by Jim Crace
It isn’t hard to coax some flame back into the ashes of the parlor fire and light a candle that I can carry from the hearth to some deeper place. I need kindling but there’s plenty at hand. The parlor floor is strewn with the documents spilling from my master’s overturned coffer, his titles, muniments and deeds. They are as dry and brittle as barley husk. I’ll only have to touch them with this candle flame and they will leap with fire.
17
O I HAVE REACHED OUR VILLAGE BOUNDS. On this main lane, our outer limits are marked on one side by a merestone, about waist high and vivid with its orange overcoat of lichen. It is dressed for traveling. I’ve not been this close to the edge for several years. It has always seemed too precarious a place; on our side of the stone there can be no trespassing, as Master Kent has told us many times: “If we stay within our bounds, there are no bounds to stay us.” One further step beyond, however, and everything you have is left behind. You are disowned.
I snap off a stalk of grass from our side of the limits, tasting our own fodder with an ox’s mouth. I grasp the merestone in both hands and bump my head against it, beating in the bounds just as we have beaten the bounds into every village child as soon as they were big enough to stray. I am that boy who needs reminding where he does and does not fit. I bump the stone three times, just hard enough to break the skin and lay the groundings of a bruise, just hard enough to make me admit to pain.
Now there’s nothing to detain me here or to encumber my escape. I have my four mementos of these seven days, all marked in skin or made from skin. There is the forehead I’ve just bloodied on the stone; there is the shiny pink scorch mark in the middle of my palm, still slightly stiff; there is the kick wound on my brow and cheek, faintly sore but it will mend, and disappear; and, finally, tied in a scroll with hogging string, the piece of calfskin vellum I crafted myself in the manor’s scullery and which I almost used as kindling along with Mr. Quill’s two preparatory charts. I burned them both: the one that’s decorated with our commons and our fields and lanes, the fabric of our village lives marked down in colors and in lines; and the other, busy one, proposing future pastures. I burned them with the man that painted them. But I have kept the flap of calf. My vellum is an unmarked sheet. It could be anywhere.
I’m resting for a moment with my hip against the stone, and facing inward toward the village of my choice for what I know will be the final time. It’s silent there. I cannot hear the clacking of a single tool. Or any animals. It’s simply quiet and undisturbed, attending to itself, an Eden with no Adam and no Eve. My winter wheat is swelling, unobserved. It won’t be many days before that single furrow where the barley grew this year will imp with greenery. Earth and seeds are soundless laborers. Even the manor house has ceased its cracking, though its pall of smoke is still stretching out across our blackened roofs and browning canopies, with Mr. Quill among its residues. There is a story I can tell, if ever I am caught by any of the Jordans of this world and asked to give an account of why I failed to save the manor house. The orphaned witch caressed its timbers with her fiery breath. That Mistress Beldam—not content to have spent her venom on the doves and Willowjack, not yet satisfied by Philip Earle’s thin blood or the damage to the groom’s face that she encouraged with her sorcery, not sated by the fires in all our homes—was determined to destroy the Kent and Jordan property as well. That was the meanest act of all. Watch out for her. She has a cart, I’ll say. She has the blackest eyes and hair. She’s bearing sin and mischief to the corners of the earth. I will not say she’s also bearing me away.
It’s time. I have to finish my farewells—though actually there’s not much of a view. From here, the prospects are hemmed in and limited: a lane, some stone-built walls, a well-attended hedge. Even the brambles and the traveler’s joy have been cut back by some attentive hand, some sickled villager who must by now be far away, and safe, and bewildered. Apart from the lichen cladding on the stone, the only color comes from scarlet haws, deep in the pruned-backed thorns.
If anything, the views ahead, beyond our bounds, are more rewarding to the eye. They are more savage, certainly. And more formless and more void. The hedges there have not been cut and trimmed for many years, if ever. They spread across the lane with their great arms as if to send all travelers back, or at best to make their passage forward troublesome. I can see where the Beldams’ cart has churned its muddy wheel ruts in the track and where its loaded sides have snapped back twigs on a pair of hazel trees, heavy with some timely nuts. The lane is telling me I should not fear the futures that it holds. I’ll not go hungry anyway. Once I tire of hazels, I can blacken my tongue with bramble berries and rouge my lips with elders and with sloes. I can fill my mouth with fruits and nuts at every step I take. The countryside will provide its seeded surplus of infinity for long enough for me to find another place where I can rest.
An unwary, solitary mouse, intent on foraging in daylight, against its custom, and too shortsighted either to spot or to be alarmed by me, pokes its tender head into the lane. I watch its fussy searching for a few moments before I let it know I’m close; I kick a loose curl of earth against its hedge. Take care. The mouse freezes for an instant, then scurries over rock and moss to disappear into its crevice home. If it is wise, it will stay there until tonight. I am left to gather up my bags of modest assets and removables, my sturdy stick, my roll of unmarked vellum chart, my silver and my bulky burdens of remorse and memory. This is my heavy labor now. I have to leave behind these common fields. I have to take this first step out of bounds. I have to carry on alone until I reach wherever is awaiting me, until I gain wherever is awaiting us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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I have enjoyed a fortunate career in books and publishing.
I want to thank Pam Turton, Tom Crace, and Lauren Crace for letting me get on with the antisocial habit of writing in a happy, stimulating, and loving household.
I am immensely grateful to David Godwin, who has been, in turn, my editor, publisher, agent, and friend since my first published short story. I have been lucky to work over several years with (among many others) John Glusman and Nan Talese in the United States and Tony Lacey and Kate Harvey in the U.K.
About the Author
Jim Crace is the author of ten previous novels. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Jim Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He lives in Birmingham, England.
Visit: www.jim-crace.com
Also available as an ebook by Jim Crace:
All That Follows | 978-0-385-53267-9
The Pesthouse | 978-0-307-45558-1
For more information on Nan A. Talese Books:
Visit: www.nanatalese.com
Follow: twitter.com/Nan_A_Talese
Friend: facebook.com/nanatalese
ALSO BY JIM CRACE
Continent
The Gift of Stones
Arcadia
Signals of Distress
Quarantine
Being Dead
The Devil’s Larder
Genesis
The Pesthouse
All That Follows
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