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children’s wake, she stood muttering distractedly. “Enough it is that I must feed you, boil your foul laundry, and cater to your mother’s idle vanity,” she declared. “I will not be your wet nurse too!” Indignantly she turned back toward the kitchen.
    “As for you, young missy...” The clumping slattern abruptly paused, looming over Tamsin. “You hold no privileged place in this household—what, you rascal, have you been into my rag bin, stealing brightly coloured scraps for that hideous doll of yours? Take care, my girl, or you will have your fingers seared as a thief!” The beldame made a perfunctory snatch at the doll, though her middle was too thick to allow her to bend over far enough.
    “All right, then,” she declared at last to the crouching child. “If these whelps will have no part of you, why then, you can be my playmate. Go find an old shingle and scrape the ashes out of yon fire grate—” she pointed to a scorched heap in the middle of the yard “—so that when I render down the pork guts this noon, the fire will flare up crisp and bright. Off to work now,” she goaded, aiming raps with her knotty broom handle at the door jamb near the child’s head. “You can begin earning your keep around here!”
    Later that morning, Tamsin huddled behind the tanning shed, dressing and primping her doll. Using a bone needle she had taken from the dry chest, and purple threads laboriously unravelled from a berry-stained fabric remnant, she attached a collar and sleeves to a small, crude shirt she had already fashioned from the same cloth. It did not occur to her, perhaps, to remove the garment from the doll; as she worked, the figure sat bobbing in her lap like a real, gnomish creature whom she mentally addressed in her silent, crooning way.
    “There now, Ninga, you will have no more chilly drafts on your neck. And your sleeves are elegant! When I am finished, you will have the finest suit of clothes in the village. Only the best for Ninga, my one true friend!”
    The pinkish-grey gourd that formed the doll’s head had dried rock-hard; as it lolled, the loose seeds within rattled and shivered with a sound almost like a whispered rejoinder. Its shape was bulbous and somewhat tapering for a human head, it was true—but the inked scratchings that sketched in the eyes, nose, and mouth gave it a convincingly sombre and only slightly fish-eyed expression, while its rag body was stuffed and seamed so as to dangle realistically where it sat, like a slack human form.
    “So, little missy, this is how you repay the kindness of your cousin’s household!” From around the comer of the shed, old Gurda was suddenly upon Tamsin, striking and swatting at her with the rough, bristling end of her broom. “For shame, ingrate! Instead of doing the one simple chore I ask of you, you sit here playing and idling the hours away!”
    Tamsin bolted, but the housekeeper planted a heavy-clogged, wooden-soled foot on the hem of the girl’s out-sized dress, pinning her to the spot as she tugged and struggled to escape. Switching her grip on the broom, Gurda belaboured her victim’s head and scrawny back with its knotty handle, striking hard enough to produce audible thwacks. “Believe it, missy, that hearth will be well-cleaned by you—if not today, then tomorrow or the day after!”
    By a desperate lunge, Tamsin managed to pull free and escape, running with her doll clutched to her chest. Gurda stumped a few paces after her, shaking her broom threateningly and hurling oaths. Then, muttering under her breath, she went back around the shed and returned to the task of stoking the fire under the great copper vat of steaming entrails.
    Tamsin, meanwhile, ran around the side of the house. When she saw that she was not pursued, she crouched down beside the trunk of a great gnarled oak, breathing heavily, yet neither crying nor whimpering. Her pale-glazed blue eyes stared out unfocused over the farm fields... until a soft voice