The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

draws me gently aside and speaks low in my ear with a sudden urgency.

      ‘You cannot trust a soul, Agnes,’ she says. Her eyes are serious and blue in her thin face. A man is thunderously rolling empty barrels out of a hatch and up on to a painted cart. There is a strong smell of stale beer coming up from the cobbles.

      ‘You should not let your guard down, Agnes. Always presume that there is no one to trust. You must look out for tricks all of the time,’ she whispers, watching my face. ‘People taking advantage.’

      ‘Tricks,’ I repeat. I am so tired suddenly.

      ‘You have nowhere to go, do you?’ Lettice says. She is still standing close to me. Fine soft hairs on the side of her cheek are catching the light behind her. And now I see that, although she speaks with such assurance, she must be young, perhaps almost as young as myself, I think.

      I shake my head. ‘I do not.’

      Lettice Talbot reaches into her bodice and takes out a crumpled little piece of paper that she gives to me. She speaks quickly now.

      ‘This is the address of my lodging house towards St Giles. Follow these directions, and begin to look for number twelve after the sign of the bootmaker’s shop. The landlady is Mrs Bray, she is a decent woman. Tell her you are one of my acquaintance, no, you are my particular friend, and there will be room for you. Make sure you do that. You must find your own way as I have business to attend to, for the while. If they should ask, be sure to say that you have had the smallpox.’

      ‘I must find work,’ I say. Lettice Talbot smiles.

      ‘There will be plenty,’ she reassures me.

      ‘What kind of work?’ I ask, hopefully. Lettice Talbot looks at me. ‘Priceless,’ she murmurs. ‘Priceless.’ The gem flashes at her neck. ‘You are a darling,’ she says softly, and touches my skin. ‘There is profit to be made from what you are.’ I nod at this, not knowing what she has in mind, but understanding that she knows how to behave in London.

      Her teeth are good and wide apart. Her arm is light about my shoulders.

      ‘We are going to be such friends,’ she says, and squeezes me tight.

      ‘I have never had a friend, not really,’ I say. ‘Only sisters.’

      And so I am persuaded, as I have no other plan, and am tired of thinking. When I have pulled out my homely bundle from the dwindling pile before the tailgate, I turn to Lettice Talbot to bid goodbye to her, but she is gesturing with someone at an upper window of the inn, shaking her head with vehemence, and does not see me waiting. I brush the dirt from the front of my dress with my hand, and when I look back again, she is gone. I cannot see her anywhere.

      By the front of the coach when I go to pay my passage I find an argument is underway between the driver and the great-coated man about his fare.

      ‘I cannot help the nation’s lack of coins!’ the man bawls, puffing with righteousness. ‘Your nuisance shortage then just means your loss, not mine! Here, you’ll take my double-guinea piece and give me change that I am due!’

      The coachman’s boy holds out a dirty hand for my own guinea, which he takes and bites. When he holds it up and looks closely at it in the gloom, his face changes and he glances sharply back at me. I am gripped by the idea that he knows it is stolen. How could he know that? He could not. My face goes hot, even though he shrugs and drops the coin into a bag inside his waistcoat and turns to pull the coachman’s terrier away from someone’s legs. The dog barks and strains at the collar, and when I turn to look again, I find the coachman’s boy is standing still and staring after me, as though he has something to say. I hurry off. I cling to my bundle in the crush and leave the yard. And yet, as I reach the gate, instinctively I have another sense of someone watching me, and I look back quickly to the balcony. I cannot see a soul up there, only a movement flickering behind a window, behind the criss-crossed panes of glass, which dips out of sight.

      My bundle is an awkward shape to carry.

      I start to make my way through the crush of people outside the yard, and hold the thought of the yellow coins protectively inside my head. If I can keep it there without distraction, nothing will happen, I say to myself. It is difficult, like holding a large slippery plate of meat above the clamour of a pack of animals.

      The noise of the crowd is huge and judders in my ears, and I find it hard to keep my balance. It is a hundred times worse than any market day or fair that I have been to. Since the child began to grow inside me, odours are so much stronger, and here the street is swimming with stenches that I am fighting to move through without gagging. Stale bodies inside unclean garments press round me giving out foul exhalations as they walk, of sweat, rotting teeth, disease. I have to hold my breath until my lungs are almost bursting, until I am a fair way past a tavern called the Boar’s Head, and on the other side of the street I see a burial ground pierced with the uprights of headstones and memorials, where my feet seem to take me. In its midst stands a towering plane tree, its scaly broad trunk rising firmly between the grassy mounds. The branches are dark with rooks gathering, like a crop of black fruits.

      Carrion birds do irk me, I think. Their cawing and rough hacking chat is like the sound of death. Here there are so many rooks that they are like a terrible smoke billowing and settling about the tree. The ground is littered with black feathers, droppings and bits of twigs beneath their nests that cluster on the branches.

      I linger here, too long. I read slowly from an engraved tablet at the side of the street. Old Site of St Peter’s, before the Fire, the tablet says. And nearby on the iron railings at the corner of Wood Street I see a likeness of St Peter, whose fingers hold his keys comfortably upon his lap.

      It is Lil who is good at the names of saints. She loves to take William on to her knee and make up stories, and her mind wanders easily while she is working. I’ve heard her say that a thief has a fish hook on every finger, because a fish caught by St Peter was found to have a shining piece of money in its mouth. My own thief’s fingers are blue with cold. I blow upon them to warm them with my thief’s breath, and turn my back on the likeness of St Peter with his judgements.

      I take a deep breath and step across the sea of Cheapside, turn down Bread Street. The likeness of Peter puts me in mind to mutter something from St John. Walk while ye have the light, walk while ye have the light, I say quietly inside my head, keeping a rhythm with my footsteps on the cobbles, and the familiar words are something of a comfort to me. I have always liked these chapters of the Bible best. I say it a few times more until I am past the church door of All Hallows, when with a start I find a beggar lurching along with me in the shadows.

      The way he strains with effort to keep up fills me with remorse. And then he plucks at my arm with swollen fingers, and as he turns his face towards me, I see one eye is closed and weeping a stickiness. It is as much as I can do not to shout out and fling my free arm to stop him touching my body.

      My coins: they are the only things that truly separate me from him, and I am horrified by my difference. His seeing eye is a hole of misery that is hard to stomach, as though there were something crawling in there, already eating him up from his gut outwards. It is the nothingness of him that is frightening me. I dare not shout, ‘Go away! Away!’ or move as if to strike him, as I would at home if I had discovered rooks eating the soft parts of a lamb in the field behind the house. I grip my bundle.

      He comes after me, persistent. Perhaps he can smell my coins, his jaws working away as though he were chewing on the stumps of his teeth. Why does no one come to help? There are people all about.

      But then he speaks to me, and his voice is mild and croaking.

      ‘Got a drop, love?’ he asks. ‘It’s just I got a thirst on me. Thought you might.’

      I shake my head shamefully and then he spits on the ground, a kind of black, bronchial spittle and he shuffles away. As he goes, he calls out something to me that at first I cannot hear, then with a shock I catch his words.

      ‘Lest darkness come upon you,’ he is saying. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness