But he said only that he’d find a cottage boy to take me, to call my child his and care for it.
I wouldn’t let myself answer I felt such bitterness, but turned my back and walked on, pulling Gideon after.
He shouted that I’d never find my way. ‘The scroungers will kill you, or worse,’ he said. He caught up with me and spoke in a softer voice. ‘Don’t judge me harshly, Agnes. I can’t choose for myself as you can.’ I turned and saw tears on his face and his arm rising roughly to smudge them.
‘You dare to cry? I was friendless and far from home and knew nothing and you took what you had no right to take. And then you stood by and let them punish me. I’ll never trust you again or like you or think you wise.’
He looked at the ground then, and let the tears come, which made me more angry.
‘And you can’t call it love, or say you didn’t know what you were doing. Because I wasn’t the first. There was Sarah before me.’
‘I did my best for Sarah.’ He wiped his face with his sleeve and lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘If you’ve found out her secret it wasn’t me who told it.’
‘Half the village knows how you took her child from her and gave it to the scroungers.’
‘To save her from shame.’
‘To save yourself. Everything, always, for yourself. Even my poor mother.’ I’d meant never to breathe a word of what I’d learnt about Janet’s baby, born dead or smothered soon after, of the belt she’d tied around her neck, and the punishment that followed. I didn’t even want to think of it. But seeing Brendan so mawkishly sorry for himself, I found I had to speak.
He was staring at me in surprise.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘I know about that too, and I wasn’t yet born.’
‘What harm did I ever do to Janet?’
‘She was driven mad, I know that, by the death of her baby, and suffered as I did in the red room, and she was only half alive when my father married her and there was nothing left for him but your leavings.’
I watched him labouring to take this in. ‘You don’t know, Agnes.’ He shook his head bitterly and looked away over the canopy of trees. ‘There’s so much you don’t know.’
‘What, though? What don’t I know?’
‘I was a boy when Janet came to my bed.’ He met my eye, daring me to say otherwise. ‘A boy without parents to watch out for me. And Janet was the girl who’d held my hand and led me to the spring to wash and to the kitchen to pour me a cup of milk, and had settled me to sleep before walking home from the Hall each evening. I understood nothing, except that it was daybreak and she was doing what she had never done before, getting into bed beside me.’
‘Liar.’
‘She meant me to be the father of her child but her child already had a father.’
‘How could you know that? How could you be sure?’
‘Because when she made to kiss me I could tell she didn’t mean it, and she left off soon enough and turned away and I heard her sobbing. I understood none of this till later.’
‘Liar, liar.’
‘I never harmed her.’
‘Who then, if not you?’
‘Oh, Agnes.’ He looked at me fiercely. ‘Only your Uncle Morton is left alive to say what went on in that cottage.’
I hit him then, letting go of Gideon’s rope to swing at him with both fists as I would have swung an axe at a tree. He stepped backwards, caught his foot on a vine branch. He frowned at me as if I was a puzzling sentence in the Book of Windows. The branches swung apart to let him in and closed again behind him. If he had fallen dead in the pond, the green water would have closed over him just so, settling again as if it thought nothing of him and couldn’t tell the Reader from a dropped corn sack. I heard branches breaking and the movement of startled birds, and a grunt like the last breath pushed out of him. Then more cracking that might have been his neck or his limbs or the limbs of trees. I waited for the noises to stop. I forgot to breathe while I waited to see if he would cry in pain from the ground. But I heard nothing so I let out my own gasp of pain and went on my way.
Day has come and thunder with it and now rain enough to drown me and make a muddy river of the track. I take shelter under a sagging iron roof while I eat and write.
I would never have hit him if he hadn’t told such lies about my mother. If he hadn’t come so close to the edge of the road he would have come to no harm.
Soon I must ride again, drenched as I am. Ruins lie all around me in the forest. I start at every sound, thinking it’s the Monk, swinging by his tail to catch me, though I don’t believe in the Monk and have worse things to fear. There is nothing for me here but sadness and danger.
Jason
From up here on the roof I can see the world – the woods and fields our world has shrunk to. It was hairy getting up this high. Aleksy helped me lay some boards on the stable roof and we raised an extension ladder from there, roping it to a downpipe to give it some stability. I found a couple of claw hammers in the shed and a bag of roofing nails and we hauled up a stack of slates reclaimed from the old outhouse. The trees in the High Wood are our nearest neighbours and their branches wave at us and sing. The wind is strong up here, but the rain has held off and for now we’re safe inside the parapet.
When I helped Aleksy on to the roof, I asked him if it reminded him of his circus days.
He wasn’t amused. ‘I work with animals. Sometimes a strongman act with elephants. For one season, when I was fourteen, shot from a cannon. But the tightrope and trapeze I left to others. These are different skills, you understand Jason, like bricklayer or plasterer.’
He’s careless of his bandaged arm, but I can see it hurts him to use it. We’ve made a late start, after clearing a patch of thistles and digging it over to plant cabbages, but we’ve still got an hour or so of daylight. We’ve brought up a broom and a stiff brush. I set Aleksy sweeping up whatever’s blown into the valleys, checking to see where the lead might have buckled or split. There’s spleenwort sprouting from the brickwork round one of the chimneystacks and moss on some of the lower slates where the water is slow to drain. I clean out the drainage holes in the parapet walls and lean over to pull an old nest from a cast iron hopper head. I see where some of the slates have slipped and a couple with long cracks in them, and I begin patching.
After a while we hear the cattle clattering into the yard for their second milking – the Friesians and the Jerseys. I have a better sense of them now that Abigail has walked me through their field at sunset. Deirdre shouts a question and falls silent while Maud, I suppose, shows her what to do. There are footsteps below in the house, a window slides open and shut again, and I picture Abigail dusting and cleaning, a few strands of hair escaping her headscarf to fall across her work-smudged face. There’s a smell of smoke from the lawn and faintly in the distance a two-note call.
‘Listen, Aleksy.’
‘What is it?’
‘Can’t you hear the cuckoo?’
Aleksy laughs. ‘Too late for the cuckoo, old man. It’s September already, maybe October. Cuckoos all flew south three, four months ago.’
The smell of the bonfire gets sharper. They’re burning the dry thistle stalks. I lean over the parapet and see the orange glow and the grey smoke rising from it. And there’s Simon – the dark mop of his hair appearing from under the portico. He waddles towards the fire, his movement hampered by the weight of whatever he’s got in his basket. Perhaps Abigail has recruited him to help her clean the house. Approaching the flames, he pauses and shifts into a slow orbit, staying as close as the heat will allow, throwing things from his basket, little patches of darkness to scatter sparks and sink into the flames.