close they looked like one bundle beneath her threadbare shawl. The shawl was patched in several places and too thin for real warmth, but she had spread it over them all and left her own shoulders exposed. Her dress was torn at the hem. Her boots were cracked open near the toes. Her hair had come loose from its pins and lay dark against the straw.
The smallest child, a boy no older than 3, slept with his thumb in his mouth and his face pressed into the hollow of her shoulder. Another child had one arm wrapped around her waist. The oldest, a girl with tangled hair and dirt on her cheeks, lay curled near the woman’s knees, one hand clutching the shawl as if it were the edge of the world.
The woman’s eyes opened.
They were dark eyes, tired beyond measure, but steady.
She did not scream. She did not scramble back. She did not pretend she belonged there. Instead, she tightened both arms around the children and looked straight at Boon Carter as if she had been expecting judgment all her life.
‘They were cold,’ she whispered.
Boon said nothing.
The lantern trembled in his hand, and the light moved over her face. She was young. Younger than he first thought. Maybe 25. Hunger had sharpened her cheekbones and shadowed her eyes, but there was something fierce in the set of her mouth. She looked like a person who had already been refused by the world and had decided to keep walking anyway.
‘Please do not wake them,’ she said. ‘They have not slept proper in 3 days.’
Boon should have demanded her name. He should have ordered her out. He should have told her that his barn was not a hotel, his hay was not bedding, and his life was not large enough to hold strangers.
But the children were so small.
He looked at their thin faces, their worn sleeves, their shoes with gaps where leather had given up. He saw blue fingers. Chapped lips. A hollow beneath the oldest girl’s cheek that looked too much like starvation.
The shotgun suddenly felt heavy and foolish in his hand.
‘Who are they?’ he asked.
The woman glanced down at the children, and for the first time her expression softened. ‘Orphans.’
‘All of them?’
‘All that are left with me.’
The oldest girl stirred in her sleep. Her lips moved, and a small broken word slipped out.
‘Mama?’
The woman’s face crumpled for one instant. It was so quick Boon might have missed it if he had not been watching her closely. Then she pressed her lips to the girl’s hair.
‘Sleep, Ruthie,’ she murmured.
Boon understood then.
The woman was not their mother.
But she was the closest thing they had.
‘Your name?’ he asked.
‘Clara Bell.’
‘How long have you been in my barn, Miss Bell?’
‘Since dark.’ She swallowed. ‘We saw the roof from the ridge. I thought maybe there would be shelter. Just for one night. We will be gone come morning.’
The words were practiced. Boon could hear it. She had said them before at other doors, other barns, other places where mercy was asked for like a debt.
‘Where did you come from?’
For a while, Clara did not answer.
