The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel - By Kathleen Kent Page 0,101

the open barrel when you must. This bread must last awhile. If you chew it long it will seem to be more. I will try to bring meat when next I come, but it may not be for days yet. So you must harken to me.” He reached through the bars and pulled me closer to him and said, “Do not share this bread with anyone but Tom. There are women here who are starving and who will beg from you, but you will sicken and die if you do not do as I say. D’ye hear me, Sarah?”

I nodded, tucking the bread into my apron, and he said to Tom, “Tom, remember what I told you that day? After you threw down the harness in the field. Remember?” When Tom nodded, Father said, “It’s to you now. I will return when I can.”

He started up to leave, but, remembering my sister, I called out to him, “Where’s Hannah?” He ducked his head for a moment and answered, “She is with the Reverend Dane’s family. They will take good care of her.” The Reverend’s wife was a kind woman, but austere, and I wondered what she would make of Hannah, only three years old, wild, unclean, with an endless need for attention. For many months I had been mother to her and now she was torn away from yet another family. For all the times I had been unkind to her or impatient or cruel, I wept.

Father crossed the corridor to give Richard, Andrew, and finally Mother some small bit of food. When Mother’s hands came through the bars, he pressed her knuckles to his eyes and said some soft words to her. Then the sheriff called down, and when Father left us, the afternoon had dimmed towards dusk. Our cell, our “good” cell, faced west, and the light of the setting sun flashed briefly through the high slits in the walls, turning our skin red and yellow, as though the straw had been set aflame and was burning us all alive in our prison.

IT TOOK ONLY a few hours for the vermin to find their way into my hair, and I woke in the night with my scalp on fire. I started scratching and tearing at it with my nails, feeling the tickling on my skin as the lice danced around my fingers. A woman somewhere on the opposite wall had started an agonized moaning, and with every breath she said, “Oh my God, my tooth. Oh my God, my tooth. . .” She continued her wailing even when she was accosted with pleas for silence, and some violent curses as well. The night had turned cold and I wrapped the shawl more tightly around me. I turned to look at Tom but the rhythms of his breathing told me he was yet deep in sleep. The haggard crying continued for an hour or so until another woman tipped a flask of some liquid into the moaning woman’s mouth. Soon her noises quieted into whimpering and she drifted off into oblivion.

I could hear tiny rustlings all through the straw and once saw the shine of a pair of dark, liquid eyes set narrowly over a pointed snout. He watched me, sniffing at the loaf of bread hidden in my apron. I kicked out at him and he crept deeper into the straw but did not move away. I kicked at him more forcefully and he melted into the darker rushes below the straw. I dozed fitfully until the murky light from the morning filled the cell enough to see more clearly the features of the women surrounding me on all sides. One by one they opened their eyes, some to pain, some to desperation, some to prayers for deliverance or acceptance, but all of them to the renewed horror of their confinement. And in common to all of these wives and mothers and sisters who had worked and prayed and midwifed in good faith with their neighbors was the searching, confused gaze that they should be accused and imprisoned and seemingly forgotten by those same neighbors.

There were some so slatternly that they rolled over to the slop buckets, scratching and rubbing themselves without any attention to their dress, or their modesty, and took no time in straightening their aprons, lacing their bodices, or turning their stockings. But most tried to clean themselves, wiping their faces with their sleeves, or polishing their teeth with the edge of their aprons, in