relying on Sybil’s good nature, Julius’s love of exalted company, and their pressing need to keep Mayhew’s interest aroused.
The Girl in the Other Bed
The door closed behind her and shut half the noise away with it. Aurora pulled on her wraps, and (after a pause to gather her courage) felt her way along the log wall, half blind in the darkness, heading like a moth for the glow of light from the wagon yard. She could hear strange noises, and felt someone pass a few feet from her as she rounded the corner of the roadhouse. There were the rails of the corral fence. She made her way along by touching the poles every few feet—but there were fearful shapes in the darkness. She was never easy without light.
A mound. What was that crumpled thing, lying there? Not Bella, it could not be …
Aurora stood still, uncertain whether she could bring herself to touch the bundle on the ground. A lantern—she was turning back to get one when she saw a bobbing light coming through the trees, and then another beside it.
‘Miss Avery? Aurora?’
It was Verrall, with Bella on his arm. Aurora ran stumbling over the packed snow to reach her sister quickly. ‘Are you—?’ She did not know what to ask.
Bella had a hand filled with snow pressed to her cheek. Tears shone in her eyes but she only sounded angry: ‘I ran into a tree branch in the dark, I am so stupid!’
‘It will leave a miserable bruise,’ Verrall said.
‘But you should see the other fella,’ East said, irrepressible. From within Aurora’s warm clasp Bella punched East’s coat-sleeve.
‘It is too cold to stand here,’ Aurora said. ‘I must find Clover, too.’
But then she remembered the bundle on the ground. Verrall was handing her his lantern already, courteous as always; she took it and went back to the corral fence, to the place where she had seen the fallen heap.
It was a woman lying there. Aurora set the lantern down beside her and gently took the woman’s shoulder. ‘Are you in difficulty?’ she asked, feeling the inadequacy of the words. ‘Can we help you?’
A shock-white face lolled towards them as Aurora turned the woman’s shoulder. Red hair like fox-fur springing from the girl’s forehead, blood coming from her nose. Her dress was torn, her skirt ripped away, and Aurora saw blood on the pallid, splaying legs.
‘How did you find out she was dead?’ East asked, after a little silence. Verrall groaned and turned away into the darkness, to be loudly sick.
Bella knelt by Aurora and lifted the girl’s bloody head to her lap. She still had a clump of snow in her hand, and with that she touched the broken cheek and eyelids. Aurora found the girl’s hands and chafed them.
The girl shifted, not moaning but making a small cat sound. She opened her eyes and stared at them, then looked away and tried to cover her skinny legs.
‘Mr. East?’ Aurora said into the darkness, where East had gone to help Verrall.
‘In a minute,’ he said. ‘Finish off, for the lord’s sake, Verrall! How much do you have in there?’
Then Mayhew came, full of authority. He bent and lifted the girl by the shoulders to help her sit up, and Bella and Aurora gave him room; he felt her head with practised fingers, then said, ‘Upsy-daisy,’ and lifted her right up to her feet.
She stood there swaying. Bella found the ripped end of the girl’s skirt and tucked it up so the girl was covered. Aurora pressed the girl’s limp hand. ‘Can you see?’ she asked. ‘Can you speak to me?’
The girl licked her broken lip. A purple mark showed faintly on her neck in the dim light. ‘My shawl …’ she said.
Bella searched for it and found it caught on a splinter of the fence-rail.
Aurora asked her, ‘Who hurt you?’
‘I—he—I—’ The girl touched her neck, and felt along her chest. ‘He took my—’
Mayhew still had hold of her back. ‘Best not to pry into it,’ he told the others, quietly. ‘It’s her livelihood, after all. You’d only get her sacked.’
Aurora felt so sorry for her. No bigger than Bella, and not much older, from her voice. Her matted red braid had come down. It lay like a rope around her neck. Her poor lip.
‘It’s nothing,’ the girl finally said. She shook her head, slowly, experimentally. ‘I’m lucky, this time.’ She had a strong accent—Irish, perhaps, mangled through her swollen mouth. She put up one hand and tucked a