The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ how one should never cross the dead unduly.

      ‘Mrs Mellin,’ I nodded to her body sitting there, and then left the cottage. Just in time, I had remembered the skillet.

      How long ago that seems already, though it was only this morning.

      ‘Two days per pound, salting,’ my mother calculates, ‘which takes us to one month on Thursday next.’ She eyes the powdering tub.

      ‘I’ll do that, Mother,’ I say. The cut meat is a bright, deep red in the flicker of firelight.

      I feel dizzy. I will have been gone for so long by a month on Thursday next, I think. Lil will brim with sadness and rage for weeks. She will cry. William will cry. Hester will be puzzled and then she will not. My mother will be eaten up with anxiousness and then her baby will come and she will have enough to do without worrying after me. I do not know about my father. Unburdened partly by my absence, he may say to my mother, ‘She is a big girl, Mary,’ as he takes up his coppice tools for his walk to the Weald to find work again, or as he clenches his large, toughened hand around the handle of his flagon at table. Or he may not. A girl can never know a father.

      I know though that the sense of change that they will feel by my desertion might be dispersed by a short-lived sense of better eating. One less mouth to feed. Less feet to shoe. Less laundry. Less water to carry. When my mother hisses and claps at the cat to get outside, it is not hard to think that it is me her irritation is directed at. ‘Good riddance!’ she shouts, and the door shudders on its wooden latch as she slams it shut. My thoughts run on as though I were already gone and I feel my heart hardening inside me like a stone as I watch them busy in the room without me. Often on the Downs you can find a fist-sized round of chalk that seems too heavy for itself, and when you crack it open on the path you find it has inside it the dense glassy darkness of flint. Lil will have more space in the bed for a while till Hester grows.

      And how a full belly will take the edge off things.

      One by one I take the four flitches and lay them heavily in the powdering tub. Evenly I salt the flesh, turning the pieces and rubbing the rough mixture in handfuls into the taut meat as it drains, until my hands are sore and my arms wet up to the elbows with the pink briny liquid that comes from it.

      My father, returned at last from the village and smelling of drink bought on the strength of promises, comes up to the tub and holds up a piece by the bone. ‘Will you see that ribbon of fat about the back and collar!’ he exclaims. ‘As thick as my thumb and forefinger together. That’s good eating! That’s worth months of scraping the beer wash out into a bucket. Didn’t I say so!’ He looks at my mother. My mother, picking up Hester from the floor, does not even seem to hear him. Her belly is huge.

      ‘Is there plenty of pepper, onions?’ my aunt nags from the back room, picking up this and that and turning things over in her hand. She means for the sausage; the bits and pieces, the scrapings and leavings, crusts, herbs. There is no waste. Lil has gone out to the stream with the stinking guts looped up in a bucket, where she washes and washes them until they are clean, and until her fingers are so frozen cold she can hardly push the guts inside out.

      My mother ignores my aunt nosing about, as she always does. She has had too many years of it to care. She takes Hester to the truckle bed and lies her down under the blanket for her sleep, then she comes back to the kitchen and begins to chop the heart and kidneys into dark pink pieces on a board.

      ‘Oh, there are always onions,’ Lil cries despairingly when she returns, holding her wet red fingers out before the fire. She hates the taste of them unless they form but a tiny part of something good to eat. ‘Should we be starving to death, our legs sprouting bony from the hems of our skinny ragged dresses, there would still be onions to feed upon.’ Lil has the sweetest tooth of all of us. She seems to suffer most from the plainness of our diet, becoming pale and drawn and falling asleep if she has carried fresh water all the way from the well. ‘Soup made with onions, for days on end, gives people a bellyache,’ she always complains, as though my mother chooses to make it on purpose to vex her.

      My aunt comes out holding a pail in front of her. ‘You should cover your butter, Mary,’ she says accusingly, and tips it up so that the soaking pat of butter in the water bobs against the side and threatens to spill out. ‘Mice will be having that, leaving their evidence all over it. Get a good lid, weigh it down. A heavy thing will do, a tile, a rock. Go on, Elizabeth!’ She has always chivvied us. My mother says that at least it is a good thing that she married our uncle, as his natural state is patient to the point of indolence. Lucky that she didn’t wed our father then, I’d thought when she said that, as his temper wouldn’t stand for nagging.

      Lil rolls her eyes as she goes to the door.

      She is right, of course; mice will eat anything. I have found tallow candles nibbled down to the wicks before, and green scrubbing soap ridged and pocked with teeth marks. Their droppings get everywhere, like big seeds of dirt. In summer we cut lengths of water mint and rue to strew over the boards in the upstairs chamber, in the hope that mice would not climb up and eat our hair in the night or make nests in the straw of our bedding.

      ‘If I was choosing,’ William had said, watching us from the doorway, ‘I should make my whole nest from herbs and feathers.’

      ‘If you were a mouse, you mean,’ I’d said to him.

      ‘If I was one.’ And I’d laughed at his earnest look and scooped him up and buried my face in his hair out of merriment. How things have changed.

      I knock off the mud from my boots at the back door then sit down in the corner to clean them. There is a quietness in the room, under the chat and the noise of the knives chopping. The cat mews once outside the closed back door then goes away. My uncle whistles something through his teeth.

      ‘Why are you greasing your boots, Agnes?’ William asks suddenly. He has come and sat beside me. Everybody stops talking, and looks around at me. There is a silence. Or perhaps I have imagined it, as they are talking again.

      ‘They are so dry, William,’ I reply in a low voice. ‘I had to catch them before the cracks set in, before the wetness of the puddles began to soak through them too easily. Shall I do your boots for you?’

      He unlaces his boots, which are too big for him, and takes them off, then he sits down beside me on the floor in his woollen stockings while I warm the grease again, which has cooled and stiffened. His feet look small. He watches me work the warm liquid evenly into the leather with a piece of rag. When I have finished, our two pairs of boots are dark and shiny.

      ‘Thank you, Agnes,’ William says, and the face that he turns to me is pleased and trusting. I get up to put the greasepot away on the high shelf, so that he cannot see my eyes filling with tears.

      Traitor’s tears, I think.

      Crying is no good. I remember the time that my mother, enraged at my wallowing over some squabble with Ann, cried out, ‘Upset? There is no place for upsetness before a pot over the fire, my girl.’ And my slapped cheek stung in the heat of the flames, the salt taste of my tears mingling with the smell of scorched soup overboiling and hissing into the hot wood ash on the hearth. No, tears are uncommon in this house.

      That was the year the cold was so bitter at pig-killing time that even the running stream froze at the edge where it touched the bank; swollen icy webs clung about the stems of reeds like boiled sugar.

      At the hearth, I watch my mother slip Lil another piece of kidney when she thinks my father cannot see, in the same way that she keeps a brown crock of honey in a secret place behind the barrels СКАЧАТЬ