The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

will soon be late.

       Seven

      NEARBY A CHURCH BELL STRIKES. The noise is short and harsh, like a stick beating a cracked pan.

      Uneasily I put my hand on the outside of my skirt over the place where the money is sewn, and as I do this, an old woman selling oranges from a crate on the filthy paving catches my eye along the street. Her pale face stares directly at me even as she hands oranges to a woman bending down, and pockets her payment. I shiver and hurry on, and as I pass I see with a shameful relief that she is blind, that her eyes are milky right through, like the eyes on a cooked fish.

      The lodging house cannot be so far.

      I stop again and study the instructions that Lettice Talbot gave to me. Turn right, take the long thoroughfare until the church, then turn the corner. But my sense of distance is becoming muddled. It is hard to measure, with no tree on the horizon, nor any silence on the road between strides. I cannot hear my steps amid the clamour of the crowd. I am invisible. The street noise is as loud as a river in full spate in winter after a week’s worth of rain. It is too much, like hearing all the songs you’ve ever known sung at once inside your head.

      I am jostled and ignored. There are hatches gaping open to kitchens and cellars deep in the ground below the pavement, filled with glimpses of casks and barrels, smells of meat, steam, the sourness of drink, of slops. I see some fingers wiped on an apron, someone carrying a brimming pot of something heavy up some steps, and a squealing infant being put to the breast. Through another hatch I see a bent, bearded man making a shoe at a bench, and his quick hammer as he knocks tacks into the leather sole sounds already like a footstep on the cobbles.

      Another church bell rings the quarter, or the half-hour.

      I smell a butcher’s shop and see strings of songbirds; brown larks and thrushes, hung from hooks on shutters opening out on to the street. Saul Pinnington, purveyor of game and preserved meats to the nobility. A single hand freckled with dark spots of blood stretches out of the window very close to me, to unhook a shining brace of pheasant. When I peer inside I can hear the splintery chopping sound of a cleaver going through flesh and bone. I should enter the white marble darkness of the shop and ask here for directions.

      I take a breath of butcher’s air.

      And then a plain-looking woman comes out abruptly from the doorway, and I walk on.

      I pass a smoky wax-chandler’s and a ballad seller bellowing from sheets of music, and still I do not ask directions. It begins to rain, and I duck into the porch outside a draper’s shop. Holling’s Fabrics. With flowers raised or sattined. All sorts of best Spitalfield silk, water silks, galloon, chintz and Persian. Ann would be enthralled by these.

      Inside the shop a thin, smart man striped like a reed looks up and glowers on seeing me, his large draper’s scissors paused mid-cut across a stretch of velvet. I am not invisible at all, I think, and move away into the street.

      The pavement is uneven and poorly made with loose slabs that squeeze out a pulp of puddlewater when I tread. The hatches have been closed and the cries of the sellers are gone from the thinning crowd. I cross the kennel gutter in the middle of the street and see a dead rat lying long and draggled, its tail stretched out. Carriage wheels flick mud behind them. The smell in the air is choking now, as though the force of the rain has stirred up unspeakable things. It is getting darker.

      My bundle is wet and heavier to carry with every step. And when a sedan chair sways by, I see the hook of a finger lift the curtain flap inside and a powdery white face glances out. It is as white as a corpse, as if death itself were riding by. I shiver and try to hum something.

      I have plenty of time yet to find the address before dark, I am certain that I do. And, turning a corner again, I begin to look for the sign of the bootmaker’s shop beside the railings, which will show I’m nearly there. But there are no shops at all in this street except for a place that sells liquor, where a man is slumped. The crowds have dwindled away.

      This cannot be right.

      The houses here are older, closer together, sometimes almost touching across the street or leaning sideways on each other for support as though they could fall down at any moment. There is a sour stench of urine and rotten things that closes the back of my throat. Along the road a woman with bare feet and a short, dirty hem is leaning inside an open doorway, her toes curled over the front of the threshold. She watches me fixedly as I approach.

      ‘What district is this?’ I venture to ask, but I see that her stare is glazed and blank.

      ‘Is it…’ I put my hand into my bodice to check the address on the paper again, but with a little lurch inside I find I do not have it. Where is it gone? I must have lost it further back. And the woman doubles over suddenly at the waist, clutching at her grimy stays, and spits something dark out of her mouth on to the pavement. And as she turns inside she staggers and steadies herself with a hand on the wall and the peeling door. There is a great stain on the back of her skirt. I hear a baby crying through the crack in the door that she leaves ajar, and my heart clenches. The wailing is a newborn’s weak, persistent noise that latches on to me as I retrace my steps back to the corner.

      I take the next left turn to shake it off.

      I am almost retching when I breathe in. My feet are sore from stepping again and again on the uneven street. I think the Hell the Bible speaks of must be quite like this; that baby growing in so much noise and filth. At home our hunger has never been as bad. Here the ground seems tainted with it; a malignant oozing worse than the dung and waste I am stepping through. A man hisses at me, a drawn-out wheezy threat. I do not run, though I am stiff with fear, and although he does not follow I hear a jug or bottle smash behind me.

      Out on the main street I take another turning in despair, knowing now that I am wholly lost.

      The air is becoming murky with the approach of dusk. I see a row of broad, new houses with exact rectangular windows, and I see inside the nearest room a servant laying out glasses at a table. She holds a glass up against the light from the window and as it turns in her hands for a second it looks like silver. My chest is tight with misery. I tell myself twice over that I will not cry until I have tried just one more turning. I am so thirsty. The ringing clip-clop of a shoed horse walking on the street makes me close my eyes and think of the lane at home to Storrington, where Ann and I would sit on the flint bridge over the stream and watch the carts go by, kicking our heels.

      The first time John Glincy spoke to me was on the bridge.

      ‘Not got much to do then, Agnes Trussel!’ he’d called out, and winked; he was sat on the tailgate of Mr Fitton’s cart all piled with brassicas and greens from Hasler’s Steading, with his felt hat pushed back upon his yellow head. My stomach twisted up with good surprise, and nerves. I’d thought it over all the way home, not heeding Ann’s presence there beside me, nor the fresh spring blooms she’d picked from the bank to give to Mother; one thinks too little of these things till they are gone. I’d thought about John Glincy’s wink though when I couldn’t sleep that night; the recollection was like a lump or a disturbance pushing at my ribs and I did not know if it was agreeable or not. I turned and turned, trying to lie comfortably on the straw ticking in the moonlight until Lil woke up and asked me crossly to be still, and then I’d pushed it from my mind as being a childish fancy I would do well to be without.

      A church bell strikes again.

      The rain gets up. I walk because I cannot think what else to do. I shift my bundle from shoulder to shoulder. I am light with being thirsty. I need to rest. And without a thought I take a left turn through an archway wide enough for just one carriage at a time to pass through, and I am in a smaller cobbled street. It is a dead end. The noise on the thoroughfare outside is swallowed up and quietened behind me. The buildings on both sides here seem old, but they do not have that stench of collapse and decay about them. They are broad, with timbers crookedly spaced and small windows criss-crossed