“Nita Langrish will laugh herself to bits when she hears this,” said Jake.
“I’m not so sure,” broke in the widow. “Nita may fool you men of Garsykes—if you’re men, which I begin to doubt—but Hardcastle escaped her. So she wants him. I’ve known her since she toddled, and that was always her way. Near died o’ crying for the moon, when she was three years old. It’s always the thing she hasn’t Nita longs for.”
“That’s true,” snarled Jake. “Awhile since she was making her baskets on the Brigg. ‘Jake,’ says she, ‘you’ve a way with dogs.’ ‘I have,’ says I. ‘It’s a birth-gift. They like as they love me, same as if I was one o’ them.’ And then she told me to put hemlock into a ball o’ meat and take it up to Logie. Hardcastle’s dog would be waiting for him at the gate, said Nita. So I went, and friendlied Roy. And I was a sick man, I tell you, coming home. To poison a dog—it doesn’t bide thinking of—but Nita made me do it.”
Long Murgatroyd rose suddenly to his big, shammocky height. He was shaken by a storm of passion.
“She’s the devil and all among us, with her basket-making and her eyes on all four sides at once to fool us. I’ve done with Nita.”
“No,” said the widow. “You’ve never done with such as Nita.”
And now feet began to patter up and down the cobbled street. Garsykes Folk were late to wake, for their work lay mainly with night-time tasks of poaching and robbery.
The woman beckoned Long Murgatroyd out of doors. He followed her with unsteady, shambling feet, and soon they had a company of unwashed folk about them, listening to the widow’s ribald laughter.
“There’s news from Logie,” she said. “Tell ’em, Murgatroyd, as you told it Jake.”
Long Murgatroyd propped himself against the wall, and looked about him with a clown’s solemnity.