The Telling (31 page)

I came flying up to the back wall of our garden and crashed into it. I was too late. They were there. Two soldiers in red coats were trampling the garden, pushing the currant canes aside, crushing the leeks and kale. I saw others through the side windows, already in the house. One stood sentry at the back door. Another stood near the bottom of the front steps. The officer sat poker-straight on his horse. Thomas thundered up and landed against the wall beside me. His breath was noisy; mine had already calmed. I remember that slow strange feeling of certainty as I watched a soldier come out of our house and approach the officer, and the officer lean down in the saddle to hear him.

They had not found him. I knew they had not found him. Mr. Moore was gone.

The officer straightened up, nodded, and dismissed the man. His voice carried clear across the battered garden.

“Burn them.”

I couldn’t watch, but neither could I leave. I turned my back and sank down in the blunt stubble. I put my head on my knees. Thomas slumped down beside me. For a while, there was just the noise of the soldiers moving around, and orders barked at each other, and the flutter and thump of books flung in armfuls from the window and landing on the ground beneath. Then there were other voices. I heard Reverend Wolfenden. I heard others too, volunteering details of the local paths and byways, the greenlanes he might have taken. The crackle of kindling; a taint of smoke in the air. Orders were shouted from horseback: three men sent down the coffin lane towards the river crossing, another three to accompany the officer along the wash-house lane and sweep up the river paths towards Lancaster.

I got to my feet and turned to look. The clatter of running footsteps and hoofbeats was receding, and my father stood there, with the Reverend, and Mr. Aitken and Mr. Forster, and other men; they were just standing there, not looking at each other, not looking anywhere, not speaking. The Reverend turned and walked away down the village street, towards the vicarage, and the men drifted off up the village, and as they walked they fell into pairs or threes, but still I didn’t hear a single word spoken. No one fell in to walk beside my father. He walked up the street alone.

Mr. Moore would hear them coming a mile off with the noise they were making. He’d slip off the path, dodge down a bank or behind a tree. They had no dogs to scent him out. His eyes would glitter like the river, but he would go unseen. Maybe he
hadn’t even gone yet. Perhaps he’d seen them coming, had slipped out the back way and hidden in the fields behind the house. I pressed the tears off my face and turned around to look. Across the sweep of field, the stubble stood brittle and upright in the evening cool. One trampled pathway crossed it, where Thomas and I had crushed it flat. No one else had come this way tonight.

Thomas stood up beside me. In silence, he put his hand on my shoulder. It was hot and heavy. I did not shake it off.

We trailed back to the dance. We walked up through the middle of the field, retracing our own footsteps. Thomas went ahead, and I followed, my skirt caught up in my hand. The pins had fallen out, and now the hem trailed, the edge thready and raw. Underneath, my stockings were snagged and bloodied. When we reached the stile, Thomas offered me his hand to help me over. We stood like that for what seemed an age, looking at each other, his hand raised to take mine and help me over and down, back onto the green, back among the people, back into the dance. I could have asked him then what part he’d had in this, what had passed between him and the Reverend, what he had been doing at the vicarage that day; but I was worn out, preoccupied, and I still hoped that things would be well; in truth, I didn’t want to know. After all, it was Thomas, only Thomas, with his kind broad face, and his ears that stuck out a little, and he was looking at me with such fierce attention, that I felt something like tenderness for him. I took his hand, and he helped me over, and the moment for asking him was gone.

“Your hair is all fallen,” he said.

I stood, and began to gather it, divide it, twist it and pin it up. Thomas watched, and he touched the ribbon there, his fingers rough-skinned but gentle, and nodded to show when it was done. We were walking side by side towards the dance, towards the music and people. There were nudges and smiles. I touched at my hair uneasily. There was no remedy for the fallen hem.

My mam didn’t say anything. I told her that I wanted to go home, and she gave me a long assessing look, and her face softened.

“Come on then.”

The bonfire was visible from the turn of the street; a dark bloody red, smoke that seemed to hang in a pool around the house. Indoors, the rooms reeked of strange smoke; of burning leather and paper and buckram and glue. Mam moved about, tutting, setting things to rights. I sat at the window in the dimming light, and watched the fire grow deeper red, and the plants and fruit canes wither and scorch, felt the vapours and mists of the unfinished stories burn away, and disperse with the smoke into the evening air.

Mam brought me tea, and I blinked away tears. She dragged over a chair to sit with me at the window, and we drank our tea from the cups she was given when she was seventeen and left service to marry Dad, and we sat in silence while outside the books burned orange and green and blue, and cracked and spat, and the words peeled away into black ash, and tiny fragments of paper were caught by the wind. A word here, a phrase there, lifted to the sky and scattered.

“Would the Wolfendens take you back, do you think?” she said. “The Reverend was saying a lot about forgiveness today.”

“I doubt it.”

There was silence. Then she said, “Did he touch you?”

I looked at her; her dark lined skin, her apple cheeks.

She said, “Sweetheart?”

There was just the soft sound of my lips unsticking, but I couldn’t speak.

“I saw the state of you when you got back to the dance,” she said. “Everyone did.”

She meant Thomas.

“There’s nothing you need to tell me about?”

“No,” I said, half-choked.

She nodded. After a while, she said, “You’re tired, you should go to bed.”

I rose, went to get the bedding from the chest.

“No, honey,” she said.

I let the blanket fall back into the chest, let the lid fall shut. Upstairs, she meant; in my old bed, in Mr. Moore’s bed. My face flushed with feeling: to hide it, and to show that there was nothing out of the ordinary, I went over to the dresser to get a book, as I had done every night since I was a little girl. There, pressed tightly between the black spines of the Bible and the
Pilgrim’s Progress
, was that little blue-backed volume of John Milton’s verse. Mr. Moore had left it for me. In those last hurried moments before departure, he had risked himself, and his liberty, to leave me this. I slipped it off the shelf, and wrapped my arms over it, pressing it close to me. I went straight up to the room. The room bore the marks of the soldiers’ presence: the rucked-up rug, the empty shelves, the smell of burning. He had gone, but there were traces of him still: his empty box, the compression of the pillow, the
bookcase. I stood in the middle of the room and opened the book that he had left me. On the flyleaf he had written, in his neat, practical hand,

For Elizabeth

a loan
,

until I see you again

Robert James Moore
.

I lay down. I buried my face in the pillow, breathed deep the scent of him. Oak. Still in that dress, my ankles pricked and bleeding, my face tangling in my hair, worn out with crying, I fell asleep.

I had been as a salmon hatched and grown in a backwater, its flesh muddy and soft from the stillness of its pond. With Mr. Moore’s arrival, a flood had thundered through my life, joining the backwater to the river’s flow, washing away the murk, bringing life and possibility, bringing evidence of a better life beyond, of an element that seemed my natural home. Having felt it, having tasted it, I knew it would be a joy to be alive in it. I could never settle again in the backwater, and be content. I knew now that I had never really been content before.

Weeks passed, and I heard nothing. I stayed at home to nurse Dad, who had been laid low with a chill from staying out all night after the dance, carousing with his friends. With scant distraction, it was hard to keep the images of Mr. Moore’s capture and imprisonment at bay: I saw him shivering with fever in a gaol cell. I saw him lying in a ditch, a sabre wound in his side, flies buzzing
in his open eyes. Every passing cart or wagon or walker made my heart race with possibility, but it was never him. It was a torment to remain at home when any moment might bring a message from him, but never did. When Thomas called, I walked out with him.

And a month had gone.

Mam got the tonic bottle down, started dosing me with it again. It smelt particularly foul; worse than before; I could barely keep it down. She had something else for my father, another bottle that she’d got Thomas to fetch from the apothecary in Hornby. She took it up to him in the evenings and would sit with him a while to give me some relief. The house seemed terribly quiet. The boys stayed long hours at their masters’ and now mostly took their meals there. We worked on baskets; little whitework ladies’ baskets that Thomas had asked us to make for him to sell on Hornby Market.

“Have you come to an agreement with him?”

Mam was turning the edge of the basket lid. We had been sitting in silence for a half-hour; I’d been lost in reverie. The sudden words made me start, and I didn’t catch her meaning.

“Pardon?”

“Thomas. When are you going to marry him?”

“Mam, no, don’t—”

“Don’t you
don’t
me!” she snapped, suddenly cross. “It’s too late for
don’t
, miss. If you didn’t want to marry him you should have said that to
him
.”

“Said what?”

“
Don’t
.” She just looked at me, her lips compressed, her cheeks
flushed. Then she put down the basket, and touched my arm, and said that we could make it right. They could get the banns read, there would be plenty of time, and no one thought much of a baby born seven or eight months after a wedding, it happened all the time, and it would put an end to all the talk, I must know there had been talk, even I couldn’t have missed noticing it.

There had been no blood that month. I knew that she was right. I went up to my room, and I took the folded paper that Mr. Moore had given me out from where I kept it, tucked between my stays and my shift. I read the direction he had written. A house on Fell Lane, Lancaster. The ink was already smudged and soft; the stamp was black and beautiful, with a young girl’s head on it, her hair ringleted and pretty. I’d been so happy. I’d never thought I’d need it. So I hadn’t told him—I’d been too ashamed to tell him—that I couldn’t write. I’d thought that he would come to teach me. I’d thought that there’d be years.

I left that night, following the way he was to have gone, along the river path to Lancaster. It was still and clear, the ground hard with frost. There were boys out setting snares for rabbits down near Thrush Gill. I thought I saw Ted’s pale thatch of hair in the moonlight, but wasn’t sure, and they didn’t notice me, and I hoped the keeper didn’t notice them. I tried not to think of my dad, the way the flesh had fallen from his bones, the yellow tint to his skin. If I saw any of them again, it would not be for many years.

I followed the silver glimmer of the river, the thick shadow of the riverbank. I climbed the rise up through the trees. Birds twittered in the undergrowth; something passed through the long
grass; I glimpsed it in the corner of my eye; the trailing brush of a dog fox. I came out of the trees to the parish marker, where we’d sat at Easter, and had our dinner spread on blankets. Below, the river rattled over shilloe; ahead, the arched stonework of Loyn Bridge caught the moonlight then lost itself in the woods on the far bank. Soon, I was beyond the bridge, skirting open meadow; keeping to hedgerows, copses. The light grew. The sun was rising over the hills to my left as I passed Caton; it flooded the valley with lilac and lavender light; birds were breaking out into song. Halton was just waking as I passed through. I came to a vast bridge, spanning the entire valley, pillars studding the meadow and river like petrified giants. I was dizzied just with looking up at it. The path turned to the hillside; steps rose up the flank of the bridge. I climbed up, thinking to find the road into town, but it was the navigation, a great weight of water suspended in the sky. A heavy skewbald mare came clopping slowly along, towing a barge, hundreds of feet above the valley floor. There was a man at her head, leading her.

“Pardon me,” I called, “is this the right way into town?”

“Aye,” he said. “It is.” His voice was strangely accented, his face weather-tanned and pocked. “D’you want a lift? Hop on.”

I thanked him. He held the horse, and a second man came out of the long low cabin and helped me on board. There was a bench built into the front of the boat; I sat there, and wrapped my shawl around me, and the horse began to walk on, and the barge to move, and suddenly the weight of all that had happened, and what I had done, and the fatigue of my journey, descended on me together, and I leaned my head against the side of the cabin, and I closed my eyes. I heard the gentle thump of the horse’s hooves,
the wash of the water against the prow, a clink and clatter from within the cabin. It was a relief to be borne along.

I may have dozed a little; the next thing I remember was being offered a cup of steaming tea.

“It’s a bit stewed,” he said. “I’ve just heated it through. We were going to get new supplies at Atkinsons.”

The tea was black and sour, but I was in need of it, and was grateful for it. He sat with me and asked where I was heading for, and I told him the street, and lied, saying that I was going to stay with friends and look for work, and he said he knew the street, it crossed the canal; he could let me off at the bridge. I thanked him, and he said it was no trouble, and he smiled.