Starvecrow Farm by Stanley J. Weyman

When Henrietta rose on the second morning of her imprisonment, and opened her door and looked out, she met with an unpleasant surprise. Snow had fallen in the night, and lay almost an inch deep in the yard. The sheet of dazzling white cast the dingy spiked wall and the mean cell-doors into grey relief. But it was not this contrast, nor the memory of childish winters with their pleasures-though that memory took her by the throat and promised to choke her-that filled her with immediate dismay. It was the difficulty of performing the prison duties, of going beyond her door, and refilling her water-pitcher at the pump. To cross the yard in sandaled shoes-such as she and the girls of that day wore-was to spoil her shoes and wet her feet. Yet she could not live without water; the more as she had an instinctive fear of losing, under the pressure of hardship, those refinements in which she had been bred. At length she was about to venture out at no matter what cost, when the door of the yard opened, and the jailor's wife came stumbling through the snow on a pair of pattens. She carried a second pair in her hand, and she seemed to be in anything but a pleasant humour.

"Here's a mess! " she said, throwing down the pattens and looking about her with disgust. "By rights, you should set to work to clear this away, before it's running all of a thaw into your room. But I dare say it will wait till midday-it don't get much sun here-and my good man will come and do it. Anyways, there are some pattens, so that you can get about-there's as good as you have gone on pattens before now! Ay, and mopped the floor in them! And by-and-by my girl will bring you some fire 'gainst you're ready for your breakfast."