The Rites of Winter

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There were heavy snows that November, and by the turn of the year Stella’s supplies of fuel were running low. She was forced to collect brushwood from the countryside surrounding the village, and celebrated her twenty-second birthday with mild frostbite of the hands. She kept a fire burning in the main room throughout the day, banking it up at night so that a residual warmth and even an ember remained when she rose the following morning. It was just as well that the inn was empty of guests and she did not have to provide extra fires; it would be difficult enough to survive the winter as it was.

The bleak, bitter weather reflected her inner state of mind. Her husband, Thomas, had died that autumn, a withered, exhausted man who looked twice his thirty-six years. He had expired in her arms without a word, as if he was glad to give up the ghost of his life. Their last guest of the season, a woman called Marguerite, had left the previous day. With her had gone Thomas’s last hope of survival. Marguerite: pale and blonde, with a smile that enchanted and blue eyes as deep and ancient as an ocean; she had stolen Thomas away, bewitched him then sucked the life from him. The doctor who had come reluctantly from the village had told her that a wasting disease had killed him. Stella knew better, for only weeks before her husband had been a vigorous man in the prime of his life and no disease could act so quickly. But she said nothing, aware that the villagers had never liked her or her husband. The inn lay on the outskirts of the village, but it might as well have been on the moon for all the contact they had had with it.

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