Reopening the yard behind Mara Vell’s shuttered bathhouse took three days of sweeping out drifted marsh sedge, oiling leather hinges, and settling accounts that had waited through the winter.
Mara Vell had kept the linen-room roof tight while Ysabet was away, and between her, the neighbor girl Rella, and old Quirin Sile walking over from the marsh road twice a week with his willow basket of chopped salt-fish, the three long-term residents of the yard had come through the months in plump, opinionated health.
Kettle, the three-legged retired pack tortoise, came stumping out from under the rhubarb patch the moment she heard Ysabet’s boots on the bricks, demanding bruised cabbage leaves with an insistent thump of her front shell against Ysabet’s shin. Tallow, the small male carriage lizard who had been abandoned after a wheel-fire the year before, had claimed the warmest corner of the laundry brick-work and hissed indignantly when Pip walked past his tail on six legs. And Sedge, the old female reed-marten whose weak hind legs could no longer climb a willow, slept curled in a clean hay-box beside the linen-room door, waking at noon to lick cod-liver oil off Ysabet’s left knuckles before going back to her nap.
