The Spoiled Earth [antikvár]

1 Once more the swan had spread its wings across the roof. This morning it was distinctly yellow with a feathery brown border which indicated that there had been heavy rain during the night. A shower, and the patch of damp was hardly visible: a downpour, however, sought out the cracks between tiles and joists and soon insinuated water down the attic walls to paint tiiat full-blown fowl on the plaster of the back room ceiling. In the comer bed, Mirrin Stalker snuggled down under the patchwork quilt. Only the tip of her nose protruded as her dark sleepy eyes ruefully contemplated the swan, an uncharitable talisman all too familiar during the wet Scottish winter. The swan meant rain, and rain meant mud: mud meant boots, and boots meant skinned heels and chapped ankles. Mirrin sighed at the prospect of discomfort, and tilted her head an inch from the pillow to leam what the hour might be. Punctual Kate, Mirrin's elder sister, and the family's most reliable clock, was half through dressing. Mirrin watched as she looped her hair into a trim coronet, then completed the process of buttoning her bodice. Never any msh with Kate; no infuriating fumbling with mismatched buttons, bent hooks, or strings which had slithered out of chemises and shifts. She envied Kate's innate tidiness, but knew better than to try to emulate it. Luxuriating in the big warm bed, she wriggled deeper under the clothes. Thank God, she could lie snug for another few minutes. Mirrin loved the soft feather-filled mattress. She and Kate had inherited it a year ago when their father had strained his back and had moved his sleeping quarters to the hard palliasse in the kitchen alcove. It had been a poor exchange for her mother, who had never sufFered a muscular tvwnge in her life; though she had known pain of other kinds, and much of it. All Flora Stalker's children had been bom in this very bed, except the poor unnamed wee mite who had made his entty into the world unexpectedly early when Flora had been alone in the house, and had fluttered out his few brief moments of existence on the flagstones of the 11