The Telling (21 page)

The book’s ghost followed me all day. The words I spoke seemed to arrange themselves into the patterns of the Reverend Milton’s verse. My thoughts were dark with Hell, entangled with Eden’s vines, glowing with the light of Lucifer’s approach. All day I was on edge that when I got back the book would be gone. When finally Mrs. Briggs released me from work, I flung on my shawl, knotted my clogs and walked as fast as I could up the village street, doing my best not to break into a run that would be noticed and talked about by the women on their doorsteps.

I came up the steps, into the kitchen, and over to the dresser: the book was gone. In its place was a squat black volume.

“Oh!”

I swung around. Dad was in his seat and Mr. Moore was coming down the stairs. Dad’s glance was irritable: “What?”

Mr. Moore paused at the stairs’ foot, and looked with innocent enquiry at me.

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

I lifted the new book down from the shelf, glanced at it swiftly. Mr. Moore crossed the room and took his hat from the peg. Dad said something more, making me start; I turned guiltily towards him, tucking the book behind my back.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a fine evening,” he said. “You should call for Thomas.”

I could feel the flush rise up my throat. “I’ve been on my feet all day.”

“When I was courting your mam, there wasn’t an evening went by that I didn’t walk the three miles to Capernwray and the three miles back, just to take a cup of tea in the kitchen with her, and with that old hag of a cook glaring at us the whole time. Things were different then. None of this nonsense then. Isn’t that right, Moore?”

Mr. Moore pushed his hat onto his head. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. He nodded to me, said good evening, and went out.

While Dad was in the room, I worked on a basket; he retired to bed early, and in what was left of the long evening, I read the new book. It was a play, by William Shakespeare, about a king called Henry. I didn’t much care for it. Mam came home, and went to bed, then the boys came in, and went up to their room. I was vexed with the story. I missed the other book. I didn’t believe the ending to the current one, didn’t believe he loved her; I didn’t see how he could have come to love her, like that, in a moment, so conveniently. It was almost dark in the kitchen when Mr. Moore came home. Outside some of the light still lingered. He caught me there, frowning at the book.

“Not to your liking?” he asked.

I blinked up at him; my very bones ached to speak to him. But I didn’t speak; I couldn’t name what it was I felt, and if I could, I would not have dared to say it.

“Never mind,” he said. He said goodnight, and went upstairs.

The Reverend Milton’s blue book had left a mark upon my thoughts, as looking upon a candle flame leaves a scald upon the
vision, that drifts across the sight after the flame itself has been snuffed out. When I lay down, it was to think of Sin, tormented in the darkness. It was to think of Eve, blinking and new born, confronted by man and God, a snake always at her heel.

Mr. Moore must have intended this. He must have known what I would do.

The next Friday was a washing day. It was all so precariously balanced; work, home, Thomas; at any moment a slight shift could cause all to fall down around me. I kept my thoughts averted. If Mr. Moore was home, I would ask him straight out: can I borrow the
Paradise Lost
? If he was not there, I would borrow it anyway. I had been given permission, after all; and it had not been withdrawn.

The house had that dim cool feel of emptiness: Mam would be down at the wash-house, expecting me. I kicked off my clogs and climbed the stairs, knocking on his door confident that there would be no reply. Silence from within: I pushed the door and it swung open. The room was empty. The bookcase stood solid and huge; it seemed familiar to the room, as though it had softened into place.

I would find the book. I would take it downstairs, hide it in the press, and then go down to the bleaching-fields and help get in the linen. He might notice the book’s absence, or he might notice its presence in my hands that evening, when I sat to read. What could he say? What could he do? He was as deep in this as I was; deeper, even: he couldn’t accuse me of anything.

I found the Reverend Milton’s book; its slim blue spine was
pressed between two bulkier volumes. I teased it out and dropped it into my apron pocket. At the end of a shelf was the stack of newspapers that Mr. Moore collected in packages from the mail coach:
The Northern Star
. I picked the top one up out of curiosity, and was just going to glance at the first page; but when I lifted it, I saw, underneath, the red buckram cover of the ledger. It lay amongst the papers, as if hidden hastily there, as if tucked quickly out of sight.

There would be dry linen on the lines, and the wet linen needing pegging out, and the women already muttering at my tardiness. I should take the book I’d come for and just go. The house was silent. The air was dry and warm and still carried the scent of oak. I heard a curlew’s cry from up the back field. There was the deep call of a grown lamb, the deeper reply of the ewe. Mr. Moore wasn’t there. I knew he wasn’t there. He wouldn’t catch me. He would never know.

I lifted the ledger down and replaced the paper on top of the stack. It was a big unwieldy thing. Resting the top edge of the ledger on the shelf, I held the bottom edge in my hands; if I heard someone coming I could push it back in amongst the papers in an instant. I peered at his writing. The letters were small and densely packed. They filled the page like the weft of a dark cloth.

Slavery has numerous phases, but every system which tends to place the labour, life and destinies of man at the disposal of another, deserves to be classed under that odious name. Since the great betrayal, when our hopes were so utterly dashed, every interest has been represented in Legislature save the interest of the People. The Church, the Bar, the
landed and moneyed interests, all these flourish, and the People are worse than undefended. We have arrived at a situation where the wolf legislates for the lamb. What the wolf desires is not the lamb’s welfare, but his own dinner
.

The exclusionists said that the People were incapable of choosing proper representation; the melancholy truth was that at the time, in many parts, men were receding in knowledge. If they were not fit then, they have worsened since; but to set up the People’s ignorance as a barrier to their suffrage is a great injustice. Ignorance is considered a barrier in no other part of the Legislature; the rich and propertied may be as ignorant as they like and still keep their vote. No one seeks to remain ignorant; it is simply that the remedy for it is kept under lock and key by the very class of men who accuse us of ignorance and deny us the vote. I think that we must shift for ourselves, since they are not about to stir themselves on our behalf. We must educate ourselves, we must arm ourselves with knowledge, so when the time comes round again, and we present our demands, supported by our petition with its thousands upon thousands of signatures, the justice and intelligence of our arguments will be unassailable.

I felt as if I had been struggling with a tangled thread for months, teasing at this loop and then that, and then suddenly with one tug in the right place, the whole muddled mess fell into a straight clear thread. I saw why the Reverend was so interested in Mr. Moore. I saw that the Reverend was afraid. I felt it too: the force
of this intelligence, this facility with words, this faith, all trained upon the state of things, a state of things that I had only known as I had known the ground I walked upon, as something that was there, God-given, unchanging and unquestionable. I shivered. The world seemed a different place. A darker place. I turned the page.

I found them in such miserable circumstances, six of them crowded into the one room, a damp and stinking cellar. There, all the necessary activities of life took place, in such crowded and miserable conditions that I find it impossible to recall without shuddering. The father was instructing his eldest daughter in the working of the loom; though it had provided him with such meagre support in life, he was unable to offer her better
.

Such light as entered the place, from a grille high up in the wall, was frequently obscured by the passing of people in the street. The only furniture was the loom and a heap of straw; when it rained, the room flooded ankle-deep. On wet nights, the mother told me, there could be no rest for anyone, since there was nowhere to lie down
.

The youngest was a child of fifteen months, and still at the mother’s breast. When I asked why it was not weaned, the mother told me that there was little enough to feed the older children, if she did not feed it herself, she must take something for it from the other portions. She must have considered me to have a physician’s brief, for she told me that in the winter past, when she had been brought very low by fever and bad food, that her husband had found her
in a swoon, and the child at her breast, by then a hungry nine-month-old, had sucked not milk, but blood
.

I slammed the book shut. Sunlight poured in through the window; a blackbird was singing in the garden. One of my stockings needed darning at the heel; a hairpin pressed into the back of my head. None of it was real, not as real as what I’d just read. I had to speak to Mr. Moore.

But there was no escape until the washday was done. I had to go back, and comport myself as if nothing were amiss, until the last of the linen was dry and hefted back up to the houses to air, the five o’clock bell was fading from the air, and everyone was heading for Mrs. Goss’s house for tea. Only then could I slip away, back down the lane, without protest. I knew that it would not go uncommented on. The women had seen me arrive late, and they had seen me leave now. I couldn’t help that. My mam would be saying that I was a good girl, but close, terrible close, and that you wouldn’t suspect a thing unless you knew, I kept it that much to myself, but there would be a wedding there before the year was out. And the others would agree that Thomas was a fine young man, and that I would be lucky to have him, with his twenty pounds a year from the baskets alone. And it was true: Thomas was, in his way, a fine young man; he just wasn’t right for me. I came down the lane, my feet thumping on the packed-hard mud and stones, to where the ways part, one path heading across the shorn meadow towards the Williamses’ willow holts, the other climbing the hill towards Storrs.

The rooks wheeled high above the trees. I crossed the beck by the wash-house, and climbed the hill. Halfway up the hillside an
oak tree stood, casting a pool of shade. I spread my shawl on the mossy turf underneath and sat down. The path passed close by and from where I sat I could see a good stretch in both directions. Mr. Moore must come that way to return home at the end of his working day. If I waited there, he must pass me too. I waited.

The bells chimed the quarter, then the half-hour. I bit at the dry tag of skin beside my thumbnail. I heard voices from above, from the cusp of the hill. The men’s figures were dark against the sky. I started to my feet. They came down the track, and I could see them clearly. Mr. Moore was in company with two men, in shirtsleeves and britches, leather tool bags slung over their shoulders. They were talking; Mr. Moore said something and the others laughed. They were workers on the Hall; I recognized them from the meetings, but they weren’t village men. I came forward, to the edge of the shade, and hesitated there. He was almost past: I opened my lips, determined to speak, but before I had to, Mr. Moore’s tread faltered, and his dark head turned, and he saw me. He stopped and regarded me with an expression of puzzled concern. I smiled uneasily.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

I glanced from him to his companions; they’d stopped too, a little way ahead, and were waiting for him. I didn’t know what to say. Mr. Moore followed my line of sight and registered my concern.

“Go on, I’ll see you there,” he called to them.

The men exchanged a glance and went on down the hill; we watched them cross the beck, then begin the slow climb up the hill towards the village. I was glad they were not local men. We were alone: Mr. Moore in sunlight, me in the shade of the tree.

“Is something wrong?” Mr. Moore asked again, and came towards me, into the shade. His face was blued by the shadow; there was a bloom of wood-dust on his skin. I felt an edge of anxiety at what I’d done, putting myself here, alone, with a man. He was studying my face.

“Elizabeth,” he said. I could feel the warmth of his body near mine; his shirt was damp with sweat. “You’re pale as buttermilk.”

He took my elbow and gently steered me towards the bole. I let myself be guided back and sat down on my shawl where it was still spread. He crouched down in front of me and dropped his tool bag onto the grass. There were clear lines, free of dust, at the corners of his eyes. He must have worked in full sun that day, squinting against the glare, at the clouds of dust.

My mouth was dry; the words came out strangely: “Who are you?”

He said, “You know who I am.”

“I don’t, I really don’t. You live in our house, you share our bread, you dole out your books like they were barley sugar, and all the time you keep yourself to yourself, you don’t say a word, and no one knows a thing about you, not really.”

He tilted his head, his brows raising; he seemed to accept this. He shifted, sat down at the edge of my shawl.

“Was it
Paradise Lost
?” he said. “Did it upset you? It is rather extreme; I shouldn’t have started you so soon on that.”

I shook my head, looking at the man who had made the bookcase, and who had made those pictures out of words. The wolf that legislates for the lamb. The high grille obscured with passing feet. The loom, the heap of straw. The baby that sucked its mother’s blood.

“You said you were a carpenter.”

“I am.”

I shook my head. “I read your book.”

He frowned, puzzled, fumbling for my meaning. “My book?”