The Book of Fires. Jane Borodale

late, or for fear of shouting something in my sleep. The straw ticking is lumpy beneath me and I turn and turn, trying to lie easily. Once the others have come home, filling the air with the reek of stale beer breath even when their chatter has ceased, I turn my face to the wall. And then I dream horrible dreams about my shape; my body going thin and stretched out for miles and miles across a brightly lit landscape, till I am nothing but an empty skin. Then I dream I am solid once more and curled under one of the ancient grassy mounds at the top of the hill, piles of flinty soil pressing me flat into the darkness, growing dry as the old bones the Wiston hounds uncovered there and dragged about, two years ago, after a week of strong rain had weakened the tamp of the soil and caused a collapse on the south side of the barrow that is exposed to the wind from the sea.

      Of course when I wake I am none of these things.

      Already a pale quantity of light has begun to seep through the patterned calico hung across the casement; a piece of the dress my mother wore at my uncle’s wedding when I was tiny. I did not mean to sleep so long. There is a sour smell in the room as I rise, take up my cloak and boots and pick my way across the creaking boards. I’m sure the anxious hammering my heart is making must be loud enough to wake them all. I pull the leather strap and open the door on to the stairs.

      Down in the kitchen my father is asleep in a sideways position on the settle with his boots still on and the hem of his overcoat pushing ashes on the hearth into a ridge. His head is thrown backwards and his mouth has dropped open, and a crackling, wet breath is rising out of it slowly into the silence of the room. I turn my eyes away as I creep past him in an agony of caution, and my feet in their woollen stockings make no sound at all on the smooth clay floor. My mother turns over in bed in the back chamber, and I see that Hester begins to stir and suck at her fist in the truckle bed beside her. I dare not cross the room to kiss her white face quiet, and her dark eyes watch me to the door.

      I touch my stays where the coins are. Out here the fog has weakened and gone and the chill air is thin and rushing to my head. I am dizzy with escape, with stealing away. With an effort I do not run as I walk down the short path and turn out on to the lane. Above me the stars are fading pinpricks in the blue sky. I can just make out that the Plough points to the North Star, as it always does. I think of the city of London, vast to the north over the next line of Downs. The sky is huge, and when I look back over my shoulder I see the house looms pale behind me in the early light.

      I look back again, and my heart almost stops when I see a glimmer of movement at an upstairs window.

      I wait for the casement to be flung open and someone to cry out, ‘Agnes! Where are you going? Get back this minute!’ But there is nothing but stillness. It was a trick of the light or the dark, reflected. Nobody knows I am gone and I feel bleak with sadness as I turn away again between the dark passage of the hedges. The rutted lane makes me stumble.

      I am ashamed. How Lil will sob and sob when she finds that I am gone, and then she will rage at me for weeks and then she will slowly forget. When I pull my bundle out from under the elder it is sopping with dew from the night, and it makes a cold wet patch on the front of my clothes.

      No smoke rises from the huddle of dwellings around the green, only from Mr Reekes the baker’s chimney at the end of the village. His smoke is white and curling, spooling upwards towards the dwindling stars as though his morning fire were freshly lit. I cannot smell the baking of loaves, the hour is too early even for that. He will be kneading and pummelling dough by lamplight with his hands as big as dinner plates, hands that I once saw squeezing inside the bodice of Alice Mant when she went in for loaves, when they thought no one was looking. I cross the pasture land then skirt the common, taking the path at the edge of the Wiston estate. I think of Ann.

      It was she who had observed John Glincy following me about one day. She is the kind of girl to notice everything. She’d said that it would be my brown hair having the shine of a ripe cob nut that drew him in.

      ‘You haven’t got blemishes,’ she’d added, standing back to get a look at me. ‘You have a good-shaped chin, neat wrists and ankles and your belly isn’t gone soft with eating too much butter. Watch out for that one, Agnes Trussel,’ she’d said. ‘You know that family is trouble all round.’ She could see from my face that I was a way from pleased about this and so she’d gone on talking. ‘Just keep your bonnet on before him. Just put your head up high and say, “No, I don’t think so, I’m really far too busy now,” or somesuch. It’s very easy.’ Of course this was all too late, I remember thinking, watching her lips go up and down as though I had never seen them before.

      ‘Oh, don’t sit there looking like a misery,’ she had laughed. ‘It’s not so bad! You are a sensible girl with manners, that knows how to behave.’

      But of course it was bad, it was very bad indeed. I didn’t like to think of her jolly face clouding up with shame and disbelief if she found me out. I would be someone different to her suddenly, not like her sister that she knows at all.

      ‘Where are you, Ann, when I need you so much?’ I whisper in the darkness, over the damp fields to Wiston House.

      I have four miles by foot along the back lanes and over the fields before I reach Steyning, or I will beg a lift on a passing cart or dray, till I get to the place called The Chequers where the lane joins the road, and there I shall wait for a carrier to London. I picture it drawing towards me, hooves mashing the skin of the road, towering wheels whirring and grinding over the grit in the yard of the inn as it comes to a halt. I feel sick. The journey will cost me two days and more than a guinea, and if all goes as it should I shall be long gone from the county of Sussex, up through the county of Surrey and into the great city by the time they find dead Mrs Mellin in her cold house.

      The lane reaches the edge of the copse and sinks down into a dip at the base of the scarp, the mud deepens and becomes more sticky with the clay. My boots make a sucking noise with each tugging step I have to take, as if the land were but reluctantly letting me pass. Red cattle are clustered together in the gloom under the beeches, they wake and shift their hooves uneasily in the thick mud as I go by, their breath rising in clouds. How dark it is under the trees. Even the early-rising blackbirds are asleep, and it is hard not to shiver with sleeplessness and the newness of what I am doing.

       Four

      THE CARRIER PULLS JERKILY AWAY and up the lane. It is a low waggon smelling of sacking and poultry, and I am sat at the back, on a bench furnished with a bolster of woven horsehair cloth, shiny with use. Besides the five other passengers, the carrier is heaped with bales of raw wool, three crates of pullets and some closed baskets into which I cannot see. The oily smell of fleeces makes it hard not to think of home, it is so strong.

      I am a thief, a disgrace, and a deserter. I have a pain high up in my lungs that I deserve, it rises till the misery is a choke in my throat. A fat woman sitting to my right is staring sideways at me. I hate her for this. I have to look down at my lap and swallow over and over, not letting a tear fall. It is as though I were moving along in a swaying kind of sleep led by the horses, knowing nothing of what I am at, nor where I am going. I fold my arms tightly over the fear in my stomach, look about and breathe the air.

      I had pulled my cap low over my brow as I passed through Steyning to the inn. I do not know so many people here, but there are those know my family well enough, and I prayed to God I would not see a soul who knows my father.

      Yet sure enough, as we passed out of the village I saw Mr Benter ahead with a pack on his shoulder, going out to the sawpits. I froze. I scarcely breathed. Dear God, may he not catch sight of me, I thought. As the cart swayed past him, he stepped into the bank and greeted the coachman. His breath was white about him in the chill. Richard Benter has been my father’s drink-mate since better times were had between them. He was so near I could make out the pock-marks on his cheek and smell the tobacco smoke leaking from the clay bowl of the pipe he sucked upon. It was nothing but a wonder that he did not see me, but I could not drag my gaze away. Then at the moment that we rounded the corner he seemed to return my