The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

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      My brother Ab is a knot of rage these days. He is like a horse-winch straining at its strap and on the point of breaking loose. A breaking strap can cause a grievous injury to those in its vicinity. But the village girls appreciate the strength of his opinions and the broadness of his shoulders. Myself I find some truth inside his arguments but often cannot hear the content of them through his fury. My mother says he was born big and angry, that he fought his way out of her belly crimson with rage. But it is hard to work at ease when your boots are mended so many times that their lumpen shapes are mainly composed of glue and stitching.

      The great barn is a blaze of light. It looms suddenly out of the mist as we round a corner, lit up like a great ship. The double doors are flung wide, and flaming torches flank the entrance, burning at the tallow greedily, quick black smoke rising and curling from the tips of the long orange flames like a hot, stirred fluid.

      We are quite late. Inside the barn the air is warm and sweet and close. Lamps hang from the beams. There is a galloping, churning fire in the central hearth, smoke twisting up to the holes in the high ceiling. Jim Figg and Jim Hickon from the village are sawing at their violins and Mr Tucker’s little boy beats at the skin of a drum. Girls younger than myself are dancing, their shoes kicking up a chaffy dust into the air. Disturbed by the smoke billowing about beneath the trusses of the roof, one bat flutters up and down the length of the barn. It cannot get out.

      He is here of course, John Glincy. When he sees that I am here, he picks up his jugful of beer and sidles over. I hate it when I feel like this. I hate him and his rough hands on my shoulders in front of my father, and his dog that shoves its nose between my legs. I shrug him off.

      ‘Could do worse than that, Ag,’ John Glincy shouts over his plate on the bench opposite me when we sit down at the trestles to eat, and I wish that he wouldn’t, his beer slopping over the slats. He is a drunkard and a lech. He is not to be trusted. How could I trust him? I do not even look him in the eye at first. Worse than what? I do not understand him. So much is bad. I am bad, my badness multiplying. And it is now too late anyway, I think to myself. If I stay here my fleshly crime will remain, growing under my skin by increments till its limbs push at my belly, and the results of my thievery will stay pressed to my skin from the outside. I will be found out. It is too much to think otherwise.

      The cooked meat tastes of nothing to me. I just chew and swallow. Even now I am watching the door in case someone should enter with a warrant for my arrest, crying out before the assembled crowd, ‘Agnes Trussel…for the dishonest purloining of twelve pieces of gold from Susan Mellin, deceased, with other coinage, the suspicion of murder of the victim aforementioned falling upon her…’

      ‘Jumpy tonight, Ag,’ he grins as he reaches round from behind me, but I don’t like it at all and push him off. I don’t want to be touched, and I tell him so.

      ‘I should prefer to run to the postbridge over the River Arun and throw myself in, and I shall not do that either,’ I spit out at him. He does not know I am with child, nor will he ever.

      ‘But the law is binding in that respect,’ he says mockingly. ‘You envowed yourself to me. I can use that, see, and ensure your bindedness. You will find it’s up to me.’ He finds it funny. He takes a pull of ale from his jug. Wetness glistens at the corners of his mouth.

      ‘What a lie you would have employed then for your own bad uses, John Glincy,’ I retort. ‘I have made no such vow, nor will I ever.’ I am sickened by the very thought of it. I am near to tears in my confusion.

      ‘Ay,’ he says, and then he bends and speaks quietly inside my ear. His mouth is hot. ‘But I’ve had you, Agnes.’ He has stopped smiling.

      And he is right.

      ‘See,’ John Glincy thrusts his foul face up to mine, ‘that’s where the difference is, your lie against mine.’ And he walks away from me across the room and turns his yellow head about and raises his jug to me and grins again, wider.

      What a twist and tangle it all is. I am lost in it; how I wish that I could shut my mind tight and make it vanish. The music reels on, making me dizzy. When I open my eyes again after a moment, I go straight to Lil and shout that I am tired and not so well, that I shall go home to lie down. She nods as though she has not heard me, her cheeks are pink and flushed.

      ‘Whatever’s the matter, Miss Misery-me? Dance! Dance!’ and she tugs at my arm till I get up and dance a quadrille with her, though my heart is not in it.

      ‘Mrs Mellin did not come,’ she leans and shouts to me above the noise, pushing some hair back into her cap. Her breath is sweet with beer.

      ‘No,’ I say. ‘She said her leg was bad.’

      Lil’s face is thoughtful for a moment, and then, because she is young and the music has started again, I can see that she has forgotten all about it. In some discomfort, I feel the yellow coins are working loose inside my stays, and slide about.

      I tell her to take care and she takes no notice, but how could she know exactly what I mean? She is twelve years old, she has pronounced that she will not lie with any man till she is three and twenty. She thinks that I have drunk too much no doubt and am leaving because of it.

      I see my bootlace is untied. And, as I bend to tie it up, the coins slither in my stays and to my horror one bright round of gold tips out and falls spinning on the chaffy floor. Quick as a flash I snatch it up and push it back into my bosom.

      ‘Lucky find, Miss Agnes Trussel!’ John Glincy’s voice booms in my ear. I clap my hand to my chest.

      ‘Don’t creep about like that,’ I shout guiltily. My breath feels unnatural. ‘Sixpence, it was a sixpence and no more than that, none of your business.’

      ‘I’d say that it could well be my business what you keep in there. Nice and cosy, I’d say. Nice place for a good little sixpence to nuzzle up. And one so shiny. Any room left over?’ and he tries to bend into my neck. God, how he smells of liquor. I push his head away and wish that he would leave me be. Could he see the glint of metal of the coins against my skin? I think; surely not. John Glincy mistakes the grimace on my face for a smile.

      ‘You should ease up more, Agnes Trussel,’ he slurs, encouraged by this. ‘I’ll show you how,’ and his hand sidles round my waist and tries to pull me to him, so that I stagger.

      ‘Don’t touch me,’ I hiss, looking about. I pray that no one sees him groping me like that.

      ‘Well, well, you are a bashful maid today, not like I have seen you be, with your legs spreading for me so readily,’ he says. ‘Weren’t so bashful then.’

      ‘I’m warning you, John Glincy, get your hands off,’ I say, and wrench myself free. Why can’t he just let me alone? His leery face is undeterred.

      ‘I wish you would drop down dead,’ I say.

      God help me if I stay and my belly swells so that it is clear what my trouble is. They will make me swear the father before the parish men, and if I comply they will force John Glincy to marry me so that I and my unwanted bastard child will not prove a burden of charity upon the parish. If I keep my mouth shut tight and do not say they may find out anyway, as he will know, and besides the shame upon my family would be too much to bear. But I will not be made wife to that man. Not if my own life depended on it would I lie with him a second time.

      He presses his face close СКАЧАТЬ