Читать книгу The Binding - Bridget Collins, Бриджет Коллинз - Страница 13

The house was so quiet it was as if the walls were holding their breath. Every few hours, during that day and the days that followed, I had to go outside and listen to the dry wind in the reeds, just to be sure that I hadn’t gone deaf. I went and got a spare pane of glass from the storeroom to fix the broken window, but as I was fitting it I found myself putting down my tools with unnecessary vehemence, tapping on the glass harder than I needed to. I was lucky not to break it. And when I sat at Seredith’s bedside I coughed and fidgeted and picked at the paring callus on my forefinger. But no sound I could make was enough to break the silence.

At first I was afraid. But nothing changed: Seredith didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse. She slept for hours, at first, but one morning when I tapped on her door she was awake. I’d brought her an apple and a cup of honeyed tea, and she thanked me and bent over the cup to breathe in the steam. She’d slept with the curtains open – or rather, I hadn’t closed them for her the night before – and the sky was full of grey-bellied clouds being torn apart by the wind. Here and there the sun flashed through. I heard her sigh. ‘Go away, Emmett.’

I turned. Her face was damp, but the bright flush had left her cheeks and she looked better. ‘I mean it. Go and do something useful.’

I hesitated. Now that she was awake, part of me wanted to ask her questions – all the questions that had been brewing since the first time I walked through the bindery door; now that she had no reason not to tell me … But something inside me baulked at the idea of so many answers. I didn’t want to know; knowing would make it all real. All I said was, ‘Are you sure?’

She lay back down without answering. After a long time she dredged up another heavy breath and said, ‘Don’t you have better things to do? I can’t bear being watched.’

It might have stung, but somehow it didn’t. I nodded, although her eyes were closed, and went out into the passage with a sense of relief.

I was determined not to think, so I set myself to work. When I collapsed on the lowest stair in the hall and looked at the clock, I saw that I’d been at it for hours: cleaning and filling the lamps, scrubbing the floor and wiping out the kitchen cupboards with vinegar, sweeping the hall and sprinkling the floor with lavender water, polishing the banister with beeswax … They were jobs that my mother would have done, at home, or Alta; I’d have rolled my eyes and trod unconcerned footprints across their clean floors. Now my shirt clung to my back and I smelt rank and peppery with sweat, but I looked round and was glad to see the difference I’d made. I’d thought that I was doing it for Seredith, but suddenly I knew I’d been doing it for myself. With Seredith ill, this was no one’s house but mine.

I got to my feet. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the morning, but I wasn’t hungry. I stood for a long time with one foot on the stair above, as if there was a decision to be made: but something made me turn again and go into the passage that led to the workshop. The door was closed and when I opened it there was a blaze of daylight.

I stoked the stove extravagantly because I’d chopped the wood myself, and no one could see me wasting it. Then I tidied methodically from one side of the room to the other, straightening shelves, sharpening tools, oiling the nipping press and sweeping up. I tidied cupboards and discovered old supplies of leather and cloth I hadn’t known we had, and a stash of marbled paper at the bottom of the plan chest. I found a bone folder carved with faint scrimshaw flowers, a book of silver leaf, a burnisher with a thick, umber-streaked agate … Seredith was tidy, but it was as if she’d never thrown anything away. In one cupboard I found a wooden box full of trinkets, wrapped in old silk as if they were important: a child’s bonnet, a lock of hair, a daguerreotype mounted in a watch case, a heavy silver ring that I tilted back and forth in my palm for a long time, watching the colours slide from blue to purple and green. I put that box back carefully, pushing it behind a pile of weights, and once it was out of sight I forgot it almost at once. There was a box of type that needed sorting, and jars of dye so old they needed to be poured away, and little dry nubs of sponge that needed washing. It all gave me pleasure – an unfamiliar sensuous pleasure, where everything – the neatness of a blade, the wind in the chimney, the yeasty smell of stale paste, the logs collapsing into ash in the stove – was distinct and magnified.

But this time, when I’d finished, what I felt wasn’t satisfaction but fear, as if I had been preparing for an ordeal.

When I’d taken Seredith’s dirty clothes away, her keys had been in the pocket of her trousers. Now they were in mine. Not the key that she wore round her neck, but the keys to the other doors, the front and back of the house, and the triple-locked doors at the end of the workshop … Their weight in my pocket felt like part of my body. The sense of possession I’d had blurred into something else.

I looked out at the expanse of marsh. The wind had died and now the clouds were massed in a thick grey bank, while the glints of water lay still as a mirror. Nothing stirred; it could have been a picture painted on the window-pane. Dead weather. What would they be doing at home? It was slaughtering time, unless Pa had started early; and there were repairs to be made, tools and tack and a back wall of the barn that needed seeing to … If we were going to run a hawthorn fence across the top of the high field, as I’d suggested last year, we would need to plant it soon. My nerves tingled at the memory of sharp thorns jabbing into cold fingers. For an instant I thought I could smell turpentine and camphor, the balm Ma made to ward off chilblains; but when I lifted my hand to my nose my palm smelt of dust and beeswax. I’d sloughed that life off like a skin.

I raised my head and listened. There was no sound from anywhere. The whole house was waiting. I took the bundle of keys out of my pocket, and walked round the lay press and along the worn floorboards to the far door. My heart thudded but the three keys went into the three locks and turned cleanly, one by one.

Seredith had kept the hinges well oiled. The door swung back as easily as if someone had opened it from the other side. I don’t know why I had expected it to be stiff. My pulse sped into a sudden crescendo that sent black specks whirling across my eyes; but after a few seconds my vision cleared and I could see a pale, bare room, with high uncurtained windows like the workshop. A table of scrubbed wood, with two chairs facing each other across it. The floor and walls were bare. I put the keys down on the table and the sound of it startled me.

I had no right to be here. But I had to be. I stood still, resisting the crawling sensation at the base of my spine.

Against the mottled grey of the windows the binder’s chair stood out in silhouette. It was straight-backed and simple – less comfortable than the one nearest to the door – but somehow I knew it was Seredith’s chair. I drew the other one out from the table, hearing the legs bump as I dragged it over the uneven floor, and sat down. How many people had waited here to have their memories taken away? Enough to wear a path into the floorboards, coming and going …

How did it feel? I could imagine the sick fear in the pit of your stomach, the terror that flickered when you tried to see past the point of no return, to the person you would be … But the moment itself? To have something wrenched out of the deepest part of you – how did that feel? And afterwards, when you had a hole inside you … I saw again the blankness in Milly’s eyes as she left, and clenched my jaw. Which was worse? To feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered? Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point? And yet that numbness would take part of your self away, it would be like having pins-and-needles in your soul …

I took a deep breath. It was too easy to imagine sitting here, in this seat; I ought to put myself in Seredith’s chair. What would it be like to be her? To look into someone’s eyes and then do – that – to them? The thought of it made me feel sick, too. Whichever way you looked at it … Seredith had called it helping. But how could that be right?

I stood up, caught my ankle on the side of the table, and steadied myself on the back of the chair. The carving cut into my palm, not hard enough to hurt but enough to take me by surprise. I looked down at the shape of it, the gleam of bluish light on the wooden scroll.

So many times it had been the light catching on something that brought on the illness. The latticed sun falling on the hall floor, the slant of daylight seen through a half-open door … I knew how it began, the bright shape – not quite a memory – that fitted like a key into a hole in my mind, and the sickness that spilt out. And now I felt the same shock of recognition and fear. I cringed instinctively, waiting for the blackness to swallow me. It would be the end, the abyss. Now that I was here, in the place I was most afraid of … the source, the heart.

My knees gave way. I dropped into the chair, bracing myself as if for a crash. But my mind stayed steady. A beam creaked, a mouse scratched in the thatch above the window. The darkness rolled and sucked like a tide, at arm’s length; and then, instead of drowning me, it receded.

I held my breath. Nothing happened. The darkness drew back and back, until I felt exposed, drenched in grey daylight until my eyes watered.

Time passed. I looked down at my hands on the scrubbed table. When I’d left home, they’d been dead white and spidery. Now there was a callous on my left forefinger from paring leather with a knife that was too blunt, and my left thumbnail was long so that I could position a finishing tool without burning myself. But it was the shape of them – thin but not bony, strong but not bulky – that made me see them for the first time. They weren’t a farmer’s hands – not like Pa’s – but they weren’t an invalid’s hands, either. I would have known that they were a bookbinder’s hands; and not just because they were mine.

I turned them over and looked at the lines on my palms that were supposed to tell me who I was. Someone – was it Alta? – had once told me that your left hand showed the fate you were born with, and your right showed the fate you made for yourself. My right hand had a deep, long line down the centre, cutting my whole palm in half. I imagined another Emmett, the Emmett who might have taken over the farm, the way my parents always planned: an Emmett who hadn’t got ill, and hadn’t ended up here, alone. I saw him look back at me with a grin, pushing his chilblained hands into his pockets, and then turn towards home, whistling.

I bowed my head and waited for the sudden sadness to pass; but it didn’t. Something gave way inside me, and I started to cry.

At first it was as involuntary as being sick: great paroxysms like retching, each spasm driven by an unpitying reflex that made me gasp and sob for air. But slowly the urgency eased, and I had the time to catch a lungful of air between sobs; and then at last I wiped the wetness and snot off my face, and opened my eyes. The sense of loss was still sharp enough to make the tears rise again, but I blinked them away and this time I managed to master my breath.

When I raised my head the world was empty, clear, like a cut field. I could see for miles, I could see where I was. There’d been shadows at the corners of my vision for so long I’d grown used to them, but now they had gone. This quiet room wasn’t terrible, it was only a room; the chairs where two people could sit opposite each other were only chairs.

I paused for a moment, testing the place where the fear had been, as though I was checking a rotten tooth with my tongue. Nothing – or no, maybe a sharp faint echo of pain: not the dull ache of decay but something cleaner, like a gap that was already healing. There was a scent in the air like earth after rainfall, as if everything had been freshly remade.

I picked up the keys and left without locking the door behind me.

I was ravenous. I found myself in the pantry, gorging on pickles out of a jar – and then, sated, I was so exhausted I couldn’t see straight. I’d meant to take a bowl of soup up to Seredith, but I fell asleep at the kitchen table with my head on my arms. When I woke up the range had gone out and it was nearly dark. I lit it again – covering myself and the clean floor with ash – and then hurriedly warmed the soup and carried it up to Seredith’s room. The bowl was only slightly hotter than tepid, but no doubt she’d be asleep anyway. I pushed the door open with my foot and peered round.

She was awake, and sitting up. The lamp was lit, and a glass bowl of water was perched in front of it to focus the light on a shirt she was patching. She looked up at me and smiled. ‘You look better, Emmett.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes.’ She peered at me and her face changed. Her fingers grew still, and after a moment she put the shirt down. ‘Sit.’

I put the tray on the table next to her bed and drew the chair up beside her. She reached out and pushed my jaw with one finger, tilting my face towards the lamplight. It wasn’t the first time she’d touched me – she’d often corrected my grip, or leant close to me to show me how something should be done – but this time I felt it tingling on my skin.

She said, ‘You’ve made your peace with it.’

I looked up, into her eyes. She nodded to herself. Then, with a long sigh, she sat back against her pillows. ‘Good lad,’ she said. ‘I knew you would, sooner or later. How does it feel?’

I didn’t answer. It was too fragile; if I talked about it, even to her, it might break.

She smiled at the ceiling, and then slid her eyes sideways to include me. ‘I’m glad. You suffered worse than most, with the fever. No more of that for you. Oh’ – she shrugged, as if I’d spoken – ‘yes, other things, it won’t ever be easy, there’ll always be a part of you missing, but no more nightmares, no more terrors.’ She stopped. Her breath was shallow. Her pulse fluttered in the skin above her temple.

‘I don’t know anything,’ I said. It took an effort to say it. ‘How can I be a binder when I don’t even know how it works—’

‘Not now. Not now, or it’ll turn into a deathbed binding.’ She laughed, with a noise like a gulp. ‘But when I’m well again I’ll teach you, lad. The binding itself will come naturally, but you’ll need to learn the rest …’ Her voice tailed off into a cough. I poured a glass of water and offered it to her, but she waved it away without looking. ‘Once the snows have gone we’ll visit a friend in Littlewater. She was my …’ She hesitated, although it might only have been to catch her breath. ‘My master’s last apprentice, after I left him … She lives in the village with her family, now. She’s a good binder. A midwife, too,’ she added. ‘Binding and doctoring always used to go together. Easing the pain, easing people into life and out of it.’

I swallowed; but I’d seen animals being born and dying too many times to be a coward about it now.

‘You’ll be good at it, boy. Just remember why we do it, and you’ll be all right.’ She gave me a glinting sideways look. ‘Binding – our kind of binding – has to be done, sometimes. No matter what people say.’

‘Seredith, the night the men came to burn the bindery …’ The words came with an effort. ‘They were afraid of you. Of us.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Seredith, they thought – the storm … that I’d summoned it. They called you a witch, and—’

She laughed again. It set her off coughing until she had to grasp the side of the bed. ‘If we could do everything they say we can do,’ she said, ‘I’d be sleeping in silk and cloth-of-gold.’

‘But – it almost felt like—’

‘Don’t be absurd.’ She inhaled, hoarsely. ‘We’ve been called witches since the beginning of time. Word-cunning, they used to call it – of a piece with invoking demons … We were burned for it, too. The Crusade wasn’t new, we’ve always been scapegoats. Well, knowledge is always a kind of magic, I suppose. But – no. You’re a binder, nothing more nor less. You’re certainly not responsible for the weather.’ The last few words were thin and breathless. ‘No more, now.’

I nodded, biting back another question. When she was well I could ask whatever I wanted. She smiled at me and closed her eyes, and I thought she’d fallen asleep. But when I started to rise she gestured at me, pointing at the chair. I settled myself again, and after a while I felt my body loosen, as if the silence was undoing knots I hadn’t known were there. The fire had nearly gone out; ash had grown over the embers like moss. I ought to tend to it, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. I moved my fingers through the focused ellipse of lamplight, letting it sit above my knuckle like a ring. When I sat back it shone on the patchwork quilt, picking out the curl of a printed fern. I imagined Seredith sewing the quilt, building it block by block through a long winter. I could see her, sitting near the fire, frowning as she bit off the end of a thread; but in my mind she dissolved into someone else, Ma or Alta or all of them, a woman who was young and old all at once …

The bell jangled. I struggled to my feet, my head spinning. I’d been drowsing. For a while, on the edge of wakefulness, I’d heard the noise of wheels and a horse, trundling down the road towards the house; but it was only now that I made sense of it. It was dark outside, and my reflection stared back at me from the window, ghostly and bewildered. The bell jangled again, and from the porch below I heard an irritable voice muttering. There was a glimmer of light from a lantern.

I glanced at Seredith, but she was asleep. The bell rang, for longer this time, a ragged angry peal as if they’d tugged too hard at the rope. Seredith’s face twitched and the rhythm of her breathing changed.

I hurried out of the room and down the stairs. The bell clanged its impatient, discordant note and I shouted, ‘Yes, all right, I’m coming!’ It didn’t occur to me to be afraid, until I had shot the bolts and swung the door open; then just too late I hesitated, wondering if it was the men with the torches, come back to burn us to the ground. But it wasn’t.

The man in front of me had been in the middle of saying something; he broke off and looked me up and down. He was wearing a tall hat and a cloak; in the darkness only his shape was visible, and the sharp flash of his eyes. Behind him there was a trap, with a lantern hanging from the seat-rail. The light caught the steam rising from the horse, and its plumes of breath. Another man stood a few feet away, shifting from foot to foot and making an impatient noise between his teeth.

‘What do you want?’

The first man sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his glove. He took his hat off, handed it to me and stepped forward, forcing me to let him cross the threshold. He pulled his gloves off finger by finger and laid them across the brim of the hat. He had straggling ringlets that hung almost to his shoulders. ‘A hot drink and a good dinner, to start with. Come in, Ferguson, it’s perishing out there.’

‘Who the hell are you?’

He glanced at me. The other man – Ferguson – strode inside and stamped his feet to warm them, calling over his shoulder to the trap-driver, ‘Wait there, won’t you?’ He put his bag down on the floor with a heavy chinking thud.

The man sighed. ‘You must be the apprentice. I am Mr de Havilland and I have brought Dr Ferguson to see Seredith. How is she?’ He walked to the little mirror on the wall and peered into it, stroking his moustache. ‘Why is it so dark in here? For goodness’ sake light a few lamps.’

‘I’m Emmett.’

He waved me away as if my name was incidental. ‘Is she awake? The sooner the doctor sees her, the sooner he can get back.’

‘No, I don’t think she—’

‘In that case we will have to wake her. Bring us up a pot of tea, and some brandy. And whatever you have to eat.’ He strode past me and up the stairs. ‘This way, Ferguson.’

Ferguson followed him in a waft of cold air and damp wool, reaching back in an afterthought to shove his hat at me. I turned to hang it on the hook next to the other one, deliberately digging a fingernail into the smooth felt. I didn’t want to take orders from de Havilland, but now that the door was shut it was so dark I could hardly see. I lit a lamp. They’d left footprints across the hall floor, and thin prisms of compacted mud from the heels of their boots were scattered on the stairs.

I hesitated. Resentment and uncertainty tugged me in different directions. At last I went into the kitchen and made a pot of tea – for Seredith, I told myself – and took it upstairs. But when I knocked, it was de Havilland’s voice that said, ‘Not now.’ He had a Castleford accent, but his voice reminded me of someone.

I raised my voice to call through the door panel. ‘You said—’

‘Not now!’

‘Emmett?’ Seredith said. ‘Come in.’ She coughed, and I pushed open the door to see her clutching at the bedcovers as she tried to catch her breath. She raised her head and her eyes were red and moist. She beckoned me in. De Havilland was at the window, with his arms crossed; Ferguson was standing at the hearth, looking from one to the other. The room seemed very small. ‘This is Emmett,’ Seredith managed to say. ‘My apprentice.’

I said, ‘We’ve met.’

‘Since you’re here,’ de Havilland said, ‘maybe you would ask Seredith to be reasonable. We’ve come all the way from Castleford and now she is refusing to allow the doctor to examine her.’

She said, ‘I didn’t ask you to come.’

‘Your apprentice did.’

She shot me a look that made my cheeks burn. ‘Well, I’m sorry that he wasted your time.’

‘This is absurd. I’m a busy man, you know that. I have pressing work—’

‘I said I didn’t ask you to come!’ She turned her head to one side, like a child, and de Havilland rolled his eyes at the doctor. ‘I’m perfectly all right,’ she said. ‘I caught a chill the other night, that’s all.’

‘That’s a nasty cough you have.’ It was the first time I’d heard the doctor speak to her, and his voice was so tactful it was positively unctuous. ‘Perhaps you could tell me a little more about how you’re feeling.’

She worked her mouth childishly, and I was sure she was going to refuse; but her eyes flicked to de Havilland and at last she said, ‘Tired. Feverish. My chest hurts. That’s all.’

‘And if I might …’ He moved to her and picked up her wrist so swiftly she didn’t have time to pull away. ‘Yes, I see. Thank you.’ He looked at de Havilland with something in his eyes that I couldn’t interpret, and said, ‘I don’t think we need intrude any longer.’

‘Very well.’ De Havilland walked past the bed, paused as if he was about to speak, and then shrugged. He took a step towards me, the way he’d done before, with an absent-minded determination that meant I had to move out of his way. Ferguson followed him, and I was alone with Seredith.

‘I’m sorry. I was worried.’

She didn’t seem to hear me. She had her eyes closed, and the broken veins in her cheeks stood out like red ink. But she knew I was there, because after a minute she flapped at me, dismissing me without a word.

I went out into the passage. The lamplight spilt up the stairs and through the banisters, edging everything in faint gold. I could hear them talking in the hall. I walked to the top of the stairs and paused, listening. Their voices were very distinct.

‘… stubborn old woman,’ de Havilland said. ‘Really, I apologise. From what the postman said, I was under the impression that she had asked—’

‘Not at all, not at all. In any case, I think I saw enough. She’s frail, of course, but not in any real danger unless her condition gets worse suddenly.’ He crossed the hall and I guessed that he was picking up his hat. ‘Have you decided what you’ll do?’

‘I shall stay here and keep an eye on her. Until she gets better, or—’

‘A pity she’s all the way out here. Otherwise I would be very happy to attend her.’

‘Indeed,’ de Havilland said, and snorted. ‘She’s a living anachronism. One would think we were in the Dark Ages. If she must carry on with binding, she could perfectly well work from my own bindery, in comfort. The number of times I’ve tried to persuade her … But she insists on staying here. And now she’s taken on that damned apprentice …’

‘She does seem somewhat … obstinate.’

‘She’s infuriating.’ He hissed a sigh through his teeth. ‘Well, I suppose I must endure this for a while and try to make her see sense.’

‘Good luck. Oh—’ There was the sound of a clasp being undone, and a clink. ‘If she’s in pain, or sleepless, a few drops of this should help. Not more.’

‘Ah. Yes. Good night, then.’ The door opened and shut, and outside there was the creak and rumble of the trap drawing away. At the same time there were footsteps as de Havilland climbed the stairs. When he saw me he raised the lamp and peered at me. ‘Eavesdropping, were you?’ But he didn’t give me time to answer. He brushed past me and added, over his shoulder, ‘Bring me some clean bedding.’

I followed him. He opened the door of my bedroom and paused, quirking his head at me. ‘Yes?’

I said, ‘That’s my room – where’m I supposed to—’

‘I have no idea.’ Then he shut the door in my face and left me in darkness.