.’

‘I’ve always found it difficult, it’s true,’ she said. They’d reached St Thomas’s and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache opened the large wooden door but Jeanne was standing with her back to him. Looking at Ruth, then shifting her gaze to the three great pine trees on the village green.