I nodded.
‘Jane promises us that knowledge. She teaches us to ache for it.’ The words were no more than a rattle in the Reader’s throat. ‘But she nowhere tells us how it might be done.’
‘Sarah says – ’
‘That we contain Air and are contained by Air?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘That nothing is or can be in the world that the Book of Air leaves out?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not this. For this we have to search in other places.’
‘In the Book of Windows.’
He looked at the silver box, then at the trees away beyond the lawn. ‘Perhaps.’
A simple word. My father would say it if I asked him to carve me a finger doll or take me with him to count the sheep. A shrug. An opening and closing of the lips. A falling note straddling promise and disappointment.
And the Reader said it no less lightly, as if the outcome was nothing to him, while I gaped, breathless and unbalanced.
Because if not in the Book of Windows, where did he mean?
When they brought me back from my outing on the moor, the Reeds told me book learning isn’t everything, old women muttering in the shadows who would make a mystery of ringing a chicken’s neck if it was all the mystery they had. But for the Reader who has read the books all through to say this filled me with fear, to leave this possibility that the highest knowledge of the endtime was to be searched for elsewhere.
Our conversation was over. I was back in the kitchen with some unwashed dishes in my hand, having drifted like a sleepwalker along the corridor and down the stairs.
Fear, yes, but excitement also. He said ‘perhaps’ and I don’t know what he meant by it.
The fire needed lighting, so I went in the yard to fetch wood. Passing the shaded corner where the woodshed joins the back wall of the house, I thought of the secret the old women showed me after my time on the moor. It was to this place they brought me. It was the dead time of the night, and I was so tired and hungry I could no longer be sure whether I was awake or dreaming. There is an ancient pot, blue and yellow with painted flowers, big enough for a child to hide in. They dragged the pot to one side and uncovered a flagstone browner than the others with shapes and letters on it. They lifted the stone, and it was not a stone but a rusting block of metal. Underneath was a space, four brick walls going down into darkness, the size of the pit we dug last winter for Annie’s baby sister. We lay on our bellies on the ground and looked down into the darkness, and I saw our own faces staring back at us. One of the women lowered a lighted candle on a dish until it touched the water where my face had been, and the other dropped sage and flower petals. I lay between them, staring down at the flame until the smoke stung my eyes. There were holes in two of the walls, black circles as big as saucers. I imagined myself the size of a thumb and wondered where those holes would take me.
When I spoke, my voice whispered back at me. ‘What is it?’
The Reeds took it in turns to answer, and the echoes were more voices.
‘A place of reflection.’
‘A place where fire and water meet.’
‘The Grace Pool.’
The candle floated to one side and I saw my own face again, not as steady as at first. ‘Is it a secret?’
‘From men and children, yes.’
‘Does Sarah know?’
‘Sarah knows book learning but book learning isn’t everything.’
‘Will I see it again?’
‘When you must.’
‘When your thoughts rise up in your throat.’
‘When you have to speak but are afraid to speak.’
‘And will I hear an answer?’
They said nothing, but lifted out the candle, put the cover back, and dragged the pot back into its place.
And there’s another secret told. All these secrets inside one great secret. Until someone reads what I write and I am taken in front of the Mistress and all the secrets are out.
The Grace Pool is the proper place for secrets.
So today, with my head full of the Reader and my first sight of the Book of Windows, I stopped with my kindling to see if the pot had been moved. Looking at it, I felt my thoughts rise up in my throat and wondered if I should go back tonight with a candle and sage. Would I have the strength to move the pot and the metal flagstone under it? I was lost in these thoughts and didn’t hear the others until Megan spoke.
‘We missed you.’
I turned, and they were all there, just come from the house into the yard, Megan and Roland and cousin Annie. I know not to trust Megan’s smile and I thought, of all of them, she was the least likely to miss me. With one hand she touched Roland’s arm. Not even a hand, just three fingers tapping lightly on his shirt. But I saw then that she would tie a rope round him if she could and drag him after her.
Annie, who has light skin and hair the colour of wheat, looked paler than ever and hollow in the face as though some worry gnawed at her.
‘Sarah has been asking after you,’ she said. ‘I told her you had a fever.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And you’re well now?’
‘Much better.’
‘You look better,’ Roland said, ‘and you’ve been to see the man.’
I knew he meant it as a question, but I didn’t know how to answer him. Why the Reader had sent for me was partly a secret between us, that he had caught me spying, and otherwise a mystery to me.
The geese came waddling towards us over the cobbles.
‘I’ve been shutting them up at night,’ Annie said, ‘and letting them out in the morning, but they’re glad to see you back, I think. Look how they come to you.’
It was true, they gathered close about me, treading on my feet and twining their necks over each other.
‘They like you best.’
‘They do,’ Megan said. ‘They treat you like a sister. Don’t you think they do, Roland?’ She poked his arm to get him to respond. ‘Don’t you think they treat her like a sister? You don’t suppose some gander flapped in at her mother’s window one night?’
Roland smiled though I could see he tried not to. ‘They like Agnes best because she’s the kindest of us, and the cleverest.’ He looked at me when he said this and then at the ground, and the smile had gone from his face.
I would have said that geese know enough to care more for kindness than for cleverness. But just then Peter came in at the yard end leading the horse and cart with Tal’s son Daniel trailing after, and we went our different ways, me towards the kitchen, Megan and Annie to the fields, and Roland to skulk somewhere out of sight. From the kitchen door, I saw Daniel blush when the girls passed him and turn after them to say something, but no sound came except a kind of grunting. He’s clever with his hands, Daniel, just like his father, and more than twenty years old, but he can’t look one of us girls in the eye, and it’s a torment to him to speak, though he talks easily enough to the horses.
I looked again at the blue and yellow pot. The stones around it were green with moss. It might have stood there growing roots since the endtime. Even if I had the strength to move it, would I find the Grace Pool, or nothing but a patch of ground with worms wriggling?
Jason
Sometimes I check out without warning. Time passes and I can’t quite put my finger on what I’ve been doing. I sit in a field to shake a stone from my boot and find myself in an empty cottage sorting through a drawer of kitchen knives. I stoop for the log basket, stand with the water slopping at my feet and see I’ve lifted a bucket from the spring. I have vivid moments when I reel from the smell of the earth on my spade, the smell of midday warmth on cobwebs and tomato plants gone to seed, or dazzled by moonlight on wet leaves. Other times the world is a blur. Objects lose their edges. Colours wash into one another.