There was no answer. She knocked again and waited. No sound, no sense of life. And yet she knew someone had to be sitting before the fire whose smoke curled from the roof. She knocked again and called softly, reassuringly. Maybe if they heard a woman’s voice, they would open up.
Nothing. She walked back into the lane and surveyed the house as it squatted in a bare vegetable patch. The windows were shuttered, showing not a speck of light.
Portia shivered. She had never before felt so completely alone, and she was very frightened. She was as frightened of the cold, of the impossibility of spending a brutal February night without shelter, as she was of human attack. The puppy whimpered. The animal must be starved. Was it old enough to eat bread and meat and cheese?
But first they had to get out of the night. The sky was black with cloud, utterly lightless, and the wind was rising. The church would offer sanctuary. It would be cold and hard, but they would be out of the wind and safe from human interference.
She opened the lych-gate and trod up the path to the church door. It was a small Norman church, a huddle of gray stone, with a rose window over the arched oak door. Portia lifted the latch and pushed, praying that it wouldn’t be locked. The door creaked loudly as it yawned open onto the dark, damp chill of the vestibule.
She stood accustoming her eyes to the darkness, and slowly the font, the long rows of pews, the glimmer of the altar, took shape. Maybe there were priest’s vestments in the sacristy, something at least that she could wrap herself in. There was the altar cloth, but that seemed somehow sacrilegious.
She approached the altar and sat down on the top step against the communion rail, unwrapping her cloak to lift out the puppy.
“So, what sex are you?” It was too dark to see, but her searching fingers found the answer quickly enough-definitely female. The little creature licked her hand and whimpered again.
Portia set her down and opened the cloth package of food. The puppy scrabbled frantically against her knee as she smelled the meat. Portia took her knife from her boot and cut the meat up into the smallest pieces she could and laid them down on the altar steps. The puppy seemed to sniff and the offering disappeared.
“I have a feeling your need is greater than mine,” Portia murmured, cutting some more. She fed all the meat to the puppy and drank the wine, feeling it warm her on the inside at least. She contemplated lighting one of the altar candles but decided that showing a light would not be wise. She had no idea what kind of reception she’d receive from the hamlet’s inhabitants, but from what she’d seen of the shuttered cottages, it was wise to assume that it wouldn’t be friendly.
The puppy, its belly full, trotted off into the darkness. Portia, guessing what she was after, scrambled up hastily. “Wait… you can’t be uninhibited in a church.” She scooped her up and carried her back outside. In the churchyard, behind the shelter of a yew tree, they took care of nature’s needs, then returned to the church.
Portia found a threadbare cassock in the sacristy and wrapped herself in it. She sat with her back against the altar and closed her eyes. The puppy crawled up onto her lap and dived under her cloak and cassock, seeking her warmth.
“It’s all right for some,” Portia said, shivering. The trip outside had undone all the good of the wine and she had only a swallow left.
It no longer seemed sacrilegious to make use of the altar cloth. She couldn’t imagine God would be offended if it would save one of his creatures from freezing to death where she sat.
Even with the altar cloth, it was too cold to sleep. She was bone weary, every muscle tensed against the deep ache of the cold. “You know something, Juno, if that ill-tempered bastard of a Decatur is in the least ungrateful after what I’ve been through, I shall take my knife to his throat,” she muttered into the puppy’s neck, finding some comfort in talking aloud even to an animal who couldn’t talk back.
Why had she decided to call this unprepossessing scrap Juno? The question flitted through her brain without stopping for answer. Her mind began to play tricks. She thought she was back in her bed in Cato’s castle. Then she was back in St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh listening to Jack curse her up hill and down dale because she hadn’t brought him enough brandy to keep the demons at bay. Then she was in a sunny meadow along the river Loire. The sun was hot on her back, baking her bones, and Jack was sitting a little way away from her playing dice with a pair of itinerant peddlers who were only just beginning to understand that the man they’d thought would be an easy mark was going to take them for everything they possessed, right down to the boots on their feet.
She brushed at her cheek where a fly was buzzing her, disturbing the glorious lethargy of the sun’s heat, the lovely crimson-shot blackness behind her closed eyes. The buzzing continued. Annoyed, she slapped at it and something nipped her finger hard enough to jerk her back to grim reality.
She stared blankly at Juno, who stared back with her liquid brown eyes filled with anxiety. The puppy had been licking her cheek, sensing that she was slipping away into some landscape from which she might not return.
With a violent shiver, Portia leaped to her feet, dragging the altar cloth tightly around her as she began to walk the nave, up and down, up and down, until she was wide-awake and the blood was moving, if sluggishly, in her veins. She was still colder than she ever remembered being, but she was awake and alive.
She went to the door and peered out. The darkness was graying slightly, but the sky remained heavily overcast. “I think we’d do better on the move, Juno. I’d rather face a band of brigands than freeze to death here.” She replaced the altar cloth and the priest’s cassock, ate the last crust of bread and gave the cheese to Juno, then set her face to the wind, the puppy huddled beneath her arm.
By full dawn it had begun to snow, and she was now threading her way through the trackless wastes of the Cheviots, the only witnesses to her passing a few miserable sheep huddled beneath the scant protection of leafless trees. Thirsty, she made a hole in the ice covering a small stream. Juno drank greedily but the water was so cold it gave Portia a screeching headache. Tears of misery and desperation were falling unbidden and unheeded, freezing on her cheeks. She shivered convulsively, her clothes no more protection now than if she were naked. Only the puppy kept her going, created a small spot of warmth against her chest.
The snow grew heavier and she could barely see a step ahead of her, and now she no longer knew whether she was going in the right direction or merely round and round in circles. Nothing mattered except to keep putting one numb foot in front of the other as she stumbled into the wind-driven snow.
When she first saw the diffused glow through the white veil that smothered her, Portia barely heeded it. She’d forgotten what she was looking for… had almost forgotten who she was. There was just the single driving force-to put one foot in front of the other.
But her feet took her upward toward the glow without conscious instruction from her brain. She stumbled in a rabbit hole and fell heavily, wrenching her ankle. And then she lay there, sobbing with pain and cold and terror, knowing that she was going to die where she lay, in a snow shroud.