When it was over Patience asked Knapp if she might sit for while in the empty cell. She looked for the rope flower but it wasn’t there. Knapp must have spirited it away, or perhaps Pike had taken it with him.

It seemed an eternity since he’d first wandered into town. There’d still been snow on the ground, though the worst of the winter had been over. For months before there’d been talk of a little gold to the south, and she remembered seeing the four Piper City men heading off on their expedition to look for it, Pike making the fifth as bag-carrier and general dogsbody, loaded up with cooking pots and shovels, dynamite, fuel, picks.

She walked slowly away from the jailhouse, trying to empty her mind of everything that had happened since the four Piper City men had failed to return and their horrible fate had been discovered. She tried to empty her mind of the quiet hours she’d spent with Galen Pike at the jail, of Byron Lym’s crushing rejection of her latest project, of the terrible hanging. She had never felt so miserable in her entire life. She turned out of North Street into Franklin, past the shuttered front of the general store, the closed bank, the locked-up haberdasher’s, the drawn blinds of the dentist. She paused before the heavy pine doors of the bank. On the brass knocker someone had tied an evergreen wreath with a thick black ribbon. Poor Mr Shrigley, she thought. Poor Mr Palgrave. Poor Damon Archer and Dawson Mew.

She walked on a little way and then she stopped and turned and looked back at the silent premises of the four dead men.

It had not occurred to her before.

‘Oh dear Lord,’ she whispered, thinking of Byron Lym’s stubborn but wafer-thin majority at the polls.

In Piper City everyone knew how everyone else voted and if Patience’s memory served her and she was not mistaken, there’d been forty-eight Republican voters at the last election, and since then Galen Pike had eaten four of them. It was doubtful Lym could succeed next time without them.

Patience turned on her heel.

She squared her bony shoulders and tucked her basket into the crook of her arm.

Quickened her step along Franklin Street towards home.

Ran up the steps onto the porch and in through the screen door, to tell Walter the news.

Wicked Fairy

Wicked Fairy