The Telling (28 page)

I WENT TO WORK; I didn’t know what else to do; it was what I always did. The village was stirring. Women were mending fires: smoke drifted from chimney pots, curtains were drawn back. The world had been turned upside down on Sunday, and it seemed that no one knew what to do about it, but to carry on as if the sky were still clear above our heads, and the ground still firm under our feet. That there could be troops sent for, or the Riot Act read, or that a man might challenge the vicar in mid-sermon and spit on the church floor; none of it seemed to belong to the same world as this morning, when Agnes’s mam was shaking last night’s crumbs from the tablecloth out of the front door, and chaffinches and sparrows hopped and fluttered after them.

The vicarage windows were dark and blank. I crunched up the gravel driveway, and in through the servants’ door, and I felt my skin tighten at the chill.

I had died for them on Sunday, and now I was a ghost. Mrs. Briggs was elbow-deep in a goose and didn’t even look up. Maggie’s gaze skimmed over me, and didn’t settle, and she left the kitchen without seeming to notice me. I went about my usual tasks. When I lit the bedroom fire the Reverend and his wife were still sleeping: when I came back with the water he was gone, the blankets lying neat and flat where he had lain. I set the ewer down on the washstand. Mrs. Wolfenden slept prettily, her breathing gentle; I was thinking about how she’d said the Reverend would protect her. Then he bustled back into the room from his dressing-room door, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown, looking as if he’d forgotten something. He started when he saw me.

“What—” he said, and then he faltered and looked away. He went over to his side of the bed, and picked up a book from the bedside cabinet, then he returned to his dressing room, the skirts of his dressing gown rustling.

I was chopping onions. My eyes stung with the vapours, but I was happy to be at the task. After all that had been asked of me lately, it seemed beautifully simple to be chopping onions. I was so reluctant to be done with them that I’d reduced them to almost a paste when the bell rang. I was wanted in the morning room. Mrs. Briggs’s plump face was pink and she didn’t meet my eye. She stripped leaves from rhubarb stems, sliced the stems briskly
into quarter-lengths. “Go on then, girl,” she said. I think she knew what was coming; I think she might have been feeling sorry for me.

Mrs. Wolfenden was sitting in her chair. I clasped my hands behind my back, could smell the onions even then. Alice was nearby, perched on an upright chair at a sewing table, an abundance of soft brown merino heaped in front of her. An autumn dress for Mrs. Wolfenden; the fabric was beautiful, but I wasn’t sure that it would suit her light colouring. Mrs. Wolfenden herself was at some smaller work; a piece of crisp white linen in her hands; she was trimming it with white silk ribbon. She barely raised her eyes from this work when I came in; just a flicker of a glance, though her cheeks and throat flushed red. When I came to stand in front of her, she spoke without looking up, and it was in a kind of breathless rush, as if she had it all committed to memory, and must not pause for risk of losing the pattern, of finding herself interrupted. She said that they had hardly thought to see me there that day, after the disturbances on Sunday.

“It was my father, madam, not me, who caused the furore.”

Her cheeks pinkened deeper; I could see the choice of word had piqued her.

“Well,” she said, and looked up, delivering her reasons in a list, “it’s nonetheless clear that you cannot be trusted, that you have become unreliable, and are clearly not the kind of girl that we could possibly keep on staff, not coming from a family like that; the Reverend Wolfenden expressed his doubts to me some time ago, but I had suggested generosity, and restraint, and watchfulness, and how have I been rewarded?”

“Perfectly adequately,” I said. “You have nothing to complain
of. I’ve done my work, and done it well, even though it has suited you often enough to pretend otherwise.”

She shook her head. “The Reverend said to expect insolence. I am sorry that things have come to such a pass, but we will have to let you go.”

She set her sewing down and lifted a clutch of coins from a nearby table: my pay. I looked at it a moment. It would have been a great satisfaction to tell her to put it in the poor box, but prudence got the better of me. I held out my hand; she slid the coins into it, not letting our hands touch. Her hand was tugged back as if by a jerked cord and rested on her belly; and then I noticed. The cut of her dress did much to disguise it, but there was the unmistakable swelling, the filling out of breasts, and when I looked again into her face I saw the glowing plumpness of the lineaments, the softness of the jaw. She saw me notice, and blushed deeper still. I jangled the coins in my hand. I smiled at her. I padded out of the room in my felt slippers. Things were about as bad as I could imagine them, but nothing in the world would have persuaded me to exchange my place for hers.

I took off my slippers and put on my clogs. I left my cap and apron there. Going out through the scullery door, into daylight and onto the doorstep, I was surprised to find that my heart was lightened at the loss of my place, even though I had no notion of what I would do to find another one. I’d never have to wear those felt slippers again; I’d never have to curtsey again, not unless I chose to. I stepped down onto the gravel path just as someone
came briskly around the corner; we nearly collided. Thomas; he blushed right to his ears.

“I was just delivering—”

I nodded and began to turn away. I didn’t have the goodwill in me at that moment to hear another story of his success, his accumulating profits.

He followed me, skipping a step to keep up.

“What’s up, where are you off to?”

“Nowhere.”

“What do you mean nowhere? It’s the middle of the day.”

“I’ve been dismissed.”

He grabbed my arm, and stopped me, and turned me to him, and I just looked at him blankly. He put his arm around my shoulder, and tried to pull me close, but I pushed him away.

“Times will be hard,” he said.

“I know.”

I turned again, heading for the vicarage gate, and he followed me, the sound of our paired feet noisy in the morning quiet. We passed Mr. Fowler, who was raking the gravel. He looked at us askance.

“If you need help, I can help,” Thomas was saying. “Give you work, whatever you want.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

I clutched the coins tightly, the metal edges pressing into my palm. As we strode down the drive, my mind was turning on the possibilities: farm work and domestic work and leaving for the mills; what I could get without a good word from my former employer, who also happened to be the vicar. The future did not look rosy. And whatever work I managed to secure, whatever else
happened, Mr. Moore would be gone. He must leave; he must be made to see that he must leave, before it was too late. I flung the gate wide, and it crashed back on its hinges, and I set off up the village street; Thomas stayed to fasten it, and then dashed after me. When Mr. Moore goes, I was thinking, I will have nothing. I will have nothing left at all.

The crowd almost blocked the road where it crested Brunt Hill. Irebys and Robinsons, and some of the Gorst boys, and Thomas’s cousins, and men down from the hill-farms, almost strangers; it was uneasy to see them gathered there; another clear indication that the changes of Sunday were leaching into the weekday world. I made to slip through them, but Jack Gorst stopped me, and said, “You’d best know we’ve called a strike.”

I’d thought things were as bad as they could be. I’d been wrong. “A what?”

“A strike,” Richard Moss said. “No one’s to have any dealings with the gentry or the clergy.”

“Who says so?”

“We took a vote. We’re all agreed on it.”

“No one asked me,” I said. Jack Gorst and Richard Moss just looked at me blankly a moment. “To what end?” I asked. “What are you striking for?”

“The land. We want the land back.”

“Do you think this’ll help?”

“See how they get along without us.”

“Does Mr. Moore know?”

Jack shrugged. I shouldered past them. They fell into conversation with Thomas. He asked how they were getting on; the strike was not news to him. And yet he had been at the vicarage, delivering,
as he put it. It puzzled me how he could be on such easy and familiar terms with both sides in the dispute. I wondered if the strikers knew where he had been.

There was a new book on the dresser. It was a play about a man called Hamlet who found it hard to screw up his courage to the point where he must kill his uncle, which seemed quite reasonable to me. Mam came home and found me reading. Although the house was spotless, it sealed her bad mood for the evening.

She’d been stopped in the street and told about the strike: there seemed no need to tell her about my dismissal; at least not yet, since nobody would be working. She couldn’t be still; she was fretting that her cows would suffer unmilked, and she went out to talk to the men, and a crowd of them went up and did the evening milking. I stayed at home, and waited for Mr. Moore, but he did not come back. I finished the play, but at every sound from the street, at the faintest voice in the distance, I was up and at the window, or peering around the edge of the open front door, into the evening street.

The men brought pails back down from the Oversbys’, slopping with milk. They went around all the houses with them. Mam filled a quart pot. She looked grim.

“They said I had to take it. They said everybody had to have some.”

The boys had a mug of milk apiece, and Mam made a custard, and we sat and ate custard, my mam and me and the boys, and though it was sweet and good and the boys slobbered it down like puppies, when I caught Mam’s worried expression, things felt very far from good. She told me that there had been a fight up at Oversbys’. The women of the family had already fled to town, Mr.
Oversby had stayed, they believed, but nobody had seen him. He’d left Sammy Tate to guard the dairy. Mam wouldn’t have minded leaving the milk behind; it was only the cows she was concerned about; but the men were saying that the village was to have it, because the village needed it, and why should they pay for it, and Sammy had tried to stop them, and had got his head broken, and the milk was stolen, and that was why we all had to have some, so that everyone shared in that guilt.
If someone gets hurt
, Mr. Moore had said.
If someone gets killed, then—with my reputation
—

“Was Mr. Moore there?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know where he’s got to; or your dad.”

They were out till after I fell asleep, and I didn’t hear them come in. I don’t know if they came separately or together, or if Mr. Moore had paused to look at me sleeping there on the kitchen floor. I remember thinking that despite everything, despite the danger and the trouble, and the worry, Mr. Moore had thought to leave a book for me. It made me strangely happy, even in all that confusion.

The next day stretched out ahead of me like a flooded field, calm and flat, with the usual paths across it hidden. Little to do but the chores of the house, which got done in no time at all, by my mam and me together. We started to consider daft ideas; that we would take down the curtains for cleaning; that we might drag bedding outside to let it air. In the end we didn’t accomplish any of it. Mam remembered my half-finished dress, and set me to sewing, and set herself to help me with it.

“We’ll hardly have the dance now,” I said, “with all this going on.”

“I don’t see why not. And there’s no good in leaving a thing half done.”

The day started chilly, and then grew overcast. The boys were out of the house, though whether they’d actually gone to their work, I didn’t know. Neither the smith nor the cordwainer could be considered gentry, much less clergy; but I doubted the boys would care for such nice distinctions.

Mr. Moore stayed alone upstairs all morning; I could hear him moving around. He only came down a little after dinnertime, though we hadn’t actually thought to prepare a meal. He went straight over to the dresser and took the book and replaced it with another. Until then, the books had appeared and disappeared mysteriously, covertly. To see him do this, quite openly, made me feel even more uneasy. Things were different now; some things that had seemed to matter no longer mattered at all. There was no time to waste. The way he did it also seemed so simple; as artlessly thoughtful as the lighting of a candle to save my eyes. It made my throat ache.

He drank tea with my mam and me, and he tried to talk of ordinary things, but Mam was stiff with him, and I was awkward and over-full of feeling. I tidied away the tea things, and glanced towards the new book, but I had to sit back down to my sewing. Mam acted as if neither of us were really there; she barely spoke, barely looked at either of us. She mentioned Sally’s absence as if it were an inexplicable thing. I heard horses approach, and looked up to see the Wolfendens’ carriage pass the front window. I glimpsed Mrs. Wolfenden’s face, pale; she was staring bolt ahead.

Around four, my father banged into the house, a paper clamped in his fist, and I saw it was a
Northern Star
.

“So much for shoddy workmanship,” he yelled at Mr. Moore. “So much for hastiness. There are strikes all over the region, in Colne, and Preston, and Skipton, and Lancaster. You should have stood with us, you should have stood with us. This is the dawn of a new age, a better one.”

“I hope you’re right.” He gave my father a thin smile.

I knew that none of it was news to him, and that it didn’t change a thing.

The new book that he had left me was another of those Greek ones; it ended badly, with a deal of blood. I lay reading it in the firelight after everyone had gone to bed. I left it on the dresser when I went up to speak to him.

He stood in the doorway, in his shirt and britches, and did not offer me to come in. His eyes were tired, and there were deep creases in his brow. We spoke in whispers.