Dead Man's Embers by Mari Strachan Read Free Book Online

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8
    Non thinks the heat will surely kill her, it will squeeze her heart until it stops beating and bursts. She has taken an extra dark drop again this morning but it is not enough. Meg complains incessantly, of the heat, of the work, of the unfairness of being a girl. Non cannot disagree with Meg; it is hot, the work is hard whatever the weather, it is unfair that it should be the women who have to do it. But she is unable to look into the future and promise Meg that one day men will be doing women’s work the way women did men’s work during the War. Somehow, it does not seem likely.
    It is surely pleasanter in the garden, so she shoos Meg out to pick beans and pull potatoes and carrots, to gather eggs from beneath the hens if the heat has not stopped them laying altogether, to fetch the milk from the earthen store Davey has built in the shade of the garden wall to give her somewhere cool to keep the milk and the butter and the cheese. With the hem of her apron she wipes away the sweat that is stinging her eyes before taking the roast from the oven to baste it and return it to carry on cooking.
    â€˜Mint,’ she says to Meg who comes through the kitchen doorwith her bounty. ‘We need mint for the sauce to have with the lamb.’
    â€˜It’s hotter in the garden than it is in the house.’ Meg pours water from the pitcher into the bowl on the small table by the door and splashes her face with it. ‘At least it was cool in chapel this morning. Half the people fell asleep. Nain was snoring.’ The memory makes her giggle. ‘But I’d better not say it when she’s here. She and Taid are coming for their dinner, are they?’
    â€˜As usual,’ Non says. And when did that become usual? Was it after Billy died? Before that, Mrs Davies would never deign to eat anything that Non prepared. And she would not allow Non to send Billy any of her herbal preparations to alleviate the symptoms of his illness. Non was never fond of Billy, there was something about him that made her flesh creep, but he was her husband’s brother, and that was that, it seemed. He worked so hard, Billy, at avoiding being recruited, faked illnesses and conditions with his mother’s connivance that she, Non, knew he did not have, only to die ingloriously of influenza after the War was over. In Manchester. No one knew what he was doing in Manchester. Non had not been brought up a believer but she sometimes thought that Billy had suffered a divine retribution of some sort. Now, she hopes Mrs Davies had given up the strange idea she had conceived that Billy’s name should be on the town’s war memorial as a casualty of the influenza brought back by the returning soldiers.
    â€˜Mint,’ Meg says, thrusting a bunch of it at her. ‘And I’m not doing anything else.’
    Non inhales the scent of the mint. ‘Oh, Meg,’ she says, ‘just smell the coolness coming from it.’
    â€˜Nothing is cool,’ Meg says. ‘Absolutely nothing. We’ll all roast to death before we get to eat the roast.’
    She is pleased with that, Non thinks, as Meg forgets her threatto do nothing and takes the tablecloth and cutlery through into the dining room. She hears her open the window though there is no breath of air to be had to blow through the room.
    Meg returns briefly into the heat of the kitchen. ‘And,’ she says, ‘the stink from Maggie Ellis’s closet is dreadful. She says it’s your fault, you forgot to pick whatever it was you promised her to put in there yesterday.’
    â€˜How can you expect us to eat hot food in this heat, Rhiannon?’ Mrs Davies seems hotter than anyone else, if such a thing is possible. It does not improve her temper.
    â€˜Mother,’ Davey says, ‘you’d complain just as much if we’d given you cold food for your Sunday dinner.’
    Non is grateful that he allies himself with her. It is always a