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‘No. The younger one, Sherwood. I had him at my titties, sucking away, and I thought: it’s a sickness to take pleasure in this, but Lord, you know that made it all the more pleasurable? And I began to think, when the child had gone, what else would give me pleasure? What’s the worst I could do?’
‘And?’
‘My mind fairly began to spin at the possibilities,’ she said with a smile. ‘It really did. If we’re not going to be forgiven, why try to be something I’m not?’ She was staring hard into his face. ‘Why should I waste my breath hoping for something we’ll never have?’
Jacob pulled his face from her hands. ‘You won’t tempt me,’ he said. ‘So stop wasting your time. I have my plans laid—’
The book’s burned,’ Rosa snapped.
‘I’ll make another.’
‘And if that burns?’
‘Another! And another! I’ll be the stronger for this loss.’
‘Oh, so will I,’ Rosa said, her features draining of warmth, so that her beauty seemed, for all its perfection, almost cadaverous. ‘I will be a different woman from now on. I will have pleasure whenever I can take it, by whatever means amuse me. And if someone or something gets a child upon me I’ll fetch it out of m’self with a sharpened stick.’ This notion pleased her. Laughing raucously, she turned her back on Jacob, and spat into the ashes. There’s for your book,’ she said. She spat again. ‘And there’s for forgiveness.’ Again she spat. ‘And there’s for God. He’ll have nothing more from me.’
She said no more. Without looking to see what effect she’d had upon her companion (she would have been disappointed; he was stony-faced), she strode out. Only when she’d gone did Jacob let himself weep. Manly tears; the tears of a commander before a broken army or a father at his son’s grave. He didn’t simply grieve for the book – though that added to the sum – but for himself. After this, he would be alone. Rosa – his once beloved Rosa, with whom he’d shared his most cherished ambitions – would go her hedonistic way, and he would take his own road, with his knife and his pen and a new journal full of empty pages. Oh, that would be hard after so many years together, and the work before him still so monumental and the sky so wide.
Then an unbidden thought: why not kill her? There would be satisfaction in that right now, no question about it. A quick slice across her pulsing throat and down she’d go, like a felled cow. He’d comfort her in her final moments; tell her how much he had loved her, in his way; how he would dedicate his labours to her until they were finished. Every nest he rifled, every burrow he purified, he would say: this is for you, my Rosa; and this; and this, until his hands, bloodied and yolked, had finished with their weary work.
He pulled his knife from his belt, already imagining the sound of its swoop across her neck; the hiss of her breath from her throat, the fizz of her blood. Then he went after her, back towards the Courtroom.
She was waiting for him; turned to face him with her pet ropes – what she liked to call her rosaries – cavorting around her arms like vipers. One leapt as he approached her, finding his wrist with the speed of her will, and catching it so tight he gasped at the sensation.
‘How dare you?’ she said. A second rope leapt from her hand, and wrapping itself around his neck caught hold of his knife-hand from behind him. She flicked her eye and it pulled tight, wrenching the blade back towards his face. ‘You would have murdered me.’
‘I would have tried.’
‘I’m no use to you as a womb, so I may as well be crow-bait, is that it?’
‘No. I just…I wanted to simplify things.’
‘That’s a fresh excuse,’ she said, almost admiringly. ‘Which eye is it to be?’
‘What?’
‘I’m going to puncture one of your eyes, Jacob. With this little knife of yours—’ She willed the ropes to tighten. They creaked a little. ‘Which is it to be?’
‘If you harm me, it’ll be war between us.’
‘And war’s for men, so I would lose? Is that the inference?’
‘You know you would.’
‘I don’t know a thing about myself, Jacob, any more than you do. I learned it all watching women do as women do. Perhaps I’d be a very fine soldier. Perhaps we’d have such a war, you and me, that it would be like love, only bloodier.’ She cocked her head. ‘Which eye is it to be?’
‘Neither,’ Jacob said, a tremor in his voice now. ‘I need both my eyes, Rosa, to do my work. Put one of them out and you may as well take my life with it.’
‘I want recompense!’ she said, through her perfect teeth. I want you to suffer for what you just tried to do.’
‘Anything but an eye.’
‘Anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unbutton yourself.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Unbutton yourself.’
‘No, Rosa.’
‘I want one of your balls, Jacob. It’s that or an eye. Make up your mind.’
‘Stop this,’ he said softly.
‘Am I supposed to melt now?’ she replied. ‘Get weak with compassion?’ She shook her head. ‘Unbutton yourself,’ she said.
His free hand went to his groin.
‘You can do it yourself, if that’ll make you feel any better. Well? Would it?’
He nodded. She let the ropes about his wrist relax a little.
‘I won’t even watch,’ she said. ‘How’s that? Then if you lose your courage for a bit nobody’s going to know but you.’
The ropes loosed his hand completely now. They returned to Rosa and looped themselves around her neck.
‘Go to it.’
‘Rosa…?’
‘Jacob?’
‘If I do this—?’
‘Yes.’
‘—you’ll never talk about it to anybody?’
Talk about what?’
‘That I’m not…complete.’
Rosa shrugged. ‘Who’d care?’ she said.
‘Just agree.’
‘I agree.’ She turned her back on him. ‘Make it the left,’ she said. ‘It hangs a little lower, so it’s probably the riper of the two.’
He stood in the passageway when she’d gone and felt the heft of the knife in his hand. He had commissioned it in Damascus, a year after the death of Thomas Simeon, and had used it innumerable times since. Though there had been nothing supernatural about its maker, some authority had been conferred upon it over the years, for it grew sharper, he thought, with every breath it took. He would be able to scoop out what the bitch demanded without much trouble; and after all, what did he care? He had no use for what he now cupped in his palm. Two eggs in a nest of skin; that’s all they were. He put the tip of the blade to his flesh, and drew a deep breath. In the Courtroom, down the passageway, Rosa was singing one of her wretched lullabies. He waited for a high note, then cut.
V (#ulink_822bb63d-253a-5147-830a-3e6969d81e51)
Will didn’t attempt a short cut back to the Courthouse, but took the road down to the village. At the intersection there was a telephone box, and he thought: I should say goodbye to Frannie. It wasn’t so much for friendship’s sake as for the pleasure of the boast. To be able to say: I’m going; just as I said I would; I’m going away forever.
He stepped into the box, fumbled for some change, then fumbled again (his fingers chilled, even through his gloves) to find the Cunninghams’ number in the out-of-date directory. It was there. He dialled, prepared to disguise his voice if Frannie’s father came on the line. Her mother answered, however, and with a hint of frostiness brought her daughter to the phone. Will got straight to the point: swore Frannie to secrecy then told her he was leaving.
‘With them?’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
He told her it was none of her business. He was simply going away.
‘Well I’ve got something that belongs to Steep,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ she countered.
‘All right,’ Will said. ‘Yes, I’m going with them.’ There was no doubt in his feverish head that this was so. ‘Now…what have you got?’
‘You mustn’t say anything. I don’t want them coming looking.’
They won’t.’
She paused a moment. Then she said: ‘Sherwood found a book. I think it belongs to Steep.’
‘Is that alt?’ he said. A book; who cared about a book? But he supposed she needed some memento of this adventure, however petty.
‘It’s not just any book,’ she insisted. ‘It’s—’
But Will had already finished with the conversation. ‘I have to go,’ he said.
‘Wait, Will—’
‘I haven’t got time. ‘Bye, Frannie. Say ‘bye to Sherwood, will you?’
He put the receiver down, feeling thoroughly pleased with himself. Then he left the relative comfort of the telephone box, and set out on the track to Bartholomeus’ Courthouse.
The fallen snow had frozen, and formed a glittering skin on the road ahead, upon which a new layer of snow was being deposited as the storm intensified. Its beauty was his to appreciate, and his alone. The people of Burnt Yarley were at home tonight, beside their fires, their cattle gathered into sheds and byres, their chickens fed and locked up in their coops for the night.
The mounting blizzard soon turned the scene ahead of him into a white blur, but he had sufficient wits about him to watch for the place in the hedge where he’d previously gained access to the field, and, spotting it, dug his way through. The Courthouse was not visible, of course, but he knew that if he trudged directly across the meadow he’d reach its steps in due course. It was harder going than the road, and his body, for all his determination, was showing signs of surrender. His limbs felt jittery, and the urge to sink down in the snow for a while and rest grew stronger with every step. But he saw the Courthouse now, coming out of the blizzard. Jubilant, he wiped the snow from his numbed face, so that the blaze in him – in his eyes, in his skin – would be readily seen. Then he started up the steps. Only when he reached the top did he realize that Jacob was in the doorway, silhouetted against a fire burning in the vestibule. This was not a piffling blaze like the one Will had fed: it was a bonfire. And he did not doubt for a moment it had living fuel. He could not see what, exactly, nor did he much care. It was his idol he wanted to see, and be seen by. More than seen, embraced. But Jacob did not move, and a terror came upon Will that he’d misunderstood everything; that he was no more wanted here than at the house he’d left. He stopped one step short of the top, and waited for judgment. It did not come. He was not even certain Jacob had even seen him.
And then, out of the shadowed face, a soft, raw voice.
‘I came out here without even knowing why. Now I see.’
Will dared a syllable. ‘Me?’
Jacob nodded. ‘I was looking for you,’ he said, and opened his arms.
Will would have gone into them happily, but his body was too weak to get him there. As he climbed the final step he stumbled, his outstretched hands moving too slowly to protect his head from striking the cold stone. He heard Jacob let out a little shout as he fell, then the sound of the man’s boots crunching on the frost as he came to help.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
Will thought he answered, but he wasn’t certain. He felt Steep’s arms beneath him, however, lifting him up, and the warmth of the man’s breath on his frozen face. I’m home, he thought; and passed out.
VI (#ulink_6ab89ac5-c384-5b83-abf0-15e1b4ecebe7)
i
Thursday’s evening meal in the Cunningham house was in winter a hearty lamb stew, mashed potatoes and buttered carrots, preceded always by the prayer that the family recited before every meal: ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ There was very little talk around the table tonight, but that was not unusual: George Cunningham was a great believer in things having their proper time and place. The dinner table was for dining, not for talking. There was only one exchange of any length, which took place when George, observing Frannie toying with her food, told her sharply to eat up.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ Frannie replied.
‘Are you sickening for something?’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised after yesterday.’
‘George,’ his wife said, casting a fretful glance at Sherwood, who was also not showing much of an appetite.
‘Well look at the pair of you,’ George said, his tone warming. ‘You look like a pair of drowned pups, you do.’ He patted his daughter’s hand. ‘A mistake’s a mistake, and you made one, but that’s the end of it as far as your Mum and I are concerned. As long as you learned your lesson. Now you eat up. And give your Dad a smile.’ Frannie tried. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ her father chuckled. ‘Well, you’ll brighten up after a good night’s sleep. Have you got a lot of homework?’
‘A bit.’
‘You go up and do it, then. Your Mum and Sherwood’ll take care of the dishes.’
Grateful to be away from the table, Frannie took herself upstairs, fully intending to prepare for the history test that was looming, but the book before her was as incomprehensible as Jacob’s journal, and a good deal less intriguing. At last she gave up on the life of Anne Boleyn, and guiltily pulled the journal out of its hiding place to puzzle over it afresh. She had scarcely opened it, however, when she heard the telephone ring and her mother, having talked for a few moments, called her to the landing. She slid the journal out of sight beneath her study books and went to the top of the stairs.
‘It’s Will’s father on the phone,’ her mother said.
‘What does he want?’ Frannie said, knowing full well.
‘Will’s disappeared,’ her mother said. ‘Do you know where he might have gone?’
Frannie gave herself a few moments to think it over. While she did so she heard the gale bringing snow against the landing window, and thought of Will out there somewhere, in the freezing cold. She knew exactly where he’d go, of course, but she’d made a promise to him, and intended to keep it.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘He didn’t say where he was when he telephoned?’ her mother asked.
‘No,’ she said, without hesitation.
This news was duly communicated to Will’s father, and Frannie took herself back to her bedroom. But she could no longer concentrate on study, legitimate or no. Her thoughts returned over and over again to Will, who had made her a co-conspirator in his escape plans. If any harm came to him she would be in some measure responsible; or at least she’d feel that way, which would amount to the same thing. The temptation to confess what little she knew, and be relieved of its weight, was almost overwhelming. But a promise was a promise. Will had made his decision: he wanted to be out in the world somewhere, far from here, and wasn’t there a part of her that envied him the ease of his going? She would never have that ease, she knew, as long as Sherwood was alive. When her parents were old or dead, he would need someone to watch over him, and – just as she had promised him – that someone would have to be her.
She went to the window and cleared a place on the fogged glass with the heel of her hand. Snow blazed through the light from the streetlamp, like flakes of white fire, driven by the wind that whined in the telephone wires and rattled around the eaves. She’d heard her father say fully a month before that the farmers at The Plough were warning that the winter would be cruel. Tonight was the first proof of their prophecies. Not the cleverest time to run away, she thought, but the deed was done. Will was out there in the blizzard somewhere. He’d made his choice. She only hoped the consequences weren’t fatal.
ii
