I saw he was frightened, not just of them but of me. Frightened of my stained face, my stinking clothes, my ungathered hair, of what I might do or say which could be anything because even I don’t know any more.
I took a step towards him, but he turned his back on me. He must have had the key in his pocket because I heard it grinding in its hole. A murmur reached me from the Grace Pool so I went and sat between the tiled walls and started on the cherries, chewing to shut the noise out. I had my eyes shut tight, but I heard him come towards me, felt him sit beside me in the narrow space.
‘My calling must be soon,’ he said. ‘A few days maybe if the rain holds off. While the moon still shines. You know I must be taken to the woods.’
I opened my eyes and saw his dark shape slumped against the wall, his head in his hands.
‘So you and Megan have talked.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s what you want.’
‘It’s what must happen.’
We said nothing else for a while. From where I sat the voice from the Grace Pool was no more than the hum of the river heard from the top field. The barn owl was busy in the yard. I ate until all the cherries were gone.
‘You’ll breathe untainted air though,’ I said at last, ‘and eat what food you choose and open your own casement, and drink from the spring and wash in it, and though you need never labour like a cottager you’ll dig and plant, and feel the sun on your back, and the rain when the rain comes.’
He made a noise in his throat and I felt him move and straighten. Then he said, ‘Do you know why I go so often to the murk?’
‘Because your father sat there the day before he died reaching for hazelnuts.’
‘No. Perhaps at first. But not anymore.’
‘Why then?’
I waited for his answer and thought he had sunk again into his dark mood. But when he spoke his voice was full of life. It reminded me of our games on the stairs and along the passageways of the Hall.
‘You know that thing you have in the kitchen to grind meat for a pie.’
‘Yes.’
‘The way the wheels turn against each other. Somebody thought of that.’
‘The endtimers.’
‘No. Somebody. And if meat, why not apples for cider? Why not anything?’
‘Not everything needs grinding.’
‘But grinding’s just one kind of work. Everything takes work. Do you see, Agnes? And you turning that handle is just a way of getting the work done.’
‘It’s me that turns the handle, not you.’
The Grace Pool was silent. The birds had begun their fierce urgent calling. It was light enough that I could see Roland’s eyes. For that moment he wasn’t looking at me but at the stone wall beside me. Or at something that no one else would see.
He said, ‘I spend time in the murk so I can understand how it worked.’
‘And do you?’
‘Partly. There are notched wheels that turn against each other, like in your meat grinder. But more of them and they’re knotted together and covered up, but I poke holes in the rust and I can see more of the hidden parts. It’s like this, Agnes. There are two kinds of movement. There’s turning like the movement of the grinder or the machine they used for opening tins – like the movement of a cartwheel along a track. And there’s a forward and back movement like when you cut a piece of wood with a saw, or bread with a knife. Whoever made the murk knew how to turn sawing into wheeling, and now I do too.’
‘And why would that be such a trick?’ I had no patience with his dreaming. The new day would soon be here and all I wanted was to make the kitchen fire and bring in more logs and put the porridge on to cook, to be a person again and not a dried out thought rattling in the red room.
‘Because that’s part of the secret, Agnes.’
‘What secret?’
‘Of what made the murk move without a horse to pull it, without men to turn its wheels.’
‘So what’s the other part?’
‘The harder part. I don’t know what made the back and forward movement. Not a man’s arm, but something like the punch of a fist over and over, but not a fist either. I think something like a green log bursting in the fire. A blow to send the air rushing.’
‘And all this so you can ride without a horse?’ All I wanted was for Brendan to take me by the hand to the Mistress and to say he had called me and I had answered.
‘Riding doesn’t matter. What matters is finding something to push and push where there’s no man to push.’
‘Like when I boil the porridge in the clay pot,’ I said. ‘The lid is heavy but the steam doesn’t mind.’
‘Yes. Of course. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘So maybe you should build a fire and blow the murk across the lawn with boiling porridge.’
‘Maybe I should.’
I heard the eagerness in his voice and it made me angry. ‘Except someone would have to carry the logs to feed the fire so the same person might as well push the murk.’
‘It’s not about the murk. I keep telling you. It’s about what the endtimers knew. It’s about how they lived and how we live. It’s about work.’
‘You talk about work but you don’t even know what work is.’ I was in a rage that the sun was rising, that he would soon be gone and I would be here still. ‘Every day while she lived my mother carried water from the brook. And every day before they locked me in here I carried water from the well into the kitchen at the Hall. And a pot of water is as heavy as a stone and slops about like a squalling baby that won’t lie still to be carried. You can sit in the murk and dream because you don’t know what it is to live like a cottager.’
‘Listen, Agnes. I have to go soon, or be caught here with you. I can’t let you out, because they’d lock you away forever and send me to the forest to fight with wolves and scroungers.’ He was looking at me now and his eyes were full of fire. ‘I can tell Megan I don’t love her. That I thought I did but it was a mistake. I’d take a beating from her father and suffer all their dark looks if I knew you wanted me and only me. If I knew you’d be good and let them let you go.’
His eyes were too fierce. I pulled my hair over my face to shut them out, and to cover my tears. But I couldn’t hide my sobbing. I wanted to say what he wanted me to say, but I didn’t know if it was true. Or if it was truly Brendan I wanted. Or if I wanted neither of them, but only to be myself.
And how could I promise to be good when I couldn’t even promise to bleed when it was already past my time to bleed. Long before I’d stopped my noise he’d gone, locking the door again.
The cherry stones were on the floor beside me. He’d forgotten them in talking of the murk. Or in asking things of me I couldn’t give. I picked them up because Roland didn’t want them found, but thinking: who minds what moulders in this room? I took them to the window to push them through the broken pane, but kept hold of them because Roland had brought them. It was a kind thing he did to bring me cherries. So I hid them under the bed.
I looked in the mirror to see who this Agnes was that Roland had come to visit, to ask her what she had done with the Agnes everybody wanted her to be. If I turned my head I could see my eyes in one piece of the glass, my mouth in another, the dirt around it streaked with tears, such an ugly unwashed face for Roland to look at. It made me angry that any other villager could go to the river and I must stay uselessly here. I would ask the Reeds for water. I would hammer at the door and shout and no one should rest until I had water enough to wash in. Then I was sad again that mother was dead and Roland to marry Megan and there was no one to care about my face or any other part of me.
Down in the yard I heard the hollow sound of a dry log pulled from the pile, and another, and the horses whinnying. I felt the warmth of the sun on me and watched the stain on my mouth turn to blood. I thought I was hurt in some new way. Then I understood. Not dirt, and not blood either, but cherry juice. And I had wasted it. If I had kept the cherries, if I had waited for Roland to go, I might have squashed them between my legs, letting the juice run on my skin and stain my skirt. I would have shown the Reeds when they came for my pot.