Stannock

The Hallam surveyor came into the inn at Stannock at the first bell with snow on her boots, and Orla knew her hands before she had said a word.

Short. Shorter than Orla by a head, and broad in the shoulder from carrying a chain, and forty or more, with grey in the plait down her back and a face burnt brown across the nose by a summer on the ridge. She stood in the door of the long room where Orla sat with the case on the bench beside her and a bowl going cold, and looked at the case, and at the brass corners, and at Orla.

“You came down off the pass in that,” she said. “Yesterday. The whole town’s saying so. Two of you, and one carrying the other.”

“He carried the case. I carried him.”

“That’s the right way round.” She came in and sat…