Goda’s youngest was six, and she had been coughing into Wren’s marsh tea for nine days.
Sella came up the eel-wives’ lane at the hour when the light went and the flue began to draw badly, the way it always did at that time of the evening. The chimneys breathed back the smoke from the houses below, and the smoke hung over the lane in a flat grey sheet that caught in the throat and would not let go. She had walked the lane every day since the cough came. She knew the step of every door. She did not knock at this one. She lifted the latch and went in, and the room closed round her like a fist.
The box bed stood against the back wall, with its curtains drawn back and a lamp on the chest beside it. Goda was sitting on the bench at the foot of the bed with her hands in her lap. Wren was kneeling at the head of the bed, holding a cup to the child’s lips. The child was not drinking. She was lying back against the bolster with her eyes half open and her small chest moving under the blanket in short, shallow, labouring heaves. Her lips were bright with blood at the corners. There was a rag on the blanket, folded and stiff, that had been used too many times.
