The widow had the kid. She had not asked for it.
Tamsin had put it into her arms at the bottom of the Lowgate steps without a word, and then she had turned round and walked back up the path with her hands empty, and the widow had stood there with the warm bony weight of the animal against her shoulder and had not known, for a moment, what to do with her own two arms. She had not held a goat before. She had held a child, and a husband, and a tin cup on a string, and a great many sacks of meal on her back up the Lowgate path in the bad winters, but she had never once been handed a creature that could not stand and did not know what it was being given to.
It had slept against her all the afternoon. It lay now in the room behind the wall, on a folded blanket by the cold hearth, with its legs tucked under and its ribs going in and out, quick and light, like the thin skin of a drum. Every so often it lifted its head and bleated, one small sad note, and the widow would get up from her stool and go over and crouch beside it and put a hand on its neck, and it would settle, and sleep again.
