Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

How did they make their paper so smooth and pale, with nothing to snag the nib and suck the ink into puddles, and so much of it, sheet after sheet, each one perfect? Sarah has taught us how to scrape the inner bark from willows and mulberries and dry the long threads from hemp stems, grinding them in the pestle with rushes and leaves of iris. We boil rabbit skins for gum. Stirring all this together in clean spring water, we move our hands and wrists this way and that to catch it evenly in the sieve. We press and roll the pulp and let it dry. And so we make paper. All her life Sarah has done this and knows its secrets as well as anyone in the village. And still how calloused our pages are. Our neatest letters send out tendrils, growing bigger than we meant them.

I would write in this book only for the pleasure of making letters.

The day after our first talk, Brendan sent for me to come from the yard where I was feeding the peelings to the geese. And the next day, from the study. He sent the Mistress, who looked over her glasses at me, and spoke as if I was a child caught sniggering in the schoolroom. The other girls looked at me then, Megan breaking into smiles that were less innocent than they looked, Annie pale and anxious. Roland stared at his hands, thinking perhaps that he was the one who should be sent for, not me. Sarah let go of the page she’d been reading and looked hard into my face as if it would tell her why I was wanted where I had never been wanted before. And the next day another message. And each time I climbed to the turret. Sometimes Brendan had a question, about Roland, or about my mother or about how things went on in the village. Sometimes he wanted nothing but to be brought some nettle tea or a piece of bread. Sometimes he’d have me sit by him and talk about Jane, which I always love to do.

One time, as I came down the big oak staircase, trailing my fingers along the handrail, I found Annie sitting at the turn, hugging the shadows.

She said, ‘Is he kind to you, Agnes?’

‘Kind? Why shouldn’t he be kind?’

‘Is he though?’

I shrugged. ‘He’s kind enough.’

She got up on her knees then and gripped my hand until it hurt. ‘They’re not to be trusted.’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Men. They can’t help themselves.’

I laughed, but only because I felt awkward hearing her say such things. ‘We only talk, Annie.’ I sunk down on my knees beside her. ‘We sit and talk. He asks me about mother sometimes, and about the Book of Air. We talk about calling and how Jane could have heard Rochester from so far away, a day’s journey at least.’

‘Isn’t Sarah’s teaching enough for you?’

I laughed again, because she looked so earnest. ‘Annie,’ I said, ‘we only talk.’ I left her there at the turning of the stairs.

Another day I was sweeping the upper passage and reached the half stairs and there were his boots on the narrow landing and I looked up and there was all of him. And his whole face was a question so deep you’d need a bucket with a long rope to fetch up an answer.

‘You’re here,’ he said.

‘Yes sir.’

‘Before I sent for you.’

‘This is my day to sweep upstairs.’

His strong eye settled on my face. ‘So you didn’t hear me call?’

‘Did you call?’

He peered at me and his weak eye began its dance. ‘Surely, Agnes, a cry vibrated on your startled ear, in your quaking heart, through your spirit?’ He was saying Jane’s words, but making them his own.

‘No sir.’

He smiled and I wondered if he was teasing me. It made me uncomfortable to hear words from the Book of Air so lightly spoken.

That evening as I walked home from the Hall I saw someone standing at the foot of the drive. The gatepost is half buried in ivy and clematis and overhung with oak branches, so I wasn’t sure it was Roland until he reached out towards me and pulled me into the darkness.

He said, ‘What does he want with you?’

‘Nothing. Just to ask me things.’

‘And you do what he asks?’

‘I mean questions. He asks me questions.’

‘All that time alone, reading and thinking, all that time to study the Book of Windows, and he has to send for Agnes to answer his questions?’

‘Only to have someone to talk to. He knows so much more than me. He knows more than anyone.’

‘Does he though?’ The words were little more than breath against my ear. ‘Does he know this?’ Roland kissed me then, and the feel of his lips and his boyish smell were so familiar, and the shape of him so comfortable against me, that I forgot for a moment that we are no longer children to romp in the Hall and snuggle in corners. I would have stayed longer, cushioned in ivy with his mouth against mine if his hands hadn’t gone to work. If they hadn’t known so exactly where I ached. How unfair it seemed to be divided against myself, and Roland risking so little and me so much. I squirmed away from him, catching my skirt and headscarf in branches of blackthorn.

He turned his back and kicked at the undergrowth. ‘I don’t know why you’re so unkind.’

‘You know why,’ I said, pulling the thorny strands from my hair.

‘I know. Brendan has turned your head and made you think you’re too good for the rest of us.’

I looked at him where he stood, proud and angry, hugging himself because I wouldn’t. And I thought, I shall go home and cook supper and write about this is in my book, just as it happened. And I thought, how strange to be here in this exact moment of my life with this boy who likes me, and to be thinking how to hold it in words for no one to read. As if I had taken a step back from this moment to see how it looked, or as if I had wandered outside of myself and had lost my way.

Roland had taken something from his pocket and was fiddling with it.

I asked, ‘What is it?’ I was sorry to be fighting. We’d always been such friends.

He shrugged. ‘Just something I found at the Hall.’

‘Let me see.’ It was a machine something like scissors, the two arms hinged like the handles of scissors. They didn’t cross over, though, and become blades, but met in a tangle of notched wheels, all rusted now.

‘What was it for?’

‘They had metal tins with sealed lids. They used this to cut the lids off.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve found some of the tins. You can see where they’ve been cut.’

‘And how did they put the lids back?’

He looked up at me with amusement, as if I’d asked a stupid question and he was glad of it. ‘They didn’t.’

He took the thing from my hand and walked off into the orchard, and I went home to mother and the pig.

And so the days passed. Roland didn’t visit. We passed on the staircase or in the stable yard. But he kept away from the kitchen. The rain held off and I helped with the haymaking, following behind the men as they swung their mowing hooks, to gather the grass. I chopped wood for the fire, fetched water, worked in the kitchen. When I could, I crossed the hallway to the study and listened to Sarah’s teaching and wrote the texts, with the sweet smell of the mown hay coming in at the window. But in every word spoken to me I heard a question. I had become a mystery. I saw Megan grow more giggly with Roland. Annie would come in looking heavy and sullen and say nothing, or come late, or look ill and ask to leave early. Then she stopped home and it was just the three of us. I thought Annie stayed away because she had no one to talk to.

Then a day came when all the villagers were called to the lawn and the Mistress told us that Annie was going to have a child. I blushed to hear this. I was ashamed for her at first, and then for myself. I thought of all the times she had offered to confide in me and I’d thought only of my own trouble.