Joe Treasure: The Book of Air

All of which I already knew, though I didn’t say so. You’d learned this stuff from books, but I knew it with my hands – the soft surfaces of brick and stone, the crumbling texture of lime mortar, the invisible ripples of the laths behind the plaster, light everywhere, and the settled shape of things because it was all going to be here forever.

It was early summer and the sheep from the farm next door had been let loose on the lawn. We could hear them nibbling below the bedroom window. Sometimes in the dark they sound like old men hacking over their ciggies in pub doorways. Then the crows start up. Then cats and foxes and God knows what. Give me a police siren any day, or a domestic at chucking out time. Not that sleep was what we’d come for. ‘How about double glazing?’ I said, and you said, ‘You mean so we can enjoy the peace and quiet of the countryside?’ And we both laughed. We had a good time, didn’t we, Caro, even though you’d had the best education taxes could buy and I was just an ignorant capitalist.

We were going to have fun fixing this place up. We were going to raise children here. Five at least, I told you. ‘You’ll get two like everyone else and like it,’ you said, but you laughed as if my idea was appealing in a scandalous kind of way. And I wasn’t joking. I wanted a riot of kids. I wanted them tumbling through the woods, climbing the trees, chasing each other up the backstairs and down the big oak staircase, ransacking the attic. I’d be rioting with them – helping them build their tree houses, organising go-kart races on the lawn. Now look at me, Caro. I can hardly move. I’m done for. Put to bed in the turret. It took all their strength to get me up here, Maud and Abigail, with me stumbling between them. They’ll have to carry me all the way down again when my time’s up. Didn’t think of that, did they? They forgot I wouldn’t be walking, wouldn’t be around to dig my own grave.

I’ve sent word that I’m sick. I’ve waited all morning to be fetched from my bed and made to answer to the Mistress for what I’ve done. I’m not sick but only in need of sleep. I may be sick if this shaking is a sign of sickness. I’m in need of sleep but cannot sleep. I’m not sick. It’s fear that makes me shake, fear that I shall be punished, fear of the Mistress. What if I’m shut out from the Hall for ever and must find other work? What if I’m never to sit in the study again, or ever to see the Book of Air? My biggest fear is that Sarah will not forgive me.

I wait, but still no one comes.

I went last night to the Hall when mother had gone to bed. I waited in the stable yard in the shadow of the outhouse wall, crouching against the damp ivy. After a while the Masons came as I knew they would. They came into the yard with a cart, two riding, two walking, their features blackened and muffled. One of the riders stood up in the cart and tapped the window with a bean stake. The curtain moved and I saw the pale blur of Roland’s face behind the glass. Then nothing, except the snorting of the mare and the stirring of branches, until Roland appeared at the kitchen door. He started at the sight of the Masons, but they covered him at once in a black hood and bound his arms. Then they hoisted him up and slung him on the cart like a side of pork, throwing some sacking over him.

If I had turned to the wall and waited for them to go, if I had turned away and they had found me there, I might have suffered only a sharp word. I should have said I was there to save the chickens from the fox. Why not? I might have remembered the chickens scratching in the yard, or the axe left outside to rust in the dew. I might have been restless, called from sleep by the wind, a small slip not worth a flogging. There’s no harm in walking out at night for a purpose. When we hear that scroungers have been seen in the village, mother has me stay out with her sometimes to watch the vegetables and beat pans to scare them off.

I didn’t turn to the wall. I watched. And when the Masons left I followed.

I know who the Masons are when they are not Masons, as I knew the old women under their veils when they came for me. We all do, though we never say so. Three of these Masons I knew for certain. Peter who sees to the tanning and is as broad as a tree. Tal, fencer and cottage fixer, narrow and clever with his hands. The third, Uncle Morton, Annie’s father, who I never see but I feel a shadow fall across my heart, though the worst I know of him is a scowl and an angry word. He grew up fatherless like me, and helped raise my mother who was four years younger, so I should think better of him, but cannot. Morton’s limp would show from any distance. It could be black as the pit and you would hear the uneven clop of his feet.

But there was one I didn’t know.

They turned out of the yard by the orchard and set off along the moorland road. They made slow progress, and the cart made enough noise creaking over the rutted track that I was able to straggle behind, keeping near the hedge, shadowed by hawthorn and dogwood. I followed to the uplands where the sheep graze. After a while the ground fell away and they reached a river bank where they drew aside into the grass.

A strange island had grown in the middle of the water. It might have been a shed for a single cow but made all of hazel wands and with walls of woven cloth. It twisted in the current and I saw that it was tethered upstream, one rope to each bank, and sat on the water like a boat. Not like a boat in shape, but like the bed the Mistress sleeps in, which is its own room hung with curtains to keep out winter draughts. A bed then such as Jane might have known, only that its frame was not carved and jointed like furniture from the endtime but crudely twined together, and not in an upstairs chamber of the Hall but out here among the summer grazing where no bed should be, bobbing strangely on the flood.

The mare sneezed and lowered her head to eat. The Masons were in the water, with Roland, unhooded now and naked to the sky, riding like a corpse on their shoulders. They were up to their waists before they reached the middle and moved unsteadily, feeling their way. Pulling the curtain back they lay him on the bed and covered him with a quilt. The bed rocked on the water, and upstream the rushes swayed where the ropes cut through. They murmured to him then, songs we use to put babies to sleep, chants to fend off scroungers. They drew the curtain around him and waded back to dry themselves at the cart, leaving Roland to sleep, if sleep was possible. I thought I heard him snoring, but it might have been the water rushing between us. I slept, cold as I was with only the bracken to warm me.

I had a dream of flying and my book that I write in now was on my shoulders. The blank pages fluttered like wings. There was a blaze of cowslips and poppies on the ground and I flew down towards them.

I woke and it was deepest night. A slip of moon showed between clouds. Its light touched the branches of Roland’s bed where they were stripped of bark, and came to me over the water.

I closed my eyes and found my dream again. But the book was now a weight that pushed me down towards the meadow, and what had been flowers was a lake of fire. When I was about to fall, I woke with a start and saw a flame above the water and an answering flame below it, and between them the narrow shape of Tal wading from the bank. The flame was the torch he carried, a clutch of branches dipped in tallow. He pushed on towards Roland, steadying himself in the air with his free arm.

I thought it was a mistake when his torch dipped and the corner of the curtain was suddenly alight. I opened my mouth to cry out, to warn Roland, to call Tal by name, though he was black-faced and muffled as a Mason and his name lost to him. But there was a strong hand on my mouth and the warm breath of a stranger at my ear and my body was pressed to the ground with a man’s weight. I watched the curtains flare into bright colour, and then the frame itself, a winter tree bursting in an instant into blossom. And the stink was of apple logs burning on a winter fire.