‘Are you sickening now, Agnes?’ my mother asks impatiently as I sit working the loom in the corner, and I realise that my feet have paused over the treddles. I shake my head. I can’t tell her that I am full up inside and that there are coins hard on my skin wherever I go and that they feel already like a great weight. I fling the shuttle backwards and forwards through the warp with a vigour that I muster from a wretched part of myself.
Yet I am certain that my aunt stops in the doorway to stare at me before she goes home to wash. I do not turn my head, but I can hear her rustling and breathing and the creak of the basket over her arm. It is as though she hesitates, then does not say a thing. I wait till I have thrown six more rows before I look round, but I find the doorway is empty; there is just a darkness as the sun goes behind a cloud.
I have made up my mind.
THE NEXT DAY PASSES. By afternoon the light is failing more quickly than the approach of sundown, and the sparrows stop piping in the hedge outside. When it is too dim to work at the loom, I go to the window and see that there is not a breath of wind and that the sky has thickened into low cloud. Even as I watch, a grey November sea fog begins to roll in over the hills and down the scarp slope through the woods, like a vast, damp smoke engulfing the house. How cold it is.
‘When you were up at Mrs Mellin’s yesterday,’ my mother says, ‘I hope you told her that I said she is welcome to walk to Mutton’s Farm with us tonight. She can hardly come alone, the weather like this, can she?’ I turn away from the window.
‘Oh, but must she walk with us?’ Lil grumbles. ‘She creeps along like an ailing badger dragging its toenails, always moaning that her back is an agony of humpiness and that the baker won’t deliver to her any more from the village. Small wonder, I say. She spoils the day.’
‘Elizabeth!’ rebukes my mother, sharply.
‘Oh, where’s all the fun gone?’ Lil adds under her breath to no one in particular, and provokes my mother’s quick and stinging palm across her cheek. We are well practised in the art of ducking now, whether we deserve a slap or not.
‘That’s what happens when you spoil a maid,’ my father’s unwanted comment comes from the settle where he has his boots off before the fire. It is a good thing that he does not know about the spoons of honey, I think. He was displeased enough when the Rector’s wife told me I should have an education.
‘Schooling?’ he’d shouted. ‘That’ll feed us nicely, will it? You’ll go to no school I know of!’
And so instead the Rector’s wife helped me to read after church on Sundays, or when she had a moment on a Friday. I liked the kind of words I found inside the newspapers she lent me, the Bible, the way that words could tell things properly. ‘You must learn to write next, Agnes,’ she’d said. ‘You are a quick and clever girl, you could train to be a teacher.’ And then the Rector’s wife was expecting a child at last, after five long years of waiting and hoping, and there was no time to help me any more.
We wait for Mrs Mellin a little, but of course she does not come, and by the time we are walking to Mutton’s Farm for the Martinmas feast, it is dark and quite impossible to see more than yards ahead. The lamp that my father carries casts light poorly before us, the damp air giving it a halo made of mist and light. The sounds of our talking bounce back strangely at us. Lil and I cling together as we walk, with our free hands outstretched into the murkiness; it is as though we were walking in our sleep together. William’s voice chatters on and on somewhere behind us in the dark.
Once a year Mr Fitton gives a great feast to keep us sweet, to keep the rents flowing in pleasantly, and the pool of ready labour there to hand. My brother Ab says that Mr Fitton has his inner eye undyingly to Lady Day and Michaelmas, when the benefits of letting land is apparent in the easy shape of gold and guineas. He can afford to get the butcher in to brown a fat sheep over a blaze of fruitwood and to stuff us with spice cake and have the prettiest girls pour out a froth of ale into our cups, he says. He wants to butter up his workers and his tenants, holding us over with some lurking, ancient sense of gratitude we should be feeling. My brother Ab will take a look at the people pegging away at the victuals when we get to the great barn and he will spit on the ground.
‘Fill the belly and the will sleeps,’ he always says.
My brother Ab is a knot of rage these days. He is like a horse-winch straining at its strap and on the point of breaking loose. A breaking strap can cause a grievous injury to those in its vicinity. But the village girls appreciate the strength of his opinions and the broadness of his shoulders. Myself I find some truth inside his arguments but often cannot hear the content of them through his fury. My mother says he was born big and angry, that he fought his way out of her belly crimson with rage. But it is hard to work at ease when your boots are mended so many times that their lumpen shapes are mainly composed of glue and stitching.
The great barn is a blaze of light. It looms suddenly out of the mist as we round a corner, lit up like a great ship. The double doors are flung wide, and flaming torches flank the entrance, burning at the tallow greedily, quick black smoke rising and curling from the tips of the long orange flames like a hot, stirred fluid.
We are quite late. Inside the barn the air is warm and sweet and close. Lamps hang from the beams. There is a galloping, churning fire in the central hearth, smoke twisting up to the holes in the high ceiling. Jim Figg and Jim Hickon from the village are sawing at their violins and Mr Tucker’s little boy beats at the skin of a drum. Girls younger than myself are dancing, their shoes kicking up a chaffy dust into the air. Disturbed by the smoke billowing about beneath the trusses of the roof, one bat flutters up and down the length of the barn. It cannot get out.
He is here of course, John Glincy. When he sees that I am here, he picks up his jugful of beer and sidles over. I hate it when I feel like this. I hate him and his rough hands on my shoulders in front of my father, and his dog that shoves its nose between my legs. I shrug him off.
‘Could do worse than that, Ag,’ John Glincy shouts over his plate on the bench opposite me when we sit down at the trestles to eat, and I wish that he wouldn’t, his beer slopping over the slats. He is a drunkard and a lech. He is not to be trusted. How could I trust him? I do not even look him in the eye at first. Worse than what? I do not understand him. So much is bad. I am bad, my badness multiplying. And it is now too late anyway, I think to myself. If I stay here my fleshly crime will remain, growing under my skin by increments till its limbs push at my belly, and the results of my thievery will stay pressed to my skin from the outside. I will be found out. It is too much to think otherwise.
The cooked meat tastes of nothing to me. I just chew and swallow. Even now I am watching the door in case someone should enter with a warrant for my arrest, crying out before the assembled crowd, ‘Agnes Trussel…for the dishonest purloining of twelve pieces of gold from Susan Mellin, deceased, with other coinage, the suspicion of murder of the victim aforementioned falling upon her…’
‘Jumpy tonight, Ag,’ he grins as he reaches round from behind me, but I don’t like it at all and push him off. I don’t want to be touched, and I tell him so.
‘I should prefer to run to the postbridge over the River Arun and throw myself in, and I shall not do that either,’ I spit out at him. He does not know I am with child, nor will he ever.
‘But the law is binding in that respect,’ he says mockingly. ‘You envowed yourself to me. I can use that, see, and ensure your bindedness. You will find it’s up to me.’ He finds it funny. He takes a pull of ale from his jug. Wetness glistens at the corners of his mouth.
‘What a lie you would have employed then for your own bad uses, John Glincy,’ I retort. ‘I have made no such vow, nor will I ever.’ I am sickened by the very thought of it. I am near to tears in my confusion.
‘Ay,’ he says, and then he bends and speaks quietly