Her cottage sits tightly into the base of the scarp, the steep coppice threatening to swallow it. I call loudly as I approach, and hear how her chickens make a fuss and clamour at the side of the house. The door at the front is shut and I lift the latch and push it open, bending straight into the coldness of the parlour. A brown cat rushes outside.
‘Hello!’ I call. ‘Good day, Mrs Mellin!’
Mrs Mellin is deaf, and she doesn’t answer my greeting as I clatter about, choosing a skillet. The pots are loud and hollow on the worn brick floor as I stack them into their habitual places behind the dirty cloth stretched under the shelf. I go into the kitchen, where she is always. She has her back to me, sitting in front of a stone-cold grate. ‘Oh!’ I say in concern. ‘Why is your fire out, Mrs Mellin?’
And I am shocked. Mrs Mellin is dead in her chair. Her purple tongue is sticking out and her eyes are rolled back in her head. Her arm lolls down over the edge of the chair. On the floor, as if it has rolled away from her, is a small china jar, the jar that usually sits on the left of her mantelpiece. The lid is further away, almost out of sight, right under her chair. My mouth is dry.
‘Oh, Mrs Mellin.’ I am afraid and sorry. My heart beats very fast. I talk to her as if she were asleep as I prop her head and push her eyelids closed. I expect her body to be stiff but she is soft and limp. I don’t look at her tongue and I hear myself talking giddily to her in a way that I don’t recognise. She doesn’t need me to be foolish, but I talk and talk. I pick up her fingers between my own and fold them into a sensible arrangement in her lap. She looks more ordinary now, although I still don’t look at her tongue. Her hands are neither cold nor warm, they are the same temperature as the wooden chair that she is sitting on. Mine are still warm after walking fast up the lane in the sunshine; I see I still have black blood under my fingernails. I sit down on the settle at the other side of the hearth to gather my breath and ask myself to whom I should run and ask for help. It is a long way to the Rectory. I stand up again. My mother will be working without me, thin and tired after the long day boiling pudding and preparing to salt the new pork flesh in the big trough. When it is done we will wash off the salt and hang the sides from the iron hooks at the back of the hearth in the smoke. I should go home again. I am ashamed to think of eating but a sudden thought of the taste of meat makes my mouth flood with water.
I do not know how much time has passed. I lean forward. Perhaps I have made a mistake, and Mrs Mellin is just asleep or ill. Perhaps she needs help. She is not much liked. I lift her eyelid back up, gingerly. Her eye is yellowish blank and I notice that there is an odd smell about her, as though she were already changing into another substance. No, I have been around dead things enough now to know that Mrs Mellin has been gone for some days. I stand back; I must send a child to tell the Rector she is deceased. He will come and he will say some words and let her fingers touch the cover of his Bible and then they will bury her and that will be that. I bend down to pick up the fallen jar beside her chair and glance inside.
And there are the bright coins.
They spill out and roll and clatter on the floor in my surprise. They gleam and flash astonishingly as I bend again to pick each one up and turn it over in my fingers. I count a guinea; a half-guinea; one, two, three, four, five crowns and a handful of foreign gold, perhaps from Spain. The burnish on them is high, as if she had spent time polishing each one. They are so bright: brighter than rosehips in a dark hedge, than birch leaves in October, than celandines, toadflax, than stones still wet from the river bed, than yellow fungus in the coppice, than the yolk of a hen’s egg. They are like…Fire. Like the sun.
And then the coins change as I am holding them and begin to show their value to me. My heart begins to beat so fast that I can hardly hear the plan taking shape inside my head.
THE HALF-MILE HOME ALONG THE LANE seems a great distance. It is bright out here, and hurts my eyes, my crisp shadow bouncing along ahead of me between the bank and hedgerow.
There are no flowers, save some tight, worn heads of black knapweed, although matting caps of toadstools like soft flaking eggs are pushing through the moss and grasses. The ridge of the Downs is a great bulk above me, like the darkness of an animal waiting for the sun to set. At the bend by the place where the stream curls inward and almost touches the lane, flooding it over during wet times and washing the bones of the road smooth, I meet a travelling man. He comes along from Steyning way, with a tall pack on his back that makes him stoop sideways with the burden of it. The shadow he casts is stretched out and misshapen on the bank.
‘Will not persist,’ he says, implying the sunshine, halting for breath and glancing awkwardly up at the sky. He cocks his head backwards as best he can, to the east beyond the line of beechwood on the hill. His voice is thin and weaselly.
‘A great weight of fog rolling in off the sea is pressing in over the scarp, down there. No doubt we’ll be near to choking with it,’ he adds with a gloomy relish, ‘before the night has encroached itself upon us.’ He has a curious manner of speech; his eyes are very keen and they look me over, taking in my shape, my hands, the skillet. He blocks the way. I pull my shawl closer about me, and ask what it is that he has in his pack. It is bound up with strips of fabric, all grimy with dirt from the road.
‘Sellings,’ he replies inscrutably. ‘Buyings and sellings.’ The man looks down at the road and passes me and rounds the bend, but the thought of him grows like a canker in my mind as I walk on. I see that my shadow is already fading in the road ahead of me, and that the man’s footprints are deep in the mud all the way back to the house. Clots of blackberries are finished and mouldering in the hedgerow, and the undertow of a loamy smell of rot and fungus hangs in the air.
Inside the house I see that my mother has unstrung the pig, and struggled it on to the bench. It is heavy on its side, and judders with fat when William rocks the plank to show me. ‘Mother’s cross. She’s shouting,’ he whispers at me plaintively. I touch his upturned face and wink at him to stay in the kitchen and guard the pig from dogs and rats. My mother is pouring the hot kettle over a board. She doesn’t look up from her cloud of steam.
‘Did she spare the skillet then, nor mind us asking?’ she says. A strong smell of scalding wood fills the room.
‘Why did you not wait for the men to move the pig, Mother?’ I say. I wish she would look at me. How I wish I could beg her to glance up now and notice me, to see how things are wrong. Standing there I count to four inside my head.
‘Oh, I must get on, Agnes,’ she says, slamming the kettle back on the black hook over the fire. The hook shakes with the weight. ‘The skillet!’ She holds out her hand. ‘Your father’ll not be back before midday if I know him.’ Her voice is flat and tense. ‘No, Hester!’ she shouts abruptly. ‘Put that down!’ And I reach out hastily and take a bowl away from the baby before she breaks it on the floor.
My mother sits down then and rubs her sleeve over her forehead, and I see that her face is long and grey and tired, which makes the disquiet twist about inside me like a worm. How would she get by, were I not here to help her in the house? But of course from the back room the noise of Lil working the loom comes regularly hissing and clacking like a mechanical breath.
‘Where is Father?’ I ask.
‘Where do you think, Ag?’ she says shortly.
Hester begins to crawl to me, gurgling with effort, her baby’s gown dragging at her knees through the dirt as she crosses the floor that wants sweeping. I wait again for my mother to ask me why my errand took so long, but she does not, and so I blink and turn away. Perhaps the fire needs to be stoked; I bend over the hearth, pushing the logs closer together to coax at the heat. I wish that colour wouldn’t rush so readily into my cheeks. I begin to talk up cheerfully about Mrs Mellin’s skillet.
‘She did mind, the old witch, but I promised her a bit of meat after the