“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!” 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 ale.
“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, and 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 cozy, I’d say. Nice place for a good little sixpence to nuzzle up. And one so shiny. Any room left over?” 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? 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.” His hand sidles around my waist and he 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 onto 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 onto the path, onto 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 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. Through the smoke, I see my mother is there, 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 smolder of wood on the fire, which has settled into a steady blaze, burning with 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 gatepost. 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. 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 gatepost 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 onto 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 onto 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 backward 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 onto the lane. Above me the stars are fading pinpricks in the blue sky. I can just make out that the Plow 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 that 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 upward toward the dwindling stars as though his morning fire was freshly lit. I cannot smell the baking of loaves; the hour is too early even for that. He will be kneading and pummeling 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 cobnut 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 some such. 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.
“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 toward 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, where 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.
4
The carrier pulls jerkily away and up the lane. It is a low wagon 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 four 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 who 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 onto 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 pockmarks on his cheek and smell the tobacco smok
e 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 say, and 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 neighbors? 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 continues 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.
The Book of Fires Page 4