The Book of Fires

‘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 in the outhouse, and gives a spoonful of it to Lil to make a difference to her bad days, when she has them. My father does 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 (#u06b8c99d-013f-59ea-b76f-ee9a9cf0da4b)

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 a look at the people pegging away at the victuals when we get to the great barn and he will spit on the ground.

‘Fill the belly and the will sleeps,’ he always says.

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.