The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

      ‘See,’ John Glincy thrusts his foul face up to mine, ‘that’s where the difference is, your lie against mine.’ And he walks away from me across the room and turns his yellow head about and raises his jug to me and grins again, wider.

      What a twist and tangle it all is. I am lost in it; how I wish that I could shut my mind tight and make it vanish. The music reels on, making me dizzy. When I open my eyes again after a moment, I go straight to Lil and shout that I am tired and not so well, that I shall go home to lie down. She nods as though she has not heard me, her cheeks are pink and flushed.

      ‘Whatever’s the matter, Miss Misery-me? Dance! Dance!’ and she tugs at my arm till I get up and dance a quadrille with her, though my heart is not in it.

      ‘Mrs Mellin did not come,’ she leans and shouts to me above the noise, pushing some hair back into her cap. Her breath is sweet with beer.

      ‘No,’ I say. ‘She said her leg was bad.’

      Lil’s face is thoughtful for a moment, and then, because she is young and the music has started again, I can see that she has forgotten all about it. In some discomfort, I feel the yellow coins are working loose inside my stays, and slide about.

      I tell her to take care and she takes no notice, but how could she know exactly what I mean? She is twelve years old, she has pronounced that she will not lie with any man till she is three and twenty. She thinks that I have drunk too much no doubt and am leaving because of it.

      I see my bootlace is untied. And, as I bend to tie it up, the coins slither in my stays and to my horror one bright round of gold tips out and falls spinning on the chaffy floor. Quick as a flash I snatch it up and push it back into my bosom.

      ‘Lucky find, Miss Agnes Trussel!’ John Glincy’s voice booms in my ear. I clap my hand to my chest.

      ‘Don’t creep about like that,’ I shout guiltily. My breath feels unnatural. ‘Sixpence, it was a sixpence and no more than that, none of your business.’

      ‘I’d say that it could well be my business what you keep in there. Nice and cosy, I’d say. Nice place for a good little sixpence to nuzzle up. And one so shiny. Any room left over?’ and he tries to bend into my neck. God, how he smells of liquor. I push his head away and wish that he would leave me be. Could he see the glint of metal of the coins against my skin? I think; surely not. John Glincy mistakes the grimace on my face for a smile.

      ‘You should ease up more, Agnes Trussel,’ he slurs, encouraged by this. ‘I’ll show you how,’ and his hand sidles round my waist and tries to pull me to him, so that I stagger.

      ‘Don’t touch me,’ I hiss, looking about. I pray that no one sees him groping me like that.

      ‘Well, well, you are a bashful maid today, not like I have seen you be, with your legs spreading for me so readily,’ he says. ‘Weren’t so bashful then.’

      ‘I’m warning you, John Glincy, get your hands off,’ I say, and wrench myself free. Why can’t he just let me alone? His leery face is undeterred.

      ‘I wish you would drop down dead,’ I say.

      God help me if I stay and my belly swells so that it is clear what my trouble is. They will make me swear the father before the parish men, and if I comply they will force John Glincy to marry me so that I and my unwanted bastard child will not prove a burden of charity upon the parish. If I keep my mouth shut tight and do not say they may find out anyway, as he will know, and besides the shame upon my family would be too much to bear. But I will not be made wife to that man. Not if my own life depended on it would I lie with him a second time.

      He presses his face close again so I hear him distinctly, and he pinches my thigh so forcefully it hurts.

      ‘You can only taunt a man’s cock,’ he mutters thickly, ‘for so long.’ And with that he leaves me there, and takes his empty jug back to the barrel for more. Though he has his back to me I can hear his coarse bellowing laughter even as I am doubled up and retching on to the damp grass outside the barn door.

      An owl hoots.

      ‘Oh, God,’ I say beneath my breath, ‘what have I done?’ There is a shuffle of footsteps and Mrs Peart the cordwainer’s wife is looming over me. Her shape casts a long, flickering shadow on to the path, on to the shifting fog out there, with the firelight behind her.

      ‘Don’t drink so swift,’ she croaks in sympathy, when she sees who it is. She must have heard me whimpering. Mrs Peart who always smells as if she were stuffed entirely full of loose tobacco, and with her fingers as yellowed as parsnips.

      ‘It’s a fearsome brew this year they have, fearsome strong,’ she says, staring out at the night. ‘It will have done some men a deal of damage come a few hours’ time.’ She puts her pipe back in the gap between her teeth to go on smoking. ‘Let’s pray that nobody sets hisself on fire this year at least,’ she says, and gives a dirty chuckle. ‘After all, Mr Tuke still has those scars.’ She pats my shoulder a little in mindful, unsteady friendliness and then she ambles back into the revelry.

      ‘What shall I do?’ I whisper when she is gone, but the night says nothing. There is just the fog out there, shifting its uneasy formless bulk about, obscuring any sight of stars.

      At the door of the barn I hesitate and turn around. I cannot see John Glincy now. My mother is there, through the smoke on the other side of the barn, her foot tapping in time with the drum. There is a warm smell of sweat and new rushes on the floor and the smoulder of wood on the fire, which has settled into a steady blaze, large branches cut and dragged down from the copse where the beeches fell in the great storm. Hester is lying awake across her lap, her little legs kicking at the air. I cannot see my mother’s face; there are people in front of her. As I turn away a huge burst of laughter comes out of their mouths like a red explosion. It rings in my ears as I hurry away, the sudden quiet and the cold outside making me deaf for a moment like a clamp over the ears. Nothing feels right.

      The flares along the misty path outside have burnt down almost to the quick. I step back along the dark lane, my hand up before my face, and I think my trouble over; the twist and tangle of my life like a wattle fence, holding itself together with to-ing and fro-ing, and yet having some order in a certain direction, and making a boundary between one state and another. And somehow it helps to think of my troubles interwoven like this. As I walk homeward, I become quite clear in the resolve I’ve made.

      At the empty house I tie some things inside a piece of oilcloth, in haste lest someone should have followed me home. The house feels desolate and fixed suddenly in time, with things strewn about just as we left them, like an ordinary day. I cannot choose this moment to depart, of course, as all of drunken Washington would be engaged in searching for me as soon as my absence from the cottage were discovered. They would think me murdered or ravaged, or both. I must wait until the break of morning and slip out then. I carry the bundle in readiness out of the house, taking it a short way down the lane through the fog. The fog is wet and penetrating everything. The entrance to an empty field looms up suddenly upon my left, and I push the bundle under the hedge behind the gate-post. If I didn’t feel so sad and muddled it would be almost ridiculous, hiding my belongings under a bush like a vagrant or a criminal.

      ‘I am going to London,’ I say into the mist, to try my idea out. My voice is like the voice of someone else, it sounds thin and flat in the dark field. This is how felons feel, I remind myself. They feel small and lonely, as they should. I have stolen money from a corpse. The short tubes of stubble crunch under my soles. I stand still, with my hand to the gate-post for a long time and breathe in the cold smell of night in the cropped field, hear the small sounds of night creatures finding their way along the new hedgerow. There is a dripping as the mist collects in droplets on the underside of things; on the limbs of trees, on twigs and leaves. Each drop gathers water slowly to itself, becomes fat with heaviness, then falls pat on to the dead leaves below. I find this dripping strangely comforting, as though it were the noise of the earth nourishing itself. As I turn back and step out blindly to the lane, the cry of a wood owl quavers out of the copse behind me.

      That