The Telling (9 page)

The first knock was a jolt to me; I’d been lulled into such a stupor, a fug of repetition. Lift an iron, chase it around the creases and folds of a shift or shirt, fold the clothing, change the iron, take another item from the heap and start again. Mam flinched too; she glanced at Dad, who didn’t move. She set her iron on the hearth and went to the door. Mr. Gorst stood on the doorstep; behind him his two boys. It had started to rain; a fine light drizzle.
Dad rose from his chair, folded his paper and welcomed them in. Mr. Gorst took off his cap, shook it, flicking the drops of rain into the street. His boys followed him indoors. Mam closed her eyes, breathed carefully. She left the door a fraction open, came back to the hearth, lifted an iron, and smoothed out the last creases from a chemise. She folded it, set it on the pile, picked up another. She pursed her lips, said nothing.

They came from further off, this time: Mr. Woods and his oldest boy from Broomfield, and the Mackereths from out at Docker, the Blacows from High Carr, and the Tysons from Cawood. They brought cool air, the sweet musty smell of cattle and the sour smell of clothes that had been long worn and got damp.

We had our sleeves rolled at the heat. The room was full of steam and the smell of scorched cloth. We were dripping with sweat. Sally was hunched like a goblin in a dark corner, working on her basket and muttering to herself. We were in no state to receive a soul, much less half the men of the parish.

I was dipping down to change irons. There was a knock on the open door, a quick quiet tap that pushed the door a little further back. I heard Thomas say good evening to my mam. I stayed down, my skin scorching, my eyelashes sticking together as I blinked at the fire’s heat.

“Lizzy,” Mam said. “Lizzy. Get up. Thomas is here.”

I had to stand up, and wipe my sore hands on my apron, and push my hair off my forehead, and smile, and say that I had not heard him come in. He offered me his big pink hand; I was expected to shake it. It was as ridiculous to be shaking hands with Thomas as it would be to shake hands with Ted or John. I glanced
at Mam; she nodded at me, urging me on. I lifted my hand to be shaken. It was worn, sore with the iron, and a little scalded with the tea. Thomas’s hand when it closed around mine was cold and hard; he squeezed my hand tight. Mam would have left me crouching at the hearth, let Thomas come in and go upstairs without acknowledgement, if she hadn’t been vexed beyond patience at finding her washday made a public spectacle.

We were still sitting up when the ten o’clock bell rang out. The linen was folded and put away; the fire had died down, and we had opened a window to let out the fug of heat. We were as dumb as moles, fatigued beyond complaint. We sat on the rug, and passed a jar of goose fat back and forth, digging out a lump and rubbing it into our hands. Sally had finished one basket, started another, and abandoned it. It now lay like a jackdaw’s nest under the dark window.

Above us, the creak and rumble of the meeting went on, and I suppose we listened to that, or rather listened for a change in it, for any sign that it was nearing an end. I was glad of the silence between us, the mute passing of the jar felt like something from when I was a child. The day had done me in. I held only one clear thought in my head: I had to sleep. If they did not leave soon, I would lay my head down on the rug, and close my eyes, and not care if half the county were to troop past and see me lying oblivious on the floor.

At the half-hour bells, the noise from above altered; furniture scraped on the boards, and clog soles clattered and thumped, and the voices became separate and distinct as the door opened overhead, and the men began to spill down the stairs, their faces cast into sharp shadows by the rush-lights. Mam waited until the
last of them was out of the door, and then, shrunken with weariness, she climbed the stairs to her room, and went to bed. Sally and I stumbled out of our clothes and heaped our bedding on the floor.

Sally breathed quietly, her head pillowed on her arm. Hair-thin threads of light slipped here and there between the boards above. My mouth kept on opening, but I didn’t speak out loud. Her breath was coming deeper, slower; she was drifting further into sleep. I could see blank spaces on the ceiling where no light penetrated. I picked out the pattern of our old room: our bed, the blue and white rag rug in front of the fireplace, the chest, the washstand, and another black shape that for a moment I could not identify: the box. I licked the tea-scald, the blisters from the iron. Mam’s patience was not inexhaustible. What if she were to hear what the Reverend Wolfenden had asked of me? And why, after all, could he possibly need to burn so many candles? Why did he need the light so late?

Morning sun did not reach this side of the house; in the dim light the leather of the Reverend’s chair seemed to glow; the deep swirling walnut of the desk had a soft bluish sheen, like silk. The books, lining the walls, were bound in warm tan leather; here and there the gold lettering caught a little light, so that it seemed that tiny candles gleamed and flickered all about the room. I had always liked dusting in there. Before that day, dusting had been the only reason for me to be there.

The carpet gave under my slippered feet, like moss. The Reverend’s brow creased as I spoke, his chin drawn back into his neck,
so that the folds of flesh stood out over his collar. As I told him what I knew, he drew his chin further back; if he continued like this, I thought, he might disappear into his own skin; the rolls of loose flesh would close around his face, like water. When I had finished, he thrust his chin back out again.

“You had no indication of the contents?”

“No, sir.”

The Reverend nodded, pressed his lips tight in thought. “And Mr. Moore did not speak of it to you?”

“Sir, I am not in his confidence.”

The Reverend nodded again, and did not seem to notice how the colour rose to my cheeks.

“You must make an effort to become so. Find out what was in the box, and when you know, come and tell me.”

“Sir—” My voice failed; I cleared my throat. “Sir, I was able to tell you this only because half the parish could have told you; the box was delivered in full public view. As for anything else, I am at a loss, sir, I don’t know how I could go about it. He is a man who one does not easily approach.”

The Reverend’s look was assessing, but did not seem unkind to me; it was a long moment before he spoke.

“Very well,” he said. “I understand. If you leave early this afternoon, you will find him absent; he’s hardly likely to have another holiday so soon. You shall find out for me what is in that box. Then when I summon you again, you shall tell me what you have learned.”

He said this as if it were a simple instruction such as any employer might give, such as clean the stair carpet, or straighten your cap.

“Is it right, sir? To do such a thing? I shall have to go into his room.”

“It is not only right, it is essential.”

“What if he is there?”

“Then I must speak to Mr. Oversby about keeping him more fully occupied. If you are not fortunate today, you may leave early again tomorrow. If he is there tomorrow, then you may leave early the day after; you may go every day until you get the opportunity to make a close examination of that box.”

I nodded. He still looked at me, expecting something more.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, but I did not feel at all thankful. Mr. Moore, when he arrived, he’d talked of weapons, of people arming themselves, of cities on the verge of conflagration. That was Lent, and now it was just past Whitsun, and Sunday just gone was Trinity Sunday, and he was holding meetings in our house, and had had a box delivered to our front door, and the Reverend had demanded to know what was in the box. I recalled the dark flowers of Mr. Moore’s eyes, his words, the press of his fingertips into my hand. The first warning of tears stung my eyes.

“Can I ask, sir, what has he done?”

“It is not so much what he has done,” the Reverend said, “but what he intends to do.”

This seemed all the answer I would get. I thought myself dismissed; I curtseyed and turned to go. I heard the Reverend draw breath to speak again; I turned back. He stared at me so determinedly that I knew he must have found it hard to look at me at all.

“I can trust you, can I not, to keep this between ourselves?”

“You can, sir.”

“I have your word on that?”

“You do.”

I turned away, and left the library. My slippers trod soft on the wooden floor of the hall. It seemed to me as though I walked a narrow path indeed; a moment’s loss of balance, a single misstep, would send me reeling into the abyss. This was more grave, more strange a circumstance than I had imagined. The Reverend should not have asked me for my word, a servant’s word; he should not have needed to.

To be out in the open light and fresh air and without anything to carry, going to fetch nothing, expecting to carry nothing back, was stranger still. It was as if a gust of wind might lift me and carry me away, like a dandelion seed or the fluff of old-man’s-beard. Circumstances had changed so profoundly, so swiftly, that I could no longer be sure of the earth beneath my feet.

I shut the door carelessly behind me, pulled off my clogs and dropped them on the stone flags, trying to make as much warning noise as possible. The house gave no sound back: it seemed empty. Upstairs, I stood and listened, breath held, at his door. Nothing. I knocked, hopelessly.
Be there
, I was thinking.
No matter that you would think me a fool, be there and save me from doing this. Save me from knowing
.

There was no answer. I knocked again, louder. Still nothing. I lifted the latch, my hand trembling. I slipped into the room.

My room. The patchwork curtains hanging from the windows, just as ever. The same china-blue and white rug on the floor beside the bed; sun streaming in through the windows as it always had, the boards that warm rich honey-colour beneath my feet. But a bag lay on the floor, slumped, dark, unfamiliar, with
the smell of worn leather and smoke about it. There was a man’s jacket slung over the back of my old chair. And on the far side of the room, sitting just where its shadow had been last night, was the box.

The straps hung loose like dogs’ tongues, the lid was flung back, and the contents were spilled out onto the floor. Books. My heart softened with relief, and then with pleasure. I had crossed the room, knelt down, and picked up the first volume that came to hand before I could even think about it. The book was a creamy block of sewn pages, unbound. I leafed through it and weighed it in my hand. It was not a rifle, or a pistol, or gunpowder, or a sword. It was a book, unbound, innocent and naked as a newborn baby.

It was as though all the treasures of Spain had been flung up from the seas to land on my old bedroom floor. I lifted book after book from the box. There were works by men called Thomas Paine, Homer, William Shakespeare, Charles Lyell; some were familiar to me from the vicarage library, some I did not recognize at all; but I could tell the Reverend about this without fear. They were just books; books the two men had in common; whatever the Reverend’s suspicions of Mr. Moore, they must be dispersed by this. And if there was no guilty secret here, then there was no need to hasten back to the vicarage with the news. I settled myself down on the floor, took up a volume, and opened it.

THE LIFE AND

STRANGE SURPRIZING

ADVENTURES OF

ROBINSON CRUSOE
,

OF YORK, MARINER:

who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all

alone in an un-inhabited Island on the

Coast of AMERICA, near the

Mouth of the Great River of

OROONOQUE
,

Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck
,

wherein all the Men perished but himself
.

WITH

An Account of how he was at last as strangely

deliver’d by PYRATES

Written by Himself
.

I closed it, looked at the cover, turned it around. It was embossed in black on the tan leather:
Robinson Crusoe
. The same name as my chapbook, the same story briefly told; but it could not be the same. My chapbook was barely thirty pages, and this was hundreds. I opened it again, flicked through titles and blank pages till I reached the start of the story.

I was still there, lying on the floor, leaning on my elbow on the rug, utterly lost in the book, the sun hot on my head, the sand soft under me, the call of strange birds, turtles clawing up the beach, when I heard the front door slam. I dropped the book and fled to the boys’ room. I thumped at pillows, shook out covers, folded clothes and slammed the chest shut, making as much noise as possible. Then I came downstairs, trying to look unconcerned, but it was only Sally, lolling in Mam’s chair like a moppet.

“I am done for,” she said.

I made her tea, and she drank it, and looked at me over the rim of the white cup. “You’re home early,” she observed.

I just shrugged. “I’m something of a favourite with the Wolfendens,” I said. “They gave me a half holiday.”

Mr. Moore came home late, his face lined with fatigue and damp with sweat, his skin stuck with wood dust. Mr. Oversby had kept him busy, and worked him hard, it seemed. He went straight upstairs, and my heart quickened with anxiety: I had left without thinking, without tidying, without putting the books away.

When he came down, there was nothing to suggest that he had noticed anything amiss. His skin was shiny with washing, and his hair curling wet; he brought a book with him and took his customary seat. He did not speak, and did not seem either particularly to notice or ignore me, just sat at the hearth and read until it was time for tea. He ate his tea with us, and afterwards Mam went off to the evening milking, and Sally went to sew with Mrs. Forster, and the boys went out to play, and Dad hadn’t come home anyway, he must have been on an evening’s work at the public, and so we were alone in the house, me and Mr. Moore.