Ebba had walked from Thornwick to the river gate in two days, with her cousin’s crutch under her arm and her mother’s name in her mouth, and she had slept one night in a carter’s barn at the Ruined Bridge with the frost coming through the gaps in the planks and the carter’s dog lying across her feet. She had not told anybody in the parish that she was going. She had only put on her good grey coat, and buttoned it to the collar over the stitches the quarry dust had left in the lining, and taken the crutch from her cousin’s bed without asking, and gone.
Her mother had watched her go from the doorway with a cough in her chest and both hands in her apron. She had not said anything. She had only said, when Ebba reached the lane, “Tell the Hold I am not dead,” and Ebba had said, “I will,” and had not turned round, because she knew that if she turned round she would not go.
She was not sure, now, standing in the back row of the lodgers’ gallery in the Great Hall with the Writ sealed and the candles burning low and a Turn’s worth of heads turned toward her, that she had been right not to turn round.
