The Book of Fires

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 again so I hear him distinctly, and he pinches my thigh so forcefully it hurts.

‘You can only taunt a man’s cock,’ he mutters thickly, ‘for so long.’ And with that he leaves me there, and takes his empty jug back to the barrel for more. Though he has his back to me I can hear his coarse bellowing laughter even as I am doubled up and retching on to the damp grass outside the barn door.

An owl hoots.

‘Oh, God,’ I say beneath my breath, ‘what have I done?’ There is a shuffle of footsteps and Mrs Peart the cordwainer’s wife is looming over me. Her shape casts a long, flickering shadow on to the path, on to the shifting fog out there, with the firelight behind her.

‘Don’t drink so swift,’ she croaks in sympathy, when she sees who it is. She must have heard me whimpering. Mrs Peart who always smells as if she were stuffed entirely full of loose tobacco, and with her fingers as yellowed as parsnips.

‘It’s a fearsome brew this year they have, fearsome strong,’ she says, staring out at the night. ‘It will have done some men a deal of damage come a few hours’ time.’ She puts her pipe back in the gap between her teeth to go on smoking. ‘Let’s pray that nobody sets hisself on fire this year at least,’ she says, and gives a dirty chuckle. ‘After all, Mr Tuke still has those scars.’ She pats my shoulder a little in mindful, unsteady friendliness and then she ambles back into the revelry.

‘What shall I do?’ I whisper when she is gone, but the night says nothing. There is just the fog out there, shifting its uneasy formless bulk about, obscuring any sight of stars.

At the door of the barn I hesitate and turn around. I cannot see John Glincy now. My mother is there, through the smoke on the other side of the barn, her foot tapping in time with the drum. There is a warm smell of sweat and new rushes on the floor and the smoulder of wood on the fire, which has settled into a steady blaze, large branches cut and dragged down from the copse where the beeches fell in the great storm. Hester is lying awake across her lap, her little legs kicking at the air. I cannot see my mother’s face; there are people in front of her. As I turn away a huge burst of laughter comes out of their mouths like a red explosion. It rings in my ears as I hurry away, the sudden quiet and the cold outside making me deaf for a moment like a clamp over the ears. Nothing feels right.

The flares along the misty path outside have burnt down almost to the quick. I step back along the dark lane, my hand up before my face, and I think my trouble over; the twist and tangle of my life like a wattle fence, holding itself together with to-ing and fro-ing, and yet having some order in a certain direction, and making a boundary between one state and another. And somehow it helps to think of my troubles interwoven like this. As I walk homeward, I become quite clear in the resolve I’ve made.

At the empty house I tie some things inside a piece of oilcloth, in haste lest someone should have followed me home. The house feels desolate and fixed suddenly in time, with things strewn about just as we left them, like an ordinary day. I cannot choose this moment to depart, of course, as all of drunken Washington would be engaged in searching for me as soon as my absence from the cottage were discovered. They would think me murdered or ravaged, or both. I must wait until the break of morning and slip out then. I carry the bundle in readiness out of the house, taking it a short way down the lane through the fog. The fog is wet and penetrating everything. The entrance to an empty field looms up suddenly upon my left, and I push the bundle under the hedge behind the gate-post. If I didn’t feel so sad and muddled it would be almost ridiculous, hiding my belongings under a bush like a vagrant or a criminal.

‘I am going to London,’ I say into the mist, to try my idea out. My voice is like the voice of someone else, it sounds thin and flat in the dark field. This is how felons feel, I remind myself. They feel small and lonely, as they should. I have stolen money from a corpse. The short tubes of stubble crunch under my soles. I stand still, with my hand to the gate-post for a long time and breathe in the cold smell of night in the cropped field, hear the small sounds of night creatures finding their way along the new hedgerow. There is a dripping as the mist collects in droplets on the underside of things; on the limbs of trees, on twigs and leaves. Each drop gathers water slowly to itself, becomes fat with heaviness, then falls pat on to the dead leaves below. I find this dripping strangely comforting, as though it were the noise of the earth nourishing itself. As I turn back and step out blindly to the lane, the cry of a wood owl quavers out of the copse behind me.

That night I hardly sleep for fear of waking late, or for fear of shouting something in my sleep. The straw ticking is lumpy beneath me and I turn and turn, trying to lie easily. Once the others have come home, filling the air with the reek of stale beer breath even when their chatter has ceased, I turn my face to the wall. And then I dream horrible dreams about my shape; my body going thin and stretched out for miles and miles across a brightly lit landscape, till I am nothing but an empty skin. Then I dream I am solid once more and curled under one of the ancient grassy mounds at the top of the hill, piles of flinty soil pressing me flat into the darkness, growing dry as the old bones the Wiston hounds uncovered there and dragged about, two years ago, after a week of strong rain had weakened the tamp of the soil and caused a collapse on the south side of the barrow that is exposed to the wind from the sea.

Of course when I wake I am none of these things.

Already a pale quantity of light has begun to seep through the patterned calico hung across the casement; a piece of the dress my mother wore at my uncle’s wedding when I was tiny. I did not mean to sleep so long. There is a sour smell in the room as I rise, take up my cloak and boots and pick my way across the creaking boards. I’m sure the anxious hammering my heart is making must be loud enough to wake them all. I pull the leather strap and open the door on to the stairs.

Down in the kitchen my father is asleep in a sideways position on the settle with his boots still on and the hem of his overcoat pushing ashes on the hearth into a ridge. His head is thrown backwards and his mouth has dropped open, and a crackling, wet breath is rising out of it slowly into the silence of the room. I turn my eyes away as I creep past him in an agony of caution, and my feet in their woollen stockings make no sound at all on the smooth clay floor. My mother turns over in bed in the back chamber, and I see that Hester begins to stir and suck at her fist in the truckle bed beside her. I dare not cross the room to kiss her white face quiet, and her dark eyes watch me to the door.

I touch my stays where the coins are. Out here the fog has weakened and gone and the chill air is thin and rushing to my head. I am dizzy with escape, with stealing away. With an effort I do not run as I walk down the short path and turn out on to the lane. Above me the stars are fading pinpricks in the blue sky. I can just make out that the Plough points to the North Star, as it always does. I think of the city of London, vast to the north over the next line of Downs. The sky is huge, and when I look back over my shoulder I see the house looms pale behind me in the early light.

I look back again, and my heart almost stops when I see a glimmer of movement at an upstairs window.

I wait for the casement to be flung open and someone to cry out, ‘Agnes! Where are you going? Get back this minute!’ But there is nothing but stillness. It was a trick of the light or the dark, reflected. Nobody knows I am gone and I feel bleak with sadness as I turn away again between the dark passage of the hedges. The rutted lane makes me stumble.

I am ashamed. How Lil will sob and sob when she finds that I am gone, and then she will rage at me for weeks and then she will slowly forget. When I pull my bundle out from under the elder it is sopping with dew from the night, and it makes a cold wet patch on the front of my clothes.

No smoke rises from the huddle of dwellings around the green, only from Mr Reekes the baker’s chimney at the end of the village. His smoke is white and curling, spooling upwards towards the dwindling stars as though his morning fire were freshly lit. I cannot smell the baking of loaves, the hour is too early even for that. He will be kneading and pummelling dough by lamplight with his hands as big as dinner plates, hands that I once saw squeezing inside the bodice of Alice Mant when she went in for loaves, when they thought no one was looking. I cross the pasture land then skirt the common, taking the path at the edge of the Wiston estate. I think of Ann.

It was she who had observed John Glincy following me about one day. She is the kind of girl to notice everything. She’d said that it would be my brown hair having the shine of a ripe cob nut that drew him in.

‘You haven’t got blemishes,’ she’d added, standing back to get a look at me. ‘You have a good-shaped chin, neat wrists and ankles and your belly isn’t gone soft with eating too much butter. Watch out for that one, Agnes Trussel,’ she’d said. ‘You know that family is trouble all round.’ She could see from my face that I was a way from pleased about this and so she’d gone on talking. ‘Just keep your bonnet on before him. Just put your head up high and say, “No, I don’t think so, I’m really far too busy now,” or somesuch. It’s very easy.’ Of course this was all too late, I remember thinking, watching her lips go up and down as though I had never seen them before.