The picture of his puzzled squint and half-raised hand comes to me over and over. Did Mr Benter see me perched upon the carrier to London? How could I know? And if he did, what will he do?
‘Was it one of yours I saw this forenoon?’ I could hear him say. ‘On the up-cart for town?’
My father, who could never bear to give away what he has no knowledge of, would keep his mouth buttoned up at that suggestion.
‘May have been,’ he might shrug.
Only later would he mutter that, if it was so, then it was without a by-your-leave. My father would not ask to borrow Mr Fitton’s mare to ride behind and bring me back.
It makes no difference if they know where I have gone. At least, if nobody knows about my thieving. And of course they do not. How could they know? No one would have thought that Mrs Mellin had a quantity of money. For we did not, and were we not her nearest neighbour? I have a flicker of doubt. Surely it was just her mean little secret that she hoarded away–and for what? She had nobody left.
The woman beside me makes me jump. ‘Sawpit does well from the need for fencing these days, don’t it,’ she comments. Of course, she must know Mr Benter. Perhaps it was her face that had caught his eye.
I cough, as if I did not hear her properly.
And the terror ebbs away, but some miles on a trickle of disquiet goes on chuckling and babbling inside my head, willing the horses’ progress to be faster, faster. Pressing at my stays I make sure that the coins do not clink or rattle up against each other. I eye the road behind. When I get to the city I will be swallowed up, I reassure myself; all traces vanished.
We go through Ashurst, past Blake’s Farm and Sweethill Farm.
A way after Godmark’s Farm we have to wait in the road to cross the river. I make myself eat dry bread from my pocket, my fingers stiff with cold. I make myself take notice of the way the road goes on, opening a distance up between some portion of my troubles and my circumstance. I see a man drinking from a wooden flask, his head strained back to take the liquid in. I see a hawk. I smell the tang of horses, and the straw of the fat woman’s bonnet. I see a team of oxen opening earth behind the blade of a plough. I see three new, pale wheels in a wheelwright’s yard, and hear the hiss of a spoke-shave peeling at wood. I see the orange carcass of a fox.
And over time the motion of the carrier steadies me and makes me sensible. Taking the chill air deeply keeps the sickness at bay. In truth there is nothing to do but observe the world unfolding behind me and to the sides of the road as we progress. I see how the mud in the road behind us changes from a pale clay to a darker brown of silt, and then to clay again.
The mud is shallow and white with chalk as the waggon heaves uphill to a gibbet on the crossroads. The man beside the driver cries, ‘Burnt Oak Gate!’ but no one gathers up their bags in readiness to leave. As we approach, I see a glistening crow push itself away from the gibbet’s crossbar and fly heavily upwards. It catches a breeze that we cannot feel here on the ground, and stays almost motionless on the movement of the air, skilfully floating, like a malevolent thought. It waits for our arrival. Its head turns as it surveys the landscape; we draw up alongside and inch slowly by. I don’t like to look but somehow my head turns towards the gibbet anyway. I feel something prickle over my skin, as though spiders were crawling there. I grip my forearms tight with my hands.
One of the irons has the last bits of a man’s body hanging in it; the head has slumped in the top cage and the rest is tarred bones held together with very little. Some threads of fabric hang down from what remains of his breeches. The other irons are empty and swing more loosely in the cold air. A creaking is just audible. There are some small dry yellow bones on the ground beneath, and white splashes of bird droppings. The fat woman nudges me, smiling with triumph.
‘See how they deserves it,’ she declares. ‘A dreadful crime, no doubt.’ I cannot find a thing to say, but another woman nods and points her finger towards the scene in case her daughter sat beside her hasn’t heeded. The daughter’s head swivels round as we pass, drinking in the detail.
‘It’s a man, Mother.’ Her childish voice is satisfied and lazy. A chill has settled in me, although I make myself nod faintly in agreement. I must appear an honest, law-abiding creature, even to myself. The fifth passenger in the back seat takes no notice of the scene, nor any other passing by. He alternates between a dozing state and being occupied in eating something crumbly from a brown packet on his knee, a cascade of pastry falling down the front of his great-coat.
As we gain sufficient distance from the gibbet, the crow behind us drops and settles on the irons again, twisting its head sideways to reach its black beak through the bars. Another crow flies down, and I look away. They say that crows and rooks mean trouble, and there are always plenty of them.
Lichfowl, my mother calls them. Corpse birds.
And beyond here I am plunged into unknown country. Burnt Oak Gate marks the edge of what I know. How rapidly the world is changing; everywhere we pass new fencing and altered boundaries. Thorny hedgerows of quickset and blackthorn slice straight through the sensible, ancient lengths of land, taking no heed of the curve of running water or the shape of a hill, just spanning the breadth of the stubbled fields to form vast, unreasonable squares that make no sense of the terrain they apportion. We see a quantity of people walking out on the road, with packs and babies and pieces of furniture strapped to their backs. They have the shifting, dogged look of people uprooting and leaving behind them all that they know. They are looking for labour in towns, in the city. A woman looks up as we go by, and stares at me as she stands into the edge of the muddy road, making way. We pass so closely I could reach my hand out and touch the thinness of her jaw. I can hear that she murmurs a rhyme over her shoulder to the child tied to her back.
‘Jack, he was nimble, Jack, he was quick, Jack, he jumped over the candlestick.’
‘Which Jack is that, Mamma?’ the child asks, twisting its little fingers in her hair, and there is a pause and then the woman replies bitterly, as if to herself, ‘Any man-jack with an ounce of sense left in him.’
And she is right. I can hear the words, even after the carrier has rounded a corner and she has gone from sight. We should all be snatching our chances if they show themselves to us. The old ways are gone now. The carved-up countryside is filling fat men’s pockets with more than they need, while working men like my father are broken down and weakened and made small as their choice and independence are removed from their reach. Enclosure is a tightening around their necks, making slaves of them. It is a length of cord held only by some men of wealth. Enclosure drives them into corners like rats. My blood starts to boil with fury, and I clench my thumbs inside my fists. For my family there can only be misery ahead. For my family next year there will be no pig. There will be little but trouble, I fear, for them and so many like them, hunger making their bellies tight, day after day.
Good men like my father, feeding his family, taking what dismal employment he can, to pay off the baker, the shopkeeper, the miller. Bad men like him; all in the same sorry plight. What is a good man though, I start to think, or a bad one? As the carrier rattles on these thoughts begin to open up and drift about like smoke inside my head.
As I say, I am not myself, and I can hardly pronounce on morals or goodness. I picture myself entering St Mary’s church with my belly swollen, round as a mare’s in the very shape of shame, and my face flushes with humiliation.
I will not think of these things.
Instead I make myself notice that the sun is a flat disc of white light, more like a hole in the clouds. I see that the hedges are filled with berries and drupes of ivy. I notice the twist and crook of the road. And then, gradually, my fists unclench and I slip into a drowsy state with my head nodding forwards on to my chest, until the cold wakes me again. The clouds thicken as the morning passes. It is a long journey, in countless ways.
Halts occur at intervals to water the horses, to take up a passenger, set one down. Uneasily I eye my bundle, strapped with the rest of the baggage, at every stop. Mrs Mellin’s coins are tucked inside my stays