Stone Cradle by Louise Doughty Page B

face was pale and her gaze misty with pain. She lifted a hand.
    A nurse in a grey uniform got in front of us as we went to her. ‘I can allow you a few minutes only,’ she said, ‘and then we have to lock this room as I must attend elsewhere.’ She turned away and left us to it.
    Dadus reached out to Dei and took her raised hand. I went around the other side, turning Lijah towards her so she could see his sleeping face. Her head was bare and her hair white at the temples. Her skin was as grey as the nurse’s uniform and seemed to hang on her face like it was too loose for the bones beneath. I could not believe the change in her. She was an old woman, suddenly, and I felt this thick load of panic inside but I did not want her to see it, so I smiled. She smiled, and tried to speak, but it was clear the pain was too great, so we talked to her and told her how we’d quitour fines and had found lodgings nearby until they let her out. I bent and put Lijah down on the boards, next to her, and she managed to turn her head a little and look at him.
    After a short while, the nurse came over and fussed us out. It broke my heart to be leaving Dei there but we made sure she knew we would be back just as soon as they’d let us.
    As the nurse locked the door behind her, Dadus said, ‘Whereabouts in the town can we purchase laudanum for her?’ and the nurse told him the name of the chemist’s, and said how we was not to worry about her being sent back to the cells but as soon as she could sit she would have to quit her sentence with light labour, like the others. She saw what we thought of this by the looks on our faces and said that in most other prisons a hard labourer with broken legs would have been tossed back in the cells to take their chances with the rest. It was only on account of Huntingdon being so progressive that there was any such thing as a room for the sick and injured.
    All the way back to our lodgings, my father said nothing, but his fists were clenched and he strode at such speed that I ran to keep up.
    *
    We got Dei back when her time was done. She hadn’t had to do the light labour after all, on account of being in too much pain to sit. Dadus used the last of our money to hire a cart so that we could get Dei back up to Ramsey and get our vardo back from the Lees. It was a big problem how we’d get the wherewithal to pay them back, and to keep buying laudanum for Dei, but all I could think of was how once we got Dei back then it would all be sorted. I realised how, though she had always been the quietest one of all of us, she had always done the most and held it all together.
    We took Dei on the cart across the bridge. There was a big common on the other side of the river where some of our Travelling folk camped sometimes and Dadus was thinking how we might beable to stop with them for a few days while we worked out whether Dei could make it up to Ramsey.
    It was the coldest day of all. We piled blankets on Dei but she was shivering and sweating in turn. Dadus had talked a pie out of the baker, to give to Dei, to celebrate the getting-of-her-back. She took a nibble at the crust then said she couldn’t manage the rest, and this worried me more than anything for after four weeks of gaol fare she should’ve fall’d on it.
    As we crossed the bridge, with Dei on the cart and Dadus leading the horse and me carrying Lijah, I looked down. The river had frozen over. The gorjers were out skating. I could see a group of women just past the arch, about six of them. They were skating in a circle, slowly, with their hands tucked into fur muffs and their long coats flying out behind them. One of them slipped and wheeled her arms and then fell, and they all burst out laughing.
    I looked back as we left the river behind, at the dark figures skating on the grey ice, flying around like big birds, as free as you please.
    *
    The Travellers on the common took us in. They were a small group and it turned out they were related to