by Jo Baker
At the half-hour bells, the noise from above altered; furniture scraped on the boards, and clog soles clattered and thumped, and the voices became separate and distinct as the door opened overhead, and the men began to spill down the stairs, their faces cast into sharp shadows by the rush-lights. Mam waited until the last of them was out of the door, and then, shrunken with weariness, she climbed the stairs to her room, and went to bed. Sally and I stumbled out of our clothes and heaped our bedding on the floor.
Sally breathed quietly, her head pillowed on her arm. Hair-thin threads of light slipped here and there between the boards above. My mouth kept on opening, but I didn’t speak out loud. Her breath was coming deeper, slower; she was drifting further into sleep. I could see blank spaces on the ceiling where no light penetrated. I picked out the pattern of our old room: our bed, the blue and white rag rug in front of the fireplace, the chest, the washstand, and another black shape that for a moment I could not identify: the box. I licked the tea-scald, the blisters from the iron. Mam’s patience was not inexhaustible. What if she were to hear what the Reverend Wolfenden had asked of me? And why, after all, could he possibly need to burn so many candles? Why did he need the light so late?
—
Morning sun did not reach this side of the house; in the dim light the leather of the Reverend’s chair seemed to glow; the deep swirling walnut of the desk had a soft bluish sheen, like silk. The books, lining the walls, were bound in warm tan leather; here and there the gold lettering caught a little light, so that it seemed that tiny candles gleamed and flickered all about the room. I had always liked dusting in there. Before that day, dusting had been the only reason for me to be there.
The carpet gave under my slippered feet, like moss. The Reverend’s brow creased as I spoke, his chin drawn back into his neck, so that the folds of flesh stood out over his collar. As I told him what I knew, he drew his chin further back; if he continued like this, I thought, he might disappear into his own skin; the rolls of loose flesh would close around his face, like water. When I had finished, he thrust his chin back out again.
“You had no indication of the contents?”
“No, sir.”
The Reverend nodded, pressed his lips tight in thought. “And Mr. Moore did not speak of it to you?”
“Sir, I am not in his confidence.”
The Reverend nodded again, and did not seem to notice how the colour rose to my cheeks.
“You must make an effort to become so. Find out what was in the box, and when you know, come and tell me.”
“Sir—” My voice failed; I cleared my throat. “Sir, I was able to tell you this only because half the parish could have told you; the box was delivered in full public view. As for anything else, I am at a loss, sir, I don’t know how I could go about it. He is a man who one does not easily approach.”
The Reverend’s look was assessing, but did not seem unkind to me; it was a long moment before he spoke.
“Very well,” he said. “I understand. If you leave early this afternoon, you will find him absent; he’s hardly likely to have another holiday so soon. You shall find out for me what is in that box. Then when I summon you again, you shall tell me what you have learned.”
He said this as if it were a simple instruction such as any employer might give, such as clean the stair carpet, or straighten your cap.
“Is it right, sir? To do such a thing? I shall have to go into his room.”
“It is not only right, it is essential.”
“What if he is there?”
“Then I must speak to Mr. Oversby about keeping him more fully occupied. If you are not fortunate today, you may leave early again tomorrow. If he is there tomorrow, then you may leave early the day after; you may go every day until you get the opportunity to make a close examination of that box.”
I nodded. He still looked at me, expecting something more.
“Thank you, sir,” I said, but I did not feel at all thankful. Mr. Moore, when he arrived, he’d talked of weapons, of people arming themselves, of cities on the verge of conflagration. That was Lent, and now it was just past Whitsun, and Sunday just gone was Trinity Sunday, and he was holding meetings in our house, and had had a box delivered to our front door, and the Reverend had demanded to know what was in the box. I recalled the dark flowers of Mr. Moore’s eyes, his words, the press of his fingertips into my hand. The first warning of tears stung my eyes.
“Can I ask, sir, what has he done?”
“It is not so much what he has done,” the Reverend said, “but what he intends to do.”
This seemed all the answer I would get. I thought myself dismissed; I curtseyed and turned to go. I heard the Reverend draw breath to speak again; I turned back. He stared at me so determinedly that I knew he must have found it hard to look at me at all.
“I can trust you, can I not, to keep this between ourselves?”
“You can, sir.”
“I have your word on that?”
“You do.”
I turned away, and left the library. My slippers trod soft on the wooden floor of the hall. It seemed to me as though I walked a narrow path indeed; a moment’s loss of balance, a single misstep, would send me reeling into the abyss. This was more grave, more strange a circumstance than I had imagined. The Reverend should not have asked me for my word, a servant’s word; he should not have needed to.
To be out in the open light and fresh air and without anything to carry, going to fetch nothing, expecting to carry nothing back, was stranger still. It was as if a gust of wind might lift me and carry me away, like a dandelion seed or the fluff of old-man’s-beard. Circumstances had changed so profoundly, so swiftly, that I could no longer be sure of the earth beneath my feet.
I shut the door carelessly behind me, pulled off my clogs and dropped them on the stone flags, trying to make as much warning noise as possible. The house gave no sound back: it seemed empty. Upstairs, I stood and listened, breath held, at his door. Nothing. I knocked, hopelessly. Be there, I was thinking. No matter that you would think me a fool, be there and save me from doing this. Save me from knowing.
There was no answer. I knocked again, louder. Still nothing. I lifted the latch, my hand trembling. I slipped into the room.
My room. The patchwork curtains hanging from the windows, just as ever. The same china-blue and white rug on the floor beside the bed; sun streaming in through the windows as it always had, the boards that warm rich honey-colour beneath my feet. But a bag lay on the floor, slumped, dark, unfamiliar, with the smell of worn leather and smoke about it. There was a man’s jacket slung over the back of my old chair. And on the far side of the room, sitting just where its shadow had been last night, was the box.
The straps hung loose like dogs’ tongues, the lid was flung back, and the contents were spilled out onto the floor. Books. My heart softened with relief, and then with pleasure. I had crossed the room, knelt down, and picked up the first volume that came to hand before I could even think about it. The book was a creamy block of sewn pages, unbound. I leafed through it and weighed it in my hand. It was not a rifle, or a pistol, or gunpowder, or a sword. It was a book, unbound, innocent and naked as a newborn baby.
It was as though all the treasures of Spain had been flung up from the seas to land on my old bedroom floor. I lifted book after book from the box. There were works by men called Thomas Paine, Homer, William Shakespeare, Charles Lyell; some were familiar to me from the vicarage library, some I did not recognize at all; but I could tell the Reverend about this without fear. They were just books; books the two men had in common; whatever the Reverend’s suspicions of Mr. Moore, they must be dispersed by this. And if there was no guilty secret here, then there was no need to hasten back to the vicarage with the news. I settled myself down on the floor, took up a volume, and opened it.
THE LIFE AND
STRANGE SURPRIZING
ADVENTURES OF
ROBINSON CRUSOE,
OF YORK, MARINER:
> who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all
alone in an un-inhabited Island on the
Coast of AMERICA, near the
Mouth of the Great River of
OROONOQUE,
Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck,
wherein all the Men perished but himself.
WITH
An Account of how he was at last as strangely
deliver’d by PYRATES
Written by Himself.
I closed it, looked at the cover, turned it around. It was embossed in black on the tan leather: Robinson Crusoe. The same name as my chapbook, the same story briefly told; but it could not be the same. My chapbook was barely thirty pages, and this was hundreds. I opened it again, flicked through titles and blank pages till I reached the start of the story.
I was still there, lying on the floor, leaning on my elbow on the rug, utterly lost in the book, the sun hot on my head, the sand soft under me, the call of strange birds, turtles clawing up the beach, when I heard the front door slam. I dropped the book and fled to the boys’ room. I thumped at pillows, shook out covers, folded clothes and slammed the chest shut, making as much noise as possible. Then I came downstairs, trying to look unconcerned, but it was only Sally, lolling in Mam’s chair like a moppet.
“I am done for,” she said.
I made her tea, and she drank it, and looked at me over the rim of the white cup. “You’re home early,” she observed.
I just shrugged. “I’m something of a favourite with the Wolfendens,” I said. “They gave me a half holiday.”
—
Mr. Moore came home late, his face lined with fatigue and damp with sweat, his skin stuck with wood dust. Mr. Oversby had kept him busy, and worked him hard, it seemed. He went straight upstairs, and my heart quickened with anxiety: I had left without thinking, without tidying, without putting the books away.
When he came down, there was nothing to suggest that he had noticed anything amiss. His skin was shiny with washing, and his hair curling wet; he brought a book with him and took his customary seat. He did not speak, and did not seem either particularly to notice or ignore me, just sat at the hearth and read until it was time for tea. He ate his tea with us, and afterwards Mam went off to the evening milking, and Sally went to sew with Mrs. Forster, and the boys went out to play, and Dad hadn’t come home anyway, he must have been on an evening’s work at the public, and so we were alone in the house, me and Mr. Moore.
I took up my basketwork, and sat by the window for the light. He stayed in his seat by the low smoulder of the kitchen fire. It was quiet, just the creak and tap of my work, the soft sounds of our breathing, the turning of his page. Once he gave a little huff of laughter, making me start and look at him, at the dark curls on his bent head; he was so lost in his reading that he did not seem to have noticed that he’d made any sound. I wanted to ask him what it was; I wanted to ask him about Robinson Crusoe; I wanted to confess what Reverend Wolfenden had asked me to do, and laugh with him about the strangeness of it all. I kept glancing up at him, my lips opening on the words, but not daring to speak. The willow creaked as I wove it. He turned a page, let a breath go. There was no other noise.
The bell struck for the quarter hour. Shortly after that, he closed the book and heaved himself out of the seat. I watched him stand, watched the creases in his dark woollen waistcoat unfold; I watched him pass, the unknown book still clamped in his hand. His movements were fatigued and stiff. My hands fell still, the basket a palisade of sticks in my lap; I listened to every creak of the stairs, every footfall overhead, thinking I’d seen the last of him for the evening, and regretting it.
The footsteps went on; he had not settled to anything. I heard him moving about, as if traversing the room from the bed to box and back again. Then the footsteps crossed the room briskly, the door was opened, and he was out on the landing again, crossing it, coming back downstairs. My chest seemed somehow to compress, as if there was a knot at my breastbone, and it was being tugged, pulled tight like corset strings. He came down and crossed back to his seat.
He had a traveller’s writing desk with him; a fold-out gentleman’s set in rosewood; the Reverend had one not unlike it. He carried a book too; a wide cloth-bound ledger, red in colour, the kind that accounts are kept in. He held it clamped against the bottom of the writing set. A box of books, a writing set: I hadn’t been so misled when I curtseyed to him. He settled back down in his chair, arranged his things, and began to fold paper for a letter. The desk lay open on his lap; his long legs stretched out across the rag rug. Though the writing desk was good, well made and expensive-looking, the ink bottle was a clay one, roughly made, and the glaze was blemished with thumbprint smears and unsmoothed edges. It occurred to me that he had most probably acquired the writing desk second-hand, it being brought within his means by the loss of its glass or china bottle. After such an expense, a clay ink bottle must have seemed perfectly sufficient, and was probably all he could afford.
There was better light, more space and solitude upstairs: why would he bring his things down here to write?
He took up his pen, examined it, trimmed it, examined it again. He dipped it, eased the excess ink off against the ink-pot’s rim, and began to write. I observed his craft closely while my hands were at their own work on the basket. I shifted it around in my lap, bent the withy to the curve of the frame, levered it in and out through the uprights, tamped it down to fit snug against the layer before, all the time watching the strange progress of his hand across the page. The pen’s plume wove and wobbled, his hand shifted a fraction further, traced another pattern, shunted on again. He paused to dip the pen. Mr. Moore’s face was in shadow; he leaned back from the writing slope, peered down at the page.
I wanted to tell him that he might have my place at the window, where he might see what he was doing. He finished the letter with a flourish. I opened my lips and he glanced up at me. His dark eyes caught the firelight. I lost my nerve, looked down at the basket and didn’t speak.
He lifted the shaker, scattered sand onto his page, then leaned the sheet towards the hearth. The grains showered into the flame, making it spark and sputter. He folded the paper, smoothed it flat, and bent to light a spill at the fire. I watched him light his sealing wax, watched the wax drip onto the white folded page, and pool there, like blood. My hands had fallen still.
“Would you like to see the stamp?” he asked.
The way he was sitting, his eyes were shadowed, his face half-lit by embers, half-lit by the evening window. The moment, with the redness and flickering shadows, and the pale blue light from outside, had an unearthly quality to it; it did not seem to belong to this world. His fingertips were stained black with ink.
“I’ve seen stamps,” I said. “The Reverend has stamps. I take the family’s letters to the post if Mr. Fowler’s occupied.”
“Yes, of course.”
He put the letter to one side, and took up the ledger from where he’d left it on the floor. I pressed my lips together, looking away and feeling foolish. He was writing in the ledger, leaning back, peering down at the words as he formed them, seeming to be utterly occupied by the movement of his pen. I could have said yes. I could have just said yes. If I had, then instead of sitting in silence while he wrote and thought me discourteous and cold, I would be standing at his side, bending my head to look at the dainty image in his hand; I could have reached out to draw it nearer, and our hands might have touched again. I turned the basket in my lap and tugged sharply at the withy, wrenching it through the stakes. The wood creaked and splintered on the curve. I muttered inwardly, undid the last few weaves, my cheeks burning. I cut the withy short, behind the splintering, and wove the stray end in. I started it off again.
We continued without speaking. His feet were stretched out on the rug: the leather soles of his boots were patched, well mended, and the mends themselves were worn and needing repair. How far must he have come, to wear his boots into such holes, to wear the patches
thin? He was leaning back still further than before, putting more distance between himself and the work as the light faded. He peered down at his hand, at the pen as it moved in its pattern of tiny shiverings, forward shifts.
“Isn’t it driving you out of your wits?” I said.
He looked up. His brow was creased into a headache frown.
“I mean, not having enough light to see what you’re about.”
“My eyes aren’t what they were.”
“You’d be better here.”
I dropped my tools into the half-made basket, gathering it to me as I rose. He shook his head and gestured with an inky hand for me to sit back down.
“I don’t need the light,” I said. “If someone but thought to put the tools into my hands, I’d be making baskets in my sleep.”
I didn’t know what devil had got into me. I lifted the basket; I remember particularly the green sappy smell of willow, and the cool smooth feel of the exposed split surface of the withies, the bulk and slight weight of the basket in my arms. I went over to him, waited for him to rise.
He stood up. He lifted the writing set with him. The pen was clutched against the board, the ledger and letter and loose papers sliding against each other.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
He carried his things over to the windowsill, and took my seat, and said nothing more. The evening light brought out the blue of the stone floor, the iron sheen of his dark hair. It had only been a tone, an inflection to the voice, but it filled me with indignation. He was mocking me, I knew it. There was a sufficiency of irritations and vexations in my life, without him mocking me.
I sat down where he’d been sitting, my feet on the rag rug where his had been. The wooden rungs of the high-back chair were smooth; they held me upright, supporting me, so that I could lean back and feel some relief from my stays. I felt somehow taller, sitting there in my mam’s chair; less of a child.
He was setting his writing slope to rights. He wiped and dipped his pen, touching the nib against the rounded rim of the ink pot.
