I waited, not sure what I should say.
‘From thinking what you’ve done? Or from thinking what might be done to you?’
I said ‘no sir’, or ‘yes sir’, or both of those one after the other.
‘What will be done to you, do you suppose?’
‘I shall be punished.’
He thought about that and winked and sucked on his pipe. ‘You live with your mother Janet?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Can I see your cottage from here?’ He moved his head to show that I should join him.
I passed his armchair and his desk and his bed, feeling as if a rope tethered me to the door and tightened at my chest. His room was higher even than the rooms on the upper passage, and I could see right across the lawn and over the river to the cottage chimneys. When I pointed to our cottage he stood behind me to see where I was looking. I felt his breath on my neck, and thought of his weight pressed against me in the bracken.
‘And you work here at the Hall?’
‘I do sir.’
‘And study sometimes with Sarah. She talks of you.’
I felt the tears come in my eyes.
He moved so he could see my face. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Is she angry with me? I know she must be angry. Will she let me study? I’ll take a flogging if I can only read the Book of Air.’
‘Why would she be angry?’
‘Because…’ I said and for a moment said nothing else.
He waited for me.
‘Because I hid below Roland’s window. Because I followed the horse cart.’ I found I was slow to name what I had done.
He watched me, and his good eye would have been enough to make me say anything if he had watched a moment longer. But he smiled. ‘You hid below Roland’s window. Who would flog you for that?’
I didn’t know how to answer him.
‘Do you love Roland? Do you feel called by him? Is that why you watch by moonlight while he sleeps?’
‘No sir.’ Though the room was cold, I felt my face burning.
‘What do you think of Roland?’
‘That he should study harder.’
The Reader made a noise like the noise mother makes when she wakes herself with her snoring. A cloud of smoke rose from his mouth and I saw he was laughing. ‘And what does he do when he should be studying?’
‘He wanders alone. He sits in the murk, sometimes for hours.’ I felt bad telling tales of Roland. I know he’s drawn to the murk because of his father. They say his father was seen to sit there all day and all night before he died.
‘Roland is disappointing. But what about you?’
I held my breath, waiting to hear what words he had for me. I waited until I was afraid I would faint.
He said nothing but breathed out smoke and let it rise between us. Only when he tilted his head and said ‘Well?’ did I know that he meant me to answer. ‘Tell me what I should think of you.’
I was silent for a moment. Then I knew what I wanted to say. ‘You know there are persons of earth and stone and rock who will be found where you left them, like Rochester?’
‘Are there?’
‘Yes, and there are persons of air who are as hard to hold as Jane. Well I am a person of air.’
He looked at me strangely and I felt it was something I shouldn’t have said about myself.
‘And Roland?’ the Reader said. ‘What about Roland?’
I said I didn’t know.
‘A person of earth or a person of air? Neither I think. So is he like Rochester’s mad wife, who set fire to his house and died in the flames?’
I shook my head. I hadn’t thought about this.
‘Not a person of fire then. He is cold perhaps and goes where he must go.’
I thought of our kissing on the backstairs. ‘Not cold,’ I said. ‘Not cold like Sturgeon Rivers.’
I write the name according to its sound, as we do in the study, because Jane’s spelling of it contains a mystery lost to us. And writing it, I imagine Sarah at my shoulder, hear the smiling voice with which she praises good work. But there is nothing to praise in this. Ink and paper misused in remembering events of significance to no one but me, that I said of Roland that he isn’t cold, and that the Reader agreed and sucked smoke from his pipe and that I was afraid.
‘Not yet like Sturgeon Rivers, no,’ he said. ‘He’s only a summer brook, a trickle to dip your foot in.’ He seemed no longer interested in Roland.
His eyes made me uncomfortable, so I looked away. There were shelves on either side of the fireplace filled with strange and beautiful things – glass bottles of different shapes, some with paper covers printed with words and pictures, delicate pottery in bright colours, metal objects intricately formed. He looked at me still, as if I was a thing he’d never seen before, a flower vase dug up in a field for him to put on his shelf.
‘Take something,’ he said.
I shook my head. What could I take, and what should I do with it? Put it on the cottage mantle for the neighbours to gawp at? Hide it with my father’s knife? Then I saw something I wanted. It was a bottle of plastic from the endtime – white but so thin that when I picked it up the light showed through it. I imagined the ink trickling in at the neck to darken it. I turned the stopper to see that it fitted snuggly. Its sides settled under the pressure of my hand. It had no weight. It was perfect.
‘This,’ I said.
‘Take it.’
To stop his looking I named the Book of Windows and asked if I could see it.
He was silent for a moment and I thought he would rebuke me. Then he said, ‘If you like,’ as if seeing the Book or not seeing it didn’t much matter. He led me to the desk where there was a box about the size of the box Tal carries his tools in. Not wooden, like Tal’s, but metal shiny as moonlight with a black panel on the front. The Reader rested his pipe on the table, and the panel gave back its flame like a mirror. He put his finger to one corner. There was a sharp sound and the front swung open as if pushed from inside, and I saw that the mirror was a pane of glass, dark, smoke stained.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said and reached a hand to touch it.
‘Oh the box. Yes they loved boxes – black, silver, the colours of the night sky. And to put what in? No one knows. Some so thin they close on nothing, on a breath of air flat as paper. And there, saying nothing, are all the letters of the alphabet tightly packed. But always, outside or in, there’s a window. But to look at what?’
‘Doesn’t it say in the book?’
‘Somewhere, perhaps.’ He pointed through the open door to the object inside. ‘There it is.’
It might have been a slab of cheese lying on a plate.
‘Tell me, Agnes. What do you know about the Book of Windows?’
‘That aside from the Book of Death, about which nothing can be said, it is the deepest of all the books, the most difficult to master. And that only the Reader – ’
He waited for me to find the words and the courage to speak them.
‘That only you, sir, among the people of the village now living can read it.’
‘What else?’
‘That it contains the highest wisdom of the endtime, all Jane’s knowledge boiled and rendered to its essence. That its pages come loose in the hand like summer pears.’
‘You know what everyone knows.’
‘I know what the Mistress taught us.’
‘And it’s true enough for the schoolroom.’
I felt I had disappointed him.
‘There are things, Agnes, that the Book of Air can’t tell us.’ He closed the box with a click, and stood for a moment in silence. Then he looked into my face. ‘Tell me, Agnes, do we believe that the endtimers solved the mystery of Calling?’
I could barely answer.
‘That they had learned to speak at a distance, to cry out to one another and be heard, to assert a presence, as Jane wrote, independent of the cumbrous body?’