As though havoc were not doing enough with them, the Lost Folk let in another adversary—cringing and abject fear—fear that slackened the muscles and slew their will to live. Every other house was tenanted by dead or dying, and those free of the plague as yet were journeying up the fells with bundles slung over-shoulder. It was better to go anywhere than stay in Garsykes, where plague stalked silent through the buzzing flies.
The last fugitive to seek the hills was Widow Mathison, and Nita was at her cottage-door as she came past with her boy.
“Afraid, like the rest?” mocked the basket-weaver.
“Not for myself. I’d have stood by my tavern to the last, but there’s the little lad to think of. Hardcastle o’ Logie saved him from the bog, and ’twould be a shame to let him die of Garsykes fever. You don’t like Hardcastle’s name, I notice. He’s had the laugh of us at the end of all.”
With flaunting, half-frightened derision, she gripped her boy’s hand, and together they went up the track of flight that many Garsykes Folk had taken—the track marked here and there, as they sped further up the wilds, by some dying man who raved in anguish, or by a dead woman with a baby crying at her breasts for food.
Nita looked down on the steamy haze of Garsykes. Up here, where her cottage nestled in a dingle of the highlands, the breeze blew clear and free. Death might ride as he would through a village she despised and loathed—but how could he touch little Nita, who wove baskets for the Dale? She glanced far out to Logie, its grey chimneys pushing up above the lush, green woodlands. Hardcastle and his bride were there, and already she was weaving snares for them, supple as the willows that were her stock-in-trade, when a heavy tread sounded close at hand.
She saw Long Murgatroyd lurching and swaying up the road—saw him steady himself as he neared her.
“There were three of us left in Garsykes,” said Murgatroyd. “And now there’s only two.”
“How is that?” asked Nita, humouring a man in liquor.
“I stepped into the widow’s for a drink of ale—hoping she’d forget what she’d chalked on the inside o’ the door against me. And there wasn’t a widow there. So I helped myself.”