Between Two Fires (9781101611616) (2012)
“The cloths she had bundled around her middle were coarse and chafed her, but she was glad to have found them in the farmhouse; the mother of the dead family inside had been halfway through sewing a dress for herself when the disease came and made her lay her needle aside. She had been found leaning out the window, dead a good month so she was mostly bone, the wattle under her dark as though she had melted into the wall. Delphine thought the woman’s fever might have made her want air at the end ...of it. She guessed, too, that the whole family had sickened at once; one small corpse hugged another in the corner opposite, the smaller of them clutching a cloth poppet with eyes of snail shell. The mother was already too weak to bury them when they died. And where was the man of the house? Was it the old man in the barn? Or was he the woman’s father? She guessed it was the father, and that he had been mad before and they kept him in the barn; but then it occurred to her that he might have hidden himself there to save his life, perhaps warning others away with that rusty scythe, and there lost his mind.MoreLess
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