The Snow That Would Not Melt

About

The magic in it is small and stubborn: an object that is kept properly for a person, and tended without being admitted to, holds that person's afternoon. Nine years ago a child called Pellen made a snowball in the chapel yard and did not come home, and the village has kept the snowball in the cold room ever since, on the grounds that there is no reason to throw it away. This winter the room is a degree above the mark its keeper cut on the wall, the chapel wants the space back for a warm bench, and the four people who have tended the room are the four people who have never once said the word out loud. Elsa Ruck sweeps the chapel and the cold room on the same round and is the only one who reads the glass every week. The room is warming because the village is. Not because anyone has decided anything: the same parish that has been heating itself for nine winters has started, quietly, on the

Cast

• E Elsa Ruck Protagonist. Sweeps the chapel, the vestry and the cold room on the same Tuesday-and-Friday round, at two shillings a round. The only one of the four who reads the thermometer and keeps the date on it no portrait yet
• B Brenn Ockholt Peat-cutter. Has cut and carried two cords a year for the cold room since he was twenty, and has been paid fourpence short a year for nine of those winters without once putting it in a ledger. no portrait yet
• M Marthe Linnet Chapel woman. Has kept the poor fund for seventeen years and the cold room's fuel out of it for nine, and wants the room for a warm bench at Candlemas. She is not being cruel about it. no portrait yet
• C Cuddock Bream Cut the chalk mark at minus four in the first winter, carried the snowball in on a hurdle board on the fourteenth of the Cold Moon nine years ago, and has never been asked about either. no portrait yet