Twenty years it took me.
Agnes
After that first talk with Brendan – he tells me I am to call him Brendan – I took my book at night to the river, upstream beyond the orchard. I meant to throw it in. I thought I would never have the strength to shut my mouth about the book and about Brendan too. To keep silent about this to him, and about him to everyone. It made my head turn and turn like the big staircase in the Hall to think of the lies I must tell. For a while I held the book close and felt my heart thumping against it. Then I swung it behind me, meaning to hurl it into the stream. But at that moment a barn owl shrieked and in my surprise I slipped from the bank into the water. I clung to a handful of cow parsley. When I pulled myself out I was covered in mud and wet to the knees, but the book was unspoiled because I had held it safe above my head. I knew then that I would never destroy it.
I went instead to the Grace Pool. The pot was heavy to move and I was afraid to try. I crept away with my thoughts unspoken. I think there is no such place. I was asleep when I lay down in the courtyard with the Reeds, or it was the herbs they dropped in the candle flame that put the idea in my head.
I should have left the book in the attic. It would have lain there for some other person to find, or until it rotted, and no danger would have come to me. I should have left it with the other treasures. One other thing was of great value and beauty, but I wasn’t tempted by it. A black pipe it was, something like the pipes Tal whittles from bamboo shoots to play tunes on, with holes for his fingers, but longer, as long as my arm, and the holes covered with little rings of metal. Some of them moved as I touched, so I was afraid I had broken them. I blew in at the end, but heard only the rush of my own breath. There were other things too. There was a small leather case not much bigger than my hand neatly packed with little tiles of plastic, each a different colour, with words and strange designs. I’ve seen more like these since in the turret, laid out on the shelves beside Brendan’s fireplace. But I left the leather case and the pipe where I found them. Only the book I brought away with me.
How did they make their paper so smooth and pale, with nothing to snag the nib and suck the ink into puddles, and so much of it, sheet after sheet, each one perfect? Sarah has taught us how to scrape the inner bark from willows and mulberries and dry the long threads from hemp stems, grinding them in the pestle with rushes and leaves of iris. We boil rabbit skins for gum. Stirring all this together in clean spring water, we move our hands and wrists this way and that to catch it evenly in the sieve. We press and roll the pulp and let it dry. And so we make paper. All her life Sarah has done this and knows its secrets as well as anyone in the village. And still how calloused our pages are. Our neatest letters send out tendrils, growing bigger than we meant them.
I would write in this book only for the pleasure of making letters.
The day after our first talk, Brendan sent for me to come from the yard where I was feeding the peelings to the geese. And the next day, from the study. He sent the Mistress, who looked over her glasses at me, and spoke as if I was a child caught sniggering in the schoolroom. The other girls looked at me then, Megan breaking into smiles that were less innocent than they looked, Annie pale and anxious. Roland stared at his hands, thinking perhaps that he was the one who should be sent for, not me. Sarah let go of the page she’d been reading and looked hard into my face as if it would tell her why I was wanted where I had never been wanted before. And the next day another message. And each time I climbed to the turret. Sometimes Brendan had a question, about Roland, or about my mother or about how things went on in the village. Sometimes he wanted nothing but to be brought some nettle tea or a piece of bread. Sometimes he’d have me sit by him and talk about Jane, which I always love to do.
One time, as I came down the big oak staircase, trailing my fingers along the handrail, I found Annie sitting at the turn, hugging the shadows.
She said, ‘Is he kind to you, Agnes?’
‘Kind? Why shouldn’t he be kind?’
‘Is he though?’
I shrugged. ‘He’s kind enough.’
She got up on her knees then and gripped my hand until it hurt. ‘They’re not to be trusted.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Men. They can’t help themselves.’
I laughed, but only because I felt awkward hearing her say such things. ‘We only talk, Annie.’ I sunk down on my knees beside her. ‘We sit and talk. He asks me about mother sometimes, and about the Book of Air. We talk about calling and how Jane could have heard Rochester from so far away, a day’s journey at least.’
‘Isn’t Sarah’s teaching enough for you?’
I laughed again, because she looked so earnest. ‘Annie,’ I said, ‘we only talk.’ I left her there at the turning of the stairs.
Another day I was sweeping the upper passage and reached the half stairs and there were his boots on the narrow landing and I looked up and there was all of him. And his whole face was a question so deep you’d need a bucket with a long rope to fetch up an answer.
‘You’re here,’ he said.
‘Yes sir.’
‘Before I sent for you.’
‘This is my day to sweep upstairs.’
His strong eye settled on my face. ‘So you didn’t hear me call?’
‘Did you call?’
He peered at me and his weak eye began its dance. ‘Surely, Agnes, a cry vibrated on your startled ear, in your quaking heart, through your spirit?’ He was saying Jane’s words, but making them his own.
‘No sir.’
He smiled and I wondered if he was teasing me. It made me uncomfortable to hear words from the Book of Air so lightly spoken.
That evening as I walked home from the Hall I saw someone standing at the foot of the drive. The gatepost is half buried in ivy and clematis and overhung with oak branches, so I wasn’t sure it was Roland until he reached out towards me and pulled me into the darkness.
He said, ‘What does he want with you?’
‘Nothing. Just to ask me things.’
‘And you do what he asks?’
‘I mean questions. He asks me questions.’
‘All that time alone, reading and thinking, all that time to study the Book of Windows, and he has to send for Agnes to answer his questions?’
‘Only to have someone to talk to. He knows so much more than me. He knows more than anyone.’
‘Does he though?’ The words were little more than breath against my ear. ‘Does he know this?’ Roland kissed me then, and the feel of his lips and his boyish smell were so familiar, and the shape of him so comfortable against me, that I forgot for a moment that we are no longer children to romp in the Hall and snuggle in corners. I would have stayed longer, cushioned in ivy with his mouth against mine if his hands hadn’t gone to work. If they hadn’t known so exactly where I ached. How unfair it seemed to be divided against myself, and Roland risking so little and me so much. I squirmed away from him, catching my skirt and headscarf in branches of blackthorn.
He turned his back and kicked at the undergrowth. ‘I don’t know why you’re so unkind.’
‘You know why,’ I said, pulling the thorny strands from my hair.
‘I know. Brendan has turned your head and made you think you’re too good for the rest of us.’
I looked at him where he stood, proud and angry, hugging himself because I wouldn’t. And I thought, I shall go home and cook supper and write about this is in my book, just as it happened. And I thought, how strange to be here in this exact moment of my life with this boy who likes me, and to be thinking how to hold it in words for no one to read. As if I had taken a step back from this moment to see how it looked, or as if I had wandered outside of myself and had lost my way.