The Book of Fires

‘Oh, don’t sit there looking like a misery,’ she had laughed. ‘It’s not so bad! You are a sensible girl with manners, that knows how to behave.’

But of course it was bad, it was very bad indeed. I didn’t like to think of her jolly face clouding up with shame and disbelief if she found me out. I would be someone different to her suddenly, not like her sister that she knows at all.

‘Where are you, Ann, when I need you so much?’ I whisper in the darkness, over the damp fields to Wiston House.

I have four miles by foot along the back lanes and over the fields before I reach Steyning, or I will beg a lift on a passing cart or dray, till I get to the place called The Chequers where the lane joins the road, and there I shall wait for a carrier to London. I picture it drawing towards me, hooves mashing the skin of the road, towering wheels whirring and grinding over the grit in the yard of the inn as it comes to a halt. I feel sick. The journey will cost me two days and more than a guinea, and if all goes as it should I shall be long gone from the county of Sussex, up through the county of Surrey and into the great city by the time they find dead Mrs Mellin in her cold house.

The lane reaches the edge of the copse and sinks down into a dip at the base of the scarp, the mud deepens and becomes more sticky with the clay. My boots make a sucking noise with each tugging step I have to take, as if the land were but reluctantly letting me pass. Red cattle are clustered together in the gloom under the beeches, they wake and shift their hooves uneasily in the thick mud as I go by, their breath rising in clouds. How dark it is under the trees. Even the early-rising blackbirds are asleep, and it is hard not to shiver with sleeplessness and the newness of what I am doing.

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THE CARRIER PULLS JERKILY AWAY and up the lane. It is a low waggon smelling of sacking and poultry, and I am sat at the back, on a bench furnished with a bolster of woven horsehair cloth, shiny with use. Besides the five other passengers, the carrier is heaped with bales of raw wool, three crates of pullets and some closed baskets into which I cannot see. The oily smell of fleeces makes it hard not to think of home, it is so strong.

I am a thief, a disgrace, and a deserter. I have a pain high up in my lungs that I deserve, it rises till the misery is a choke in my throat. A fat woman sitting to my right is staring sideways at me. I hate her for this. I have to look down at my lap and swallow over and over, not letting a tear fall. It is as though I were moving along in a swaying kind of sleep led by the horses, knowing nothing of what I am at, nor where I am going. I fold my arms tightly over the fear in my stomach, look about and breathe the air.

I had pulled my cap low over my brow as I passed through Steyning to the inn. I do not know so many people here, but there are those know my family well enough, and I prayed to God I would not see a soul who knows my father.

Yet sure enough, as we passed out of the village I saw Mr Benter ahead with a pack on his shoulder, going out to the sawpits. I froze. I scarcely breathed. Dear God, may he not catch sight of me, I thought. As the cart swayed past him, he stepped into the bank and greeted the coachman. His breath was white about him in the chill. Richard Benter has been my father’s drink-mate since better times were had between them. He was so near I could make out the pock-marks on his cheek and smell the tobacco smoke leaking from the clay bowl of the pipe he sucked upon. It was nothing but a wonder that he did not see me, but I could not drag my gaze away. Then at the moment that we rounded the corner he seemed to return my look directly even as he disappeared from view behind the shop. My heart thumped.

The picture of his puzzled squint and half-raised hand comes to me over and over. Did Mr Benter see me perched upon the carrier to London? How could I know? And if he did, what will he do?

‘Was it one of yours I saw this forenoon?’ I could hear him say. ‘On the up-cart for town?’

My father, who could never bear to give away what he has no knowledge of, would keep his mouth buttoned up at that suggestion.

‘May have been,’ he might shrug.

Only later would he mutter that, if it was so, then it was without a by-your-leave. My father would not ask to borrow Mr Fitton’s mare to ride behind and bring me back.

It makes no difference if they know where I have gone. At least, if nobody knows about my thieving. And of course they do not. How could they know? No one would have thought that Mrs Mellin had a quantity of money. For we did not, and were we not her nearest neighbour? I have a flicker of doubt. Surely it was just her mean little secret that she hoarded away–and for what? She had nobody left.

The woman beside me makes me jump. ‘Sawpit does well from the need for fencing these days, don’t it,’ she comments. Of course, she must know Mr Benter. Perhaps it was her face that had caught his eye.

I cough, as if I did not hear her properly.

And the terror ebbs away, but some miles on a trickle of disquiet goes on chuckling and babbling inside my head, willing the horses’ progress to be faster, faster. Pressing at my stays I make sure that the coins do not clink or rattle up against each other. I eye the road behind. When I get to the city I will be swallowed up, I reassure myself; all traces vanished.

We go through Ashurst, past Blake’s Farm and Sweethill Farm.

A way after Godmark’s Farm we have to wait in the road to cross the river. I make myself eat dry bread from my pocket, my fingers stiff with cold. I make myself take notice of the way the road goes on, opening a distance up between some portion of my troubles and my circumstance. I see a man drinking from a wooden flask, his head strained back to take the liquid in. I see a hawk. I smell the tang of horses, and the straw of the fat woman’s bonnet. I see a team of oxen opening earth behind the blade of a plough. I see three new, pale wheels in a wheelwright’s yard, and hear the hiss of a spoke-shave peeling at wood. I see the orange carcass of a fox.

And over time the motion of the carrier steadies me and makes me sensible. Taking the chill air deeply keeps the sickness at bay. In truth there is nothing to do but observe the world unfolding behind me and to the sides of the road as we progress. I see how the mud in the road behind us changes from a pale clay to a darker brown of silt, and then to clay again.

The mud is shallow and white with chalk as the waggon heaves uphill to a gibbet on the crossroads. The man beside the driver cries, ‘Burnt Oak Gate!’ but no one gathers up their bags in readiness to leave. As we approach, I see a glistening crow push itself away from the gibbet’s crossbar and fly heavily upwards. It catches a breeze that we cannot feel here on the ground, and stays almost motionless on the movement of the air, skilfully floating, like a malevolent thought. It waits for our arrival. Its head turns as it surveys the landscape; we draw up alongside and inch slowly by. I don’t like to look but somehow my head turns towards the gibbet anyway. I feel something prickle over my skin, as though spiders were crawling there. I grip my forearms tight with my hands.

One of the irons has the last bits of a man’s body hanging in it; the head has slumped in the top cage and the rest is tarred bones held together with very little. Some threads of fabric hang down from what remains of his breeches. The other irons are empty and swing more loosely in the cold air. A creaking is just audible. There are some small dry yellow bones on the ground beneath, and white splashes of bird droppings. The fat woman nudges me, smiling with triumph.

‘See how they deserves it,’ she declares. ‘A dreadful crime, no doubt.’ I cannot find a thing to say, but another woman nods and points her finger towards the scene in case her daughter sat beside her hasn’t heeded. The daughter’s head swivels round as we pass, drinking in the detail.

‘It’s a man, Mother.’ Her childish voice is satisfied and lazy. A chill has settled in me, although I make myself nod faintly in agreement. I must appear an honest, law-abiding creature, even to myself. The fifth passenger in the back seat takes no notice of the scene, nor any other passing by. He alternates between a dozing state and being occupied in eating something crumbly from a brown packet on his knee, a cascade of pastry falling down the front of his great-coat.

As we gain sufficient distance from the gibbet, the crow behind us drops and settles on the irons again, twisting its head sideways to reach its black beak through the bars. Another crow flies down, and I look away. They say that crows and rooks mean trouble, and there are always plenty of them.

Lichfowl, my mother calls them. Corpse birds.

And beyond here I am plunged into unknown country. Burnt Oak Gate marks the edge of what I know. How rapidly the world is changing; everywhere we pass new fencing and altered boundaries. Thorny hedgerows of quickset and blackthorn slice straight through the sensible, ancient lengths of land, taking no heed of the curve of running water or the shape of a hill, just spanning the breadth of the stubbled fields to form vast, unreasonable squares that make no sense of the terrain they apportion. We see a quantity of people walking out on the road, with packs and babies and pieces of furniture strapped to their backs. They have the shifting, dogged look of people uprooting and leaving behind them all that they know. They are looking for labour in towns, in the city. A woman looks up as we go by, and stares at me as she stands into the edge of the muddy road, making way. We pass so closely I could reach my hand out and touch the thinness of her jaw. I can hear that she murmurs a rhyme over her shoulder to the child tied to her back.

‘Jack, he was nimble, Jack, he was quick, Jack, he jumped over the candlestick.’

‘Which Jack is that, Mamma?’ the child asks, twisting its little fingers in her hair, and there is a pause and then the woman replies bitterly, as if to herself, ‘Any man-jack with an ounce of sense left in him.’

And she is right. I can hear the words, even after the carrier has rounded a corner and she has gone from sight. We should all be snatching our chances if they show themselves to us. The old ways are gone now. The carved-up countryside is filling fat men’s pockets with more than they need, while working men like my father are broken down and weakened and made small as their choice and independence are removed from their reach. Enclosure is a tightening around their necks, making slaves of them. It is a length of cord held only by some men of wealth. Enclosure drives them into corners like rats. My blood starts to boil with fury, and I clench my thumbs inside my fists. For my family there can only be misery ahead. For my family next year there will be no pig. There will be little but trouble, I fear, for them and so many like them, hunger making their bellies tight, day after day.

Good men like my father, feeding his family, taking what dismal employment he can, to pay off the baker, the shopkeeper, the miller. Bad men like him; all in the same sorry plight. What is a good man though, I start to think, or a bad one? As the carrier rattles on these thoughts begin to open up and drift about like smoke inside my head.

As I say, I am not myself, and I can hardly pronounce on morals or goodness. I picture myself entering St Mary’s church with my belly swollen, round as a mare’s in the very shape of shame, and my face flushes with humiliation.

I will not think of these things.

Instead I make myself notice that the sun is a flat disc of white light, more like a hole in the clouds. I see that the hedges are filled with berries and drupes of ivy. I notice the twist and crook of the road. And then, gradually, my fists unclench and I slip into a drowsy state with my head nodding forwards on to my chest, until the cold wakes me again. The clouds thicken as the morning passes. It is a long journey, in countless ways.

Halts occur at intervals to water the horses, to take up a passenger, set one down. Uneasily I eye my bundle, strapped with the rest of the baggage, at every stop. Mrs Mellin’s coins are tucked inside my stays securely; I feel them there against my ribs when I lean forward or breathe deeply. All that I have, I could lose, I remind myself.

On the heath before Horsham, two men hail the carrier and ride the tailgate. They thump their boots on the floor of the cart so that it shakes and they are loud and troublesome and smell of liquor. I am relieved when after a mile or so they are forcibly turned off. A quarrel ensues and then one of the men falls to the ground. I can hear the growl of the driver’s terrier at the front of the waggon for a long time afterwards, and I fall asleep to dream of a man with a chafed, red neck walking along the edge of the road, alongside the carrier. His strides are purposeful and angry. I awake with a start to find he is not there.

The hedges wind along beside us until my eyes are glazed with staring. A young rabbit bolts across our muddy wake and disappears into the undergrowth. I see that the light is beginning to fail, and there is a stillness to the cold air, our white breath rising as though we were all smouldering quietly on fire.

After the bustle of Horsham the afternoon dies quickly around us. We pass lit windows in the walls of dwellings, and men returning from work on foot, their faces caught in the carriage lights as they stand aside. I hear the thump of wood being split with an axe. We go by a low cottage with a taper burning in the kitchen where a woman bends forward at the waist; she is raising her hand and shaking something at a man seated by a table. It is a curious matter, I think to myself, the seeing of things and yet not understanding.

We halt for the night some time towards Dorking. The Red Lion is a dingy place. I order broth that comes in a broad swilling plate of pewter that makes it cold upon arrival, and I cannot tell what meat has given it its flavour. I finish it as best I can.

‘Cheap beds?’ The woman in the tap-room repeats my words too loudly, as if to feign offence, then calls an older woman to take me to the back chamber. The woman has brown spots over her neck like the burnt parts of a griddle-cake. When she reaches out to take the payment her eyes widen just a little at the sight of all my yellow coins together. I push the rest back into my stays, and look about. There are other beds in the room but it would seem that I am the only lodger here tonight. A musty odour of old upholstery and unwashed bedding hangs in the air. There is no fire. The woman lights a dripping candle for me from the one that she holds, and turns to leave.

‘I should sew that gold into your skirts, young woman,’ she observes from the doorway, her spotted hand on the latch. I look at her.

‘I should?’ I say.

She pokes her head back into the gloom of the chamber, and lowers her voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

‘Tuppence for the use of a needle and threads, and three shillings for the excessive trouble I shall be put to in not telling a soul,’ she says. ‘My mouth does run away with itself sometimes, about tidy, shiny sums tucked up in warm corners, here and there.’ Her eyes glitter as she casts a meaningful glance round the empty room. ‘I knows individuals, and what they can thirst for.’ My heart sinks, and I nod in dismay.

Later I sit and pull uneasily at the needle she brings me; the thread is red and garish and looks out of place against the weave of my plain fabric, and my fingers are clumsy with cold. The woman had bitten the coins that I gave her and chuckled horribly to make her point all down the corridor until a door closed somewhere and the noise was muffled.

When the sewing is done, the needle lies on the sill in the candlelight like a sharp little knife.

I do not sleep at first, there is so much din and clatter from somewhere nearby, so that when sleep comes to me eventually I dream of rats the size of dogs chewing at something I cannot see. It is cold all night. When I wake in the morning I see that the needle has gone. Though I look to see if it has rolled away on to the dirty rug or between the floorboards, I cannot find a trace of it.

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