The Sins of the Wolf

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Hester Latterly sat upright in the train, staring out of the window at the wide, rolling countryside of the Scottish Lowlands.

The early October sun rose through a haze above the horizon. It was a little after eight in the morning, and the stubble fields were still wreathed in mist, the great trees seeming to float rootless above it, their leaves only beginning to turn bronze on odd branches here and there. The buildings she could see were of solid gray stone, looking as if they had sprung from the land in a way the softer colors of the south never did. There were no thatched roofs here, no plaster walls pargeted in patterns, but tall chimneys smoking, crowstepped gables outlined against the sky, and broad windows winking in the early light.

She had come home when her parents had died at the close of the Crimean War, nearly a year and a half before. She would like to have stayed in Scutari until the bitter end, but the family tragedy had required her presence. Since then she had attempted to put into effect some of the new nursing practices she had learned so painfully, and even more, to reform England’s old-fashioned ideas of hospital hygiene in accordance with Miss Nightingale’s theories. And for her pains, she had been dismissed as opinionated and disobedient. There really was no defense against either charge. She was guilty.

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