They walked back to the end of town in the company they had to keep, sanctified, prayed over, written down in the church rolls, and gossiped about all the way, till the most of the traffic left in the general outflow from the church was miners and loggers on their way to The Evergreen for a pint of philosophy.
Behind them, the church bell rang. Sometimes down in Tarmin after a snow-fall, when there were few sounds on the mountain but nature and when the wind was just exactly right, you could hear bells in the winter air. The bells of heaven, he’d thought when he was a little boy.
He’d never known that sound had come from here.
The year past was a bad dream, but this morning with the church bells ringing out through the village and echoing off the mountain, Darcy had put on one of her prettiest winter outfits—Mark had brought her the blue wool sweater from the store before she’d ever seen the shipment up from Tarmin that summer, that happy summer before Faye’s accident, and she’d hired Angie Wheeler to sew up a pair of gray wool slacks out of a book of patterns.
She hadn’t had occasion to wear them until now. She scarcely went out except for groceries.
Still, it was the sort of day to think about the condition of things. She wiped the year’s accumulation of dust off the bureau and swept the carpet. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t been aware of the dust piling up and the passage of a spring and a summer and a fall—because she wasn’t crazy. She knew how much time had passed that the sweater had lain in a drawer. She knew Mark was dead. She knew Faye hadn’t waked from her drowned, chilled sleep. She’d cleaned the office herself of Mark’s blood and she hadn’t greatly blamed him for deserting her. Faye had just cost him too much, and she with the relationship they’d had, all revolving around Faye, couldn’t make that loss up.
The dust just hadn’t mattered after that.
But today she found herself thinking that the dust had gotten too thick on the downstairs table and remembering that it had had a nice sheen and a pretty grain.
And once she’d done that, she saw the curtains, how dingy the white had become.
She started around the office polishing the tables and Mark’s bookshelves.
But straightened bookshelves had made her notice the rugs there needed sweeping.
Then she took out Faye’s pretty things from the chest and bathed the girl and arranged her golden curls—they were so like Faye’s— and changed the sheets and dressed her in Faye’s fine lace-collared gown.
Clean sheets meant putting on a washing, of course, which meant heating up the kitchen, and firing up the boiler for the washing machine, which she only did on Sunday afternoons, but there hadn’t been the volume of washing in the house in, oh, a long time.
And those curtains were due a laundering.
That took a good deal of time, and when the sun had gotten to the window in Faye’s room she made hot soup and arranged a napkin to protect Faye’s pretty gown, and ever so carefully fed the girl. The sun came through, bright and blinding, and made the white sheets into snowbanks and the girl’s hair into golden glass. Darcy fed her young patient, and the girl ate as she would eat if she was coaxed.
But at the second sip the girl blinked, and blinked again and passed a glance around the room.
“Where is this?” she asked then.
“Evergreen, honey. You’re all right.”
“How did I get here?” she asked. She was porcelain and gold, wind-blushed and delicate despite the signs of exposure. Darcy scarcely dared breathe, feared to say something that might drive her back into that silent world and shatter this tenuous contact.
“Honey, your brothers brought you. They carried you up the mountain.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Darcy. This is my house. I’m the village doctor.”
“Are you?” The eyes drifted shut again. And opened, and wandered across the details of the room. “Can I stay here?”
“Honey, you can stay here as long as you want to. Would you like some cereal?”
A thin, pale hand explored the crocheted white roses. “It’s a pretty room.”
“It was my daughter’s room. Now it’s yours.”
“Did your daughter grow up?”
“No. She died. So you see—” Darcy set the bowl and the spoon down on the table. And the girl didn’t slip away. She touched the white coverlets and explored a ribbon in an eyelet cutaway. Darcy couldn’t resist the curls. And Darcy found she could say the hard truth about Faye without a lump in her throat now. She wound a curl around her finger and made it perfect. “There’s no one to use the room now. I’d like you to stay, sweet. I would.”
“I want my mama,” the girl said. “I want my mama.” But white-gowned arms reached for her and hugged her, the way no one had since Faye died. Not even Mark. And the girl was so thin, so weak. “I want to go home,”‘ the girl said.
Not Faye. Brionne Goss. From Tarmin. Which didn’t exist anymore.
“Honey, I don’t think you can go home. This is Evergreen. I’m afraid nobody’s left in Tarmin. That’s what they say. So you can stay here as long as you like.”
“Where’s my mama?”
“I think she must be dead, honey, like my daughter. Like my husband. —Like your papa.”
“Not my papa!” It was an angry voice. Terribly angry, weak as it was. “Not like my papa!”
“I think everybody’s gone, honey, except your brothers. They brought you here.”
Darcy watched tears start. She sat down on the edge of the bed and brushed the wind blushed cheek with a gentle finger and let the tears run for a moment before she gathered the frail body against her and let the child cry her eyes dry.
Then she mopped the child’s wet lashes and gave her a handkerchief from Faye’s bureau and let her blow her nose.
“I could make you a bowl of cereal,” she said, “if you don’t want soup.”
The blond head turned away.
“A sandwich.”
“No.” A frail fist wiped at a tear.
“Do you want me to bring your brothers?”
“No!”
“There might be cookies. I might have some.”
The girl turned her head toward her. Sniffed.
“Would you like some cookies, sweet?”
A nod.
“All right. I think I could do that, sweet. I certainly could. It’ll take me a bit. But you’ll have cookies.”
She hadn’t the makings of cookies. It meant a trip outside and asking the shopkeepers on a Sunday afternoon, at which time some were open and some weren’t. But she was willing. She put on her coat and her scarf and went out to the bakers’ house and roused Alice Raigur out and bought cookies, as the fastest course to produce them. She went and called on the grocer’s house and bought dried beef, ferociously expensive, and pasta and sugar-sweets, which the grocer just happened to have. She went back with her arms full of groceries and to her own surprise found herself nodding and being pleasant to one of her less-liked neighbors in the passage coming back.
The child was asleep when she got back. When Brionne waked to her urging she seemed listless as before and didn’t remember her name, but all the same Darcy kept her word and served Brionne the cookies with hot tea—Brionne ate half of a cookie.
Danny couldn’t say exactly there was peace in the barracks, or that the business with the horse was settled. It hadn’t come around last night. Maybe it had been scared off by the shot Ridley had fired. < Gunfire> was part of its personal nightmare; and maybe with guns going off it just hadn’t wanted to stay.