The Book of Fires (3 page)

And there are the bright coins.

They spill out and roll and clatter on the floor in my surprise. They gleam and flash astonishingly as I bend again to pick each one up and turn it over in my fingers. I count a guinea; a half-guinea; one, two, three, four, five crowns and a handful of foreign gold, perhaps from Spain. The burnish on them is high, as if she had spent time polishing each one. They are so bright: brighter than rosehips in a dark hedge, than birch leaves in October, than celandines or toadflax, than stones still wet from the riverbed, than yellow fungus in the coppice, than the yolk of a hen’s egg. They are like . . . fire. Like the sun.

And then the coins change as I am holding them and begin to show their value to me. My heart begins to beat so fast that I can hardly hear the plan taking shape inside my head.

T
he half-mile home along the lane seems a great distance. It is bright out here, and hurts my eyes, my crisp shadow bouncing along ahead of me between the bank and the hedgerow.

There are no flowers, save some tight, worn heads of black knap-weed, although matting caps of toadstools like soft flaking eggs are pushing through the moss and grasses. The ridge of the Downs is a great bulk above me, like the darkness of an animal waiting for the sun to set. At the bend by the place where the stream curls inward and almost touches the lane, flooding it over during wet times and washing the bones of the road smooth, I meet a traveling man. He comes along from Steyning way, with a tall pack on his back that makes him stoop sideways with the burden of it. The shadow he casts is stretched out and misshapen on the bank.

“Will not persist,” he says, implying the sunshine, halting for breath and glancing awkwardly up at the sky. He cocks his head backward as best he can, to the east beyond the line of beechwood on the hill. His voice is thin and weaselly.

“A great weight of fog rolling in off the sea is pressing in over the scarp, down there. No doubt we’ll be near to choking with it,” he adds with a gloomy relish, “before the night has encroached itself upon us.” He has a curious manner of speech; his eyes are very keen and they look me over, taking in my shape, my hands, the skillet. He blocks the way. I pull my shawl closer about me, and ask what it is that he has in his pack. It is bound up with strips of fabric, all grimy with dirt from the road.

“Sellings,” he replies inscrutably. “Buyings and sellings.” The man looks down at the road and passes me and rounds the bend, but the thought of him grows like a canker in my mind as I walk on. I see that my shadow is already fading in the road ahead of me, and that the man’s footprints are deep in the mud all the way back to the house. Clots of blackberries are finished and moldering in the hedgerow, and the undertow of a loamy smell of rot and fungus hangs in the air.

 

 

Inside the house I see that my mother has unstrung the pig, and struggled it onto the bench. It is heavy on its side, and judders with fat when William rocks the plank to show me. “Mother’s cross. She’s shouting,” he whispers at me plaintively. I touch his upturned face and wink at him to stay in the kitchen and guard the pig from dogs and rats. My mother is pouring the hot kettle over a board. She doesn’t look up from her cloud of steam.

“Did she spare the skillet then, nor mind us asking?” she says. A strong smell of scalding wood fills the room.

“Why did you not wait for the men to move the pig, Mother?” I say. I wish she would look at me. How I wish I could beg her to glance up now and notice me, to see how things are wrong. Standing there I count to four inside my head.

“Oh, I must get on, Agnes,” she says, slamming the kettle back on the black hook over the fire. The hook shakes with the weight. “The skillet!” She holds out her hand. “Your father’ll not be back before midday if I know him.” Her voice is flat and tense. “No, Hester!” she shouts abruptly. “Put that down! ” And I reach out hastily and take a bowl away from the baby before she breaks it on the floor.

My mother sits down then and rubs her sleeve over her forehead, and I see that her face is long and gray and tired, which makes the disquiet twist about inside me like a worm. How would she get by, were I not here to help her in the house? But of course from the back room the noise of Lil working the loom comes regularly hissing and clacking like a mechanical breath.

“Where is Father?” I ask.

“Where do you think, Ag?” she says shortly.

Hester begins to crawl to me, gurgling with effort, her baby’s gown dragging at her knees through the dirt as she crosses the floor that wants sweeping. I wait again for my mother to ask me why my errand took so long, but she does not, and so I blink and turn away. Perhaps the fire needs to be stoked; I bend over the hearth, pushing the logs closer together to coax at the heat. I wish that color wouldn’t rush so readily into my cheeks. I begin to talk up cheerfully about Mrs. Mellin’s skillet.

“She did mind, the old witch, but I promised her a bit of meat after the curing was done,” I explain lightly. It is my first lie of such proportions, and it comes away from my tongue with an ease that I don’t much like. The tended flames gather and spark brightly from the wood.

 

When my uncle arrives with his boots crunching on the path, and the butchering itself begins, I go straight to the trestle to cut up the onions, and turn my back. I find the smell of the pig is too strong this year for me to stomach. The blood is too red, the skin too much like my own. I have to swallow over and over to go on with the cooking.

My uncle is good with the butcher’s knife. Not like my father, who has not the patience. When I was smaller I liked to watch him cut up the carcass. There was a kind of miracle to the ease with which he separated the sides from each other, as though this were the way that nature had intended after all, it being so neat. I liked how the meat shrank away behind the cut of the knife as he worked, as if he had only to touch the meat in the right places to make it part of its own accord. Not the bones, though, all splintery rasping and sawing with blades to break them apart. Nor the fibrous caul that is beaded with fat around the stomach where the belly is flatter; he had to tug and rip at that to take it away to put into the larding pot. There should be six pints of lard to render and boil and strain from this pig, and some left to beat into flour to make flead cakes.

“Oh, the fat smells good!” William is excited and jumps about, holding the spoon. When he skims off the scum as it rises his little mouth is opened up with concentration.

The whole pig’s head boils whitely in a deep pot at the edge of the fire. I always set the pot so that the snout faces inward to the flames, as though it were warming itself and cannot see what we are doing to the rest of the body. I keep it covered to the ears so that it cannot even hear what we are saying, until it falls softly apart in its own juices. When it is done and taken away from the heat and cool enough to touch, William will sit and pick the head bone clean. He has a way with being careful, although he does not skin the tongue himself.

I am thinking, thinking.

At first in Mrs. Mellin’s kitchen the thoughts had flung themselves from side to side in my head, like water does in the pail on the walk from the well. I’d paced about. My heart had beat so fiercely that I was afraid for it and pressed my fingers at my chest bone. All the time the coins were winking brightly at me, a yellow pile upon the wooden table. I had hardly dared to touch the coins again, although my fingers left the place over my heart from time to time and hovered near.

Are they a sign from God?
I’d thought.

The hens were fighting outside in her yard.

I’d scooped grain from a bushel sack and stepped outside. It was somehow surprising that the same sun was still shining. I took a breath. The leaves on the beech trees and the birch were vivid and they caught at the light, making many shades of yellow against the blue sky. Two finches swayed on thistle-heads, plucking out seeds. The air was fresh and clean, a cold, scouring kind of air, making the world seem washed and bright. It could be hard to conceal a secret in such an atmosphere of clarity, I’d reasoned.

I flung handfuls of grain and they drummed the ground firmly, as heavy rain does when it strikes baked earth at the start of a summer downpour. The hens strutted and flustered. It was extravagant to give good wheat to the birds, but Mrs. Mellin would not be needing flour where she had gone.

I almost laughed at how the world had changed so sharply.

The yellow coins had made my head feel light and free, quite a separate feeling from my bigger quandary.

Only six of Mrs. Mellin’s hens were left. A fox had taken the rest in October when the ground was hard with the second frost, creeping low out of the edge of the wood like a living shape of fear. The chickens that were spared the slaughter sat in the lower branches of the ash tree for two days until hunger drove them down again to scratch at the earth as if nothing had happened.

I brushed my palms together to get rid of the wheaty dust and the feel of Mrs. Mellin’s dead skin against my own. I took a breath. How cold and clear it was. Outside in the yard the world felt calm and ordinary. I counted some beats of my heart, eighteen, nineteen, thankful that no one could hear it.

And I realized that if I were gone from here, nothing would change. Any space I left in the world would fill in quickly, as earth closes in when you pull beets up from the ground.

I will take my disgrace elsewhere
, I’d thought.
I must run from here, until my shame is over or changed.

Quickly I’d gone inside and bound the top of the sack of grain closed to keep out rats. I took up most of the coins and gathered them flatly into a coarse piece of cloth. I put one to my lips as I did so; I could not help but touch my tongue to it, and bite. It was cold and hard. The metallic taste was almost like blood, and a ball of my white breath puffed out into the cold air of the room. I folded the cloth tightly and tucked it between my stays and my skin. When I breathed in, I could feel the lump of the coins pressing my rib cage. My ears strained for any sound of footsteps on the path, and I glanced again and again through the dirty glass of the window facing the lane. I replaced the china jar on the mantelshelf neatly with the chipped part facing the wall. Inside I’d left two pieces of Spanish gold to pay for the burial, this being only seemly, and knowing as I do how one should never cross the dead unduly.

“Mrs. Mellin.” I nodded to her body sitting there, and then left the cottage. Just in time, I had remembered the skillet.

 

How long ago that seems already, though it was only this morning.

“Two days per pound, salting,” my mother calculates, “which takes us to one month on Thursday next.” She eyes the powdering tub.

“I’ll do that, Mother,” I say. The cut meat is a bright, deep red in the flicker of firelight.

I feel dizzy. By a month on Thursday next, I will have been gone for so long. Lil will brim with sadness and rage for weeks. She will cry. William will cry. Hester will be puzzled and then she will not. My mother will be eaten up with anxiousness, and then her baby will come and she will have enough to do without worrying after me. I do not know about my father. Unburdened partly by my absence, he may say to my mother, “She is a big girl, Mary,” as he takes up his coppice tools for his walk to the Weald to find work again, or as he clenches his large, toughened hand around the handle of his flagon at table. Or he may not. A girl can never know a father.

I know, though, that the sense of change that they will feel by my desertion might be dispersed by a short-lived sense of better eating.
One less mouth to feed. Less feet to shoe. Less laundry. Less water to carry.
When my mother hisses and claps at the cat to get outside, it is not hard to think that it is me her irritation is directed at. “Good riddance!” she shouts, and the door shudders on its wooden latch as she slams it shut. My thoughts run on as though I were already gone and I feel my heart hardening inside me like a stone as I watch them busy in the room without me. Often on the Downs you can find a fist-sized round of chalk that seems too heavy for itself, and when you crack it open on the path you find it has inside it the dense glassy darkness of flint. Lil will have more space in the bed for a while till Hester grows.

And how a full belly will take the edge off things.

One by one I take the four flitches and lay them heavily in the powdering tub. Evenly I salt the flesh, turning the pieces and rubbing the rough mixture in handfuls into the taut meat as it drains, until my hands are sore and my arms wet up to the elbows with the pink briny liquid that comes from it.

My father, returned at last from the village and smelling of drink bought on the strength of promises, comes up to the tub and holds up a piece by the bone. “Will you see that ribbon of fat about the back and collar!” he exclaims. “As thick as my thumb and forefinger together. That’s good eating! That’s worth months of scraping the beer wash out into a bucket. Didn’t I say so!” He looks at my mother. My mother, picking up Hester from the floor, does not even seem to hear him. Her belly is huge.

“Is there plenty of pepper, onions?” my aunt nags from the back room, picking up this and that and turning things over in her hand. She means for the sausage: the bits and pieces, the scrapings and leavings, crusts, herbs. There is no waste. Lil has gone out to the stream with the stinking guts looped up in a bucket, where she washes and washes them until they are clean, and until her fingers are so frozen cold she can hardly push the guts inside out.