The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ not know, it might stoke his wrath unnecessarily. My mother thinks I do not know about the honey either, but when Lil comes close with her breath all smelling of sugar and flowers it is hard not to notice. Once I took a spoon out there and prised up the sticky cork to help myself when no one was home. The honey was like metal and blood and summer all together in my mouth, but the guilty taste was the one I remembered, day after day for weeks. I didn’t do it again.

      We sell the honey from the hive if there is enough. Hive money, egg money, bird money when my father has trapped larks and snipe. ‘The wealthy suffer from their fancy palates and inconstant appetites,’ he says. ‘So we must offer something delicate, and should it tempt the shillings from their silky purses when they pay off the butcher, so much the better.’ That thought made him wink at me. It all goes towards the important things we need: flour, salt, twine, the mending of pots and boots.

      The day draws on.

      Later we sit at the trestle table together and eat, although I can taste nothing but the smell of the raw pig everywhere, and I find I cannot swallow the rough bread at all. William leans over, still chewing at his own, to grab my bread and press it eagerly between his little teeth. Nobody scolds him, as nobody notices, they are so occupied in being well fed. I do not enjoy the thick stew made with pig’s liver and pig’s kidneys that Lil ladles out to all of us from the blackened pot. Instead I watch my mother’s bony hands spoon gravy into Hester’s open mouth until her bowl is empty. ‘This is good,’ we all say, trying not to seem too hungry before my aunt.

      I go to the loom.

      I am thinking hard and yet not thinking at all. It is as though my mind were all in pieces.

      It had almost happened once before, I remember, when I was sat with John Glincy on the bank, one time in spring. I’d let the pig go on slowly down the lane, snouting at roots all by itself. I would have been in trouble if they’d caught me doing that, just letting a weaner go wandering off.

      ‘It’s nothing but playing, is it, Ag?’ he’d said, as his hand was inching up inside my underskirt. I didn’t mind, I told myself.

      His face took on a strange shape as he was talking, as though it had a lot to concentrate on. His hand was rough and didn’t stay still. I didn’t think much on it either way, and no one ever saw, so I thought; what harm was it? In truth I did not know what I should have said to make him stop. Like I say, no one saw, and besides old Mr Jub came shuffling over the brow of the hill and John Glincy slid his hand out quick enough then, and touched his hat, if you please, to Mr Jub as he passed us by; Mr Jub who leant so heavily upon his stick it looked as though he were punishing the ground at every step. Then he went off.

      That afternoon I saw John Glincy beating at his dogs on his walk home with a viciousness that made me catch my breath. His father is angry like that, too; we heard there was a working dog at Gallop’s Farm, over Findon way, that he killed by kicking at it until it fell down. My mother says there must be some kind of ill-luck in the earth under their dwellinghouse, they have had so many troubles there. Yet he is blessed with a head of thick yellow hair, the colour of straw, so that it is his head which stands out brightly against the darkness of the field when the men are driving the ploughs and the sun shines down on them. That makes him hard to gainsay or refuse in any way; he is so unyielding, and goes at a matter until he has it, like a hound after a hare.

      ‘Are you sickening now, Agnes?’ my mother asks impatiently as I sit working the loom in the corner, and I realise that my feet have paused over the treddles. I shake my head. I can’t tell her that I am full up inside and that there are coins hard on my skin wherever I go and that they feel already like a great weight. I fling the shuttle backwards and forwards through the warp with a vigour that I muster from a wretched part of myself.

      Yet I am certain that my aunt stops in the doorway to stare at me before she goes home to wash. I do not turn my head, but I can hear her rustling and breathing and the creak of the basket over her arm. It is as though she hesitates, then does not say a thing. I wait till I have thrown six more rows before I look round, but I find the doorway is empty; there is just a darkness as the sun goes behind a cloud.

      I have made up my mind.

       Three

      THE NEXT DAY PASSES. By afternoon the light is failing more quickly than the approach of sundown, and the sparrows stop piping in the hedge outside. When it is too dim to work at the loom, I go to the window and see that there is not a breath of wind and that the sky has thickened into low cloud. Even as I watch, a grey November sea fog begins to roll in over the hills and down the scarp slope through the woods, like a vast, damp smoke engulfing the house. How cold it is.

      ‘When you were up at Mrs Mellin’s yesterday,’ my mother says, ‘I hope you told her that I said she is welcome to walk to Mutton’s Farm with us tonight. She can hardly come alone, the weather like this, can she?’ I turn away from the window.

      ‘Oh, but must she walk with us?’ Lil grumbles. ‘She creeps along like an ailing badger dragging its toenails, always moaning that her back is an agony of humpiness and that the baker won’t deliver to her any more from the village. Small wonder, I say. She spoils the day.’

      ‘Elizabeth!’ rebukes my mother, sharply.

      ‘Oh, where’s all the fun gone?’ Lil adds under her breath to no one in particular, and provokes my mother’s quick and stinging palm across her cheek. We are well practised in the art of ducking now, whether we deserve a slap or not.

      ‘That’s what happens when you spoil a maid,’ my father’s unwanted comment comes from the settle where he has his boots off before the fire. It is a good thing that he does not know about the spoons of honey, I think. He was displeased enough when the Rector’s wife told me I should have an education.

      ‘Schooling?’ he’d shouted. ‘That’ll feed us nicely, will it? You’ll go to no school I know of!’

      And so instead the Rector’s wife helped me to read after church on Sundays, or when she had a moment on a Friday. I liked the kind of words I found inside the newspapers she lent me, the Bible, the way that words could tell things properly. ‘You must learn to write next, Agnes,’ she’d said. ‘You are a quick and clever girl, you could train to be a teacher.’ And then the Rector’s wife was expecting a child at last, after five long years of waiting and hoping, and there was no time to help me any more.

      We wait for Mrs Mellin a little, but of course she does not come, and by the time we are walking to Mutton’s Farm for the Martinmas feast, it is dark and quite impossible to see more than yards ahead. The lamp that my father carries casts light poorly before us, the damp air giving it a halo made of mist and light. The sounds of our talking bounce back strangely at us. Lil and I cling together as we walk, with our free hands outstretched into the murkiness; it is as though we were walking in our sleep together. William’s voice chatters on and on somewhere behind us in the dark.

      Once a year Mr Fitton gives a great feast to keep us sweet, to keep the rents flowing in pleasantly, and the pool of ready labour there to hand. My brother Ab says that Mr Fitton has his inner eye undyingly to Lady Day and Michaelmas, when the benefits of letting land is apparent in the easy shape of gold and guineas. He can afford to get the butcher in to brown a fat sheep over a blaze of fruitwood and to stuff us with spice cake and have the prettiest girls pour out a froth of ale into our cups, he says. He wants to butter up his workers and his tenants, holding us over with some lurking, ancient sense of gratitude we should be feeling. My brother Ab will take СКАЧАТЬ