"Cast Out" by Joanna Michal Hoyt

A 'fear plague' mist envelops a community.

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Cast Out by Joanna Michal Hoyt

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Verity pushed back the quilts, rolled off her straw mattress onto the floor, felt for the poker, and stirred the ashes. The embers glowed. She wouldn’t have to go fire-borrowing again.

Her chilled hands were clumsy. One glowing bit of wood rolled from the hearth and across the earth floor in the direction of her mattress. She beat at it with the poker until it was completely extinguished. Then she raked the ashes back over the coals, crawled back under the quilts, and breathed out hard, trying to make a warm place with her breath. Slowly her body relaxed toward sleep...

And stiffened. The mattress was warm again. Was it too warm? That ember had rolled toward it. What if a spark had flown into it when she wasn’t looking and was smoldering in the coarse cloth, about to ignite the dry straw inside?

She’d wake when the mattress caught fire, and she’d put it out.

With what? The water in the pail was frozen.

There was a clear foot of snow on the ground. She would throw snow on the mattress... if she woke in time. But such a fire might smoke heavily. What if the smoke choked her in her sleep, and the fire devoured first her cabin and then the whole settlement?

That was hardly likely, she told herself. A woman in her right mind would not think of such a thing.

A woman not in her right mind may be more of a danger to her neighbors than she knows, she answered herself. Best take precautions.

She wept as she hauled the mattress out the door, rolled it in snow, hauled it back in cold and sodden, slung it over her one good wooden chair, set the chair as close to the hearth as she dared (not very close), poked the fire back to life, and wrapped herself in quilts to watch the night out.

She woke to gray light filtered through the oiled cloth of the window, to bone-crunching cold and a dead fire. She tried to shrug off her quilt. The pain in her scalp stopped her. Her hair was frozen to the quilt with mucus and tears.

Verity held her hands to her belly until they thawed enough to work the scissors and hack her hair off on one side. She pulled her coif on tightly, but still felt ragged edges of hair sticking out. She couldn’t go fire-borrowing like that. If she was lucky the neighbors would know her for a daftie, cluck about her to each other, shun her even more markedly than they already did; if she was unlucky (and what else had she ever been?) they’d take her for a witch, and then... She smelled smoke again, tried to think of something else.

She spent most of an hour struggling with flint and tinder before a spark caught. It was another hour before the fire burned hot enough to do any good. She’d meant to make soap, but the day was lost. Again.

She’d forgotten that eleven-year-old Prudence Carlyle was coming to make soap with her. When Prudence knocked at the door, Verity considered pretending she wasn’t home. Then she reflected that Prudence could see the smoke of her fire. She opened the door, saw Prudence staring at her face and hair, at the soggy lump of the mattress.

“You’re ill?” Prudence asked.

“Yes,” Verity said. A sane woman might be taken ill. “I can’t make soap with you today. I hope this isn’t catching, but the good Lord only knows; you’d best run along home. I’ll... I’ll stop in and tell you when I’m... better.”

Which you will never be, a cold voice murmured inside her ears.

Verity burst into tears. When she looked up, the door was closed and Prudence gone.

Verity brought a frozen hunk of pork in to thaw for stew, then sat down to spin, trying to steady her breathing to the rhythm of the wheel. It almost worked. At noon she went out to break the ice from the cow’s water trough again. Coming around the back of the byre, she glanced toward the road and saw Goody Carlyle’s short upright figure bustling toward her house.

Goody Carlyle hadn’t seen her yet. Verity lacked courage to face her exaggerated patience. She ducked back behind the byre and into the woods and started walking, staying just in sight of the cabins lining the road (she’d learned not to wander in the wildwood in her fears; it was too easy to get lost), but far enough off the road and into the trees so no one was likely to call to her.

When the hail came rattling down through the bare branches, she’d already walked a fair piece from her cabin. She ran for the nearest place she had a right to be: the meetinghouse.

The meetinghouse was the settlement’s one stone building. On weekday winter mornings the children met there to learn from whichever of the settlement’s elders had learning and time to spare. On Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays the settlement’s two Jewish families, twelve Catholic families, and seventeen Protestant families of one kind and another held their prayer meetings. The different kinds might mutter about each other, but they managed to share the meetinghouse, and to avoid bloodshed; most of Blackburn’s settlers had come upriver fleeing from blasphemy laws or witch trials or deadly fights between groups of believers. In between lessons and prayer services, the meetinghouse stood open to whoever had need of prayer, or of shelter. To be sure, some people had suggested locking it after the Strangers – the first newcomers to enter Blackburn in a generation – began coming upriver with their shadowed eyes and their charred bundles, but since so many of the Settlement’s folk used the space, and since making dozens of keys would be a nuisance and an expense, it was open still.

Verity ducked inside, sat down on a back bench and tried to steady her loud gasping breaths. As she did so she realized someone else was there.

Goodman Knowlton, who often led the prayer meetings Verity attended, rose from one of the front benches. “Mistress Clark, are you all right?” Knowlton asked.

She opened her mouth to say Yes. “No,” she said.

“Are you ailing? Shall I go for Frau Abramowitz?”

She looked down at her hands. “I am afraid.”

“Has someone hurt you? Threatened you? One of the Strangers?” His voice sharpened.

“No! No, it is only that I am afraid.”

“Of what?”