Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

‘But all the highest wisdom.’

‘Listen to me Agnes. I have read it every way it can be read. Yes, they told us it was the highest wisdom of the endtime, strained and simmered to its essence, that it was the moment of blessing, the breath of all the dying endtimers brought together into one living breath. But I can find in it only the fever that killed them. They were raving who wrote it, parched with the heat of their own blood. What has been boiled and burned away is any touch of thought and all that’s left is ash. I know all the words. I have them in my heart. I say them over, slow and solemn. I bring them here to the darkness of the wood hoping for their wings to open like moths rising into brightness. I speak them to you, Agnes, calling to the spirit of Jane in you, watching for any answering spark, but nothing comes.’ He stared at the ground and I listened to the noise of his breathing. ‘You saw the pictures, Agnes, as I saw them. The scroungers sit and stare and in the time it takes a villager to plough a field or roast a pig they know more about calling than I’ve learned from all my years with the Book of Windows.’

‘But they can’t do it.’

‘No, they can’t do it, they can’t call and be heard, but they can hear the calling. They can see how the endtimers lived and what they looked like.’

‘But they can’t go when they’re called.’

He looked at me then and said ‘No’ and made such a hollow sound of it that for the moment my own sadness was swept away by his.

‘And now here’s one more thing you’ve tricked out of me,’ he said, ‘one more thing for you to babble about – that Brendan has searched his book to its bottom and found nothing.’

‘What trick? And what if you have found nothing? Why are you afraid? There’s no one to lock the door on you, to hurt you and starve you of water.’

‘You don’t know.’

‘You’re the Reader. You live in the turret at the Hall. The backstairs are yours, and the stables. You come and go as you like.’

‘Because, Agnes. Because of what I know. But what if I know nothing? Less even than the villagers think everyone knows?’

The shadows deepened around him and he seemed hunched under their weight. Tiny creatures crept and scurried between us, voles and stag beetles and ants, every one making its own sound. The air shifted and the slender boughs dipped and straightened. I seemed to hear a single twig and the soft fibres of a single leaf snagging on it. Then the wood was a heaving din as if a door had swung open and let the noise out, every forest creature rooting and nestling.

‘If I say, sir, that I crept naked into your bed when you were sleeping.’

‘No Agnes.’

‘If I say that I made you. That I held a kitchen knife at your neck and said either tell me all the secrets of the Book of Windows or give me a child that can learn them or I’ll slice you like a boiled chicken. And you said one of those I can’t do. And I said which. And you said the secrets are for those who give their lives to book learning. And I said, of the other two then, choose.’

‘No Agnes.’ And he whistled as you would whistle a dog.

‘If I say I put the knife to my own neck and made you do it.’

‘No.’

‘What then?’

But the women were coming out of the shadows. I hadn’t thought that the Reeds answered to the Reader’s whistle.

‘Then you are nothing but a coward, afraid to stand up to the Mistress, afraid to do what even poor stammering Daniel found the courage to do when he claimed Annie, though the child wasn’t his.’

It was only then that I saw Uncle Morton’s limp and the solid shape of Peter under the straggle of leaves. And I felt their hands on me again, hands strong enough to wrestle a ram, to fell a tree with three blows of the axe.

‘You must go back to the red room, Agnes.’

‘Then I shall keep no secrets, not yours nor mine, but shout every secret from my window.’

‘And the villagers will bend to their digging and cover their heads to shut out your noise.’

‘They come to me at night.’

‘Who comes to you?’

‘I know I’m not the first. There was a child you sent to live with the scroungers.’

‘No one comes to you, Agnes.’

‘The child you had with Sarah that my mother helped her have, when your child with my mother was already buried in secret.’

I felt the sting of his hand on my cheek and against my ear, and would have fallen if the men hadn’t held me.

He spoke quietly, spitting the words. ‘There was no child, not with Sarah, not with Janet.’

Whatever I shouted then was caught in the scarf pulled across my face.

They hurt my feet dragging them through the woods. I am bruised with kicking and the force of their hands on me, my nails broken on branches, on doorframes and banisters.

I shall be here now until the baby is born. If the baby lives to be born. If I live to see it. I shall dwindle and sicken until my thoughts wander. When my baby is dead, they’ll let me out. When I’m broken. Like a sparrow searching for the air, hitting the walls until it’s too weak to fly. The daylight will hurt my eyes and every sound will scare me and I shall cower in the cottage like my mother, scratching a pig for company. They know my secrets now. Brendan knows all my secrets. I’ve given them up to him for nothing. Brendan doesn’t love me and never loved me.

All except my book. My book is what Brendan doesn’t know. The book is what no one knows because it’s beyond their guessing.

The ink pot is dry. I’m down to the last scratching. Without ink the book is nothing. If I don’t write and if no one reads, it’s nothing. A dream I must wake up from. Agnes daughter of Janet. This is how I write. This is not a text. What is it then?

Abigail finds me digging. I’m deep in my hole, puddling in murky water, levering up shards of blue-green shale. My life is no bigger than this hole. My mind is as dark.

‘Surely that’s enough.’

Her features are blurred in the bright air. I step sideways, lose my balance and stagger. My shoulder settles softly against the clay wall.

‘Rest, Jason. Drink some water.’

‘I want to get this done.’

‘And you will, but you must take care of yourself. Let me help you up.’

I rub my eyes. Her hand reaches down out of a rainbow of shifting light and I raise a hand to meet it. She steadies herself. Cradling a piece of rock, I hoist myself on to the ladder. Three steps up and I’m able to dump the rock at ground level and pull myself out. I stand clumsily. My boots are heavy with mud.

‘I have to get my strength back.’

‘But you push yourself too hard.’ Letting go of my hand, she pulls a cloth from her belt and wipes my face.

‘Is that blood on your skirt?’

‘I’ve been making jam. Now sit there and don’t move. I’m getting you water.’

I settle on the pile of rock and picture what has to be done – the stone lining, the brick flu, the timber structure – door towards the house, window facing the hills for privacy. Some jackdaws are squabbling outside the kitchen. Then Abigail is back with two cups and a jug of water, cold from the spring.

She asks me when I last saw Simon.

‘I don’t know. Breakfast I suppose.’

We sat around the kitchen table with mugs of nettle tea. Abigail poached eggs, dropping them one at a time loose in a pan of boiling water, while I sliced up a bowl of apples. And we talked about the day. Maud and Deirdre had milked the cows already and let the hens and geese out to scratch and peck on the lawn. I’d done an hour’s digging. Aleksy had been in the top field, hacking weeds. Django? It was anyone’s guess what Django had been up to, but here he was anyway, ready to eat. Abigail had given Simon a wash and dressed him in his long trousers and a woolly jumper and he sat for a bit, kicking the legs of his chair and humming between bites of egg before drifting out to play in the yard.