The Telling (17 page)

So fast, in a blink, with just a word.

Mr. Moore was up there, his face as still as stone, leaning over his book, his hand raised to support his head, his fingers splayed
in the dark curls of his hair. The ink on his fingertips. Writing. Writing his book.

Monday morning. The vicarage kitchen was white with flour, full of the warm yeasty smell of breadmaking. I had my sleeves rolled and was kneading dough on the deal table, under Mrs. Briggs’s close scrutiny. I knew I would be called to account that day; the Reverend would send for me. My thoughts twisted like a wool-scrap on a twig. I leaned my body into the work, pressed and folded and pressed again the warm fleshy dough. If only I had told the truth when the truth was simple and safe; if only I had told the Reverend about the books when I had yet to see what temptation into error they contained. My arm was haunted by the pressure of his hand; I would almost have thought to see its print upon my bare flesh. My thoughts were haunted by the echoes of his words; they fell into the rhythm of my work. He had denied God, he walked alone in darkness; he needed guidance; he needed the Reverend’s help. But would the Reverend really help a man he had called a viper? And yet, and yet, I kept returning to what he had professed, without hope of redemption or reward:
we must love one another
. Every time I tried to think ahead, I could see my rough hand extended to knock on the library door, I could hear the Reverend’s voice calling me in, I could see the door swinging slowly open, and me moving silently into the room; I could see the books glinting with gold, and the Reverend sitting in his chair, his waistcoat stretched into creases, and I could see his lips parting to form the words of his first question, but after that, nothing: images tumbled into confusion, thoughts would
not come clear. I could not see myself speaking; I could not begin to think what I would say.

It happened, as I knew it must. The bell rang above our heads, making me jump. Mrs. Briggs said, “Scrape that slather off your hands, get washed.”

“Can’t Maggie go?”

“And have her come back straight away saying it’s you they’re wanting? And don’t answer back.”

There were green willow boughs in the hearth: no pretence even that a fire was to be lit. The day was warm and the room full of golden sunlight. He was standing at the open window, basking in the warmth. I had knocked and he had told me to come in: he knew that I was there. I came to a halt in the middle of the carpet. I was conscious of the tick of the library clock, the warm blaze of sunshine on my face, I didn’t know what I would say.

The window gave onto shrubbery-patched lawns, the boundary wall, the fields beyond swept up towards the pale blue sky. The grass was long and heavy-headed; the wind moved it in silky ripples. A breath of outside air came in, sweet, smelling of grass and earth. I found myself thinking of the temple in Lyell’s book, the water at the base of the rocks, the water rising to eat at the temple’s pillars, the water retreating to lap again at the rocks. The lives lived in that duration. The ignorant change and continuity of the material world.

The Reverend turned from the window, and crossed the room to his seat, looking like a crow in his black clothes. He sat down and folded his hands over his stomach.

“Child?”

I bobbed a clumsy little curtsey, and said nothing. My head was like a jar of flies; I didn’t dare open my mouth.

“You were absent from communion on Sunday.”

I forced myself to speak. “I was poorly, Reverend: my mother will have told you.”

“And yet you are well enough to work today.”

“I must work, sir; the money is needed.”

“And you must worship! It is folly to put material needs before the spiritual. Consider the life beyond! Consider the lily of the field, consider the story of Martha, if you will, did she not find that—”

I looked down at my slippered feet pressed into the thick velvety plush of the carpet; my eyes followed the methodical, intricate patterning of red and ivory and green. I didn’t need to hear the story of Martha again. I was waiting for the words to form themselves in my head, words that could explain Mr. Moore and not at the same time condemn him, words that would secure assistance for me in my confusion and yet not harm him further in the Reverend’s sight. I was glad, at least, that the worry of anticipation was over; while the Reverend talked, the clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the moments of the interview, and I was glad of that too, since the longer the Reverend talked, the less I would be required to: he could not keep me there forever.

Mr. Moore had said that there was no such thing as forever. He carried the scent of oak about with him, and that made me think of oak apples that are not fruit at all, but galls, perfectly round and smooth; grown by a little creature out of the flesh of the tree, to be its comfort and retreat. I was thinking of what
Mr. Moore had said, his articles of faith, and that he didn’t care if I never agreed with him. I was thinking of Eve in the garden, expressly forbidden to taste the fruit, and created with all her faults by the same God who caused the tree to grow there, within her easy reach. I felt as though some time ago, I had been handed something exquisite, and dangerous, and prone to harm, and that I had not noticed it, not really, not recognized its true value till that moment.

I raised my eyes and looked at Reverend Wolfenden. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded on the dark bulge of his waistcoat. His mouth was moving, his lips forming the words of the story, but I still didn’t listen, I watched instead the way the flesh of his throat folded over his collar and wobbled as he spoke, and I was thinking, I did a good job on that collar, coming to me all grimed and shiny with dirt, and there it is now, white as the proverbial lily of the field. And the other clothes, the underthings, coming to us sweat-patched and soiled, to be scraped and rubbed and soaked in lye and hung out for the night air to bleach, to make clean enough for a gentleman to wear, though it was a gentleman that dirtied them in the first place. And the chamberpot I whisked out from under his bed every morning, and what swam in it that I tried not to look at and not to catch the smell of as I carried it out to the privy and slopped it down into the pit. Easy to be fresh as the lily, easy to sit there in spotless white linen and tell a story about the sinfulness of letting work distract you from spiritual matters, easy to devote yourself to cleanliness and Godliness when there’s always someone else to do the dirty work, to do your cleaning, to slop out your dung for you.

The sing-song tone of his voice shifted; the story must be ending. I gathered my attention and fixed it on his words.

“Because whatever you may know, it is your duty to inform me. You understand that, don’t you, child, that as your pastor, as the man charged with your spiritual security, you must tell me whatever you know, however slight, that might represent a threat to your wellbeing, your family’s, and that of the wider parish.”

The silence stretched. Reverend Wolfenden looked at me with his pale grey eyes. He said, “Child? On your soul, child. You must tell me what you know.”

“I am at a loss to know, sir, why you are so concerned with Mr. Moore.”

The Reverend’s eyes sharpened. His hands slowly separated; he took hold of the arms of his chair. He did not speak. I watched his eyebrows raise, pushing his forehead into folds.

“I mean, sir, that I am sure you know more than I do. No one tells me anything.”

“What,” Reverend Wolfenden said, “do you actually know?”

I couldn’t tell the Reverend about the box without suggestion of my own laxity: if I had discovered it, why had I not come straight to him with the information? And better, perhaps, that the Reverend believed the box brim-full of gunpowder than packed with books like Lyell’s. But the meetings, they were public; whatever went on there went on openly. Anything I could say about that could be heard from any quarter, should the Reverend but ask.

My mouth was dry. I had to say something. I said what seemed most safe to say. “They have meetings. They exchange books; it is for the education and betterment of the men. They hold debates.”

His pale eyes glittered. He leaned forward.

“What manner of debates?”

“I don’t know, sir. Being a, being a female, women are not allowed, so, I think it must be a great addition to the parish if—”

He waved away my words. We lumbered towards disaster. “What books does he possess?”

There was a moment’s awful silence.

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me narrowly, studying my face. I felt certain he would see my guilt, my knowledge, as immediately as God had known of Eve’s.

“No,” he said. “Perhaps you don’t.”

My heart lifted, exultant. There was silence. I watched him, alert, on my nerves. His grey eyes with their pink tracery of veins, his pale hands, the reddish hair growing on their backs. I blinked, a tiny moment of darkness, and all the while he kept his eyes on me.

“Sir, as I said, I can only tell you what I know, I wouldn’t like to risk a guess on such a grave matter.”

The Reverend rubbed his hands together, palm-on-palm, with a papery kind of sound.

“And who goes to these meetings?”

“I don’t know.”

When he spoke again, it made me flinch: “Of course you know. You live there.”

“It’s just, people come once and never come again. Some come once or twice: but I am always so tired, sometimes I’m half asleep.”

He said, “Tell me who comes.”

His eyes did not leave my face. My mouth was so dry. I felt that we teetered on the brink of something, of some awful precipice.

“One man,” he said. “Tell me the name of one man who comes.”

My eyes slid away from his, across the room towards the mantel, where the clock sat, with its cool china face and prickly gold casing, with its arms spread wide and low like a man driving cattle, and I caught sight of my face in the mirror behind it, the pale oval of my skin and the dark smudges of my eyes, and I got that odd feeling you get when you happen once in a while to see your own image; the way it’s familiar and strange at the same time; an uneasy kind of a feeling, of being caught unawares, of being caught staring.

I looked back towards the Reverend. “Thomas Williams, sir. Thomas Williams of Brunt Hill Cottage.”

Reverend Wolfenden let his eyes fall shut. He nodded. “You may go about your work.”

The kitchen was a hell of baking. I wove my way through the noise and swelter and out into the cool dimness of the hallway. I took off my slippers, levered on my clogs and exchanged my maid’s cap for my shawl. If she noticed, let Mrs. Briggs think this just another of my mysterious errands. Let her just ask Reverend Wolfenden; let her challenge him with the misuse of the maids.

I stole out of the scullery door, around the side of the house, and down the drive. I risked being seen from any of those dark glassy windows, but this was the quickest way to get to him. The gravel crunched underfoot. The willows caught the breeze and whispered to themselves. I walked briskly, head up, as if I had
every right to be walking down the drive on a sunny June morning. My facility for deceit was surprising to me.

I’d got as far as the gate at the far side of the low meadow when I saw him coming up from the beck, a bundle of green willow-wands on his shoulder, his head bent, and when he looked up as he approached the gate, he saw me, and I saw his face change from the closed-off look of animal thoughtlessness, to an expression of concern and uneasy pleasure. I opened the gate for him, then fastened it after, turning and walking at his side, back towards the village, and a soft rain began to fall, wetting the air, wetting the long grass, so my skirt grew heavy with it, and it stood out in droplets on the fibres of his jacket. I drew my shawl over my head and held it pinched at my chin. I searched for words. He seemed content to walk in silence. We came to the brow of the hill, and I knew I would be in sight of the vicarage again in a moment.

“Thomas.”

He stopped. The rain fell onto my face as I looked up at him, catching on my lashes, wetting my skin, so that I could see the drops glittering in the corners of my sight.

“The Reverend might want to talk to you sometime soon.”

“Why d’you say that?”

I felt cool and calm as I said it. “He was asking me about the meetings, and since I don’t know anything about them, I told him to ask you.”

Thomas let the weight fall from his shoulder, set the bundle down on the ground. His face showed his feelings: surprise, pleasure,
uncertainty. Just as I had felt when Mr. Moore had spoken my name, when he’d said that I’d like London, Thomas was unsettled to find that he’d been thought of.

“I never talked to you about what goes on there, Lizzy.”

“I know.”

“You never asked me about it.”

“It didn’t seem my place.”

“You hardly talk to me at all unless you have to.”

“I’m sorry.”

I wiped the rain from my face. He nodded, as if there were some new understanding between us. I looked away, out across the long grass laced with raindrops.

“What do you talk about?”

“There’s plenty that just goes right over my head.”

“Then what makes you keep going back?”

“I want to learn.” He blinked then, and looked away. “Then it won’t go over my head anymore.”

“So you need him. You need Mr. Moore.”

Our eyes met. He didn’t say anything. At the time I took the look in his eyes to be one of assent; I am not so certain now.

“We need him too,” I said, feeling the press of a toe against a too-tight clog, the thin-worn rub of old darning at a heel; with each breath my belly and ribs pushed against the constraint of my stays. My skirts hung heavy with the rain. A raindrop hung blurred on an eyelash. “We need the money he brings in.”

Thomas didn’t reply. Words floated in the silence between us like moths; words that could be said, words of affection, words about money, about its relative scarcity and plenty, and arrangements that could be made to balance this out. Nothing was said.
He let out a breath, and he bent down and picked up his bundle. He shouldered it.