The Cruelest Month

Out the opening she came, inching along. And behind her came the quacking. Two tiny, fluffy birds.



‘There’s a crone,’ said Jeanne.



‘Ruth Zardo,’ said Gamache, laughing and thinking she wouldn’t get much argument in this village.



Jeanne turned to him, stunned.



‘Ruth Zardo? The poet? She’s Ruth Zardo? Who wrote,



‘I didn’t feel the aimed word hit



and go in like a soft bullet.



I didn’t feel the smashed flesh



closing over it like water



over a thrown stone.



‘That Ruth Zardo?’



Gamache smiled and nodded. Jeanne had quoted from one of his favorite poems by Ruth, ‘Half-Hanged Mary’.



‘Oh, wow.’ Jeanne was almost trembling. ‘I thought she was dead.’



‘Only parts of her,’ said Gamache. ‘She seems to be doing it in stages.’



‘She’s a legend in my circles.’



‘Witches’ circles?’



‘Ruth Zardo. That poem, “Half-Hanged Mary”? It’s about a real woman, Mary Webster. They thought she was a witch so they strung her up from a tree. This was back in the witch-hunt days. Late sixteen hundreds.’



‘Here?’ Gamache asked. He was a student of Quebec history and while he’d come across many odd and brutal events, none would match the witch-hunts.



‘No, Massachusetts.’ She was still staring at Ruth, though so was everyone else. Ruth had progressed about a foot along the Commons, the baby birds behind her flapping their tiny wings, like vestiges, and going up on their little webbed feet. ‘Amazing woman,’ said Jeanne, almost in a dream.



‘Ruth or Mary?’



‘Both, really. Have you read her poems?’



Gamache nodded.



‘I was hanged for living alone,



for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,



tattered skirts, few buttons,



a weedy farm in my own name,



and a surefire cure for warts.’



‘That’s it,’ said Jeanne, following Ruth with her eyes as a morning glory follows the sun.



‘Up I go like a windfall in reverse,



a blackened apple stuck back into the tree.



‘Unbelievable. And yet,’ Jeanne finally broke contact with Ruth and turned a slow but full circle, ‘I can believe it of this village. Where else would people go to be safe? To get away from the burning times.’



‘Is that why you came here?’



‘I came because I was tired, burned out. Now there’s something. A burned-out witch.’ She laughed and they both turned back toward the small white clapboard chapel on the side of the hill, and walked toward it.



‘And yet you agreed to do a séance.’



‘It’s the training. Hard to say no.’



‘The training or the woman? You don’t have to be a healer to find it hard to say no.’



‘I’ve always found it difficult, it’s true,’ she said. They’d reached St Thomas’s and climbed the half-dozen wooden steps to the small veranda. Gamache opened the large wooden door but Jeanne was standing with her back to him. Looking at Ruth, then shifting her gaze to the three great pine trees on the village green.



‘Is that just a coincidence? A village called Three Pines with three pines on the green?’



‘No. This village was created by the United Empire Loyalists fleeing across the border from the States in the war with Britain. It was just woods then. Still is, I guess.’ Gamache had joined her and now the two of them stood side by side looking over the village, and the dense forests beyond.



‘It was impossible for the Loyalists to know when they were safe. So a code was devised. Three pine trees in a clearing meant they could stop running.’



‘They were safe,’ said Jeanne, and seemed to sag. ‘Oh, dear Lord, thank you,’ she whispered.



Gamache stood in the gentle, golden sun and waited until Jeanne was ready to go inside.



‘We were in a circle and that witch put salt down,’ said Gilles. The two men were sitting on stones by the creek in full flight. Beauvoir was listening and tossing pebbles into the water. Sandon was staring at the creek, its surface covered in dancing silver flecks where the sun caught movement. ‘I should have left then, but I don’t know, we all got caught up. It was a sort of hysteria, I think. I could hear things in the dark. It was scary.’



Beauvoir stole a quick glance at Sandon, but the man didn’t seem embarrassed by his admission.



‘Then she started calling the spirits, and saying she could hear them, and I could too. It was terrible. She’d lit candles and somehow that made the darkness even deeper. And then there was the shuffling. There was something there, I know it. That witch brought something back from the dead. Even I know that’s a mistake.’