I pull my trousers on and go up to her at the window.
‘Deirdre… talk to Abigail.’
‘Fuck off, Jason. No, don’t touch me. I don’t want your hands on me. Just fuck right off out of my life.’
‘Tell her you’re pregnant. She can help.’
‘The horses are mine, by the way, and the goats, and most of the edible food is what I brought – whatever Abigail thinks, hiding it in the cellar like it’s her personal hoard.’
‘Get some rest, Deirdre.’
‘I was all right on the road and I’ll be all right again, don’t you worry.’ She’s reached the door and stands with the bottle in her hand. ‘Once a month in the missionary position, that’ll be Abigail’s idea of sex, if she ever lets you into her capacious knickers. Because Abigail’s idea of sex, in fact, is snuggling up with Maud. Or hadn’t you worked that out yet? They just let you stay to dig holes and shovel shit.’
‘Sleep it off.’
‘Sleep the fuck off yourself. And then you can pack up your pretentious wine glasses in your chav wet dream of a car and you can leave us all the fuck alone, because we don’t need you here.’
She slams the door behind her and it swings open again. The catch is worn – something else that needs fixing that I haven’t time to fix. Her footsteps are unsteady on the backstairs. I hear her stumble and swear. For a moment there’s nothing louder than the storm. Pulling on a sweater I go out to the landing and listen while she gets to her feet again and makes it down to the first floor. There are other footsteps, another voice murmuring comfort – Abigail seeing her safely to bed, or Aleksy thinking he’s in with a chance.
It’s only when I turn again to my door that I see Django sitting with his back to the wall. There’s barely enough light to see his expression, but it’s one I’ve seen before. He does compassion like a mime-artist, head to one side, mouth and eyebrows arched. He holds his jacket open.
‘It’s Deirdre who needs the flowers,’ I tell him. But it isn’t flowers this time. A box of chocolates, perhaps. He pulls it from the inner pocket and shows it to me. It’s a copy of the Bible. So that’s all he’s got. No secret knowledge, no plan of vengeance, just the promise of salvation.
‘It’s a new heaven,’ he says, ‘and a new earth.’
‘But the same old rain.’
Beyond him, further along the corridor, water drips into the cooking pot. Either we pay attention, or we abandon the place to the slow invasion of nature, the seep and drip of water finding the weak points, until a dozen winters have split it open like a fallen trunk for woodlice to crawl through and rodents and nesting birds. Which is what’s happening – here and everywhere. It starts with a cracked slate or a choked gutter or someone smashing a window in search of food. The heat’s off, the damp’s rising. The works of man are rotting from the inside.
Agnes
I would say where I am, but I hardly know how to. I am put to bed among the ruins of the endtimers, and Brendan nearby in another room. They call this the O. I can call it neither Hall nor cottage nor forest.
I have climbed three flights of stairs to a pile of sacking. There is a broken window and the branch of a tree reaching above my head. I am half afraid to lie down in such a disordered place. At home my mother sleeps across from me. I think I shall never rest without the noise of her dreams. I remember the box of treasures hidden under my bed – my father’s best knife and the little bird he carved with it, and the chain he had from his mother, as fine and supple as a thread of water lit by the moon.
Brendan was waiting in the ruin, as he promised he would be. I mean our ruin at the edge of the village. I never knew there were so many more ruins, so many broken walls.
It was hard at first riding with no reins or stirrups and nothing but Brendan’s coat to cling to. The wind was rising and there was a great commotion of leaves and creaking branches. We travelled eastward and had soon left the village far behind. I think I slept, perhaps only for a moment, perhaps for longer. We passed cottages with fallen roofs. Towards dawn, we came down into the heart of a ruin vaster than I could ever have imagined, pieces of wall and sloping timbers all overgrown, extending beyond the road on either side, until they were lost in woodland and mist.
We came to a stream and Brendan stopped to let Gideon drink and rest. We sat on fallen stones and ate some bread and boiled pork.
He asked me what I thought about being in the forest and I said I would be afraid to be there alone. He said, ‘Afraid of what?’ and I said, ‘Of scroungers and wild beasts but mainly of the Monk.’ He said, ‘The story of Maud and the Monk is good for a winter evening by the cottage fire’ and I felt foolish then for believing it.
He asked me questions about myself. Do I like cleaning and cooking at the Hall? Am I frightened of the Mistress? Has she beaten me and do I fear to be beaten? Then he asked about Janet. Was she well and happy when I left her? I told him I have never known my mother well or happy since my father took sick, and scarcely before then. I asked him what of his parents and he said he had been an orphan for as long as he could remember and brought up at the Hall when there was another Mistress, long dead now, and Sarah was a child but already more clever in learning than any of them. It moved me to hear her praised, and to know that she understood the Book of Air when she was younger than I am now.
I should not have argued with her at the spring. I let her see me sullen and petulant and am sorry for it.
Later we talked about Jane and the names of Jane inscribed on her Book and whether they are truly her names, or the names of the copiers who made the book, or not names at all but words of some other meaning lost to us. John Murray and Currer Bell and C Bronte with two points over the e, like no other e written. And the strange spelling of Air that Jane uses only of herself and that must never be repeated outside the Book’s green covers.
I asked why the Book of Moon has pictures, which is because it must be understood by everyone chosen for death, which is everyone living. I knew the answer to this, but asked because it comforted me to hear Brendan say it. But when I asked why the Book of Windows can be understood by so few it was Brendan’s turn to be silent. I notice he is reluctant to speak of it. Perhaps it is because he thinks it so far above my understanding, but I think it is because it makes him feel sad in some way. When mother says one of us must feed the pig, and groans with her hand at her back, I go silent sometimes and stare out into the darkness because I would rather be somewhere else where there is no pig to be fed and no Janet, though I don’t know where. This is how Brendan looks when I ask him about the Book of Windows. His sadness stirs me because there is the same restlessness in it. Since we left the village he has seemed younger to me.
He turned then and caught me looking. ‘Trust no one,’ he said.
‘No one, sir?’ I asked him.
‘No one except me.’
‘And Sarah?’
‘Sarah will break your heart. You should find a boy to love.’
‘But not to trust?’
‘A boy with a strong back for digging and strong hands, but gentle when he should be.’
‘And I shouldn’t trust him?’
He didn’t answer, but said, ‘I have brought you where the villagers are afraid to come. Today or tomorrow you will see things you’ll never forget.’ And he spoke to Gideon and we climbed on his back.