‘What then?’
‘I don’t know. They tell stories.’
‘Stories? What stories?’
‘I never read them. They were my wife’s.’
‘All your life, you never read them. And you’re alive still and she’s dead.’
I stand up, leaving Django coughing into the grass, shake myself free of Aleksy’s hand. Maud stands apart, humming to herself. Abigail is holding Simon against her, stroking his head. She looks at me sadly and I’m stung to a new fury that she should blame me for Django’s crime.
I walk rapidly towards the orchard where the sun is setting among the trees.
I hear Deirdre say, ‘He’s right though, Aleksy. He’s right, Django. Look at all you’ve burned. What a waste. What are we going to do now on winter evenings?’
Aleksy laughs. ‘Milk cows same as summer. Chop wood so we don’t freeze. Save candles.’
‘And when the cows are milked?’
‘What you like, Deedee – play party games, make babies.’
I turn and stride back towards them, shaking with rage. Abigail is on her knees, tending to Django’s bleeding lip. She’s pulled her apron off and laid it on his lap. I’m glad to see them all shrink from me as I approach, to know they respect my anger if not my rights.
‘That’s it, Django,’ I tell him, ‘I want you out of here.’
No one argues. They can see I might do anything. Even I don’t know what I might do. I’ll take them all on, smash up the fragile order of things. I want Django gone. I’ll give him five minutes to get dressed and pack some clothes, I’ll let Deirdre and Abigail stuff food in his bag if they want, but I won’t stop until he’s off my land. Because of what he’s done. Because the others can’t grasp the horror of what he’s done. Because I can’t find the words to explain it to them.
And it happens, just that way, because I say it must. No one argues. I watch him walk off into the woods in his tight trousers and stripy blazer, stepping lightly like a boy on a camping trip, fearless of hunger or of having his throat cut for a decent pair of boots. The others watch too, keeping their thoughts to themselves. I turn from the front door and Abigail’s behind me in the hall, studying my face. And I see that I’m being managed. We’ve lost your books, Caroline. Django, who I never trusted, has burned them. I should at least feel vindicated, but I find myself diminished.
I walk past Abigail and take the main staircase to the second floor, and the half-flight to our bedroom. The door’s wide open, wedged to stop it banging, and to let Simon in. Whatever books were on the shelves are gone. I go to our bed, where I sleep alone, and pull all the pillows off. It’s still here, your copy of Jane Eyre. This at least I’ve still got. It’s nothing much to look at – a cardboard cover the colour of pondweed. But yours, loved by you since childhood, and all I’ve got left of you. Now I’m on the bed, I’m not sure I can get up, not sure I want to. My body shakes, gripped by the memory of sickness. I hear the murmur of voices and then nothing but the sound of my own breathing.
Django’s out there somewhere, and others like him, skulking in the woods, hiding in ditches, scuttling through atriums and shopping malls, bedding down where the roof doesn’t leak with their valuables held close and one eye open for snatchers.
Agnes
I was sick five days they say, sweating with fever. I rode hard in my dreams. At every turn of the road I met Brendan, his eyes puzzling over the strange tilt the world had taken and me rushing backwards from the sight of him to swing away through the trees, like the Monk, with my heart torn out of me.
And how many days before that, dragging through the forest, blinded by rain, all the time thinking I would never find the O. And I would have stayed lost, that’s certain, if a woman leading a mule cart hadn’t spoken to me kindly. What she said I couldn’t tell, but when I said I was looking for the O, she smiled, showing me the few teeth she had left, and nodded for me to climb on her cart, a wild-looking woman with an unsteady walk, wrapped in rags. She let me nest among her vegetables, and I saw nothing until she shook me awake and we were here.
Trevor says I was lucky. There are some on the road, he says, who would have stripped me of everything, or roped me with the dogs and set me to work till I was all bone. But this pelting rain had likely driven them to shelter. Even a tracker would find the scent bleared and the trail washed from the road.
I understand more of what they say now than before, though there are still words I have to guess at. They asked me why I came without Brendan. I told them I am punished and sent away from the village for something I did. I haven’t told them what. How would I say? I haven’t told them I killed Brendan, if that’s truly what I’ve done. He was their friend. More than that, I think he was Dell’s father, though perhaps she doesn’t know it.
I see more of how they live at the O. Every night there’s eating and drinking. Singing often, too. So every night is like the village at the end of a wedding, except different people from one time to another, not always the same neighbours. I see that all this pleasure is work for Trevor and Dell. People come with animals for cooking and other things they call gear or tat and Dell gives them some of what’s in the pot and fills their mugs. And later those who want are put somewhere to sleep.
Dell lets me help her in the kitchen, though I’ve hardly the strength to shell peas. I asked her today how many scroungers are there. She didn’t understand. ‘The villagers that you call planters come to forty,’ I told her. ‘Fifty maybe.’ I showed with my fingers in case she didn’t know her numbers. ‘People die and there are babies so it changes, but maybe fifty. So how many scroungers?’
She shrugged. ‘As many as there are people in the world. Because that’s all we are, us you call scroungers.’
‘So how many does that come to?’
‘Cheese, Agnes, no one can tell that.’ She put her hand on my forehead then to see if my fever was still up.
‘But if you had to guess.’
‘See, Ag,’ she said, sitting by me, ‘it’s this way. There are some we know. More we don’t and never will. Some live nearby, catching and cropping. Some live by dealing, moving on to find in one place what’s wanted in another. Some we see regular when the weather changes. Some once and never again. Maybe they tell us their names and we remember. Or else we know them by something they brought one time – a strong pan or a sack of partridge eggs. They might tell us their racket. They might not. It doesn’t matter. If they’re hungry or need a bed they come to the O.’
I think of the O as a circle and always room inside. Like the letter. I tried to explain this to Dell, but she didn’t understand. She told me O is short for O Tell Do, though not many call it that. ‘But its real name,’ she said, ‘is O Tell Do Lucks, which no one calls it except Trevor. When he’s drunk, or sad about Cat.’
‘Who’s Cat?’ I asked her.
‘Cat was Trevor’s girl. Lovely she was, and sharp as a knife. She was born at the O and always lived here. It was her mother’s, and then hers when her mother died. Cat raised me from a baby. Then she got knocked up. She’d carried before, Trevor says, but always lost them. She cried out all day long when it was her time, then all the night after, but not so much. By morning she was dead, and the tiddler dead inside her. Now it’s just Trevor and me.’
Later Dell came to see I was warm in my bed. She asked who’d sent me away and why.
I told her the Mistress. ‘But she didn’t really send me away. She locked me in the red room, a room at the Hall. And I escaped.’
Dell looked me up and down and asked me, ‘Have you had your minstrels?’
I told her I didn’t understand.