in your bed."
"Brave Martha," Aunt Blair said shakily, holding out her arms, and Martha went into them and was hugged fiercely.
Behind her, Grizel beckoned to me from the kitchen door.
"Might as well make a start," she said, looking around disgustedly at the wreckage. "Mistress is going to have a fit and half when she sees all this. She's not going to have it easy now. We'll not see the master back. He's done for, if you want my humble opinion."
***
After Lieutenant Dundas and his men had come to Ladymuir for the first time, we'd been able to repair much of the damage, scooping up the spilled meal and stitching the torn sacks, rescuing most of the cheeses, and generally putting the storeroom back in order. But this time the destruction had been complete. The troopers had stripped the storeroom, carrying off sacks and jars and barrels, and trampling what they left into a filthy mess on the floor. Inside the house, they had ripped the linen, tumbled the pots and dishes off the shelves, and smashed whatever would break.
I'd thought, when I first saw the ruin of her home, that Aunt Blair would sink into helpless despair. In fact, when she first saw the extent of the disaster, she could do nothing for at least half an hour but sit, crying and trembling, on the bench by the table, on which the remains of the breakfast porridge had been spilled and smeared and made inedible with handfuls of ash from the dead fire.
I crept around her, not wanting to irritate, not knowing where to start. I envied Grizel, who, in her usual practical way, was getting on with the work—picking up cooking pots, sweeping ashes, and fetching in twigs to try and relight the fire—while the little girls, upset by the horror of the day, squabbled noisily in the corner.
Aunt Blair stopped crying at last. She bent her head and clasped her hands, and I saw her lips moving.
She's praying, I thought, and I knew I should be praying too. I leaned on the broom I was holding, squeezed my eyelids together, and said in my heart, O Lord, deliver us from evil.
As the familiar phrase formed in my head, I remembered the last words I'd said to Jesus. I'd been filled with a rush of overwhelming love, up there by the waterfall, and I'd said, I give everything! I give!
I wasn't sure now what I'd meant or what had happened to me. I only knew that I'd felt something miraculous at the time, and that a glow, like the last pink streaks of a sunset, still lit something inside me.
"Maggie," said Aunt Blair, startling me.
I opened my eyes. She was sitting upright, and a little color had returned to her cheeks.
"You saved Andrew from that fiend," she said. "I'll not forget that. You were wonderful, dear. So brave."
She spoke more warmly than she had ever done, though I could tell that her words came from a sense of duty rather than affection. Even so, I blushed with pleasure.
"And she saved Mr. Renwick too," said Ritchie, coming in from outside. "Mother, I thought they'd driven off the cows, but they only let them loose. I've rounded them up. They're all accounted for."
"God be praised. There'll be milk then, at least, when they've calved."
Nanny and Martha heard the word milk. They stopped tussling and looked up.
"I'm hungry, Mammy," said Martha.
"So'm I," said Nanny.
"That's just too bad," Aunt Blair said with determined briskness. "You'll have to get used to it. Maggie, see if you can find any scraps of oatcake left over from this morning and give them to the children, then put the bedding together and get them to bed. Grizel, leave the fire now and clean up the mess on this table. Then we'll have to see if there's anything that can be rescued from the storeroom. We'll have to sift the oats from the mess on the floor grain by grain."
"Then what are we going to have for supper, mistress?" asked Grizel.
"Supper? Supper?" Aunt Blair's self-control, which she had wrapped around herself like a cloak, fell away for a moment. "Don't you understand, you silly girl? There is no supper. And there'll be nothing for breakfast. Your master's gone. The storeroom's empty. The silver will all be taken in fines. We're ruined, Grizel. If we survive until the harvest, it will be a miracle."
And then the cloak closed around her again, and she began to give us orders in