There was hunger in the village again. She baked a few loaves and took them where they were needed most. It was almost the last of her flour.
She lingered a while at the Glenny cottage to make sure that each child received a slice. A soft cold rain was falling as she walked home under the dripping trees.
No thanks again, she thought.
Mostly it didn't bother her that her attentions to the poor, the sick, the needy were taken for granted and had been for twenty years, but today, unreasonably, it angered her. To give so much. To receive so little.
It could have been different, she knew that. Rooks had gathered in the bare branches of the vicarage elms, as they always did at the end of the day. She sat by the kitchen stove and watched them in the last of the light. Yes, it could have been different. She could have married poor Richard. Richard who everyone laughed at including herself. Richard with no money, no prospects, no looks, no charm.
``You'll be an old maid,'' her sisters said, and the thought horrified her.
``He's your only chance,'' they said.
She turned him down and he went off to America without her.
She became a governess. She accompanied first one and then another young woman on the perilous journey from six to sixteen. She transformed two wild children into accomplished young ladies ready to launch themselves enthusiastically into the great marriage market.
She had saved every penny she earned and hoped the money would outlast her, but twenty years later she was still in good health and nearly penniless. She lit a candle and picked up her knitting. Her cat, Tom sat on her feet.
She had just turned the heel on a man's sock when she heard the knock at the door. The Glenny boy. Old Egbert was having the horrors again. She sighed and pulled a thick shawl about her and went out in the rain.
Old Egbert was standing in the muddy road stark naked and tearing at himself and screaming. She and the boy got him down in the mud and tied him hand and foot. She could hear liquid sloshing in his stomach so she took from her pocket a piece of fat bacon on a string and she forced Old Egbert to swallow it. Then she jerked it back out, accompanied by at least a pint of alcohol reeking stomach contents.
They dragged him into his filthy shed and laid him on the bed. She got four cups of water down him and when he fell into snoring slumber she untied his hands and feet and piled rags on his sleeping form.
She returned the fat bacon to her pocket and looked at the Glenny boy.
``Why did you come for me?'' she asked.
``He was out there in the cold,'' the boy answered.
She patted the child on his louse ridden head and walked slowly home.
It was no longer raining.