There was a grunt of effort or of pain and Trevor was on the ground, curled up as though winded from a blow. Dell too had fallen, upsetting a table, and lay dazed and breathless against it.
‘Now then sweetheart. You come without any squealing, or we unstitch the tadpole and see what his insides look like.’ Quinlan was talking to me. He was holding Dell’s knife, which was already stained with blood, unless it was only the flame from the stove gave it its colour.
Some power surged through me then, a rage such I had never felt. I reached for the nearest thing, which was the lid of the cooking pot, and hurled it at Quinlan’s head. He made to duck, but it clipped his ear and clattered away into the dark. While he was still reeling, I held up the pot, took two steps towards him and threw the stew in his face. I stepped back, letting the pot fall, feeling only then the searing heat of it.
I watched him lumber about, howling, crashing into furniture, blinded by the scalding broth, and had no thought of what to do next, except to find some way to soothe my poor burnt hands. I didn’t see where Dell came from, nor what she held beside her, until she was close enough to take a blow at him. It was an axe she struck him with, and I felt the heat of his blood on my face as he went down and was sickened, all at once, by the smell of blood and ash and rabbit meat and rosemary and burning skin.
There were figures then in the doorway, sleepers roused by our noise, gaping and wide-eyed in the glow of the flames. But none of them stepped forward. It wasn’t their fight. Dell rolled Trevor on to his back and cried out to find there was a bleeding gash near his heart and not a breath of life left in him.
Some of the men helped us dig graves for Quinlan and Trevor. We carried them to the patch of ground where Cat is buried, which was a garden once I think, though long neglected like the ruins all around. We put Quinlan in a far corner so that their bodies might not be eaten by the same worms. Dell bound two sticks together into a shape like a t to mark the place where Trevor’s body lay. I asked her was it for the t of Trevor’s name, thinking I might one day show her the difference between a big and a small t, but she frowned and shook her head and said it would be the same for anyone loved and missed. Then she wept bitterly.
She told me it wouldn’t be safe for us now at the O. People would come looking for Quinlan. The boys he had spoken of would want to know where he had gone and his boat full of leather. She said we should trust no one, not the men who had helped us, not Madge, not the regulars who had been Trevor’s friends. If we meant to go north we should set off south. I saw she was right. So we packed up what food and clothes we could carry, with some precious things of my own to load on Gideon’s back. We thought of taking the cow to help with our burden – such a fine strong beast and the boy who tended it nowhere to be seen. But we knew it was too pale and strange and would mark us out on the road. We slipped away while it was still dark.
I think now of life at the O as a dream from which I have woken. I once feared more than anything to watch a flogging at the Hall. But a flogging had its own shape, always the same. You knew the worst of it from the beginning. Even in the red room I knew why they had put me there. I see now that here among the scroungers, at the best of times, everything must be haggled over from day to day and everyone lives by chance like a weed in a cottage wall.
I have lived here no one’s wife and free to care for my child without shame. But all the business of calling and being called and then standing on the lawn among neighbours to hear certain texts from the Book of Air was as warm and comforting to me as sunshine, and it seems to me now that shame was its necessary shadow.
After Walt was born no one stood with me to ask, as after any birth in the village, ‘What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion? What mystery that broke out now in fire and now in blood at the deadest hours of night?’ And no one to explain that through these hard words of Jane’s we are reminded that from the moment of our making we are fire as well as air, that Bertha no less than Jane is in all of us, that we are conceived in crime and must live a mystery to ourselves.
I have found the turn of spring with all the birds coming and the bright leaves and the snowdrops pleasant and comfortable, but here, away from the village, it has no meaning. And so with everything. Times and changes are just themselves and nothing more. I see that it is not just the Book of Air that I yearn to read more than one way, but the events of my waking life. I didn’t begin to understand this until Walt was born. Even if Quinlan had never come to the O, I would have wanted more for Walt than this thin scrabble for existence.
If we mean to go north. Those were Dell’s words. We both knew without saying that with nothing left for us at the O but danger we would try to reach the village. There is danger for us there too, I have no doubt of that, but at least Walt will be safe. My neighbours will surely take the child, even if they turn me out. If I am locked away or killed, perhaps they will raise him at the Hall. If we lose our way in the forest and starve or fall into the hands of ruthless men it will be worse.
I think Dell has her own reasons to come that neither of us will put words to. For myself, I am frightened of the village, and frightened of what I must do when I get there, but driven by a desperate hope. My courage might fade when we come near the Hall and within the Mistress’s reach. But we have decided and must take our chances.
Jason
In the dining room, what’s left of last night’s dinner litters the table – the plates stained with gravy, the wilting flowers, the candles shrunk to dried puddles of wax. The chairs are just as we left them, angled away from the table, one tipped over on to the floor.
I sit with my back to the window. Simon is on my lap. He’s wearing my jacket and I hold him close, but he doesn’t stop shivering. I’d take him to the kitchen, but Maud’s in the kitchen with Abigail. The church is still burning. I can taste the fire. The flames light up the mirror above the mantelpiece and animate the pictures.
There are blackberries scattered on the table. I gather the ones within reach and offer them to Simon, but he shuts his mouth tight and shakes his head. He asks for Jangle and I tell him again that Django’s dead.
I hear raised voices in the hall. Deirdre comes in, followed by Aleksy. She asks me what we’re going to do.
‘About what?’
‘What are we going to do about Maud?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I haven’t thought about it.’
‘We must do something.’
Aleksy pulls a chair up to the table. ‘Maud’s young. She’ll get over it.’
Deirdre is exasperated. ‘It’s not about her. It’s about Django. She killed him. We can’t do nothing.’
‘You want we build her a little gaol? We all milk the cows and bring water in for her to sit and get fat? You want to give her ten years maybe? Then for sure she won’t kill no one else.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Just give her a good slapping then. What do you think? You want to do it, or how? You want me and Jason to beat her a little?’
‘You’re really a disgusting human being, Aleksy – you know that?’
Aleksy grins slyly.
Deirdre turns to me. ‘I just think we ought to do something, Jason – to show that it’s important – to show that Django’s life mattered.’
‘You never killed no one, Deedee?’ Aleksy asks her.
‘That was different. That was on the road. That was self-defence.’
‘This was no different.’
‘She gets away with it and who’ll be next?’