скачать книгу бесплатно
‘You can trust me, boy. I know a little about binder’s fever. Normally it isn’t so bad, but … you will recover. Slowly, of course.’
‘What?’ I raised my head so suddenly it sent a flash of pain across my temple. There was a name for what was wrong with me? ‘I thought it was just – madness.’
She snorted. ‘You’re not insane, boy. Who told you that? No, it’s an illness like any other. It’s a sort of temporary frenzy.’
An illness, like influenza or scurvy or the flux. How I wanted to believe it. I looked down at the red creases in my wrist. Further up my arm there were two bluish smudges like fingerprints. I swallowed. ‘Binder’s fever? What’s it got to do with binders?’
She hesitated. ‘Only binders get it. That is … not binders, but people who could be binders. When you have the calling … sometimes it goes wrong, in your head. It’s how I knew you’d be a binder, boy – and a good one. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. And now that you’re here, it will pass.’
‘Do all binders get it?’
‘Not all, no.’ A spatter of rain rattled the window. She glanced up, and I followed her gaze; but there was nothing out there, only the grey emptiness of the marshes, and wet veils of fog. ‘One of the greatest binders of all nearly died of it,’ she said. ‘Margaret Pevensie. She was a widow in the Middle Ages, and she bound over twenty books – that was a lot, in those days. A few of them survived. I travelled to Haltby, once, to see them.’ Her eyes came back to me. ‘My old master used to say that the binderbound fever was what made someone an artist, not a mere artisan. I always thought he was teasing me, but if he was right … well, you’ll make a good apprentice.’
I laid my hand over the bruises on my arm, fitting my fingers into the marks. The wind murmured in the thatch and drove another gust of rain against the window-pane, but the house was thick-walled, solid, as old as rock. Binder’s fever, not madness or weakness.
‘I’ll get you some soup.’ She got up, put the reel of thread and the loose folded pages into the pocket of her apron, and lifted the sewing frame.
I craned forwards. ‘Is that …?’
‘Lucian Darnay’s book. Yes. It will be.’
His name was like a hook that snagged my insides and jerked tight. Lucian Darnay, the boy who hated me. The hook sank deeper, tugged harder. ‘What are you making for him?’ Seredith glanced at me, but she didn’t answer. ‘Can I see?’
‘No.’ She strode past me to the door.
I tried to get to my feet, but the room spun. ‘Was it—’
‘Get back into bed.’
‘—him, Seredith, was it – did I get ill again because of him, or – who was he, why did he …?’
‘He won’t come back. He’s gone.’
‘How do you know?’
Her eyes slid away. A timber creaked above, and suddenly the house felt fragile, as if the thick walls were nothing but a dream.
‘I’ll fetch you that soup,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.
For a while after that, Seredith locked herself in the workshop in the afternoons. She didn’t tell me what she was doing, and I didn’t ask: but I knew she was working on Darnay’s book. Sometimes, when I’d finished my chores, I leant against the door, half listening and half dreaming, trying to make sense of what I heard. Most of the time it was silent – a peculiar heavy silence, as if the whole house listened with me, every fibre of wood and plaster tuned to the absence of sound – but now and then there would be banging, or scraping, and once there was the clunk of an overturned pot. As it got colder my joints tingled and ached from standing still for so long, but I couldn’t wrench myself away. I hated the compulsion that held me there, waiting for something I didn’t understand; but it was irresistible, a mixture of curiosity and dread, driven by the nightmares that still haunted me, even now I was getting better.
They were rarer now, and they’d changed – the formless black terrors had sharpened into clear dreams, full of sunlight – but they were just as bad. Ever since that day, the fear had a face: Lucian Darnay’s. I saw him again and again, his fierce eyes, his last look at me before he walked to the half-open door at the end of the workshop. I saw him sit down, straight-backed, in that quiet, bright, terrible room, and a surge of panic went through me – because in my dream it wasn’t him sitting there, it was me.
They were trying to tell me something. I didn’t know what I was frightened of: but whatever it was, it lived in Seredith’s locked room. When I woke and couldn’t get back to sleep I sat by my window, letting the sharp night air dry the clamminess of my skin, and tried to understand; but no matter how much I turned it over in my head, no matter how much I tried to see past the fear, there was nothing except Lucian Darnay, and that half-glimpsed room. Whatever happened in there, it seeped out, setting my teeth on edge, bleeding into my dreams.
I asked Seredith about him one evening when I was scouring a pan and she was making stew. She didn’t look up, but her fingers stumbled and knocked half an onion on to the floor. She bent slowly to pick it up. ‘Try not to think about Lucian Darnay,’ she said.
‘Why won’t you show me his book? All I’m learning is this endless finishing work, I thought I was supposed to …?’ She rinsed the onion and went on chopping it. ‘Seredith! When are you going to—’
‘I’ll teach you more soon,’ she said, pushing past me into the pantry. ‘When you’re well again.’
But day after day passed, until I was nearly as strong as I’d ever been, and she still didn’t tell me.
Autumn changed into winter. In our day-by-day life – the monotonous, meditative routine of work and food and sleep – I lost track of time. The days rolled round like wheels, full of the same chores and the same hours of finishing work, marbling paper, paring leather or gilding the edge of a dummy block. Mostly, my practice-pieces ended up in the old barrel Seredith used as a waste-bin; but even when Seredith stared down at one of the papers and said, without smiling, ‘Keep that one,’ it went into the plan chest and stayed there, out of sight. Nothing ever seemed to get used. I almost stopped wondering when they’d be good enough, or when I’d see a real book; and maybe that was what Seredith wanted. In the still silence of the workshop I concentrated on small things: the weight of the burnisher, the squeak of beeswax under my thumb. One morning I looked out and saw, with a shock, that the reeds were poking through a thin layer of snow. I’d noticed the cold, of course, but in a distant practical way that made me move my work closer to the stove and dig out a pair of fingerless gloves. Now it hit me: I’d passed months here, nearly a quarter of a year. Soon it would be the Turning. I took a deep, chilly breath, wondering how – if – we would celebrate it, alone in the middle of nowhere. It hurt to imagine my family surrounded by evergreens and mistletoe, toasting absent friends in mulled ale … But Seredith hadn’t said anything about letting me go home, and if deep snow fell the roads would be impassable. Not that anyone had come, since Lucian Darnay, except the weekly post. The post-cart still stopped at our door, and the driver scuttled inside to bolt a mug of hot tea before he went on; until one day, a few weeks later, the clouds were so low and the air so ominously stagnant that he shook his head when I invited him inside. He threw a packet of letters and a bag of supplies onto the ground at my feet as quickly as he could before huddling into his nest of blankets. ‘Going to snow again, boy,’ he said. ‘Not sure when I’ll be back. See you in the spring, maybe.’
‘The spring?’
A sharp blue eye glinted at me from the space between his hat and scarf. ‘Your first time out here, isn’t it? Don’t worry. She always makes it through.’
With that he clicked to the shivering horse, and jolted off down our path towards the road. I stood there watching until he was out of sight, in spite of the cold.
If I’d known … I racked my brain to remember what I’d said in my letter to my family – the last one this year … But what would I have added? Wished them a happy Turning, that was all. In a way I was glad that home felt so far away, that I could stand there and feel nothing, as if the freezing air had numbed my mind as well as my fingers.
A fit of trembling seized me, and I went inside.
He was right. It snowed that night, sieving it down in a silent blizzard, and when we woke the road was hardly a ripple in the whiteness. I was meant to light the stove first thing, but that morning when I walked into the workshop Seredith was already awake and at her bench. She was watching a bird hop and flutter outside, leaving neat tracks like letters. A drift of flour from the paste she’d been mixing made it look as if the snow had come through the window.
She’d lit the stove, but I shivered. She looked round. ‘There’s tea ready. Oh, and is there anything you need? I’m writing a list for the next order from Castleford.’
‘The postman said he wouldn’t be back till spring.’ I was so stiff with cold that I nearly spilt the tea when I tried to pour it.
‘Oh, Toller’s a fool. It’s too early for winter. This will thaw in a few days.’ She smiled as I glanced involuntarily at the bank of snow that rose halfway up the far window. ‘Trust me. The real snows won’t be here until after the Turning. There’s enough time to prepare.’
I nodded. That meant I could write another letter home, after all; but what would I say?
‘Go out to the storehouse and take stock.’ I looked at the glittering snowdrifts and a thin chill ran up my back. She added, ‘It’ll be cold,’ with a glint in her eye that was half mockery, half sympathy. ‘Wrap up well.’
It wasn’t too bad when I got down to it. I had to move boxes and sacks and huge jars to see what was there, and after a little while I was panting with exertion and too warm to keep my hat on. I dumped the sack I’d been moving and leant against the side of the doorway to catch my breath. I let my eyes linger on the woodpile, wondering if it would be enough to get us through winter. If it wasn’t, somehow I’d have to find more; but in this wide bare landscape there was no wood to gather or trees to cut down. A cloud had come up to cover the sun, and a breeze whined in my ears like someone sharpening a knife a long way away. It was going to snow again. Surely Seredith was wrong about the thaw.
I should have got back to work. But something caught my eye – something too far away to see clearly, struggling along the faint line of road like an insect stuck in white paint. At last the dark blot grew into the shape of a horse, hock-high in the snow, with a fat hunchbacked speck of a rider. No – two riders, looking as small as children until I realised that the horse was a huge shaggy Shire horse. Two women, the one behind straight-backed, the other sagging in front and slipping sideways at every step. Long before I could see their faces clearly, their voices carried across the snow: a desperate mutter of encouragement, and above that the thin desolate keening I’d thought was the wind.
When they stopped in front of the house, and one woman dismounted awkwardly into the snowdrift, I should have gone to help her. Instead I watched as she struggled, coaxing and tugging and finally heaving the other woman off the horse as if she was a doll. The shrill wailing went on, high, inhuman, only hiccupping and starting again when the women stumbled on their way to the front door. I caught a glimpse of wide glazed eyes and loose tangled hair and lips bitten bloody; then they were huddled in the porch, and the bell jangled off-key.
I turned back to the ordered familiarity of the storeroom; but now there were shadows lurking behind every pile and looking out at me from every jar. Who would drag themselves through this snow, unless they were desperate? Desperate for a binding … Like Lucian Darnay. But what could a book do? What could Seredith do?
In a moment she would open the door to the women. Then she’d take them through the workshop to the locked room …
Before I had time to think I had crossed the little yard and skirted the side of the house so I could slip inside by the back door. I paused in the passageway and listened.
‘Bring her in.’ Seredith’s voice.
‘I’m trying!’ Breathless, a village accent, stronger than mine. ‘I can’t get her to – come on, Milly, please—’
‘Didn’t she want to come? If she doesn’t agree, I can’t—’
‘Oh!’ A brief laugh, sharp with bitterness and fatigue. ‘Oh, she wanted to come, all right. Begged and begged, even in this snow. And then half a mile down the road she went like a rag doll – and she won’t stop this bloody noise—’
‘Very well.’ Seredith said it without heat, but it was enough to cut her off. The wailing went on, sobbing and quavering like a trickle of water. ‘Milly? Come here. Come inside. I can help you. That’s good, now your other foot. Good girl.’
Something about her tone reminded me of when I’d first come here. I turned my head and focused on the wall in front of my face. A thin crust of windblown snow clung to the rough plaster, as intricate and granular as salt crystals.
‘That’s better. That’s good.’ It was like Pa, murmuring to an edgy mare.
‘Thank goodness.’ The woman’s voice cracked. ‘She’s gone mad. You’ll make her better. Please.’
‘If she asks me to. There we go, Milly. I’ve got you now.’
‘She can’t ask – her mind’s gone—’
‘Let go of her.’ A pause, and the keening faded a little. The other woman sniffed. Seredith added, more gently, ‘You’ve done all you can. Let me look after her now.’ I heard the workshop door open, and the three sets of footsteps: Seredith’s familiar tread, the lighter step of the other woman and a dragging, halting shuffle that made my scalp crawl.
The door closed again. I shut my eyes. I could count the time it took them to walk along the worn boards to the locked door, the moment Seredith unhooked her keys and put them to the locks … I thought perhaps I heard it open and shut again, unless it was the knock of my heartbeat in my ears.
Whatever happened behind that door, it was happening now, to the woman who looked like a wounded animal.
I didn’t want to know. I forced myself to go back to the storeroom. I still had work to do. But when I’d hauled the last sack back into place and chalked up the last numbers on the wall, it was as if no time at all had passed. It was nearly sunset, and I’d had nothing to eat or drink all day. I stretched, but even the ache in my shoulders was distant and unimportant.
When I walked into the workshop the room was dim and grey. A fine flurry of snow crackled against the windows.
‘Oh!’
I spun round, catching my breath. The other woman, not the mad one but the tall, straight-backed one who’d brought her … Stupid. Somehow I knew that everyone went in there on their own, alone with the binder. Of course Seredith would have told this woman to wait outside. I was an idiot to have jumped like that.
‘Who are you?’ she said. She was dressed in shapeless blue homespun, and her face was weather-beaten and freckled, but she spoke like I was a servant.
‘The binder’s apprentice.’
She gave me a wary, hostile look, as if she belonged here and I didn’t. Then she sank slowly back on to her seat next to the stove. She’d been drinking from my mug; a thin ribbon of steam rose from it and dispersed in the air.
‘Your … friend,’ I said. ‘Is she still – in there?’
She looked away.
‘Why did you bring her here?’
‘That’s her business.’
No, I wanted to say, no, I don’t mean that, I mean what’s happening to her, why bring her here, what can Seredith do? But I hated the way the woman had turned away, dismissing the question. I sat down, deliberately, and reached for the jar of flour-paste, rummaged in a drawer for a clean brush. I had some endpapers cut and ready to be glued out; I could do that without concentrating, while the room filled with a silent hum from the locked room …
But it wasn’t locked now. If I went and turned the handle the door would open. And I’d see … what?
A gobbet of paste dropped from my brush onto the workbench, as if someone had spat over my shoulder. The woman was pacing, her heels clicking on the floor at every turn. I kept my eyes on my work, on the dirty rag I was using to wipe the paste away.
‘Will she die?’
‘What?’
‘Milly. My friend. I don’t want her to die.’ I could hear how hard she’d tried not to say the words aloud. ‘She doesn’t deserve to die.’
I didn’t look up until I felt her come close to me. The scent of wet wool and old saddles rose from her clothes. If I looked down I could see the hem of her skirt, the old blue linsey stained along the bottom edge with splashes of mud. ‘Please. I heard that sometimes they die.’
‘No.’ But my heart turned over. For all I knew …
‘You liar.’ She swung away, her breath rasping in her throat. ‘I didn’t want to bring her. She was desperate. I said to her, an old witch, why go to the old witch? You know it’s wrong, it’s evil, stay strong, don’t give in. I should never …’ She caught herself, as if she’d realised how loudly she’d spoken, but after a moment she started again. ‘But today she was crazy, I couldn’t hold out any longer. So I brought her to this awful place, and now she’s been in there for …’ Her voice trembled and died.
‘But you said – you asked Seredith to help her …’ I bit my tongue.
But she didn’t seem to hear me, let alone realise that I’d been eavesdropping earlier. ‘I just want her back, my lovely Milly, I just want her to be happy again. Even if she has to sell her soul for it. I don’t care if it’s the devil’s bargain, whatever the old bitch has to do, all right, she can do it! Bring Milly back, that’s all. But if she dies in there …’
The devil’s bargain. Was that what Seredith did? The bitch, the old witch … I tried to lay the coloured paper on top of the white, but I missed. Clumsy hands, stupid trembling hands. Even if she has to sell her soul. But what did that have to do with books, with paper and leather and glue?
The sun came out between two slabs of cloud. I looked up into a pinkish mist of sunlight. It stung my eyes; for a split second I thought I saw an outline, a dark silhouette against the dazzle. Then the sun was gone, and the young man was too. I blinked away reflexive tears, and looked past the after-image to my work. I’d let the paper cockle, and I’d let it dry; when I tried to peel it away it ripped. I ran my thumb over the sticky white scar that ran across the feathered patterning. I had to start again.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’ She strode to the window. When she glanced at me her eyes were in shadow but her voice had a pleading edge. ‘I don’t know what I’m saying. I didn’t mean that. Please don’t be angry. Please don’t tell her – the binder – will you? Please.’
She was afraid. I screwed up my botched endpaper and threw it away. Not just afraid of Seredith, afraid of me too …
I took a deep breath. Cut more papers. Mix more paste. Glue out the pages, lay them down, nip in the press, hang them up to dry … I didn’t know what I was doing, but somehow I carried on. When I came back to myself the room was so dim it was hard to see, and a pile of glued papers were waiting to be put between pressing boards. It was like waking from a dream. There’d been a sound, the door opening.
Seredith’s voice, dry as stone. ‘There’s tea on the stove. Bring it here.’
I froze, but she wasn’t talking to me. She wasn’t looking in my direction, she hadn’t seen me. She was rubbing her eyes; she looked drained, infinitely weary. ‘Hurry,’ she said, and the woman scurried towards her with a spilling teapot and chinking cups.
‘Is she – all right?’
‘Don’t ask foolish questions.’ A moment later she added, ‘In a minute she will be ready to see you. Then you should hurry home, before more snow falls.’
The door closed. A pause. A spray of snowflakes brushed the window like a wing. So much for the thaw. In a while the door would open again. I willed myself not to turn round when it did.
‘Come on, my dear.’ Seredith led the keening girl out into the workshop – only now she was docile, quiet.
And then they were embracing, the other woman laughing with relief, sobbing, ‘Milly,’ over and over again while Seredith slowly, deliberately locked the door behind them.
Alive, then. Sane, then. Nothing terrible had happened. Had it?
‘Thank goodness – oh, look at you, you’re well again – thank you—’
‘Take her home and let her rest. Try not to speak to her of what’s happened.’
‘Of course not – yes – Milly, sweetheart, we’re going home now.’
‘Gytha. Home …’ She pushed the tangled hair away from her forehead. She was still gaunt and grimy but not long ago she’d been beautiful. ‘Yes, I should like to go home.’ There was something empty and fragile in the words, like a cracked glass.
The woman – Gytha – led her into the hallway. ‘Thank you,’ she called again to Seredith, pausing at the door. Without anyone pushing her Milly was inert, her face so calm it looked like a statue’s. I swallowed. That uncanny serenity … It made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. My heart said, wrong, wrong, wrong.
I must have made a noise, because she looked at me. I met her eyes for an instant. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing no one there.
Then they were gone, and the door closed. A second later I heard the front door open and shut. The house sank back into the muffled snow-silence.
