All The Dark Places

18. Rubber Ball

  Early morning twilight seeped over the sky and Rosalind had not slept in two nights. There was too much to be done to bother with sleep, to allow herself the luxury of a pillow and a soft mattress. In the daylight, she worked, the labor of it breaking her down. There was the garden to be tended to, the building of chicken coops and more rabbit hutches. Fuel had to be found and that meant excursions out on the road, looking for anything to keep the lamps burning at night. She rode her horse (Desmond was increasingly being thought of as hers now) out along the roads and through farmland, looking for houses that had been abandoned. The owners had left for greener pastures, though she could not think of a better place to be than exactly where she was. Still, people had family elsewhere and then there were those that just refused to believe. They went off to the city and never came back. They went to Manchester... gone. Birmingham... gone... Liverpool... gone. And of course the ghost of London. It was too much to think about. The work kept her from thinking about anything too much. About Charlie. She missed her husband, her charming little house in Oregon, her friends, martinis and sushi and chocolate bars and obnoxious DJ's on the radio. She missed morning coffee on the porch with her neighbors weed eating their flower beds. The normal stuff. She missed all of it with a dull and palpable ache.

The last two days had come and gone in a flurry of work. Her hands were rough and callused from digging post holes with a shovel. Her hair had not been brushed in a week and it hung loosely pinned to the crown of her head with tendrils frizzing all around her face. I must look like a madwoman, she thought, glancing in the mirror near the desk in her room. My room, she thought. No, not really my room at all. Just some space I am squatting in and hoping no one pulls the rug out from under me. When she wasn't working outside, she was organizing everything in the castle and the hunting lodge out by the lake. They could use everything for something. Stacks of old newspapers in the attic for kindling. Nevermind the vintage newspapers from WWII, they needed warmth, not nostalgia. She could not bring herself to burn the immense collection of books in the castle. She hoped it would not come to that, but the fact was that winter was coming, and with it came the Northern snow and ice that would likely freeze out Thornwood's more fragile residents. The old, the sick, the small children. People would die. Food would be scarce. Unless they had a plan. Nighttime was for making plans.

She scribbled diagrams and ideas down in her journal, scratching them out and starting again. She found an old map of the area that zeroed in on the local buildings within a twenty mile radius. It showed churches, warehouses, even farms. It showed a farming equipment warehouse and a plant nursery. Of course there were the grocery markets and everyday things of Athelgate, but those had been stripped bare and raided as expected. At night, she planned out the future by candlelight while Scott snored from exhaustion nearby in the bed they shared.

The guilt was there still, even weeks after she had hidden her own secret stash of supplies on the rooftop, she felt horrible about the deception. Still, no one was starving yet. Struggling, yes, but not starving. She put down the pen and journal and rubbed the soreness out of her hand, staring at the window. She needed flour, salt and butter to make bannocks for the next two days.[ Rowan Aftyn, 7/12/15, 4:08 PM] She had learned to make the medieval bread cakes at Faelorn Grove, that sweet and nostalgic commune that now seemed so crucial to her survival. She went to the window and opened it, climbing out carefully onto the rooftop ledge. Untying the cord of the first burlap bag, she found the flour and the salt. She was removing what she needed into a kitchen jar when she heard a sound down below.

There was Felicia, bouncing a rubber India ball against the stone of the castle wall. The girl was repeating a sing-song rhyme every time the ball bounced back into her hand.

"If-I-Catch-This-One-Rosalind-Doesn't-Die"

When she heard the words, Rosalind was so stunned that she lost control of her footing and her leg slipped off the side of the ledge. She ducked down and grasped the ledge, belly down on the cold stone, cheek pressed to a soot covered block of chimney stone with an "umph" sound.