The Stars and the Cookie Jar

...brought to you by Gabriel Faure's Elegie in Cminor, as interpreted by DuPre. That's really the Weaver's theme, I think, just as 'Vanished Like The Snow' is the Storyteller's. I got about 850 words in tonight, ending a comparatively long dry spell where all I did was rearrange and slaughter what I already had.

   There was silver in my hair that winter, like spray off the waves. When the clouds lay thick as fleeces I stood and watched the iron-dark winter sea. I did not see her coming laden up the middle of our track; I never turned from the window until I heard my husband’s voice, jackdawing, raised.
   I came down the stairs to find the great room strewn like the village goods-market: bolts of cloth wrapped in oiled paper, white thread on bobbins, black thread on spools, colored thread softly folded like a sleeping woman’s hair. There was a handloom, small but surely not light, streaming snow onto the hearth.
   A woman was trapped between my husband, my hearth and the door. Her clothes were sodden, the stony color of gulls, and her face was the same tint, from far too long in the cold. A swath of plaid, blue and ochre and eelgrass-green, covered her hair. It was the only brightness about her: frost lay over her mouth and exhaustion paled her eyes. She seemed no taller than my shoulder, and I am not tall.
   “Wants to stay the winter,” said my husband. “She cannot pay.”
   “She won’t pay.” My dark hair was untidy, from idle hours in the window’s draught, and my eyes must have seemed to him wild. “Or have you so much luck and fortune, Joseph Merrow, that you can turn travelers out of doors?”
   I had not said so many words to him in months. He looked from the stranger, to me, to the red palm print at the fire-back; he cleared his throat. His boots left oily marks on the scrubbed floor.
   We were left gazing across at one another, still as pond-ice. Then she reached to touch the loom, the way I reached in the night to know you still breathed, when you were small. Her hands were bare, blue and white and roughened red, but she touched the wood of the loom like silk.
   “I can pay,” she said, blinking a few times in the firelight. “In weaving, in things you need.”
    I shook my head. When I made no spoken answer she turned to me, waiting. Her eyes were a washed green, the underside of new leaves; fire-touched, as though she had not slept in days. The flickering light stretched and shadowed her, and there were gold threads in the plaid scrap that bound her hair.
    “I will pay.”
    “This is the best fire in the house,” I said, louder than I might. “Stay and get warm.”        
   She looked at me, sudden and sharp, and reached all the way to the fire-back: her chilblained hand must have seared and stung in such heat. She laid it over the red mark there.  “Why is this here?” She looked at me, and her sleeve began to steam, but she did not move her hand.
   “This place is mine,” I said, not quite answering.
   “But is it the place you want?”
   I took her bare wrist and drew her back, fear-sharp, from the flame.