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Tan was outside. Easter caught sight of her lurking in the alley beside the workhouse and called, “Here, girl.”
But the dog ran down the lane and disappeared. Judy Rhines brought a meaty bone and hid it under a rotten barrel, but a city mongrel took it. After a week of watching, Tan was starved and listless. But when she caught Cornelius’s scent, her ears pricked up and she crept out of her hole.
He arrived after midnight and went in to stare at what was left of Ruth. She was wasted, diminished to what looked like half the size of her healthy self. It seemed impossible that this frail woman—for there was no mistaking this fine-boned creature for a man anymore—had once been as strong as him. Knotted mats of white hair escaped from the too-small cap on her head. She was so still, he wondered if she was dead.
Just then, her eyes flew open and searched the ceiling, as though she was expecting a visitor from on high. She looked frantic and afraid until she saw him and moaned.
“What is it?” he whispered.
She flailed her head from side to side and he saw tears glitter at the corners of her eyes. Her suffering overwhelmed him. She was alone and terrified, in pain, despairing.
He could deliver her from this misery with the blanket or even with his bare hands, he thought. It would be a mercy, like putting down a horse with a broken leg. But he had never killed a horse, much less a woman. It was not in him. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Ruth closed her eyes and grew still again. Perhaps she had understood his apology. Perhaps she had just been dreaming. Whatever her thoughts, Cornelius felt that
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he’d been dismissed. He set down the pile of kindling he’d brought and fled.
When he reached the Dogtown cottage that he would always think of as Judy’s house, he held the door open for Tan, who had followed him. She hesitated for a moment but then ran to a corner, watching him. He lit the fire and stared at the flames, haunted by the image of Ruth alone and forgotten in a cold room on a hard bed. Cornelius looked at Ruth’s dog, who had made her way to the hearth and was curled at his feet. He wished her mistress an easy death. Then he wished the same for himself.
Sometimes, when Easter was there, Ruth tried to speak. But all she could muster was a croak.
“Does it hurt?” Easter asked, alarmed. “Would you like a dram?”
Ruth closed her eyes wishing she could say, “I need nothing.” She would have taken Easter’s hand and finally said her thank-yous.
Though speech was lost to her, Ruth’s hearing seemed sharper than ever. In the night, she heard the halyards clang in the harbor and thought about how different winter sounded in Dogtown—a dark hum in the pines, a slow hiss in the leaves.
Through the thin panes of glass, she heard the splash of waves and remembered how the ocean had made itself heard all the way up in the hills; the surf on distant boulders like a muffled knock on an enormous door.
Ruth heard snow against the workhouse window, and
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recalled a storm that had coated the bare trees with salt spray, which disappeared in the morning sunlight with a brittle clatter of falling ice.
During the day, Ruth listened to the sounds from the street: horses clopping, wagons rumbling, the mismatched chorus of voices: greeting, laughing, swearing, selling, urging. There were gulls, too, barking and shrieking, like gulls everywhere.
Days passed over, around, and through Ruth. One
morning during Easter’s visit, the doomed sailor woke up, shouting and cursing. Easter ran over to see what had happened and rushed back to give Ruth the full report. “No one can talk French, but he was pointing to his mouth and to his stomach clear enough,” she said. “Poor feller was half-starved, of course. When Matron brought him the thin stuff she passes off as gruel, he threw it at her. They sold everything he had, down to th
e boots, don’t you know,”
Easter confided, as though she and Ruth had always shared these kinds of stories. “They counted on him dying, so now they got to scramble up some clothes and shoes for him. You should have seen the fellow’s face! Mad as a wet hen.”