The Binding. Bridget Collins

inside me tipped. I said, slowly, ‘But they didn’t want to murder us. Not really. They wanted to burn the house.’ A pause. The flame bobbed, so I couldn’t tell if her expression had changed. ‘Why did you lock yourself in, Seredith?’

      She reached for the banister and began to climb the stairs.

      ‘Seredith.’ My arms ached with the effort to stop myself reaching for her. ‘You could have died. I could have died, trying to get you out. Why the hell did you lock yourself in?’

      ‘Because of the books,’ she said, turning so suddenly I was scared she’d fall. ‘Why do you think, boy? Because the books have to be kept safe.’

      ‘But—’

      ‘And if the books burn, I will burn with them. Do you understand?’

      I shook my head.

      She looked at me for a long time. She seemed about to say something else. But then she shivered so violently she had to steady herself, and when the spasm had passed she seemed exhausted. ‘Not now,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she’d come to the last of her breath. ‘Good night.’

      I listened to her footsteps climb to the landing and cross to the room where she slept. The rain swirled through the broken window and rattled on the floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

      I was aching all over with cold, and my head was spinning with tiredness; but when I shut my eyes I saw flames spitting and clawing at me. The noise of the rain separated into different notes: the percussive hiss of water on the roof, the whisper of the wind, human voices … I knew they weren’t real, but I could hear distinct words, as if everyone I had ever known had surrounded the house and was calling to me. It was fatigue, only fatigue, but I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted … Most of all I wanted not to be alone; but that was the one thing I couldn’t have.

      I had to get warm. My mother would have parcelled me up in a blanket and wrapped her arms round me until I stopped shivering; then she would have made me hot tea and brandy, sent me to bed and sat beside me while I drank it. The familiar ache of homesickness threatened to overwhelm me. I went into the workshop and lit the stove. Outside there was a hint of light, a crack between the clouds and the horizon; it was later than I’d realised.

      It occurred to me, vaguely, that I had saved Seredith’s life.

      I brewed tea, and drank it. The flames dancing in my head began to subside. The voices grew fainter as the rain slackened. The stove creaked and clicketed and smelt of warm metal. I sat on the floor, leaning against the plan chest, with my legs spread out in front of me. From this angle, and in this light, the workshop looked like a cave: mysterious, looming, the knobs and screws of the presses transformed into strange rock formations. The shadow of the board cutter on the wall looked like a man’s face. I rolled my head round, taking it all in, and for a second I was filled with a fierce pleasure to have saved it all: my workshop, my things, my place.

      The door at the end of the room was ajar.

      I blinked. At first I thought it was a trick of the light. I put down my cold mug of tea and leant forward, and saw the gap between the door and the jamb. It was the door on the left of the stove: not the room where Seredith took people, but the other door, the one that led down into the dark.

      I almost kicked it shut. I could have done that, left it unlocked but closed, and gone to bed. I almost did. I reached out gently with my foot, but instead of pushing it shut I edged it open.

      Blackness. An empty shelf just inside, and beyond that a flight of stairs going down. Nothing more than I’d seen before. Nothing like the bare light-filled room behind the other door, except for the cold that breathed from it.

      I stood up and reached for the lamp. I wasn’t sleepy any more. Tension pricked in my fingertips and itched between my shoulder blades. I pushed the door wide open and went down into the dark.

      It smelt of damp. That was the first thing I noticed: a thick, muddy scent like rotting reeds. I paused on the stair, my heart speeding up. Damp was almost as bad as fire; it brought mould and wrinkled paper and softened glue. And it smelt of age and dead things, smelt wrong … But as I turned the corner of the staircase and lifted the lamp, what I saw was nothing out of the ordinary: a little room with a table and cupboards, a broom and a bucket, chests that were marked with a stationer’s label. I almost laughed. Just a storeroom. At the far end – although it wasn’t far, only a few steps across – there was a round bronze plate in the wall, like a solid wheel, intricate and decorative. The other walls were piled high with chests and boxes. The air felt as dry as it had upstairs; perhaps I’d imagined the smell.

      I turned my head, half thinking I’d heard something. But everything was perfectly still, insulated from the noise of the rain by the dense earth beyond.

      I put down the lamp and looked about me. There was a drawer balanced on a pile of boxes, full of broken tools waiting to be repaired or thrown away, and a row of glass bottles filled with dark liquid that looked like dyes or ox gall for marbling paper. I nearly tripped over three fire-buckets of sand. On the table there was a humped parcel wrapped in sackcloth, and some tools. I didn’t recognise them; they were thin, delicate things with edges like fish’s teeth. I brought the lamp closer. Next to the bundle there was another cloth, spread out to cover something. This was where Seredith worked, when I was upstairs in the workshop.

      I reached out and unwrapped the bundle, as gently as if it was alive. It was a book-block, neatly sewn, with thick dark endpapers threaded with white, like tiny roots reaching through soil. The blood sang in my fingertips. A book. The first book I had seen, since I’d been here; the first since I was a child, and learned that they were forbidden. But holding it now I felt nothing but a kind of peace.

      I brought it to my face and inhaled the smell of paper. I almost opened it to look at the title page; but I was too curious about what was under the other bit of sacking. I put the block down and drew back the cloth. Here was the cover Seredith had been making. For a moment, before I understood what I was seeing, it was beautiful.

      The background was black velvet, so fine it absorbed every glint of light and lay on the bench like a piece of solid darkness. The inlay stood out against it like ivory, shining softly, pale gold in the lamplight.

      Bones. A skeleton, the spine curled like a row of pearls round pale twigs of legs and arms, and the tiny splinters of toes and fingers. The skull bulged like a mushroom. They were smaller than my outstretched hand, those bones. They were as small and fragile as a bird’s.

      But it wasn’t … it hadn’t been a bird. It was a baby.

       V

      ‘Don’t touch it.’

      I hadn’t heard Seredith come into the room, but some distant, watchful part of me wasn’t surprised to hear her voice. I didn’t know how long I had been standing there. It was only when I stepped back – carefully, as though there was something here I was afraid to wake – that I felt the stiff chill in my joints, the pins-and-needles in my feet, and knew it had been a long time. In spite of my care I knocked my ankle against a box, but the hollow sound was muffled by the earth beyond the walls.

      I said, ‘I wasn’t going to touch it.’

      ‘Emmett …’

      I didn’t answer. The wick of the lamp needed trimming, and the shadows jumped and ducked. The bones gleamed against their bed of black. As the light danced back and forth I could have made myself believe that they were moving; but when at last the flame steadied they lay quiet.

      ‘It’s only a binding,’ she said. She shifted in the doorway, but I didn’t look at her. ‘It’s mother-of-pearl.’

      ‘Not real bones.’ It came out like mockery. I hadn’t meant it to, but I was glad, fiercely glad, at the way it cut through the silence.

      ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not real bones.’