The Book of Fires

IN THE MORNING I TRY TO SWALLOW BREAD to quell my sickness, and when the bell rings at eight I take my bundle outside and join the carrier. The passengers have swelled in number, and I find I have to squeeze my way up on to the bench at the back of the waggon. When we leave the town the morning light shows a countryside choppy with hills, dotted with brightly golden copses and small farms and hamlets. Spiders’ webs catch at the damp between the stems of dead hemlock and milk-parsley. Plumes of smoke climb into the air from abundant chimneys and we see many people working the fields and driving goats and oxen. We stop for carts more frequently, even at this hour. The land seems teeming with its population.

One of the new passengers sits very upright on the bench. There is a glossiness about her. She has a fine, fancy patterned shawl over her shoulders, and her mantua is made of silk bearing woven sprigs of flowers and birds. She seems tall and narrow, with a head of brown curling hair under her bonnet. Her face is pale as a china cup. High on the cheekbones two luscious spots of blush are painted on like raspberries. She is fresh and bright. I cannot stop watching her, until her eye catches mine and she smiles directly at me. I look away hastily, my own cheeks flushing in ordinary patches on my face.

Her hands are long and bony, which she knocks together through her white kid gloves from time to time as though she were eager to reach her destination, or as if she were filled with an impatient kind of song or energy that must escape by any means. Under her boots is a small leather case. I have a feeling that her eyes are on me, but then she turns and begins to listen to the fat woman talking to the unpleasant woman with the daughter. I fold my arms carefully across my stomach and do not hear them. I pray no one will speak to me. I am bad, spoilt, I think. I am best not spoken to; I am like an apple rotting slowly away once the worms have got in. A rotten apple touching the skin of a good one in the store will taint the others till they fester together.

The day is milder than the day before.

There is no sunshine, but the clouds are high and pale, and the air has about it the nameless sweetness that earth gives off before the great frosts begin.

After some time the woman pulls off a glove and eats some fruit with her bare hand, swallowing quickly and not letting juice drip on her dress. I am startled when she leans across to me, her long fingers reaching out to offer me a plum. I take it gratefully and bite. It is late in the season for such a good one, sour and pleasant at once. The bloom on it is like a mildew on its perfect skin. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ I say.

She pulls on her glove.

‘My name is Lettice Talbot,’ the woman says, as if to set up conversation. The voice she has is light and coaxing, like a child’s. ‘Some people call me Letty.’ I spit out the stone of the plum and throw it on to the road.

‘What an uncommon name,’ I answer, out of manners.

‘I like it very much,’ the woman replies, which is a strange answer, and makes me think somehow that she has chosen it herself.

I cannot think of any other thing to say to her. A curious smell comes away from Lettice Talbot’s clothing when she moves about; as sweet as beeswax, or the dusty odour of roses that have been kept to dry inside a cupboard, or something else I cannot place. It is a good, intriguing smell that makes me want to sit a little closer to her.

At noon we roll over White Down Hill and descend into the village of Leatherhead. The inn is adjacent to the blacksmith’s, and as we pass I look into the darkness of his shop and see white-hot coals flaring and dulling with the roar of the bellows. From the yard of the inn we can still hear the regular metallic clang and ring of a hammer on hot iron against an anvil. In the silence that follows I know well the hiss of a horseshoe going into cold liquid, and the smell of a scorched hoof as the warm shoe is nailed on.

The jolting slows and stops.

‘We can take something to eat here.’ Lettice Talbot gets down immediately over the tailgate and calls up to me, brushing dirt from her palms. The harnesses clink as the ostlers unbuckle the horses. The horses are sweating and breathing heavily.

‘How stiff we become on the back of this cart, our legs stuck out over the road like a crate of dead fowls!’ She looks doubtfully towards the pullets at the front of the waggon, and then laughs, as though something wicked had occurred to her. A dog barks.

‘Are you not hungry?’ she asks. I suppose I must eat. ‘I’ll bet your last fair meal was another life ago. Am I right, sweetheart?’ She beckons me to descend.

‘There is abundant time for an inn-dinner at the Rose and Crown,’ she reassures me, as if she travelled frequently this way, and the sun breaks through the clouds as we cross the yard.

Inside, my eyes accustom to the darkness. There is a fire blazing in a broad hearth, and a savoury smell of wood-smoke and ale. Two men glance up at us and then back to some papers spread out on a table. The girl drawing ale from a barrel at the hatch directs us to a bench. We have our backs to the sunlight which falls through the leaded window, blue with smoke from the fire. The brick floor is swept. The miserable man wearing the great-coat takes a solitary seat on the far side of the room, opening his mouth to order something made with beef, then rubs his belly. He keeps his coat on. There is loud laughter from the porch and then the room seems filled with stir and levity.

How has my life has changed so quickly? I think. I feel small away from home. I feel dizzy with it.

‘What shall we have?’ Lettice Talbot says brightly. ‘Why not oysters!’ The girl wipes a cloth over the table and brings some for us, with hard sallow cheese, and bread. There is a lot of greasy red hair escaping from her cap. She looks at me as she puts them down, then goes away. The food is salty and good, and we eat hungrily without conversation. The girl comes back to remove the dish of empty shells, and Lettice Talbot claps her hands.

‘Brandy!’ she suggests.

‘Brandy?’ I say doubtfully. I don’t mention that I have never tasted it. The girl brings a jug and pours out one glass. The liquid is a bright brown as it catches the sunlight. ‘Drink up,’ Lettice Talbot coaxes, pushing the glass towards me and smiling kindly.

‘But you have none,’ I say.

‘No, no,’ she says, ‘it is for you–you look as though you need it!’

So I swallow it down. It is hot, as though it had within it something of the fire itself.

‘Where are you headed, sweetheart?’ Lettice Talbot asks. I cannot think at first of what to say. As she leans forward, I see a little locket is tied at her neck on a piece of yellow velvet, flashing in the light. The gem set upon it breaks up the brightness sharply into separate colours, as a drop of water might, catching the sunshine after rain. Her neck is smooth and white above the ribbon. She sees me looking and her hand goes to the locket as if to hide it with her fingertips.

‘How did you come by such a lovely thing?’ I exclaim.

‘It’s not real,’ she says quickly. ‘Not a proper diamond.’ And then she smiles and asks again where I am going to. She stares at me when I do not answer, and so I have to embark upon the story I have been making up inside my head.

‘I am travelling at a day’s notice up to London,’ I say, ‘to stay with an ageing cousin suffering from an illness of some gravity.’ My voice sounds like it is reciting lessons.

‘Where does she live?’ Lettice Talbot asks. I think quickly.

‘Within the city walls. She has rooms in a small house, and the servants do not like her and all of them have left her service. She is quite alone.’ I make my face look sorry and anxious as I talk, which is not difficult. My fingers touch my lips as though they know that I am telling lies.

I add with effort that she needs someone to carry water from the pump and cook up broths and sago, and take the slops away; in short the heavy, bending, stirring tasks she cannot do.

‘What sickness is she suffering?’ Lettice Talbot asks, and pours more brandy for me from the jug.

‘Bronchitis,’ I say without a hesitation. I know about bronchitis; my grandmother died all curled up with coughing up dark slimy matter, suffocated by her own lungs when they failed within her, the doctor said. Dr Twiner was a costly body to have stepped inside the house. It seemed scandalous to me that he gained his guineas whether his patients lived or died. The regretful countenance he fixed upon his shiny, well-fed face was glib and practised, and melted away as he ducked his head out of the threshold towards the lane. I watched his diminishing form swinging his polished cane all down the track until the rowans hid him from my view. My mother propped his bill behind the salt box before she sat down suddenly in front of the fire as though her legs were broken, and sobbed there for a week. She was different in those days; it was still possible to guess a little of what she thought on any matter. For one whole week she was too loose and grieved to cook, or clean the babies. Then on the seventh day she set her lip straight and stiffened quite perceptibly throughout the funeral, as though the cold draught that was blowing in under the door of the church was freezing her in more ways than one. The framework of her manner became a shape to hold her feelings in, and from that day on, her outward disposition did but rarely alter.

The room in the inn has darkened.

It occurs to me how, once the lies have started, it should become both easier and more necessary to go on fabricating a pretence. I must construct the lies quite fully, like a makeshift house, and live inside them. Lettice Talbot taps her long fingers on the tabletop, then unbuckles her case to take out a little bottle. She tweaks out the stopper, puts her finger to the hole and tips it up. She presses the wetness lightly to her neck, and an intense, giddy scent the colour of pinks and creamy whites and oranges envelops us. I am almost dazed by it.

How can I tell whether she is listening to me if she does not answer? And yet it is discourteous, I think, to be deceiving her like this. Her eyes are roving round the room as I talk, she is taking things in. I will have to check myself, I think. It will not be long before my conscience has become quite fat with secrets.

I hold my glass up by the stem and tilt the drop of brandy that remains, and, feeling a sudden, foolish need to share a truth and not a lie with her, I laugh and say that drinking it is like drinking fire. I regret my words immediately, but this is no matter because Lettice Talbot does not hear. She has stood up and begun to wrap her patterned shawl more closely around her for the next stage of our journey. How clean and new her clothes are. She pulls on her gloves, and with unease I catch a glimpse of what has happened to her wrists.

Six (#ulink_6ea682d6-417e-58f5-aabe-6c7b69e87eac)

WE GO OUT INTO THE OPEN AIR to find the weather turning. My cheeks are hot with liquor and I find that something of the world is changing and unsteady. The sky has darkened and clouded over and the unpleasant woman and her daughter are fussing that it might begin to rain and turn their ribbons limp. The fat woman shifts about on the hams of her legs and makes a great scene out of exchanging her bonnet for a large ugly hat that covers her features and obscures some of the view to my right. At the final bell the great-coated man appears and hauls himself into the waggon. A sour, unclean smell of pipe smoke and urine leaks from his clothes. I am dismayed to see him leer at Lettice Talbot as he pushes by her rudely, and to see him smirk as he rubs against her legs. He wipes some spittle from the side of his mouth with the back of his glove, lurches heavily as he sits down, and goes to sleep under his hat. Lettice Talbot does not remark at his behaviour; it is as though she has not seen it.

The horses strain and gather speed as they pull away from Leather-head.

I ask Lettice Talbot why she would not let me pay for what I had eaten at the inn. I was too confused by brandy to protest as she counted out coins and left them on the table as we left. But she shakes her head vigorously when I try to repay her and raises her hand as though it is a trifling matter.

‘But I have money!’ I insist, too loudly, and she puts her gloved finger swiftly to her mouth.

‘Shh! Quiet!’ she says.

So I am indebted now, and the heat spreading out from the spirits inside me has made the world seem vivid and too much to bear. I am unable to stop thoughts from welling up and I am sorry that some tears spill out, making the road behind us seem wobbling and indistinct. There are too many troubles to think of at once. I have been struggling to keep some thoughts quite separate in my head, as if letting them touch each other could unleash havoc in there, as flints would, knocking together on a dry day and sparking, making fires on the heath. I cannot stop the thoughts from jumbling about now. But I don’t make a sound, and then the tears cool quickly on my face in the open air.

Sometimes a fire on the heath is good for the land, I think. The blackened plants find a refreshment in their ordeal and so grow green again.

Lettice Talbot doesn’t speak a word but she leans over and brushes my hand with her own, then puts it back on to her lap. Her gloves are made from soft, new kid-skin. There are pricks of holes in the kid-skin, where the hairs of the animal grew out. The leather made from kid is very fine and supple, and easily torn. Inside the inn I had seen how white her fingers were, as though she had not touched grime or drudging tasks for a long time. Uncomfortably I remember also how the whiteness of her skin was discoloured at the heel of her wrists by a rim of broken purple bruising that had seemed quite fresh.

Finally I sleep, and when I wake I find her hand is resting over mine again, so gently that I can hardly feel her touching me. Her eyes are fixed on the jolting horizon as though she had been watching it for hours.

‘Have you napped yet?’ I ask, taking my hand away from hers, but she shakes her head.

‘Where do you come from?’ I ask, and she smiles at me as though she has not heard, or as though she were thinking hard about something different and could not leave that thought alone. Her face is serene. ‘I have…’ she looks about ‘…an acquaintance in this county. I was here to do business.’ That is all she says for a long time.