The Binding
The Binding
Bridget Collins
‘I wish I had written it’ Erin KellyImagine you could erase your grief.Imagine you could forget your pain.Imagine you could hide a secret.Forever.Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice – but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books – and memories – are meticulously stored and recorded.Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it.THE BINDING is an unforgettable, magical novel: a boundary-defying love story and a unique literary event.
Copyright (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Bridget Collins 2019
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © bilwissedition Ltd. & Co. KG / Alamy Stock Photo (background),
Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (key, boarders)
Illustrations © Andrew Davidson
Bridget Collins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008272111
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 9780008272135
Version: 2018-12-03
Praise for The Binding (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
‘The Binding is a dark chocolate slice of cake with a surprising, satisfying seam of raspberry running through it. It is a rich, gothic entertainment that explores what books have trapped in them and reminds us of the power of storytelling. Spellbinding’
Tracy Chevalier
‘Pure magic. The kind of immersive storytelling that makes you forget your own name. I wish I had written it’
Erin Kelly, author of He Said/She Said
‘The Binding held me captive from the start and refused to set me free. It is a beautifully crafted tale of dark magic and forbidden passion, where unspeakable cruelty is ultimately defeated by enduring love. Breathtaking!’
Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things
‘An original concept, beautifully written. Collins’ prose is spellbinding’
Laura Purcell, author of The Silent Companions
‘Intriguing, thought-provoking and heartbreaking . . . what a gorgeous book’
Stella Duffy
‘What an astounding book . . . something entirely of its own. Brilliant concept, truly extraordinary writing and a killer plot’
Anna Mazzola, author of The Unseeing
Dedication (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
For Nick
Contents
Cover (#u0d0a8612-d586-568e-9a02-0666f8d61af5)
Title Page (#u8cfb5b41-c621-5168-8b91-fd508582987f)
Copyright
Praise for The Binding
Dedication
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Part Two
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Part Three
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Bridget Collins
About the Publisher
PART ONE (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
I (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
When the letter came I was out in the fields, binding up my last sheaf of wheat with hands that were shaking so much I could hardly tie the knot. It was my fault we’d had to do it the old-fashioned way, and I’d be damned if I was going to give up now; I had battled through the heat of the afternoon, blinking away the patches of darkness that flickered at the sides of my vision, and now it was nightfall and I was almost finished. The others had left when the sun set, calling goodbyes over their shoulders, and I was glad. At least now I was alone I didn’t have to pretend I could work at the same pace as them. I kept going, trying not to think about how easy it would have been with the reaping machine. I’d been too ill to check the machinery – not that I remembered much, between the flashes of lucidity, the summer was nothing but echoes and ghosts and dark aching gaps – and no one else had thought to do it, either. Every day I stumbled on some chore that hadn’t been done; Pa had done his best, but he couldn’t do everything. Because of me, we’d be behind all year.
I pulled the stems tight round the waist of the sheaf and stacked it against the others. Done. I could go home now … But there were shadows pulsing and spinning around me, deeper than the blue-violet dusk, and my knees were trembling. I dropped into a crouch, catching my breath at the pain in my bones. Better than it had been – better than the splintery, sickening spasms that had come unpredictably for months – but still I felt as brittle as an old man. I clenched my jaw. I was so weak I wanted to cry; but I wasn’t going to, I’d die first, even if the only eye on me was the full, fat harvest moon.
‘Emmett? Emmett!’
It was only Alta, winding her way through the stooks towards me, but I pushed myself to my feet and tried to blink the giddiness away. Above me the sparse stars slid one way and then the other. I cleared my throat. ‘Here.’
‘Why didn’t you get one of the others to finish? Ma was worried when they came back down the lane and you weren’t with—’
‘She didn’t need to be worried. I’m not a child.’ My thumb was bleeding where a sharp stalk had pierced the skin. The blood tasted of dust and fever.
Alta hesitated. A year ago I’d been as strong as any of them. Now she was looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was younger than she was. ‘No, but—’
‘I wanted to watch the moon rise.’
‘’Course you did.’ The twilight softened her features, but I could still see the shrewdness in her gaze. ‘We can’t make you rest. If you don’t care about getting well—’
‘You sound like her. Like Ma.’
‘Because she’s right! You can’t expect to snap back as if nothing’s happened, not when you were as ill as you were.’
Ill. As if I’d been languishing in bed with a cough, or vomiting, or covered with pustules. Even through the haze of nightmares I could remember more than they realised; I knew about the screaming and the hallucinations, the days when I couldn’t stop crying or didn’t know who anyone was, the night when I broke the window with my bare hands. I wished I had spent days shitting my guts helplessly into a pot; it would have been better than still having marks on my wrists where they’d had to tie me down. I turned away from her and concentrated on sucking the cut at the base of my thumb, worrying at it with my tongue until I couldn’t taste blood any more.
‘Please, Emmett,’ Alta said, and brushed the collar of my shirt with her fingers. ‘You’ve done as good a day’s work as anyone. Now will you come home?’
‘All right.’ A breeze lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. Alta saw me shiver and dropped her eyes. ‘What’s for dinner, then?’
She flashed her gappy teeth in a grin. ‘Nothing, if you don’t hurry up.’
‘Fine. I’ll race you back.’
‘Challenge me again when I’m not wearing stays.’ She turned away, her dusty skirts flaring about her ankles. When she laughed she still looked like a child, but the farmhands had already started sniffing round her; in some lights now she looked like a woman.
I trudged beside her, so exhausted I felt drunk. The darkness thickened, pooling under trees and in hedges, while the moonlight bleached the stars out of the sky. I thought of cold well-water, clear as glass, with tiny green flecks gathering at the bottom – or, no, beer, grassy and bitter, the colour of amber, flavoured with Pa’s special blend of herbs. It would send me straight to sleep, but that was good: all I wanted was to go out like a candle, into dreamless unconsciousness. No nightmares, no night terrors, and to wake in the morning to clean new sunlight.
The clock in the village struck nine as we went through the gate in the yard. ‘I’m famished,’ Alta said, ‘they sent me out to find you before I could—’
My mother’s voice cut her off. She was shouting.
Alta paused, while the gate swung closed behind us. Our eyes met. A few fragments of words drifted across the yard: How can you say … we can’t, we simply can’t …
The muscles in my legs were shaking from standing still. I reached out and steadied myself against the wall, wishing my heart would slow down. A wedge of lamplight was shining through a gap in the kitchen curtains; as I watched, a shadow crossed and crossed again. My father, pacing.
‘We can’t stay out here all night,’ Alta said, the words almost a whisper.
‘It’s probably nothing.’ They’d quarrelled all week about the reaping machine, and why no one had checked it earlier. Neither of them mentioned that it should have been my job.
A thud: fists on the kitchen table. Pa raised his voice. ‘What do you expect me to do? Say no? That bloody witch will put a curse on us quick as—’
‘She already has! Look at him, Robert – what if he never gets better? It’s her fault—’
‘His own fault, you mean – if he—’ For a second a high note rang in my ears, drowning out Pa’s voice. The world slipped and righted itself, as if it had juddered on its axis. I swallowed a bubble of nausea. When I could concentrate again, there was silence.
‘We don’t know that,’ Pa said at last, just loud enough for us to hear. ‘She might help him. All those weeks she wrote to ask how he was doing.’
‘Because she wanted him! No, Robert, no, I won’t let it happen, his place is here with us, whatever he’s done, he’s still our son – and her, she gives me the creeps—’
‘You’ve never met her. It wasn’t you that had to go out there and—’
‘I don’t care! She’s done enough. She can’t have him.’
Alta glanced at me. Something changed in her face, and she took hold of my wrist and pulled me forwards. ‘We’re going inside,’ she said, in the high, self-conscious voice she used to call to the chickens. ‘It’s been a long day, you must be ravenous, I know I am. There better be some pie left, or I will kill someone. With a fork through the heart. And eat them.’ She paused in front of the door and added, ‘With mustard.’ Then she flung it open.
My parents were standing at either end of the kitchen: Pa by the window, his back turned to us, Ma at the fireplace with red blotches on her face like rouge. Between them, on the table, was a sheet of thick, creamy paper and an open envelope. Ma looked swiftly from Alta to me and took a half step towards it.
‘Dinner,’ Alta said. ‘Emmett, sit down, you look like you’re about to faint. Heavens, no one’s even laid the table. I hope the pie’s in the oven.’ She put a pile of plates down beside me. ‘Bread? Beer? Honestly, I might as well be a scullery maid …’ She disappeared into the pantry.
‘Emmett,’ Pa said, without turning round. ‘There’s a letter on the table. You’d better read it.’
I slid it towards me. The writing blurred into a shapeless stain on the paper. ‘My eyes are too dusty. Tell me what it says.’
Pa bowed his head, the muscles bunching in his neck as if he was dragging something heavy. ‘The binder wants an apprentice.’
Ma made a sound like a bitten-off word.
I said, ‘An apprentice?’
There was silence. A slice of moon shone through the gap in the curtains, covering everything in its path with silver. It made Pa’s hair look greasy and grey. ‘You,’ he said.
Alta was standing in the pantry doorway, cradling a jar of pickles. For a second I thought she was going to drop it, but she set it down carefully on the dresser. The knock of glass on wood was louder than the smash would have been.
‘I’m too old to be an apprentice.’
‘Not according to her.’
‘I thought …’ My hand flattened on the table: a thin white hand that I hardly recognised. A hand that couldn’t do an honest day’s work. ‘I’m getting better. Soon …’ I stopped, because my voice was as unfamiliar as my fingers.
‘It’s not that, son.’
‘I know I’m no use now—’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Ma said. ‘It’s not your fault— it’s not because you’ve been ill. Soon you’ll be back to your old self again. If that was all … You know we always thought you’d run the farm with your father. And you could have done, you still could – but …’ Her eyes went to Pa’s. ‘We’re not sending you away. She’s asking for you.’
‘I don’t know who she is.’
‘Binding’s … a good craft. An honest craft. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’ Alta knocked against the dresser, and Ma glanced over her shoulder as she swung her arm out swiftly to stop a plate from slipping to the floor. ‘Alta, be careful.’
My heart skipped and drummed. ‘But … you hate books. They’re wrong. You’ve always told me – when I brought that book home from Wakening Fair—’
A look passed between them, too quick to interpret. Pa said, ‘Never mind about that now.’
‘But …’ I turned back to Ma. I couldn’t put it into words: the swift change of subject if someone even mentioned a book, the shiver of distaste at the word, the look on their faces … The way she’d dragged me grimly past a sordid shopfront – A. Fogatini, Pawnbroker and Licens’d Bookseller – one day when I was small and we got lost in Castleford. ‘What do you mean, it’s a good craft?’
‘It’s not …’ Ma drew in her breath. ‘Maybe it’s not what I would have wanted, before—’
‘Hilda.’ Pa dug his fingers into the side of his neck, kneading the muscle as though it ached. ‘You don’t have a choice, lad. It’ll be a steady life. It’s a long way from anywhere, but that’s not a bad thing. Quiet. No hard labour, no one to tempt you off the straight and narrow …’ He cleared his throat. ‘And they’re not all like her. You settle down and learn the trade, and then … Well. There’re binders in town who have their own carriages.’
A tiny silence. Alta tapped the top of a jar with her fingernail and glanced at me.
‘But I don’t – I’ve never – what makes her think that I—?’ Now none of them would meet my eyes. ‘What do you mean, I’ve got no choice?’
No one answered. Finally Alta strode across the room and picked up the letter. ‘“As soon as he is able to travel”,’ she read out. ‘“The bindery can be very cold in winter. Please make sure he has warm clothes.” Why did she write to you and not Emmett? Doesn’t she know he can read?’
‘It’s the way they all do it,’ Pa said. ‘You ask the parents for an apprentice, that’s how it works.’
It didn’t matter. My hands on the table were all tendons and bones. A year ago they’d been brown and muscled, almost a man’s hands; now they were no one’s. Fit for nothing but a craft my parents despised. But why would she have chosen me, unless they’d asked her to? I spread my fingers and pressed, as if I could absorb the strength of the wood through the skin of my palms.
‘What if I say no?’
Pa clumped across to the cupboard, bent down and pulled out a bottle of blackberry gin. It was fierce, sweet stuff that Ma doled out for festivals or medicinal purposes, but he poured himself half a mug of it and she didn’t say a word. ‘There’s no place for you here. Maybe you should be grateful. This’ll be something you can do.’ He tossed half the gin down his throat and coughed.
I drew in my breath, determined not to let my voice crack. ‘When I’m better, I’ll be just as strong as—’
‘Make the best of it,’ he said.
‘But I don’t—’
‘Emmett,’ Ma said, ‘please … It’s the right thing. She’ll know what to do with you.’
‘What to do with me?’
‘I only mean – if you get ill again, she’ll—’
‘Like in a lunatic asylum? Is that it? You’re packing me off to somewhere miles from anywhere because I might lose my wits again at any moment?’
‘She wants you,’ Ma said, clutching her skirts as if she was trying to squeeze water out of them. ‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’
‘Then I won’t go!’
‘You’ll go, boy,’ Pa said. ‘Heaven knows you’ve brought enough trouble on this house.’
‘Robert, don’t—’
‘You’ll go. If I have to truss you up and leave you on her doorstep, you’ll go. Be ready tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Alta spun round so fast her plait swung out like a rope. ‘He can’t go tomorrow, he’ll need time to pack – and there’s the harvest, the harvest supper … Please, Pa.’
‘Shut up!’
Silence.
‘Tomorrow?’ The blotches on Ma’s cheeks had spread into a flush of scarlet. ‘We never said …’ Her voice trailed off. My father finished his gin, swallowing with a grimace as if his mouth was full of stones.
I opened my mouth to tell her it was all right, I’d go, they wouldn’t have to worry about me any more; but my throat was too dry from the reaping.
‘A few more days. Robert, the other apprentices don’t go until after the harvest – and he’s still not well, a couple of days …’
‘They’re younger than he is. And he’s well enough to travel, if he did a day in the fields.’
‘Yes, but …’ She moved towards him and caught his arm so that he couldn’t turn away. ‘A little more time.’
‘For pity’s sake, Hilda!’ He made a choking sound and tried to wrench himself away. ‘Don’t make this any harder. You think I want to let him go? You think that after we tried so hard – fought to keep a pure house – you think I’m proud of it, when my own father lost an eye marching in the Crusade?’
Ma glanced at Alta and me. ‘Not in front of—’
‘What does it matter now?’ He wiped his forearm across his face; then with a helpless gesture he flung the mug to the floor. It didn’t break. Alta watched it roll towards her and stop. Pa turned his back on us and bent over the dresser as if he was trying to catch his breath. There was a silence.
‘I’ll go,’ I said, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ I couldn’t look at any of them. I got up, hitting my knee against the corner of the table as I pushed back my chair. I struggled to the door. The latch seemed smaller and stiffer than it usually was, and the clunk as it opened echoed off the walls.
Outside, the moon divided the world into deep blue and silver. The air was warm and as soft as cream, scented with hay and summer dust. An owl chuckled in the near field.
I reeled across to the far side of the yard and leant against the wall. It was hard to breathe. Ma’s voice hung in my ears: That bloody witch will put a curse on us. And Pa, answering: She already has.
They were right; I was good for nothing. Misery rose inside me, as strong as the stabbing pains in my legs. Before this, I’d never been ill in my life. I never knew that my body could betray me, that my mind could go out like a lamp and leave nothing but darkness. I couldn’t remember getting sick; if I tried, all I saw was a mess of nightmare-scorched fragments. Even my memories of my life before that – last spring, last winter – were tinged with the same gangrenous shadow, as if nothing was healthy any more. I knew that I’d collapsed after midsummer, because Ma had told me so, and that I’d been on the way home from Castleford; but no one had explained where I’d been, or what had happened. I must have been driving the cart – without a hat, under a hot sun, probably – but when I tried to think back there was nothing but a rippling mirage, a last vertiginous glimpse of sunlight before the blackness swallowed me. For weeks afterwards, I’d only surfaced to scream and struggle and beg them to untie me. No wonder they wanted to get rid of me.
I closed my eyes. I could still see the three of them, their arms round one another. Something whispered behind me, scratching in the wall like dry claws. It wasn’t real, but it drowned out the owl and the rustle of trees. I rested my head on my arms and pretended I couldn’t hear it.
I must have drawn back instinctively into the deepest corner of darkness, because when I opened my eyes Alta was in the middle of the yard, calling my name without looking in my direction. The moon had moved; now it was over the gable of the farmhouse and all the shadows were short and squat.
‘Emmett?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Alta jumped and took a step forward to peer at me.
‘What are you doing there? Were you asleep?’
‘No.’
She hesitated. Behind her the light from a lamp crossed the upper window as someone went to bed. I started to pull myself to my feet and paused, wincing, as pain stabbed into my joints.
She watched me get up, without offering to help. ‘Did you mean it? That you’d go? Tomorrow?’
‘Pa meant it when he said I didn’t have any choice.’
I waited for her to disagree. Alta was clever like that, finding new paths or different ways of doing things, picking locks. But she only tilted her face upward as if she wanted the moonlight to bleach her skin. I swallowed. The stupid dizziness had come back – suddenly, dragging me one way and then another – and I swayed against the wall and tried to catch my breath.
‘Emmett? Are you all right?’ She bit her lip. ‘No, of course not. Sit down.’
I didn’t want to obey her but my knees folded of their own accord. I closed my eyes and inhaled the night smells of hay and cooling earth, the overripe sweetness of crushed weeds and a rank hint of manure. Alta’s skirts billowed and rustled as she sank down beside me.
‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’
I raised one shoulder without looking at her and let it drop again.
‘But … maybe it’s the best thing …’
‘How can it be?’ I swallowed, trying to fill the crack in my voice. ‘All right, I understand. I’m no use here. You’ll all be better off when I’m – wherever she is, this binder.’
‘Out on the marshes, on the Castleford road.’
‘Right.’ What would the marshes smell of? Stagnant water, rotting reeds. Mud. Mud that swallowed you alive if you went too far from the road, and never spat you back … ‘How do you know so much about it?’
‘Ma and Pa are only thinking about you. After everything that’s happened … You’ll be safe there.’
‘That’s what Ma said.’
A pause. She began to gnaw at her thumbnail. In the orchard below the stables a nightingale gurgled and then gave up.
‘You don’t know what it’s been like for them, Emmett. Always afraid. You owe them some peace.’
‘It’s not my fault I was ill!’
‘It’s your fault you—’ She huffed out her breath. ‘No, I know, I didn’t mean … just that we all need … please don’t be angry. It’s a good thing. You’ll learn a trade.’
‘Yes. Making books.’
She flinched. ‘She chose you. That must mean—’
‘What does it mean? How can she have chosen me, when she’s never even seen me?’ I thought Alta started to speak, but when I turned my head she was staring up at the moon, her face expressionless. Her cheeks were thinner than they had been before I got ill, and the skin under her eyes looked as if it had been smudged with ash. She was a stranger, out of reach.
She said, as if it was an answer, ‘I’ll come and see you whenever I can …’
I let my head roll back until I felt the stone wall against my skull. ‘They talked you round, didn’t they?’
‘I’ve never seen Pa like that,’ she said. ‘So angry.’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘He hit me, once.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘well, I suppose you—’ She stopped.
‘When I was small,’ I said. ‘You weren’t old enough to remember. It was the day of Wakening Fair.’
‘Oh.’ When I glanced up, her eyes flickered away. ‘No. I don’t remember that.’
‘I bought … there was a man, selling books.’ I could recall the clink of my errand-money in my pocket that day – sixpence in farthings, so bulky they bulged through my trousers – and the heady, carefree feeling of going to Wakening Fair and slipping away from the others, wondering what I’d buy. I’d wandered past the meat and chickens, the fish from Coldwater and the patterned cottons from Castleford, paused at the sweetmeat stall and then turned towards another a little further away, where I’d caught a glimpse of gold and rich colours. It was hardly a stall at all, only a trestle table guarded by a man with restless eyes, but it was piled high with books. ‘It was the first time I’d seen them. I didn’t know what they were.’
That curious, wary expression was on Alta’s face again. ‘You mean …?’
‘Forget it.’ I didn’t know why I was telling her; I didn’t want to remember. But now I couldn’t stop the memory unfolding. I’d thought they were boxes, small gilt-and-leather chests to hold things like Ma’s best silver or Pa’s chessmen. I’d sauntered over, jingling my money, and the man had glanced over both shoulders before he grinned at me. ‘Ah, what a golden-haired little prince! Come for a story, young sir? A tale of murder or incest, shame or glory, a love so piercing it was best forgotten, or a deed of darkness? You’ve come to the right man, young sir, these are the crème de la crème, these will tell you true and harrowing tales, violent and passionate and exciting – or if it’s comedy you’re after, I have some of those too, rarest of all, the things people get rid of! Have a look, young sir, cast your eyes over this one … Bound by a master in Castleford, years ago.’
I hated the way he called me young sir, but the book fell open as he passed it to me and I couldn’t give it back. As soon as I saw the writing on the pages I understood: this was lots of pages all squashed together – like letters, lots of letters, only in a better box – and a story that went on and on. ‘How much is it?’
‘Ah, that one, young sir. You have wonderful taste for a young ’un, that’s a special one, a real adventure story, sweeps you off your feet like a cavalry charge. Ninepence for it. Or two for a shilling.’
I wanted it. I didn’t know why, except that my fingertips were prickling. ‘I only have sixpence.’
‘I’ll take that,’ he said, clicking his fingers at me. The wide smile had gone; when I followed his darting gaze I saw a knot of men gathering a little way off, muttering.
‘Here.’ I emptied my pocketful of farthings into his palm. He let one drop, but he was still staring at the men and didn’t stoop to pick it up. ‘Thank you.’
I took the book and hurried away, triumphant and uneasy. When I reached the bustle of the main market I stopped and turned to look: the group of men was advancing on the man’s stall, as he threw the books frantically into the battered little cart behind him.
Something warned me not to stare. I ran home, holding the book through my shirt-cuff so that I didn’t stain the cover with my sweaty fingers. I sat on the barn steps in the sun – no one would see me, they were still at the fair – and examined it. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. It was a deep, heavy red, patterned with gold, and it was as soft to the touch as skin. When I opened the cover, the scent of must and wood rose up as though it hadn’t been touched for years.
It sucked me in.
It was set in an army camp in a foreign country, and at first it was confusing: full of captains and majors and colonels, arguments about military tactics and a threat of court martial. But something made me go on reading: I could see it, every detail, I could hear the horses and the snap of wind against the canvas, feel my own heart quicken at the smell of gunpowder … I stumbled on, absorbed in spite of myself, and slowly I understood that they were on the eve of a battle, that the man in the book was a hero. When the sun rose, he was going to lead them to a glorious victory – and I could feel his excitement, his anticipation, I felt it myself—
‘What in hell’s name are you doing?’
It broke the spell. I clambered instinctively to my feet, blinking through the haze. Pa – and the others behind him, Ma with Alta on her hip, everyone back from the fair already. Already … but it was getting dark.
‘Emmett, I asked what you were doing!’ But he didn’t wait for an answer before he plucked the book away from me. When he saw what it was his face hardened. ‘Where did you get this?’
A man, I wanted to say, just a man at the fair, he had dozens and they looked like boxes of jewels, in leather and gold … But when I saw Pa’s expression something shrivelled in my voice box and I couldn’t speak.
‘Robert? What …?’ Ma reached for it and then pulled away as if it had bitten her.
‘I’ll burn it.’
‘No!’ Ma let Alta slip staggering to the ground, and stumbled forward to catch Pa’s arm. ‘No, how could you? Bury it!’
‘It’s old, Hilda. They’d all be dead, years ago.’
‘You mustn’t. Just in case. Get rid of it. Throw it away.’
‘For someone else to find?’
‘You know you can’t burn it.’ For a moment they stared at each other, their faces strained. ‘Bury it. Somewhere safe.’
At last Pa gave a brief, curt nod. Alta gave a hiccup and started to whimper. Pa shoved the book at one of the farmhands. ‘Here. Package this up. I’ll give it to the gravedigger.’ Then he turned back to me. ‘Emmett,’ he said, ‘don’t ever let me see you with a book again. You understand?’
I didn’t. What had happened? I’d bought it, I hadn’t stolen it, but somehow I had done something unforgivable. I nodded, still reeling from the visions I’d seen. I’d been somewhere else, in another world.
‘Good. You remember that,’ Pa said.
Then he hit me.
Don’t ever let me see you with a book again.
But now they were sending me to the binder; as though whatever danger Pa had warned me against had been replaced by something worse. As though now I was the danger.
I looked sideways. Alta was staring down at her feet. No, she didn’t remember that day. No one had ever spoken about it again. No one had ever explained why books were shameful. Once, at school, someone had muttered something about old Lord Kent having a library; but when everyone snickered and rolled their eyes I didn’t ask why that was so bad. I’d read a book: whatever was wrong with him, I was the same. Under everything, deep inside me, the shame was still there.
And I was afraid. It was a creeping, formless fear, like the mist that came off the river. It slid chilly tendrils round me and into my lungs. I didn’t want to go anywhere near the binder; but I had to.
‘Alta—’
‘I have to go in,’ she said, leaping to her feet. ‘You’d better go up too, Em, you have to pack and it’s a long way to go tomorrow, isn’t it? Good night.’ She scampered away across the yard, fiddling with her plait all the way so I couldn’t glimpse her face. By the door she called again, ‘See you tomorrow,’ without looking round. Maybe it was the echo off the stable wall that made it sound so false.
Tomorrow.
I watched the moon until the fear grew too big for me. Then I went to my room and packed my things.
II (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
From the road, the bindery looked as if it was burning. The sun was setting behind us, and the red-gold blaze of the last sunlight was reflected in the windows. Under the dark thatch every pane was like a rectangle of flame, too steady to be fire but so bright I thought I could feel my palms prickle with the heat. It set off a shiver in my bones, as if I’d seen it in a dream.
I clutched the shabby sack in my lap and looked away. On the other side of us, under the setting sun, the marshes lay flat and endless: green speckled with bronze and brown, glinting with water. I could smell sodden grass and the day’s warmth evaporating. There was a rank mouldering note under the scent of moisture, and the vast dying sky above us was paler than it should have been. My eyes ached, and my body was a map of stinging scratches from yesterday’s work in the fields. I should have been there now, helping with the harvest, but instead Pa and I were bouncing along this rough, sticky road, in silence. We hadn’t spoken since we set off before dawn, and there was still nothing to say. Words rose in my throat but they burst like marsh-bubbles, leaving nothing on my tongue but a faint taste of rot.
As we jolted along the final stretch of track to where it petered out in the long grass in front of the house I sneaked a look at Pa’s face. The stubble on his chin was salted with white, and his eyes were sunken deeper than they’d been last spring. Everyone had grown older while I was ill; as if I’d woken up and found I’d slept for years.
We drew to a halt. ‘We’re here.’
A shudder went through me: I was either going to vomit or plead with Pa to take me home. I snatched the sack from my lap and jumped down, my knees nearly buckling when my feet hit the ground. There was a well-trodden path through the tufts of the grass to the front door of the house. I’d never been here before, but the off-key jangle of the bell was as familiar as a dream. I waited, so determined not to look back at Pa that the door shimmered and swayed.
‘Emmett.’ It was open, suddenly. For a moment all I took in was a pair of pale brown eyes, so pale the pupils were startlingly black. ‘Welcome.’
I swallowed. She was old – painfully, skeletally old – and white-haired, her face as creased as paper and her lips almost the same colour as her cheeks; but she was as tall as me, and her eyes were as clear as Alta’s. She wore a leather apron, and a shirt and trousers, like a man. The hand that beckoned me inside was thin but muscular, the veins looped across the tendons in blue strings.
‘Seredith,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
I hesitated. It took me two heartbeats to understand that she’d told me her name.
‘Come in.’ She added, looking past me, ‘Thank you, Robert.’
I hadn’t heard Pa get down, but when I turned he was there at my shoulder. He coughed and muttered, ‘We’ll see you soon, Emmett, all right?’
‘Pa—’
He didn’t even glance in my direction. He gave the binder a long helpless look; then he touched his forelock as if he didn’t know what else to do, and strode back to the cart. I started to call out but a gust of wind snatched the words away, and he didn’t turn. I watched him clamber up to his seat and click to the mare.
‘Emmett.’ Her voice dragged me back to her. ‘Come in.’ I could see that she wasn’t used to saying anything three times.
‘Yes.’ I was holding my sack of belongings so tightly my fingers ached. She’d called Pa Robert as if she knew him. I took one step and then another. Now I was over the threshold and in a dark-panelled hall, with a staircase rising in front of me. A tall clock ticked. On the left, there was a half-open door and a glimpse of the kitchen beyond; on the right, another door led to—
My knees went weak, like my hamstrings had been cut. The nausea widened and expanded, chewing on my insides. I was feverish and freezing, struggling to keep my balance as the world spun. I’d been here before – only I hadn’t—
‘Oh, damn it,’ the binder said, and reached out to take hold of me. ‘All right, boy, breathe.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and was proud of how distinctly I’d shaped the consonants. Then it all went black.
When I woke, there was sunlight dancing on the ceiling in a billowing net, water-wrinkles that overlapped the narrow rectangle of brightness that spilt between the curtains. The whitewashed walls looked faintly green, like the flesh of an apple, marred here and there with the solid froth of damp. Outside a bird whistled over and over again as if it was calling a name.
The binder’s house. I sat up, my heart suddenly thumping. But there was nothing to be afraid of, not yet; nothing here but myself and the room and the reflected sunshine. I found myself listening for the sounds of animals, the constant restlessness of a farmyard, but all I heard was the bird and the soft rattle of wind in the thatch. The faded curtains billowed and a wider band of light flared across the ceiling. The pillows smelt of lavender.
Last night …
I let my eyes rest on the opposite wall, following the bump and curve of a crack in the plaster. After I’d fainted, all I could remember was shadows and fear. Nightmares. In this clean daylight they seemed a long time ago; but they’d been bad, dragging me over and under the surface of sleep. I’d almost fought clear of them, once or twice, but then the weight of my own limbs had pulled me under again, into a choking black blindness like tar. A faint taste like burnt oil still lingered in the back of my mouth. They hadn’t been as bad as that for days. The draught raised goose-pimples on my skin. Fainting like that, into Seredith’s arms … It must have been the fatigue of the journey, the headache, the sun in my eyes, and the sight of Pa driving away without a backwards glance.
My trousers and shirt were hanging on the back of a single chair. I got up and dragged them on with clumsy fingers, trying not to imagine Seredith undressing me. At least I was still wearing drawers. Apart from the chair and the bed, the room was mostly bare: a chest at the foot of the bed, a table next to the window, and the pale, flapping curtains. There were no pictures, and no looking-glass. I didn’t mind that. At home I’d looked away when I walked past my reflection in the hall. Here I was invisible; here I could be part of the emptiness.
The whole house was quiet. When I walked out on to the landing I could hear the birds calling across the marsh, and the tick of the clock in the hall below, and a dull banging from somewhere else; but underneath it all was a silence so deep the sounds skittered over it like pebbles on ice. The breeze stroked the back of my neck and I caught myself glancing over my shoulder, as if there was someone there. The bare room dipped into gloom for a second as a cloud crossed the sun; then it shone brighter than ever, and the corner of one curtain snapped in the breeze like a flag.
I almost turned and climbed back into bed, like a child. But this house was where I lived, now. I couldn’t stay in my room for the rest of my life.
The stairs creaked under my feet. The banister was polished by years of use, but the dust spun thickly in the sunlight and the whitewashed plaster was bubbling off the wall. Older than our farmhouse, older than our village. How many binders had lived here? And when this binder – Seredith – died … One day, would this house be mine? I walked down the stairs slowly, as if I was afraid they’d give way.
The banging stopped, and I heard footsteps. Seredith opened one of the doors into the hall. ‘Ah, Emmett.’ She didn’t ask me if I’d slept well. ‘Come into the workshop.’
I followed her. Something about the way she’d said my name made me clench my jaw, but she was my master now – no, my mistress, no, my master – and I had to obey her.
At the door of the workshop she paused. For an instant I thought she’d step back to let me go first; but then she strode across the room and bundled something swiftly into a cloth before I could see what it was. ‘Come in, boy.’
I stepped over the doorsill. It was a long, low room, full of morning light from the row of tall windows. Workbenches ran along both sides of the room and between them were other things that I didn’t have names for yet. I took in the battered shine of old wood, the sharp glint of a blade, metal handles dark with grease … but there was too much to look at, and my eyes couldn’t stay on one thing for long. There was a stove at the far end of the room, surrounded by tiles in russet and ochre and green. Above my head papers hung over a wire, rich plain colours interspersed with pages patterned like stone or feathers or leaves. I caught myself reaching up to touch the nearest one: there was something about those vivid kingfisher-blue wings hanging above my head …
The binder put her bundle down and came towards me, pointing at things. ‘Lay press. Nipping press. Finishing press. Plan chest – behind you, boy – tools in that cupboard and the next one along, leather and cloth next to that. Waste paper in that basket, ready for use. Brushes on that shelf, glue in there.’
I couldn’t take it all in. After the first effort to remember I gave up and waited for her to finish. At last she narrowed her eyes at me and said, ‘Sit.’
I felt strange. But not sick, exactly, and not afraid. It was as if something inside me was waking up and moving. The looping grain of the bench in front of me was like a map of somewhere I used to know.
‘It’s a funny feeling, isn’t it, boy?’
‘What?’
She squinted at me, one of her milky-tea eyes bleached almost white by the sun on the side of her face. ‘It gets you, all this. When you’re a binder born – which you are, boy.’
I didn’t know what she meant. At least … There was something right about this room, something that – unexpectedly – made my heart lift. As if, after a heatwave, I could smell rain coming – or like glimpsing my old self, from before I got ill. I hadn’t belonged anywhere for so long, and now this room, with its smell of leather and glue, welcomed me.
‘You don’t know much about books, do you?’ Seredith said.
‘No.’
‘Think I’m a witch?’
I stammered, ‘What? Of course n—’ but she waved me to silence, while a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
‘It’s all right. Think I’ve got this old without knowing what people say about me? About us.’ I looked away, but she went on as if she hadn’t noticed. ‘Your parents kept books away from you, didn’t they? And now you don’t know what you’re doing here.’
‘You asked for me. Didn’t you?’
She seemed not to hear. ‘Don’t worry, lad. It’s a craft like any other. And a good one. Binding’s as old as the alphabet – older. People don’t understand it, but why should they?’ She grimaced. ‘At least the Crusade’s over. You’re too young to remember that. Your good fortune.’
There was a silence. I didn’t understand how binding could be older than books, but she was staring into the middle distance as if I wasn’t there. A breeze set the wire swinging, and the coloured papers flapped. She blinked and scratched her chin, and her eyes came back to mine. ‘Tomorrow I’ll start you on some chores. Tidying, cleaning the brushes, that sort of thing. Maybe get you paring leather.’
I nodded. I wanted to be alone here. I wanted to have time to look properly at the colours, to go through the cupboards and heft the weight of the tools. The whole room was singing to me, inviting me in.
‘You have a look round if you want.’ But when I started to get to my feet she gestured at me as if I’d disobeyed her. ‘Not now. Later.’ She picked up her bundle and turned to a little door in the corner that I hadn’t noticed. It took three keys in three locks to open it. I glimpsed stairs going down into the dark before she put the bundle on a shelf just inside the doorway, turned back into the room and pulled the door shut behind her. She locked it without looking at me, shielding the keys with her body. ‘You won’t go down there for a long while, boy.’ I didn’t know if she was warning or reassuring me. ‘Don’t go near anything that’s locked, and you’ll be all right.’
I took a deep breath. The room was still singing to me, but the sweetness had a shrill note now. Under this tidy, sunlit workshop, those steep steps led down into darkness. I could feel that hollowness under my feet, as if the floor was starting to give. A second ago I’d felt safe. No. I’d felt … enticed. It had turned sour with that glimpse of the dark; like the moment a dream turns into a nightmare.
‘Don’t fight it, boy.’
She knew, then. It was real, I wasn’t imagining it. I looked up, half scared to meet her gaze; but she was staring across the marsh, her eyes slitted against the glare. She looked older than anyone I’d ever seen.
I stood up. The sun was still shining but the light in the room seemed tarnished. I didn’t want to look in the cupboards any more, or pull the rolls of cloth out into the light. But I made myself stroll past the cupboards, noting the labels, the dull brass knobs, and the corner of leather that poked a green tongue round the edge of a door. I turned and walked down the aisle of space, where the floor was trodden smooth by years of footsteps, of people coming and going.
I came to another door. It was the twin of the first one, set into the wall on the other side of the tiled stove. It had three locks, too. But people went in and out – I could tell that from the floorboards, the well-trodden path where even the dust lay more lightly. What did they come for? What did she do, the binder, beyond that door?
Blackness glittered in the corners of my eyes. Someone was whispering without words.
‘All right,’ she said. Somehow she was beside me now, pulling me down on to a stool, putting weight on the back of my neck. ‘Put your head between your knees.’
‘I – can’t—’
‘Hush, boy. It’s the illness. It’ll pass.’
It was real. I was sure. A fierce, insatiable, wrongness ready to suck me dry, make me into something else. But she’d forced my head down between my knees and held me steady, and the certainty drained away. I was ill. This was the same fear that had made me attack Ma and Pa … I clenched my jaw. I couldn’t give in to it. If I let myself slip …
‘That’s good. Good lad.’
Meaningless words, as though I was an animal. At last I straightened up, grimacing as the blood spun in my head.
‘Better?’
I nodded, fighting the acid creep of nausea. My hands were twitching as though I had the palsy. I curled them into fists and imagined trying to use a knife with fingers I couldn’t trust. Stupid. I’d lose a thumb. I was too ill to be here – and yet … ‘Why?’ I said, and the word came out like a yelp. ‘Why did you choose me? Why me?’
The binder turned her face to the window again and stared into the sunlight.
‘Was it because you were sorry for me? Poor broken-minded Emmett who can’t work in the fields any more? At least here he’ll be safe and solitary and won’t upset his family—’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘What else could it be? You don’t know me. Why else would you choose someone who’s ill?’
‘Why else, indeed?’ There was an edge to her voice, but then she sighed and looked at me. ‘Do you remember when it began? The fever?’
‘I think I was …’ I took a breath, trying to steady my mind. ‘I’d been to Castleford, and I was on my way back – when I woke up I was at home—’ I stopped. I didn’t want to think about the gaps and nightmares, daytime terrors, sudden appalled flashes of lucidity when I knew where I was … The whole summer was ragged, fever-eaten, more hole than memory.
‘You were here, lad. You fell ill here. Your father came to get you. Do you remember that?’
‘What? No. What was I doing here?’
‘It’s on the road to Castleford,’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘But with the fever … you remember it, and you don’t. That’s partly what’s making you ill.’
‘I can’t stay here. This place – those locked doors. It’ll make me worse.’
‘It will pass. Trust me. And it will pass more quickly and more cleanly here than anywhere else you could go.’
There was a strange note in her voice, as though she was almost ashamed.
A new kind of fear tugged at me. I was going to have to stay here and be afraid, until I got better; I didn’t want that, I wanted to run away …
She glanced at the locked door. ‘In a way,’ she said, ‘I suppose I did choose you because you’re ill. But not in the way you think. Not out of pity, Emmett.’
Abruptly she swung round and pushed past me, and I was left staring at the dust that swirled in the empty doorway.
She was lying. I’d heard it in her voice.
She did pity me.
But perhaps, after all, she was right. There was something in the silence of the old house, the low rooms filled with steady autumn sunlight and the still order of the workshop, that loosened the dark knots inside me. Day after day went by, until the place wasn’t new or strange to me any more; then week after week … I learnt things by heart: the crinkling reflections on my ceiling, the gappy seams in the patchwork quilt on my bed, the different creak of each tread under my foot when I came downstairs. Then there was the workshop, the gleam of the tiles around the stove, the saffron-and-earth scent of tea, the opalescent gloop of well-mixed paste in a glass jar … The hours passed slowly, full of small, solid details; at home, in the busyness of farm life, I’d never had the time to sit and stare, or pay attention to the way a tool looked, or how well it was made, before I used it. Here the clock in the hall dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.
The tasks Seredith gave me in the workshop were simple and small. She was a good teacher, clear and patient. I learnt to make endpapers, to pare leather, to finish with blind or gold tooling. She must have been disappointed at the way I fumbled – how I’d paste a page to my own fingers, or gouge a square of pristine calfskin with a sharp centre-tool – but she said nothing, except, occasionally, ‘Throw it away and start again.’ While I practised she’d go for a walk, or write letters or lists of supplies to be ordered by the next post, sitting at the bench behind me; or she’d cook, and the house would fill with the smell of meat and pastry. We shared the rest of the chores, but after a morning bent over painstaking work I was glad to chop wood or fill the copper for laundry. When I felt weak I reminded myself that Seredith had done it all on her own, before I came.
But everything I did – everything I saw her do – was preparing materials or practising finishing; I never saw a block of pages, or a complete book. One evening when we were eating dinner in the kitchen I said, ‘Seredith, where are the books?’
‘In the vault,’ she said. ‘Once they’re finished, they have to be kept out of harm’s way.’
‘But—’ I stopped, thinking of the farm, and how hard we all worked, and how it had never been enough; I’d argued continually with Pa, asking for every new invention to make it as productive as possible. ‘Why don’t we make more? Surely, the more we make, the more you can sell?’
She lifted her head as if she was about to say something sharp; then she shook her head. ‘We don’t make books to sell, boy. Selling books is wrong. Your parents were right about that, at least.’
‘Then – I don’t understand—’
‘It’s the binding that matters. The craft of it, the dignity. Say a woman comes to me for a book. I make a book for her. For her, you understand? Not to be gawped at by strangers.’ She slurped soup from her spoon. ‘There are binders who only think to turn a profit, who care about nothing but their bank balance, who, yes, sell books – but you will never be one of them.’
‘But – no one’s come to you …’ I stared at her, thoroughly confused. ‘When am I going to start using what you’re teaching me? I’m learning all these things, but I haven’t even—’
‘You’ll learn more soon,’ she said, and stood up to get more bread. ‘Let’s take things slowly, Emmett. You’ve been ill. All in good time.’
All in good time. If my mother had said it, I would have snorted; but I stayed silent, because somehow it was a good time. Gradually the nightmares grew fewer, and the lurking daytime shadows receded. Sometimes I could stand for a long time without feeling dizzy; sometimes my eyes were as clear as they used to be. And after a few weeks I didn’t even look twice at the locked doors at the end of the workshop. The benches and tools and presses murmured comfort to me: everything was useful, everything was in its place. It didn’t matter what it was all for, except that a glue brush was for glue, and a paring knife for paring. Sometimes, when I paused to gauge the thickness of a scrap of leather – in places it had to be thinner than a fingernail or it would fold badly – I would look up from the dark scurf of leather shavings and feel that I was in the right place. I knew what I was meant to be doing, and I was doing it – even if I was only practising. I could do it. That hadn’t happened since before I was ill.
I missed home, of course. I wrote letters, and was half glad and half miserable to read their replies. I would have liked to be at the harvest supper, and the dance; or rather, I would have liked it, before … I read that letter over and over again, before I crumpled it up and sat looking out past my lamp-flame into the blue dusk, trying to ignore the ache in my throat. But the part of me that yearned for music and noise was the old, healthy part; I knew that silence, work and rest were what I needed now. Even if, sometimes, it felt so lonely I could hardly bear it.
The quiet days wore on, as if we were waiting for something.
When was it? Perhaps I’d been there a fortnight or a month, the first day I remember clearly. It was a bright, cold morning, and I’d been practising gold tooling on a few odd scraps of leather, concentrating hard. It was difficult, and when I peeled away the foil to see an uneven, indistinct print of my name I cursed and rolled my neck to ease the ache out of it. Something moved outside, and I looked up. The sun dazzled me, and for a moment all I saw was a shape outlined against the light. I narrowed my eyes and the glare softened. A boy – no, a young man, my age or maybe older – with dark hair and eyes and a pale, gaunt face, watching me.
I jumped so much I nearly burnt myself on the tool I was using. How long had he been there, watching me with those black stony eyes? I put the tool carefully back on to the brazier, cursing the sudden tremor that made me as clumsy as an old man. Who did he think he was, lurking there, spying?
He knocked on the glass. I turned my back on him, but when I looked over my shoulder he was still there. He gestured sideways to the little back door that opened on to the marshes. He wanted me to let him in.
I imagined him sinking gently into the mud, up to his knees, then his waist. I couldn’t bear the thought of speaking to him. I hadn’t seen anyone except Seredith for days; but it wasn’t just that, it was his stare, so steady it felt like a finger pressing between my eyes. I kept my face averted from the window as I swept the parings of leather to the ground, tidied the scraps of gold foil into their box, and loosened the screw of the hot type-holder so that I could tap the letters out on to the bench. In a minute they’d be cool enough to put back into their tray. A spacer, like a tiny brass splinter, fell to the floor and I bent to pick it up.
When I straightened to flick it on to the bench, his shadow still hadn’t moved. I sucked the sting out of my burnt finger and conceded defeat.
The back door had swollen – when was the last time it had been used? – and stuck in the frame. When I managed to get it open my heart was drumming with exertion. We stared at each other. At last I said, ‘What do you want?’ It was a stupid question; he clearly wasn’t a tradesman with a delivery, or a friend of Seredith’s here for a visit.
‘I …’ He looked away. Behind him the marsh shone like an old mirror, tarnished and mottled but still bright. When he turned back to me his face was set. ‘I’ve come to see the binder.’
I wanted to shut the door in his face. But he was a customer – the first one since I’d arrived – and I was only an apprentice. I stepped back, opening the door wider.
‘Thanks.’ But he said it with a sort of effort, and stood very still on the step, as if walking past me would soil his clothes. I turned and went back into the workshop: now he was inside he was no longer my problem. He could ring the bell or call for Seredith. I certainly wasn’t going to stop work for his sake. He hadn’t apologised for disturbing me, or watching me.
I heard him hesitate, and follow.
I made my way back to the bench and bent over the piece of tooling I’d been working on. I rubbed at one of the words to see if I could make the letters a bit clearer. The tool had been too hot on the second try – or I’d let it linger too long – and the gold had blurred; the third was a little better but I hadn’t pressed evenly. There was a chilly draught from the open workshop door, and quiet footsteps. He was behind me. I’d only looked at him for a second, but I could still see his face as clearly as if it was reflected in the window: white, smudged with shadows, with red-rimmed eyes. A deathbed face, a face no one would want to look at.
‘Emmett?’
My heart skipped a beat, because he shouldn’t have known my name.
Then I realised: the tooling. EMMETT FARMER. It must have been just large enough for him to read from a few feet away. I picked up the leather and slammed it over, face down. Too late, of course. He gave me a crooked, empty smile, as if he was proud of noticing, as if he was pleased that I’d blenched. He started to say something else.
I said, ‘I don’t know if the binder is taking commissions at the moment.’ But he went on looking at me with that odd, thirsty half-smile. ‘If that’s what you’ve come for. And she doesn’t sell books.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since harvest-time.’ He had no right to ask; I didn’t know why I answered, except that I wanted him to leave me alone.
‘You’re her apprentice?’
‘Yes.’
He looked round at the workshop, and back at me. There was something too slow, too deliberate in his look to be mere curiosity. ‘Is it a – good life?’ A twist of contempt in his voice. ‘Here, alone with her?’
The sweet scorched smell of the tools on the stove was making my head ache. I reached for the smallest, an intricate centre-tool that never came out properly in gold. I wondered how it would feel to bring it down on the back of my other hand. Or his.
‘Emmett—’ He made it sound like a curse.
I put the tool down and reached for a new piece of leather. ‘I have to get on with this.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Silence. I cut the leather into a square and fixed it to a piece of board. He was watching me. I fumbled and nearly caught my thumb with the scalpel. It felt as if there were invisible threads tangled between my fingers. I turned to him. ‘Do you want me to go and find Sere— the binder?’
‘I – not yet. Not just yet.’
He was afraid. The realisation took me by surprise. For an instant I saw past my own resentment. He was as frightened and miserable as anyone I’d ever met. He was desperate. He stank of it, like fever. But I couldn’t pity him, because there was something else, too, in the way he looked at me. Hatred. He seemed to hate me.
‘They didn’t want me to come,’ he said. ‘My father, I mean. He thinks binding is for other people, not us. If he knew I was here …’ He grimaced. ‘But it’ll be too late when I get home. He won’t punish me. How could he?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to wonder what he meant.
‘I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think …’ He cleared his throat. ‘I heard she’d chosen you and I thought I’d come and – but I didn’t think I wanted – until I saw you there …’
‘Me?’
He took a breath and reached out to brush a speck of dust off the nipping press. His forefinger trembled, and I could see the pulse beating at the base of his neck. He laughed, but not as if anything was funny. ‘You don’t care, do you? Why should you? You’ve got no idea who I am.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Emmett,’ he burst out, stumbling on the syllables, ‘please – look at me, just for a second, please. I don’t understand—’
I had the sensation that I was moving, the world racing past me too quickly to see, the speed drowning out his words. I blinked and tried to hold on, but a sickening current lifted me up and whirled me downstream. He was still talking but the words sang past me and away.
‘What’s going on?’ Seredith’s voice cut him off.
He spun round. Red crept over his cheeks and forehead. ‘I’m here for a binding.’
‘What are you doing in the workshop? Emmett, you should have called me at once.’
I tried to master the nausea. ‘I thought—’
‘It wasn’t Emmett’s fault, it was mine,’ he said. ‘My name is Lucian Darnay. I did write.’
‘Lucian Darnay.’ Seredith frowned. A strange, wary expression swept over her face. ‘And how long have you been talking to Em— to my apprentice? Never mind.’ Her eyes went to me before he could answer. ‘Emmett?’ she said, more softly. ‘Are you – well?’
The shadows swirled round me, blacking out the corners of my vision; but I nodded.
‘Good. Mr Darnay, come with me.’
‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t move. I could feel his desperation pulsing out in dark waves.
‘Come,’ Seredith repeated, and at last he turned and moved towards her. She reached for her keys and started to unlock the door at the far end of the workshop; but she didn’t look at what she was doing, she looked at me.
The door swung open. I caught my breath. I didn’t know what I had expected, but there was a glimpse of a scrubbed wooden table, two chairs, a hazy square of sun on the floor. It should have been a relief, but a tight claw closed round my chest. It looked so tidy, so austere – and yet …
‘Go in, Mr Darnay. Sit down. Wait for me.’
He drew in a long, slow breath. He glanced at me once, the fierceness in his eyes as unreadable as a riddle. Then he walked to the door and through it. When he sat down he kept his back very straight, as if he was trying not to shake.
‘Emmett, are you all right? He should never have …’ Her eyes searched my face for a reaction they didn’t find. ‘Go and lie down.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Then go and mix up a jar of paste in the kitchen.’ She watched me walk past her. I had to make an effort to take smooth steps and not stagger. Black wings were beating around me and it was hard to see where I was going. That room, that quiet little room …
I sat down on the stairs. The light lay on the floorboards in a silvery lattice. The shape of it made me think of something – half-remembered nightmares, a flash of Lucian Darnay’s face, his hungry black eyes. The darkness hung in front of me for a long time, like a fog; only there was something new in it, a flash like teeth, sharper than I could bear. Not hatred – but something that would have torn me apart if it could.
Then it closed round me, and I was gone.
III (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
I surfaced gradually into a grey soft day and the muffled sound of rain. There was another noise too, one I couldn’t identify right away: I stared at the ceiling and wondered idly what it was. A swish, a pause, a human breath, swish … After a long time I turned my head, and saw Seredith sitting at the table beside the window, her head bent. There was a kind of wooden frame set up in front of her, and piles of folded paper. She was sewing the folded pages together, along one way and then the other, and the thread whispered as it pulled taut. I watched her for a long time, lulled by the rhythm of it: in, pull, out, over, in … She tightened a stitch, cut the thread, reached for the spool, cut a new length, and tied it on. The room was so quiet I heard the little click as the knot bit. She looked round, and smiled. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I …’ I swallowed, and the sharp dryness in my mouth brought reality back. I ached all over. My wrist stung, like a Chinese burn. I glanced sideways, confused for a second. I was tied to the bed with a strip of whitish cloth. The fabric was rucked up into a narrow fold that cut into my flesh, as though I’d fought to get away.
‘You were having terrors,’ Seredith said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘No.’ Or did I? An echo of screams, a flash of dark eyes watching me …
‘Never mind. Now you’re awake I’ll untie you.’
She stood up, putting her needle down carefully on the half-sewn pile of paper, and bent over me to pick with gnarled fingers at the knot. I lay still, not looking at her. What had I done? Had I gone mad, again? Last time, when it got really bad, I’d hit out at Ma and Pa. Alta had been afraid to come near me. Had I attacked Seredith?
‘There.’ She dragged the chair to my bedside and settled into it with a sharp breath. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘No.’
‘You will be. Five days you’ve been out.’
‘Out?’
‘Two more days of rest. At least. Then you can try getting up.’
‘I’m fine. I can get up now.’ I wrenched myself into a more upright position, and grabbed the side of the bed to steady myself against the sudden drag of dizziness. Slowly the spinning stopped, but it had taken all my strength and I let my head drop back on to the pillow. I squeezed my eyes shut, forbidding myself to cry. ‘I thought I was getting better.’
‘You are.’
‘But—’ I didn’t want to think about how it must have been, one frail old woman against her crazed, hallucinating apprentice. I might have hurt her, or worse …
She shifted. ‘Open your eyes.’
‘What?’
‘Look at me. That’s better.’ She leant towards me. I smelt soap and glue and the leather of her apron. ‘It was a relapse. But the worst is over.’
I turned my face away. I’d heard Ma say that before, and every time it’d had slightly less conviction.
‘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.
‘Emmett?’ Seredith said. ‘What are you doing in here?’
I turned to the bench. In this light my tools looked like pewter, and a silver smear of glue glinted on the wood like a snail’s trail. The pile of finished endpapers was all shades of grey: ashes-of-roses, ashes-of-peacock, ashes-of-sky.
‘I thought I asked you to sort out the stores.’
A draught flicked a fine sand of ice against the window and set a wire swinging above my head. There were more papers hanging there; more dim wings, more pages than we could ever use.
‘I finished. I made more endpapers.’
‘What? Why? We don’t need—’
‘I don’t know. Because it’s something I know how to do, I suppose.’ I looked round. There were rolls and rolls of book-cloth, piled like logs on the shelf, all sombre and shadowy in this silvery half-dusk. The cupboard below held goatskins, a box of leather scraps, bottles of dye … And next to it – the door was swinging open, the catch needed seeing to – the boxes of tools glinted dully, their tiny elaborate feet poking up into the light. Reels of gold foil gleamed. In front there were presses, another long bench, the board-cutter, the plough … ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘All this – to decorate books that you don’t even sell.’
‘Books should be beautiful,’ Seredith said. ‘No one sees, that’s not the point. It’s a way to honour people – like grave-goods, in olden times.’
‘But whatever happens in your locked room … that’s the real binding, isn’t it? You make books for people, in there. How?’
She made a sudden movement, but when I looked at her she was still again. ‘Emmett …’
‘I’ve never even seen—’
‘Soon.’
‘You keep saying—’
‘Not now!’ She staggered, caught herself and dropped into the chair by the stove. ‘Please, not now, Emmett. I’m tired. I’m so tired.’
I walked past her, to the locked door. I ran my hand down over the three locks. It took an effort. My shoulder prickled with the impulse to pull away. Behind me Seredith’s chair scraped on the floor as she turned to look at me.
I stayed where I was. If I waited long enough, this fear would pass: and then I would be ready. But it didn’t. And underneath it, like a sickness I hadn’t known I had, was a black misery, a sense of loss so strong I could have wept.
‘Emmett.’
I turned on my heel and left.
In the next few days we didn’t speak of it again; we only talked about the chores and the weather, treading carefully, like people edging across new ice.
IV (#ulink_c5ac94db-6309-5157-8f78-82f56e43a677)
I woke out of a dream of fire. I opened my eyes and blinked away the flickering red light. I’d been in a palace, a maze made of flames, so high and hot they sucked the air out of my lungs, and for a moment I thought I caught the bitter scratch of smoke in my throat; but the room was dark and when I breathed all I could smell was the subtle metallic scent of snow. I sat up, rubbing my eyes.
Knocking. That was what had woken me: a hard pounding at the front door that hardly paused. And someone shouting. There was a bell jangling too, a continuous clanging like an alarum.
I dragged myself out of bed and pulled on my trousers. The boards were cold under my bare feet, but I didn’t bother about shoes. I stumbled out into the passageway and stood there for a second, listening. A man’s voice, breathless. ‘I know you’re there!’ The door juddered in its frame. ‘Come out or I’ll smash your fucking windows. Out!’
I clenched my fists. At home Pa would have reached for his rifle, and when he swung the door open whoever was there would have stammered and fallen silent. But this wasn’t my house, and I didn’t have a rifle. I crossed the passageway to knock at Seredith’s door. ‘Seredith?’ I didn’t have time to wait for an answer. I pushed it open and peered round, trying to make out where her bed was. I’d never been in this room. ‘Seredith, there’s someone outside. Are you awake?’
Nothing. I could just see the pale crumple of her pillows and rucked sheets, next to the window. She wasn’t there. ‘Seredith?’
Something muttered in the darkness. I whirled round. She was curled in a chair in the corner of the room, shielding her head as if the sky was about to fall. Her eyes were open, gleaming at me. Her face was so pale it seemed to hover in the air. ‘Seredith. There’s someone knocking at the door. Should I answer? What’s going on?’
‘Come for us,’ she muttered, ‘they’ve come, I knew they would, the Crusade, the Crusade …’
‘I don’t understand.’ My voice wavered and I clenched my fists. ‘Should I open the door? Do you want to talk to him?’
‘The Crusaders, come to burn us all, come to kill us – nowhere to run now, hide, hide in the cellar, don’t give up the books, die with the books if you must—’
‘Seredith, please!’ I dropped to my haunches in front of her, so that my eyes were at the same level as hers. I pulled gently at one of her wrists, trying to uncover her ear. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you want me to—’
She recoiled. ‘Who – get away from me – who who who—’
I rocked backwards, off balance. ‘It’s me! Seredith, it’s Emmett.’
Silence. The pounding stopped. We stared at each other through the dense grainy dark. I could hear her hoarse breathing, and my own. There was the smash of glass from downstairs. ‘Hey!’ the man yelled. ‘Come out here, you old bitch!’
Seredith shuddered. I tried to take her hand but she scrabbled backwards into the corner of the room, scraping frantically at the plaster. Her face was gleaming with moisture and her mouth was half-open. For a second she’d known who I was, but now she was staring past me, her lips trembling, and I didn’t dare touch her again.
I stood up. She caught at my shirt and tugged. I nearly fell. ‘Seredith.’ I peeled her fingers away one by one. They were brittle and clammy, and I was afraid that I’d break the bones. ‘Let go of me. I have to—’
I pulled too hard, and she cried out. But as she shook the pain from her wrist, her eyes seemed to clear. ‘Emmett,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I was dreaming. Help me back to—’
‘It’s all right. I’ll go. You stay here.’ I walked into the passage on shaking legs.
The man’s voice rose, clearer now that the window had gone. ‘I’ll smoke you out! You come out here and talk to me, witch!’
I don’t know how I got to the bottom of the stairs, or slid the bolts on the front door, but suddenly I was in the open doorway. The man in front of me startled and stepped back. He was smaller than I’d expected, and his face had a pointed, ratty look. Behind him more dark figures turned their heads. One of them had a torch. So I had smelt smoke.
He squared up to me as if he thought he was as tall as I was, though he had to tilt his head back to look me in the eye. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m the witch’s apprentice. Who the hell are you?’
‘Get her down here.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want my daughter back.’
‘Your daughter? She’s not here. No one’s here but—’ I stopped.
‘Don’t try to be smart. You know what I’m talking about. You bring her book out here, right now, and give it to me. Or—’
‘Or what?’
‘Or we burn this house to the ground. And everything in it.’
‘Look around you. It’s been snowing. These walls are three feet thick. You really believe you can just set light to the house? With one torch? Why don’t you and your makeshift army—’
‘You think we’re that stupid?’ The man gestured to his friend, who hefted a covered bucket and grinned. A slosh of liquid dribbled over the side and I smelt oil. ‘You think we’d come all this way to make empty threats? You want to take me seriously, son. I mean it. Now bring me that book.’
I swallowed. The house had thick walls, and there was snow on the thatch; but I’d seen the barn at Greats Farm on fire one winter, and I knew that if the flames took hold … ‘I don’t know where it is,’ I said. ‘I—’
Seredith’s voice said, from behind me, ‘Go home.’
‘That’s her,’ one of the dark figures said. ‘The old woman. That’s her.’
The man glared over my shoulder. ‘Don’t you order me, you old hag. You heard what I said to your – whatever he is … I want my daughter’s book. She had no right coming here to you.’
‘She had every right.’
‘You mad old bitch! She sneaked out without my permission, and then she comes home half-empty – looks at me like she doesn’t even know who I am—’
‘It was her choice. All of it was her choice. If you hadn’t—’
‘Shut up!’ He jerked forwards; if I hadn’t been there maybe he would have hit her. I caught a whiff of sour beer on his breath, mixed with something stronger. ‘I know your lot. I’m not having you sell my daughter’s book to some—’
‘I don’t sell books. I keep them safe. Now leave.’
There was a silence. The torchlight danced on the man’s face. He glanced backwards, licking his lips, and his friends stared at him. His hands opened and closed like claws.
A breeze ruffled the grass and set the torch-flame fluttering. For a moment I felt a damp breath on my cheek, blowing away the scent of smoke; then it died, and the flames leapt upwards again.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, we’ll do it your way.’ He grabbed the bucket of oil from the other man, and lumbered heavily back to the door. ‘I want that book burnt. If you won’t bring it to me, I’ll burn the house down with the book in it.’
I tried to laugh. ‘Don’t be a fool.’
‘I’m warning you. You’d better come out here.’
‘Look at us – an old woman and an apprentice, you can’t really—’
‘Watch me.’
My grip tightened on the door frame. The blood was thrumming in my fingers so hard that it felt like the wood might leap out of my grasp. I looked at Seredith. She was staring at the man, white-faced, her hair straggling over her shoulders. If I’d never seen her before I could have believed she was a witch. She said something too low to catch.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘she’s old, she hasn’t done anything wrong, whatever happened to your daughter—’
‘Whatever happened? She was bound, that’s what happened! Now, you move out of the way, or I swear I’ll burn you along with everything else—’ He lunged at me and dragged me forwards. I stumbled away from the door, surprised by the strength of his grip; then I flung my arm up to break his hold. I staggered to the side but by the time I got my balance someone had grabbed me from behind. The other man swung his torch in front of me as if I was an animal. The heat prickled on my cheeks and I blinked away stinging tears. ‘And you,’ he shouted, through the doorway, ‘you come out too. You come out and we won’t hurt you.’
I tried to pull away from whoever was holding me. ‘You mean you’ll just leave us out here in the snow? Miles from anywhere? She’s an old woman.’
‘Shut up!’ He turned on me. ‘I’m being kind, warning you at all.’
I wanted to throttle him. I forced myself to take a deep breath. ‘Look – you can’t do this. You could be deported – you don’t want to risk that.’
‘For burning a binder’s house to the ground? I’ve got ten friends’ll swear I was in the tavern the whole night. Now, get the old bitch out here or she’ll get smoked into a kipper with the rest.’
The front door slammed. A bolt shot home.
Melted snow ran off the roof in a sudden dribble, as if a pool had formed and overflowed. The breeze lifted and died again. I thought I heard it whine in the broken window. I swallowed. ‘Seredith?’
She didn’t answer. I pulled away from the man who’d been holding me. He let me go without a struggle.
‘Seredith. Open the door. Please.’ I leant sideways to peer through the jagged space where the window had been. She was sitting on the stairs like a child, her legs crossed neatly at the ankles. She didn’t look up. ‘What are you doing? Seredith?’
She murmured something.
‘What? Please, let me in—’
‘That’s it. The bitch wants to burn.’ There was a strident note in his voice, like bravado; but when I looked back at him he gave me a wide rotten-toothed grin. ‘She’s made her choice. Now get out of the way.’ He lurched forwards and sloshed oil on the wall by my feet. The smell rose like a fog, thick and real.
‘Don’t – you can’t – please!’ He went on grinning at me, unblinking. I turned and hammered at the last shards of glass in the window, smashing them away with the side of my fist; but the window was too narrow to get through. ‘Seredith, come out! They’re going to set the house on fire, please.’
She didn’t move. I would have thought she couldn’t hear me, except that her shoulders rose a little when I said please.
‘You can’t set fire to the house while she’s in it. That’s murder.’ My voice was high and hoarse.
‘Get out of the way.’ But he didn’t wait for me to move. Oil splashed on to my trousers as he went past. He poured the last dregs against the side wall and stood back. The man with the torch was watching, his expression open and interested, like a schoolboy’s.
Maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Maybe the snow on the roof would quench it, or the walls would be too thick and too damp. But Seredith was old, and the smoke would be enough to kill her, if she was inside.
‘Hey, Baldwin. Get the other bucket. Round the side.’ He pointed.
‘Please. Please don’t do this.’ But I knew it was no good. I spun round and threw myself against the door. I pounded on the wood with my fists. ‘Seredith! Open the door. Damn you, open the door.’
Someone caught my collar and pulled me back. I choked and nearly fell.
‘Good. Keep him back. Now.’
The man with the torch grunted and stepped forwards. I scrabbled desperately to break free. The seam of my shirt ripped and I almost fell into the space between the torch-flames and the door. The smell of oil was so strong I could taste it. It was on me, on my trousers and hands; the smallest leap of a spark and I’d be on fire. The burning torch hovered in front of my eyes, a spitting mass of talons and tongues.
Something thudded into my back. I’d walked backwards into the door. I leant against it. Nowhere to go now.
The man raised the torch like a staff and tilted it until it was right in front of my face. Then he lowered it. I watched it flicker, almost touching the base of the wall, almost close enough to catch.
‘No.’
My own voice; but not my own. My blood rose and sang in my ears like a flood, so loud I couldn’t hear myself think.
‘Do this and you will be cursed,’ I said, and in the sudden quiet it was as though another voice spoke underneath mine. ‘Kill with fire and you will perish in fire. Burn in hatred and you will burn.’
No one answered. No one moved.
‘If you do this, your souls will be stained with blood and ash. Everything you touch will go grey and wither. Everyone you touch will fall ill or run mad or die.’
A sound: faint, faraway, like something drawing closer. But the voice coming from inside me wouldn’t let me pause to listen. ‘You will end hated and alone,’ it said. ‘There will be no forgiveness, ever.’
Quietness spread out around me like a ripple in a pond, deadening the hiss of the wind and the scratch of the flames. But inside that quiet there was something new, ticking, like drying wood or leaves falling.
The men stared at me. I looked round, meeting their eyes, letting the other voice look through me. My hand rose to point at the man who had threatened me, steady as a prophet’s. ‘Go.’
He hesitated. The ticking broadened into a crackle, then a hiss, then a roar.
Rain.
It fell in ropes, as sudden as an ambush, blinding me, driving through hair and clothes in seconds. Icy water ran down the back of my neck and sprayed off my nose when I gasped with the shock of it. The man swung his torch sideways to catch the shelter of the overhanging roof, but the wind blew a curtain of rain over it, and then there was no light at all. There was shouting, a few stifled, panicked cries, and the sounds of a man stumbling in the dark. ‘He called down the rain – fuck this, let’s go – the magic—’
I blinked, but there were only blurred shadows, running and disappearing like wraiths. Someone called, someone answered, someone grunted and swore as he tripped and struggled to his feet; and then the noise retreated, I heard a far-off mutter of voices and horses, and they were gone.
I shut my eyes. I was soaked to the skin. The marsh hissed and rumbled under the rain, answering, echoing. The thatch whispered its own note as the wind hummed through the broken window. There was the smell of mud and reeds and melted snow.
I was cold. A spasm of shivering took hold of me and I leant forward, bracing myself as if it came from outside. When it was over I blinked the water off my eyelashes and blew the strings of rain away from my mouth. The dark had lessened, and now I could make out trembling, silvery edges to things: the barn, the road, the horizon.
I turned round and stared through the window. Even now it made my neck tingle, to turn my back on the vast emptiness where the road was. But I’d heard them go. I called softly, ‘Seredith? They’ve gone. Let me in.’
I wasn’t sure if I could really see her, or whether my brain was inventing the ghostly blur in the darkness. I wiped the water out of my eyes and tried to make her out. She was there, sitting on the stairs. I leant as close to the edge of the broken glass as I could. ‘Seredith. It’s all right. Open the door.’
She didn’t move. I don’t know how long I stood there. I murmured to her as if I was trying to tame an animal: the same words, over and over again. I started to forget what was my voice and what was the rain. I was so cold I went into a sort of dream, where I was the marsh and the house as well as myself, where I was slippery wet wood and claggy mud … When at last the bolt was shot back, I was so stiff and shrammed that I didn’t react straight away.
Seredith said, ‘Come in, then.’
I limped inside and stood dripping on the floor. Seredith rummaged in the sideboard; I heard the scratching of match after match as she tried to light the lamp. At last I crossed to her and gently took the box. We both jumped at my touch. I didn’t look at her until the lamp was burning and I’d put the glass chimney over the flame.
She was trembling, and her hair was sticking out in a clump; but when she met my eyes, she gave me a wry almost-smile that told me she knew who I was. She reached for the lamp.
‘Seredith …’
‘I know. I shall go to bed, or I’ll catch my death.’
That wasn’t what I’d been going to say. I nodded.
‘You’d better go too.’ She added, too quickly, ‘You’re sure they’ve gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Silence. She stared at the lamp, and in the soft light her face could have been young. At last she said, ‘Thank you, Emmett.’
I didn’t answer.
‘Without you, they would have burnt the house down before the rain came.’
‘Why didn’t you—’
‘I was so afraid when I heard them knocking.’ She stopped. She took a pace towards the staircase, and turned back. ‘When they came, I dreamt … I thought they were the Crusade. There hasn’t been a Crusade here for sixty years, but … I remember them coming for us. I must have been your age. And my master …’
‘The Crusade?’
‘Never mind. Those days are over. Now it’s only a few peasants, here and there, that hate us enough to murder us …’ She laughed a little. I’d never heard her say peasants like that, with contempt.
Something inside me tipped. I said, slowly, ‘But they didn’t want to murder us. Not really. They wanted to burn the house.’ A pause. The flame bobbed, so I couldn’t tell if her expression had changed. ‘Why did you lock yourself in, Seredith?’
She reached for the banister and began to climb the stairs.
‘Seredith.’ My arms ached with the effort to stop myself reaching for her. ‘You could have died. I could have died, trying to get you out. Why the hell did you lock yourself in?’
‘Because of the books,’ she said, turning so suddenly I was scared she’d fall. ‘Why do you think, boy? Because the books have to be kept safe.’
‘But—’
‘And if the books burn, I will burn with them. Do you understand?’
I shook my head.
She looked at me for a long time. She seemed about to say something else. But then she shivered so violently she had to steady herself, and when the spasm had passed she seemed exhausted. ‘Not now,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she’d come to the last of her breath. ‘Good night.’
I listened to her footsteps climb to the landing and cross to the room where she slept. The rain swirled through the broken window and rattled on the floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
I was aching all over with cold, and my head was spinning with tiredness; but when I shut my eyes I saw flames spitting and clawing at me. The noise of the rain separated into different notes: the percussive hiss of water on the roof, the whisper of the wind, human voices … I knew they weren’t real, but I could hear distinct words, as if everyone I had ever known had surrounded the house and was calling to me. It was fatigue, only fatigue, but I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted … Most of all I wanted not to be alone; but that was the one thing I couldn’t have.
I had to get warm. My mother would have parcelled me up in a blanket and wrapped her arms round me until I stopped shivering; then she would have made me hot tea and brandy, sent me to bed and sat beside me while I drank it. The familiar ache of homesickness threatened to overwhelm me. I went into the workshop and lit the stove. Outside there was a hint of light, a crack between the clouds and the horizon; it was later than I’d realised.
It occurred to me, vaguely, that I had saved Seredith’s life.
I brewed tea, and drank it. The flames dancing in my head began to subside. The voices grew fainter as the rain slackened. The stove creaked and clicketed and smelt of warm metal. I sat on the floor, leaning against the plan chest, with my legs spread out in front of me. From this angle, and in this light, the workshop looked like a cave: mysterious, looming, the knobs and screws of the presses transformed into strange rock formations. The shadow of the board cutter on the wall looked like a man’s face. I rolled my head round, taking it all in, and for a second I was filled with a fierce pleasure to have saved it all: my workshop, my things, my place.
The door at the end of the room was ajar.
I blinked. At first I thought it was a trick of the light. I put down my cold mug of tea and leant forward, and saw the gap between the door and the jamb. It was the door on the left of the stove: not the room where Seredith took people, but the other door, the one that led down into the dark.
I almost kicked it shut. I could have done that, left it unlocked but closed, and gone to bed. I almost did. I reached out gently with my foot, but instead of pushing it shut I edged it open.
Blackness. An empty shelf just inside, and beyond that a flight of stairs going down. Nothing more than I’d seen before. Nothing like the bare light-filled room behind the other door, except for the cold that breathed from it.
I stood up and reached for the lamp. I wasn’t sleepy any more. Tension pricked in my fingertips and itched between my shoulder blades. I pushed the door wide open and went down into the dark.
It smelt of damp. That was the first thing I noticed: a thick, muddy scent like rotting reeds. I paused on the stair, my heart speeding up. Damp was almost as bad as fire; it brought mould and wrinkled paper and softened glue. And it smelt of age and dead things, smelt wrong … But as I turned the corner of the staircase and lifted the lamp, what I saw was nothing out of the ordinary: a little room with a table and cupboards, a broom and a bucket, chests that were marked with a stationer’s label. I almost laughed. Just a storeroom. At the far end – although it wasn’t far, only a few steps across – there was a round bronze plate in the wall, like a solid wheel, intricate and decorative. The other walls were piled high with chests and boxes. The air felt as dry as it had upstairs; perhaps I’d imagined the smell.
I turned my head, half thinking I’d heard something. But everything was perfectly still, insulated from the noise of the rain by the dense earth beyond.
I put down the lamp and looked about me. There was a drawer balanced on a pile of boxes, full of broken tools waiting to be repaired or thrown away, and a row of glass bottles filled with dark liquid that looked like dyes or ox gall for marbling paper. I nearly tripped over three fire-buckets of sand. On the table there was a humped parcel wrapped in sackcloth, and some tools. I didn’t recognise them; they were thin, delicate things with edges like fish’s teeth. I brought the lamp closer. Next to the bundle there was another cloth, spread out to cover something. This was where Seredith worked, when I was upstairs in the workshop.
I reached out and unwrapped the bundle, as gently as if it was alive. It was a book-block, neatly sewn, with thick dark endpapers threaded with white, like tiny roots reaching through soil. The blood sang in my fingertips. A book. The first book I had seen, since I’d been here; the first since I was a child, and learned that they were forbidden. But holding it now I felt nothing but a kind of peace.
I brought it to my face and inhaled the smell of paper. I almost opened it to look at the title page; but I was too curious about what was under the other bit of sacking. I put the block down and drew back the cloth. Here was the cover Seredith had been making. For a moment, before I understood what I was seeing, it was beautiful.
The background was black velvet, so fine it absorbed every glint of light and lay on the bench like a piece of solid darkness. The inlay stood out against it like ivory, shining softly, pale gold in the lamplight.
Bones. A skeleton, the spine curled like a row of pearls round pale twigs of legs and arms, and the tiny splinters of toes and fingers. The skull bulged like a mushroom. They were smaller than my outstretched hand, those bones. They were as small and fragile as a bird’s.
But it wasn’t … it hadn’t been a bird. It was a baby.
V (#ulink_aaecdbef-78a7-5f9d-aca4-67bf1b4e490d)
‘Don’t touch it.’
I hadn’t heard Seredith come into the room, but some distant, watchful part of me wasn’t surprised to hear her voice. I didn’t know how long I had been standing there. It was only when I stepped back – carefully, as though there was something here I was afraid to wake – that I felt the stiff chill in my joints, the pins-and-needles in my feet, and knew it had been a long time. In spite of my care I knocked my ankle against a box, but the hollow sound was muffled by the earth beyond the walls.
I said, ‘I wasn’t going to touch it.’
‘Emmett …’
I didn’t answer. The wick of the lamp needed trimming, and the shadows jumped and ducked. The bones gleamed against their bed of black. As the light danced back and forth I could have made myself believe that they were moving; but when at last the flame steadied they lay quiet.
‘It’s only a binding,’ she said. She shifted in the doorway, but I didn’t look at her. ‘It’s mother-of-pearl.’
‘Not real bones.’ It came out like mockery. I hadn’t meant it to, but I was glad, fiercely glad, at the way it cut through the silence.
‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not real bones.’
I stared at the shining intricate shapes on the velvet until my eyes blurred. At last I reached out and pulled the cloth down over them; then I stood looking down at the coarse brown hessian. Here and there, where the weave was loose, I could still see the smooth edge of a femur, the nacreous curve of the skull, a miniature, perfect fingerbone. I imagined her working on them, crafting tiny shapes out of mother-of-pearl. I shut my eyes and listened to my blood pounding, and beyond that the dead quiet of walls and earth.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you do.’
The lamp murmured and guttered. Nothing else moved.
‘You know already.’
‘No.’
‘You know, if you think about it.’
I opened my mouth to say no, again; but something caught in my throat. The lamp-flame flared, licked upwards and then sank to a tiny blue bubble. The dark took a step towards me.
‘You bind – people,’ I said. My throat was so dry it hurt to speak; but the silence hurt more. ‘You make people into books.’
‘Yes. But not in the way you mean.’
‘What other way is there?’
She walked towards me. I didn’t turn, but the light from her candle grew stronger, pushing back the shadows. ‘Sit down, Emmett.’
She touched my shoulder. I flinched and spun round, stumbling back into the table. Tools clattered to the floor and skittered away. We stared at each other. She had stepped back too; now she put her candle down on one of the chests, and the flame magnified the trembling of her hand. Wax had spattered the floor; it congealed in a split second, like water turning to milk.
‘Sit down.’ She lifted an open drawer of jars off a box. ‘Here.’
I didn’t want to sit, while she was standing. I held her gaze, and she was the first to look away. She dumped the drawer down again. Then, wearily, she bent to pick up the little tools I’d knocked off the table.
‘You trap them,’ I said. ‘You take people and put them inside books. They leave here … empty.’
‘I suppose, in a way—’
‘You steal their souls.’ My voice cracked. ‘No wonder they’re afraid of you. You lure them here and suck them dry, you take what you want and send them away with nothing. That’s what a book is, isn’t it? A life. A person. And if they burn, they die.’
‘No.’ She straightened up, one hand clutching a tiny wood-handled knife.
I picked up the book on the table and held it out. ‘Look,’ I said, my voice rising and rising, ‘this is a person. Inside there’s a person – out there somewhere they’re walking round dead – it’s evil, what you do, they should have fucking burnt you.’
She slapped me.
Silence. There was a thin high ringing in the air that wasn’t real. Automatic tears rose in my eyes and spilt down my cheeks. I wiped them away with the inside of my wrist. The pain faded to a hot tingling, like salt water drying on my skin. I put the book down and smoothed the endpaper with my palm where I’d rumpled it. The crease would never come out entirely; it stood out like a scar, branching across the corner. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Seredith turned away and dropped the knife into the open drawer by my side. ‘Memories,’ she said, at last. ‘Not people, Emmett. We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any more harm. That’s all books are.’
Finally I met her eyes. Her expression was open, candid, a little weary, like her voice. She made it sound so right – so necessary; like a doctor describing an amputation. ‘Not souls, Emmett,’ she said. ‘Not people. Just memories.’
‘It’s wrong,’ I said, trying to match my tone to hers. Steady, reasonable … but my voice shook and betrayed me. ‘You can’t say it’s right to do that. Who are you to say what they can live with?’
‘We don’t. We help people who come to us and ask for it.’ A flicker of sympathy went over her face as if she knew she’d won. ‘No one has to come, Emmett. They decide. All we do is help them forget.’
It wasn’t that simple. Somehow I knew it wasn’t. But I had no argument to make, no defence against the softness of her voice and her level eyes. ‘What about that?’ I pointed to the child-shape under the sacking. ‘Why would you make a book like that?’
‘Milly’s book? Do you really want to know?’
A shiver went over me, fierce and sudden. I clenched my teeth and didn’t answer.
She walked past me, stared down at the sacking for a moment, and then slid it gently to one side. In her shadow the little skeleton shone bluish.
‘She buried it alive,’ Seredith said. There was no weight to the words, only a quiet precision that left all the feeling to me. ‘She couldn’t go on, she thought she couldn’t go on. And so she wrapped it up, one day when it wouldn’t stop crying, and she laid it on the dung heap and pulled rubbish and manure over it until she couldn’t hear it any more.’
‘Her baby?’
A nod.
I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t look away. The baby would have lain like that, curled and helpless, trying to cry, trying to breathe. How long would it have taken, before it was just part of the dungheap, rotting with everything else? It was like a horrible fairy tale: bones turned to pearl, earth turned to velvet. But it was true. It was true, and the story was locked in a book, shut away, written on dead pages. My hand tingled where I had smoothed out the endpaper: that thick, veined paper, black as soil.
‘That’s murder,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t the parish constable arrest her?’
‘She kept the child a secret. No one knew about it.’
‘But …’ I stopped. ‘How could you help her? A woman – a girl who killed her own child – like that – you should have …’
‘What should I have done?’
‘Let her suffer! Make her live with it! Remembering is part of the punishment. If you do something evil—’
‘It was her father’s, too. The man who came to burn this book. He was her father, and the child’s.’
For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I looked away, feeling sick.
There was the rustle of sackcloth as Seredith drew it back over the bones, and the creak of the box as she perched on the edge of it, holding on to the table to steady herself.
At last she said, ‘I’m not being fair to you, Emmett. Sometimes I do turn people away. Very, very rarely. And not because they’ve done something so terrible I can’t help; only because I know they’ll go on doing terrible things. Then, if I’m sure, I will refuse to help them. But it has only happened three times, in more than sixty years. The others, I helped.’
‘Isn’t burying a baby terrible?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and bowed her head. ‘Of course it is, Emmett.’
A breath. ‘You said, what books are … So every book,’ I said, ‘every book that’s ever been bound, is someone’s memories. Something they’ve chosen to forget.’
‘Yes.’
‘And …’ I cleared my throat. Suddenly I could feel the imprint of my father’s hand on my cheek, the stinging blow he’d given me years ago, as if the pain had never really faded. Never let me see you with a book again. This was what he had wanted to protect me from. And now I was an apprentice; I was going to be a binder.
‘You think,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I’m going to do what you do.’
She didn’t even glance at me. ‘It will be easier,’ she said, from a long way away, ‘if you don’t despise it. Despise books – despise the people who need help – and you despise yourself. Your work.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t. It’s not …’
She laughed. It was so close to her usual amused snort that my stomach twisted. ‘Yes, you can. Binders are born, not made. And you’re a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand. And it won’t let you rest. It’s a great force, inside you. It’s what made you ill, when … You’re stronger in it than most binders I’ve known. You’ll see.’
‘How do you know? You might be wrong—’
‘I know, Emmett.’
‘How?’
‘The binder’s fever gave you away. You will be a good binder. In every sense.’
I shook my head. I went on shaking it, even though I didn’t know why.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we do is very difficult. Sometimes it makes me angry or sad. Sometimes I regret – if I’d known what the memories were, I wouldn’t have—’ She stopped and glanced away. ‘Much of the time it doesn’t even touch me. But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’
‘I’m not doing it. It’s wrong. It’s – unnatural.’
She lowered her head, inhaling so deeply I saw her shoulders move. The skin under her eyes looked as fragile as the bloom on a moth’s wing: one touch and it would brush away and leave bare bone. She said, without looking at me, ‘It’s a sacred calling, Emmett. To have another person’s memory entrusted to you … To take the deepest, darkest part away from them and keep it safe, forever. To honour it, to make it beautiful, even though no one will ever see it. To guard it with your own life …’
‘I don’t want to be a glorified gaoler.’
She jolted upright. For a long moment I thought she would hit me again. ‘This is why I didn’t tell you before,’ she said, finally. ‘Because you’re not ready yet, you’re still struggling … But now you know. And you’re lucky to be here. If you had gone to a bindery in Castleford you’d have had your scruples beaten out of you long ago.’
I held out my finger and slid it through the candle flame, once, twice, slowing down until I could hardly bear it. There were too many questions; I concentrated on the pain and let my mouth decide. ‘So why am I here?’
She blinked. ‘Because I was the nearest. And—’ She stopped.
Her eyes slid away from mine. She kneaded her forehead, and for the first time I noticed how flushed her cheeks were. ‘I’m exhausted, Emmett. I think that’s enough for today. Don’t you?’
She was right. I was so tired that I could feel the world spinning. I nodded, and she stood up. I reached out to help her but she ignored me. She picked her way through the narrow space back to the door.
‘Seredith?’
She paused, but didn’t turn. Her sleeve had fallen back as she leant against the wall, and her wrist was like a child’s.
‘Yes?’
‘Where are the books? If you keep them safe …’
She held her arm out to point at the circular plaque on the wall. ‘On the other side of that,’ she said, ‘there’s a vault.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Yes.’ She turned, reaching for a key that hung round her neck; then her hand tightened on it. ‘No. Not now. Another time.’
I’d only asked out of curiosity. But there was something in her face – or something not in her face, something that should have been there … I pushed my tongue into the sharp space between two of my teeth and stared at her. Strands of her hair clung to her forehead, sticky with sweat. She reeled. I stepped towards her, but she stumbled back as if she couldn’t bear me to get too close. ‘Good night, Emmett.’
I watched her turn, bracing herself in the doorway as though she was fighting to stay on her feet. I should have let her go, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Seredith … What happens if the books burn? Do the people die?’
She didn’t look at me. She shuffled to the stairs and began to climb them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They remember.’
I was so tired I couldn’t think. Seredith had gone to bed; I should go too. If only I’d gone to bed an hour ago, instead of sitting down next to the stove in the workshop … Sleep. I wanted to step right off the edge of consciousness. I wanted that darkness more than anything. I wanted not to be here.
I sat down. Or rather, I found that I was already sitting, cramped on the floor with my legs folded, my back against a box. I didn’t have the energy to find a better position. Instead I wrapped my arms round my knees, put my head down, and slept.
When I woke, the first thing I felt was a kind of peace. It was almost pitch-black – the candle had gone out – and I felt as though I were drifting, disintegrating painlessly in the subtle currents of the dark. Then some of what had happened came back – but small, too far away to hurt me, like reflections in a silver cup. I got up and groped my way up the stairs, yawning. I’d thought it was the middle of the night, and the greyish light streaming through the workshop windows made me blink and rub my eyes. It was still raining, although now it was a thin quiet mizzle, and the snow only clung to the ground in a few places, grimy and pockmarked. Seredith had been right about the thaw; the post would get to us at least once more before winter really set in.
The stove had gone out. I hesitated, wanting to leave it and go upstairs to bed; but it was morning, and there was work to do … Work. I didn’t want to think about work. I crouched down and remade the fire. By the time it was going properly I was a little warmer, but the deep, cold quiet of the house needed more than the stove to thaw it. I hadn’t boarded up the broken window; but it wasn’t that, it was something else. I shook my head, wondering if my ears were playing tricks on me. It was like the way the snow had muffled every sound – or a feeling of distance, as if everything I heard was an echo …
Tea. The caddy was almost empty. I put water on to boil and went to get a new packet from the pantry. As I crossed the hall I turned my face away from the moist draught that blew in through the jagged-edged window. As soon as I’d had something hot to drink I’d find a bit of millboard—
Seredith was curled on the stairs, her head resting against the banister.
‘Seredith? Seredith!’
It was only when she moved that I knew I’d been afraid. I pulled her gently to her feet, appalled at how light she was, and the heat that was seeping from her skin. She was clammy, and her face was flushed. She muttered something, and I bent close to hear her. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. Her breath was foul, as if something was rotting inside her. ‘I was just … sitting down.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
‘I’m perfectly all right. I don’t need …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Come on.’ I half pushed and half lifted her upwards, step after step, and then along the passage to her room. She clambered into bed and pulled the blankets over herself as if she was freezing. I hurried downstairs to get her a jug of water, and herb tea to bring the fever down, and more blankets; but when I came back into the bedroom she was already asleep. She’d undressed, and her clothes were crumpled in a pile on the floor.
I stood very still, listening to the silence. I could hear Seredith’s breathing – faster, louder than it should have been – and the faint crackle of rain against the window; but behind that, and my own blood in my ears, there was nothing but the solid emptiness of the house and the marshes beyond. I was more alone here than I’d ever been.
I sat down. In this light, sleeping, Seredith looked even older; the flesh on her cheeks and below her jaw sagged, so that the skin was stretched thin over the bones of her nose and eyes. A scab of spittle clung to the corner of her mouth. She murmured something and turned over, and her hands twitched and clutched the quilt. Her skin was a chalky, yellowish colour against the faded indigo-and-white of the patchwork, while here and there the shadow of a raindrop crawled across the cotton.
I looked around. I had never been in here in daylight. There was a little fireplace and a padded window seat, and a mossy-looking armchair, but it was almost as bare as my room. There were no pictures, or ornaments above the hearth. The only decoration on the walls was the light from the window, the faint lattice, the sliding silver of the rain-shadows. Even my parents had more than this. And yet Seredith wasn’t poor; I knew that, from the lists of supplies we sent to Castleford every week, and the sacks that Toller brought back for us. I had never thought about where her money came from. If she died—
I looked down at her face on the pillow, and a kind of panic seized me. It was an effort to stop myself from waking her up and pouring the tea forcibly down her throat; it was best to let her sleep. I could light a fire, bring damp cloths, have some honey dissolved in water for when she woke of her own accord … But I sat still, unable to leave her. It had been the other way round, so many times – that she’d watched at my bedside while I slept, as patient as stone – but she’d never made me feel as though I should be grateful. For the first time I wondered whether her brusqueness had been deliberate. My throat ached.
An hour later, through the rain, I caught the distant creak and rumble of a cart, and at last the off-key jangle of the bell. The post. I lifted my head, and a perverse part of me wanted him to go away again, to leave me in this strange, bereft peace; but I got to my feet and went down to open the door.
‘Seredith’s sick. I don’t know who to … Can you send someone?’
He squinted at me above the collar of his coat. ‘Send someone? Who?’
‘A doctor. Or her family.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. She writes letters, doesn’t she? Tell the people she writes to.’
‘I—’ He stopped, and shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t count on them coming.’
He drove off. I watched until the cart was a tiny blot in the mottled expanse of brown grass and half-melted snow.
VI (#ulink_d7507669-24ed-5eb0-89fe-d9c476ea9657)
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.
VII (#ulink_8de72d76-9d04-5e7e-969d-b09fa26f2d8e)
I slept in the parlour, huddled in a spare blanket. The settee was shiny horsehair and so slippery that in the end I had to brace myself with one foot on the floor to stop myself sliding off. When I woke up it was freezing and still dark, and I ached all over. I was disorientated; for a moment I thought I was outside somewhere, surrounded by the dim hulks of winter ruins.
It was so cold I didn’t even try to go back to sleep. I stood up with the blanket still wrapped round my shoulders and staggered stiffly into the kitchen. I stoked the range and boiled a kettle for tea, while the last stars faded over the horizon. There was a clear sky, and by the time I’d drunk my tea and made a pot to take upstairs the kitchen was full of sunlight.
As I crossed the landing I heard my bedroom door open. It struck me for the first time how familiar the sound had become: I knew, without thinking, that it was my door and not Seredith’s.
‘Ah. I was hoping for shaving water. Never mind, tea will do. In here, please.’
I blinked away the after-image of the kitchen window that was still hovering in my vision. De Havilland was standing in my doorway in his shirtsleeves. Now it was light I could take in his appearance better – the ringlets of lightish, greyish hair, the pale eyes, the embroidered waistcoat – and the disdainful expression on his face. It was difficult to tell how old he was: his hair and eyes were so washed out that he could have been forty or sixty. ‘Hurry up, boy.’
‘This is for Seredith.’
For a second I thought he was going to object. He sighed. ‘Very well. Bring another cup. The hot water can come later.’ He pushed ahead of me and went into Seredith’s bedroom without knocking. The door swung closed and I caught it with my elbow and backed into the room after him.
‘Go away,’ Seredith said. ‘No, not you, Emmett.’
She was sitting up, her face haloed by wisps of white hair, her fingers clasping the quilt under her chin. She was thin, but there was a good colour in her cheeks, and her eyes were as sharp as ever. De Havilland gave her a thin smile. ‘You’re awake, I see. How are you feeling?’
‘Invaded. Why are you here?’
He sighed. He brushed a few nonexistent specks of dust off the moss-coloured armchair and sank into it, hitching his trousers up delicately at the knee. He turned his head to take in the room, pausing here and there to note the cracks in the plaster, and the scarred foot of the bed, and the darker diamond of blue where the quilt had been patched. When I put the tray down beside the bed he leant past me to pour tea into the solitary cup, and sipped from it with a flicker of a grimace. ‘This is tiresome. Suppose we stop wasting time and behave as if I was concerned for you,’ he said.
‘Rubbish. When have you ever been concerned for me? Emmett, will you get two more cups, please?’
I said, ‘It’s all right, Seredith, I’m not thirsty,’ just as de Havilland said, ‘One will suffice, I think.’ I clenched my jaw and left without looking at him. I went to the kitchen and back as quickly as I could, but when I glanced at the cup as I reached the top of the stairs I saw a feather of dust curled round the inside. If it had been meant for de Havilland I would have left it, but it wasn’t. By the time I opened Seredith’s bedroom door, swinging the cup from my finger, Seredith was sitting bolt upright with her arms crossed over her chest, while de Havilland lolled back in his chair. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘You’re an excellent binder. Old-fashioned, of course, but … Well. You would be useful to me.’
‘Work in your bindery?’
‘You know my offer still stands.’
‘I’d rather die.’
De Havilland turned to me, very deliberately. ‘So glad to see you finally managed to find your way back to us,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to pour Seredith a cup of tea before she expires of thirst.’
I didn’t trust myself to reply. I poured dark tea into the clean cup and gave it to Seredith, cradling her hands in mine to make sure that she held it securely. She glanced up at me and some of the ferocity went out of her face. ‘Thank you, Emmett.’
De Havilland pinched the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb. He was smiling, but without warmth. ‘Times have changed, Seredith. Even apart from the question of your health, I wish you would reconsider. This lonely existence, miles from anywhere, binding ignorant, superstitious peasants … We have worked very hard, you know, to better our reputation, so that people begin to understand that we are doctors of the soul and not witches. You do the craft no credit at all—’
‘Don’t lecture me.’
He smoothed a strand of hair away from his forehead with splayed fingers. ‘I am merely making the point that we learnt from the Crusade—’
‘You weren’t even alive during the Crusade! How dare you—’
‘All right, all right!’ After a moment he leant over and poured himself another cup of tea. By now it was like dye, but he didn’t seem to notice until he took a sip and his lips wrinkled. ‘Be reasonable, Seredith. How many people have you bound, this year? Four? Five? You can’t have enough work to keep yourself busy, let alone an apprentice. And all peasants with no understanding of the craft at all. They think you’re a witch …’ He leant forward, his voice softening. ‘Wouldn’t it be pleasant to come to Castleford, where binders command some respect? Where books command respect? I am quite influential, you know. I attend some of the best families.’
‘Attend them?’ Seredith echoed. ‘A binding should be once a lifetime.’
‘Oh, please … When pain can be alleviated, who are we to withhold our art? You are too set in your ways.’
‘That’s enough!’ She thrust her tea aside, slopping it over the patchwork. ‘I am not coming to Castleford.’
‘This inverse snobbery is hardly in your best interests. Why you prefer to rot away in this godforsaken place—’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I had never heard Seredith struggle to control her anger, and it made my own gorge rise. ‘Apart from anything else, I can’t leave the books.’
He put his cup down on its saucer with a clink. The signet ring on his little finger glinted. ‘Don’t be absurd. I understand your scruples, but it’s quite simple. We can take the books with us. I have space in my own vault.’
‘Give you my books?’ She laughed. It sounded like a twig cracking.
‘My vault is perfectly safe. Safer than having them in the bindery with you.’
‘That’s it, is it?’ She shook her head and sat back against her pillows, gasping a little. ‘I should have known. Why else would you bother to come? You’re after my books. Of course.’
He sat up straight, and for the first time a hint of pink seeped into his cheeks. ‘There’s no need to be—’
‘How many of your own books actually end up in your vault? You think I don’t know how you pay for your new bindery and your – your waistcoats?’
‘There’s nothing illegal about trade binding. It’s merely prejudice.’
‘I’m not talking about trade binding,’ she said, her mouth twisting on the words as if they tasted bitter. ‘I’m talking about selling true bindings, without consent. And that is illegal.’
They stared at each other for a moment. Seredith’s hand was a white knot of tendons at her throat; she was clutching the key she wore round her neck as if it was in danger of being wrenched away from her.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ de Havilland said, getting to his feet. ‘I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Neither do I. Why don’t you go home?’
He gave a theatrical sigh, raising his eyes to the cracked plaster on the ceiling. ‘I’ll go home when you’re better.’
‘Or when I’m dead. That’s really what you’re waiting for, isn’t it?’
He made a little mocking bow in her direction and strode towards the door. I leant back against the wall to let him pass, and he caught my eye and started, as if he’d forgotten I was there. ‘Hot water,’ he said. ‘In my bedroom. Immediately.’ He slammed the door behind him with a bang that made the walls tremble.
Seredith looked at me sidelong and then ducked her head, plucking at the quilt as if she was checking that the pattern was complete. When she didn’t say anything, I cleared my throat. ‘Seredith … If you want me to make him leave …’
‘And how would you do that?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Emmett. He’ll go of his own accord, when he sees that I’m recovered. It won’t be long.’ There was something sour in the way she said it. ‘In the meantime …’
‘Yes?’
She met my eyes. ‘Try not to lose your temper with him. You may need him, yet.’
But that flicker of complicity wasn’t much consolation, as the days went on and de Havilland showed no sign of leaving. I couldn’t understand why Seredith put up with him, but I knew that without her permission I couldn’t tell him to go. And knowing that it was my own fault that he was there didn’t make it easier to bite my tongue when he poked quizzically at the lumps in a salt-pork stew, or threw me a couple of shirts and told me to wash them. Between my chores, looking after Seredith and the extra work he made, there was no time for anything else; the hours passed in a blur of drudgery and resentment, and I didn’t even set foot in the workshop. It was hard to remember that a few days ago, before de Havilland came, I’d felt as if the house belonged to me: now I was reduced to a slave. But the worst thing wasn’t the work – I’d worked harder than this, at home, before I got ill – it was the way de Havilland’s presence filled the house. I’d never known anyone who moved so quietly; more than once, when I was stoking the range or scrubbing a pan, I felt the chill touch of his gaze on the back of my neck. I turned round, expecting him to blink or smile, but he went on watching me as if I was a kind of animal he’d never seen before. I stared back, determined not to be the first to look away, and at last he let his eyes travel past me to what I was doing, before he drifted silently out of the room.
One morning he passed me at the foot of the stairs as I carried a basket of logs in for the range. ‘Seredith is asleep. I’ll have a fire in the parlour.’
I clenched my jaw and dumped the wood in the kitchen without answering. I wanted to tell him to build his own fire – or something more obscene – but the thought of Seredith helpless upstairs made me swallow the words. De Havilland was a guest, whether I liked it or not; so I piled a couple of logs against my chest and carried them across the hall to the parlour. The door was open. De Havilland had turned the writing desk around and was sitting with his back to the window. He didn’t look up when I came in, only pointed to the hearth as if I wouldn’t know where it was.
I crouched and began to brush the remnants of the last fire out of the grate. The fine wood ash rose like the ghost of smoke. As I started to lay kindling I felt that creeping sensation at the base of my skull; it felt like a defeat to glance round to see if he was looking, but I couldn’t stop myself. De Havilland leant back in his chair and tapped his pen against his teeth. He regarded me for what felt like a long time, while the blood began to hum in my temples. Then he smiled faintly and turned his attention back to the letter he was writing.
I forced myself to finish the fire. I lit it and waited until the flames had taken hold. Once it was burning well I stood up and tried to brush the grey smears off my shirt.
De Havilland was reading a book. He was still holding his pen, but it lay slackly between his knuckles while he turned the pages. His face was very calm; he might have been looking out of a window. After a moment he paused, turned back a page, and made a note. When he’d finished he caught sight of me. He put down his pen and smoothed his moustache, his eyes fixed on mine above the stroking hand that covered his mouth. Abruptly his vague, interested expression gave way to a gleam of something else, and he held out the book.
‘Master Edward Albion,’ he said. ‘Bound by an anonymous binder from Albion’s own bindery. Black morocco, gold tooling, false raised bands. Headbands sewn in black and gold, endpapers marbled in red nonpareil. Would you care to have a look?’
‘I—’
‘Take it. Carefully,’ he added, with a sudden sharp edge in his voice. ‘It’s worth … oh, fifty guineas? Certainly more than you could ever repay.’
I started to reach out, but something jarred in my head and I pulled back. It was the image of his face, utterly serene, as he read: words he had no right to, someone else’s memories …
‘No? Very well.’ He put it on the table. Then he looked back at me, as if something had occurred to him, and he shook his head. ‘I see you share Seredith’s prejudices. It’s a school binding, you know. Trade, but perfectly legitimate. Nothing to offend anyone’s sensibilities.’
‘You mean—’ I stopped. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant, but he narrowed his eyes as if I had.
‘It’s unfortunate that you’ve been learning from Seredith,’ he said. ‘You must be under the impression that binding is stuck in the Dark Ages. It’s not all occult muttering and the Hwicce Book, you know – oh.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You’ve never heard of the Hwicce Book. Or the library at Pompeii? Or the great deathbed bindings of the Renaissance, or the Fangorn bindery, or Madame Sourly … No? The North Berwick Trials? The Crusades, presumably even you know about the Crusades?’
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Bridget Collins
‘I wish I had written it’ Erin KellyImagine you could erase your grief.Imagine you could forget your pain.Imagine you could hide a secret.Forever.Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice – but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books – and memories – are meticulously stored and recorded.Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it.THE BINDING is an unforgettable, magical novel: a boundary-defying love story and a unique literary event.
Copyright (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Bridget Collins 2019
Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © bilwissedition Ltd. & Co. KG / Alamy Stock Photo (background),
Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) (key, boarders)
Illustrations © Andrew Davidson
Bridget Collins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008272111
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 9780008272135
Version: 2018-12-03
Praise for The Binding (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
‘The Binding is a dark chocolate slice of cake with a surprising, satisfying seam of raspberry running through it. It is a rich, gothic entertainment that explores what books have trapped in them and reminds us of the power of storytelling. Spellbinding’
Tracy Chevalier
‘Pure magic. The kind of immersive storytelling that makes you forget your own name. I wish I had written it’
Erin Kelly, author of He Said/She Said
‘The Binding held me captive from the start and refused to set me free. It is a beautifully crafted tale of dark magic and forbidden passion, where unspeakable cruelty is ultimately defeated by enduring love. Breathtaking!’
Ruth Hogan, author of The Keeper of Lost Things
‘An original concept, beautifully written. Collins’ prose is spellbinding’
Laura Purcell, author of The Silent Companions
‘Intriguing, thought-provoking and heartbreaking . . . what a gorgeous book’
Stella Duffy
‘What an astounding book . . . something entirely of its own. Brilliant concept, truly extraordinary writing and a killer plot’
Anna Mazzola, author of The Unseeing
Dedication (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
For Nick
Contents
Cover (#u0d0a8612-d586-568e-9a02-0666f8d61af5)
Title Page (#u8cfb5b41-c621-5168-8b91-fd508582987f)
Copyright
Praise for The Binding
Dedication
Part One
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Part Two
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Part Three
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Bridget Collins
About the Publisher
PART ONE (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
I (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
When the letter came I was out in the fields, binding up my last sheaf of wheat with hands that were shaking so much I could hardly tie the knot. It was my fault we’d had to do it the old-fashioned way, and I’d be damned if I was going to give up now; I had battled through the heat of the afternoon, blinking away the patches of darkness that flickered at the sides of my vision, and now it was nightfall and I was almost finished. The others had left when the sun set, calling goodbyes over their shoulders, and I was glad. At least now I was alone I didn’t have to pretend I could work at the same pace as them. I kept going, trying not to think about how easy it would have been with the reaping machine. I’d been too ill to check the machinery – not that I remembered much, between the flashes of lucidity, the summer was nothing but echoes and ghosts and dark aching gaps – and no one else had thought to do it, either. Every day I stumbled on some chore that hadn’t been done; Pa had done his best, but he couldn’t do everything. Because of me, we’d be behind all year.
I pulled the stems tight round the waist of the sheaf and stacked it against the others. Done. I could go home now … But there were shadows pulsing and spinning around me, deeper than the blue-violet dusk, and my knees were trembling. I dropped into a crouch, catching my breath at the pain in my bones. Better than it had been – better than the splintery, sickening spasms that had come unpredictably for months – but still I felt as brittle as an old man. I clenched my jaw. I was so weak I wanted to cry; but I wasn’t going to, I’d die first, even if the only eye on me was the full, fat harvest moon.
‘Emmett? Emmett!’
It was only Alta, winding her way through the stooks towards me, but I pushed myself to my feet and tried to blink the giddiness away. Above me the sparse stars slid one way and then the other. I cleared my throat. ‘Here.’
‘Why didn’t you get one of the others to finish? Ma was worried when they came back down the lane and you weren’t with—’
‘She didn’t need to be worried. I’m not a child.’ My thumb was bleeding where a sharp stalk had pierced the skin. The blood tasted of dust and fever.
Alta hesitated. A year ago I’d been as strong as any of them. Now she was looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was younger than she was. ‘No, but—’
‘I wanted to watch the moon rise.’
‘’Course you did.’ The twilight softened her features, but I could still see the shrewdness in her gaze. ‘We can’t make you rest. If you don’t care about getting well—’
‘You sound like her. Like Ma.’
‘Because she’s right! You can’t expect to snap back as if nothing’s happened, not when you were as ill as you were.’
Ill. As if I’d been languishing in bed with a cough, or vomiting, or covered with pustules. Even through the haze of nightmares I could remember more than they realised; I knew about the screaming and the hallucinations, the days when I couldn’t stop crying or didn’t know who anyone was, the night when I broke the window with my bare hands. I wished I had spent days shitting my guts helplessly into a pot; it would have been better than still having marks on my wrists where they’d had to tie me down. I turned away from her and concentrated on sucking the cut at the base of my thumb, worrying at it with my tongue until I couldn’t taste blood any more.
‘Please, Emmett,’ Alta said, and brushed the collar of my shirt with her fingers. ‘You’ve done as good a day’s work as anyone. Now will you come home?’
‘All right.’ A breeze lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. Alta saw me shiver and dropped her eyes. ‘What’s for dinner, then?’
She flashed her gappy teeth in a grin. ‘Nothing, if you don’t hurry up.’
‘Fine. I’ll race you back.’
‘Challenge me again when I’m not wearing stays.’ She turned away, her dusty skirts flaring about her ankles. When she laughed she still looked like a child, but the farmhands had already started sniffing round her; in some lights now she looked like a woman.
I trudged beside her, so exhausted I felt drunk. The darkness thickened, pooling under trees and in hedges, while the moonlight bleached the stars out of the sky. I thought of cold well-water, clear as glass, with tiny green flecks gathering at the bottom – or, no, beer, grassy and bitter, the colour of amber, flavoured with Pa’s special blend of herbs. It would send me straight to sleep, but that was good: all I wanted was to go out like a candle, into dreamless unconsciousness. No nightmares, no night terrors, and to wake in the morning to clean new sunlight.
The clock in the village struck nine as we went through the gate in the yard. ‘I’m famished,’ Alta said, ‘they sent me out to find you before I could—’
My mother’s voice cut her off. She was shouting.
Alta paused, while the gate swung closed behind us. Our eyes met. A few fragments of words drifted across the yard: How can you say … we can’t, we simply can’t …
The muscles in my legs were shaking from standing still. I reached out and steadied myself against the wall, wishing my heart would slow down. A wedge of lamplight was shining through a gap in the kitchen curtains; as I watched, a shadow crossed and crossed again. My father, pacing.
‘We can’t stay out here all night,’ Alta said, the words almost a whisper.
‘It’s probably nothing.’ They’d quarrelled all week about the reaping machine, and why no one had checked it earlier. Neither of them mentioned that it should have been my job.
A thud: fists on the kitchen table. Pa raised his voice. ‘What do you expect me to do? Say no? That bloody witch will put a curse on us quick as—’
‘She already has! Look at him, Robert – what if he never gets better? It’s her fault—’
‘His own fault, you mean – if he—’ For a second a high note rang in my ears, drowning out Pa’s voice. The world slipped and righted itself, as if it had juddered on its axis. I swallowed a bubble of nausea. When I could concentrate again, there was silence.
‘We don’t know that,’ Pa said at last, just loud enough for us to hear. ‘She might help him. All those weeks she wrote to ask how he was doing.’
‘Because she wanted him! No, Robert, no, I won’t let it happen, his place is here with us, whatever he’s done, he’s still our son – and her, she gives me the creeps—’
‘You’ve never met her. It wasn’t you that had to go out there and—’
‘I don’t care! She’s done enough. She can’t have him.’
Alta glanced at me. Something changed in her face, and she took hold of my wrist and pulled me forwards. ‘We’re going inside,’ she said, in the high, self-conscious voice she used to call to the chickens. ‘It’s been a long day, you must be ravenous, I know I am. There better be some pie left, or I will kill someone. With a fork through the heart. And eat them.’ She paused in front of the door and added, ‘With mustard.’ Then she flung it open.
My parents were standing at either end of the kitchen: Pa by the window, his back turned to us, Ma at the fireplace with red blotches on her face like rouge. Between them, on the table, was a sheet of thick, creamy paper and an open envelope. Ma looked swiftly from Alta to me and took a half step towards it.
‘Dinner,’ Alta said. ‘Emmett, sit down, you look like you’re about to faint. Heavens, no one’s even laid the table. I hope the pie’s in the oven.’ She put a pile of plates down beside me. ‘Bread? Beer? Honestly, I might as well be a scullery maid …’ She disappeared into the pantry.
‘Emmett,’ Pa said, without turning round. ‘There’s a letter on the table. You’d better read it.’
I slid it towards me. The writing blurred into a shapeless stain on the paper. ‘My eyes are too dusty. Tell me what it says.’
Pa bowed his head, the muscles bunching in his neck as if he was dragging something heavy. ‘The binder wants an apprentice.’
Ma made a sound like a bitten-off word.
I said, ‘An apprentice?’
There was silence. A slice of moon shone through the gap in the curtains, covering everything in its path with silver. It made Pa’s hair look greasy and grey. ‘You,’ he said.
Alta was standing in the pantry doorway, cradling a jar of pickles. For a second I thought she was going to drop it, but she set it down carefully on the dresser. The knock of glass on wood was louder than the smash would have been.
‘I’m too old to be an apprentice.’
‘Not according to her.’
‘I thought …’ My hand flattened on the table: a thin white hand that I hardly recognised. A hand that couldn’t do an honest day’s work. ‘I’m getting better. Soon …’ I stopped, because my voice was as unfamiliar as my fingers.
‘It’s not that, son.’
‘I know I’m no use now—’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ Ma said. ‘It’s not your fault— it’s not because you’ve been ill. Soon you’ll be back to your old self again. If that was all … You know we always thought you’d run the farm with your father. And you could have done, you still could – but …’ Her eyes went to Pa’s. ‘We’re not sending you away. She’s asking for you.’
‘I don’t know who she is.’
‘Binding’s … a good craft. An honest craft. It’s nothing to be afraid of.’ Alta knocked against the dresser, and Ma glanced over her shoulder as she swung her arm out swiftly to stop a plate from slipping to the floor. ‘Alta, be careful.’
My heart skipped and drummed. ‘But … you hate books. They’re wrong. You’ve always told me – when I brought that book home from Wakening Fair—’
A look passed between them, too quick to interpret. Pa said, ‘Never mind about that now.’
‘But …’ I turned back to Ma. I couldn’t put it into words: the swift change of subject if someone even mentioned a book, the shiver of distaste at the word, the look on their faces … The way she’d dragged me grimly past a sordid shopfront – A. Fogatini, Pawnbroker and Licens’d Bookseller – one day when I was small and we got lost in Castleford. ‘What do you mean, it’s a good craft?’
‘It’s not …’ Ma drew in her breath. ‘Maybe it’s not what I would have wanted, before—’
‘Hilda.’ Pa dug his fingers into the side of his neck, kneading the muscle as though it ached. ‘You don’t have a choice, lad. It’ll be a steady life. It’s a long way from anywhere, but that’s not a bad thing. Quiet. No hard labour, no one to tempt you off the straight and narrow …’ He cleared his throat. ‘And they’re not all like her. You settle down and learn the trade, and then … Well. There’re binders in town who have their own carriages.’
A tiny silence. Alta tapped the top of a jar with her fingernail and glanced at me.
‘But I don’t – I’ve never – what makes her think that I—?’ Now none of them would meet my eyes. ‘What do you mean, I’ve got no choice?’
No one answered. Finally Alta strode across the room and picked up the letter. ‘“As soon as he is able to travel”,’ she read out. ‘“The bindery can be very cold in winter. Please make sure he has warm clothes.” Why did she write to you and not Emmett? Doesn’t she know he can read?’
‘It’s the way they all do it,’ Pa said. ‘You ask the parents for an apprentice, that’s how it works.’
It didn’t matter. My hands on the table were all tendons and bones. A year ago they’d been brown and muscled, almost a man’s hands; now they were no one’s. Fit for nothing but a craft my parents despised. But why would she have chosen me, unless they’d asked her to? I spread my fingers and pressed, as if I could absorb the strength of the wood through the skin of my palms.
‘What if I say no?’
Pa clumped across to the cupboard, bent down and pulled out a bottle of blackberry gin. It was fierce, sweet stuff that Ma doled out for festivals or medicinal purposes, but he poured himself half a mug of it and she didn’t say a word. ‘There’s no place for you here. Maybe you should be grateful. This’ll be something you can do.’ He tossed half the gin down his throat and coughed.
I drew in my breath, determined not to let my voice crack. ‘When I’m better, I’ll be just as strong as—’
‘Make the best of it,’ he said.
‘But I don’t—’
‘Emmett,’ Ma said, ‘please … It’s the right thing. She’ll know what to do with you.’
‘What to do with me?’
‘I only mean – if you get ill again, she’ll—’
‘Like in a lunatic asylum? Is that it? You’re packing me off to somewhere miles from anywhere because I might lose my wits again at any moment?’
‘She wants you,’ Ma said, clutching her skirts as if she was trying to squeeze water out of them. ‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’
‘Then I won’t go!’
‘You’ll go, boy,’ Pa said. ‘Heaven knows you’ve brought enough trouble on this house.’
‘Robert, don’t—’
‘You’ll go. If I have to truss you up and leave you on her doorstep, you’ll go. Be ready tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Alta spun round so fast her plait swung out like a rope. ‘He can’t go tomorrow, he’ll need time to pack – and there’s the harvest, the harvest supper … Please, Pa.’
‘Shut up!’
Silence.
‘Tomorrow?’ The blotches on Ma’s cheeks had spread into a flush of scarlet. ‘We never said …’ Her voice trailed off. My father finished his gin, swallowing with a grimace as if his mouth was full of stones.
I opened my mouth to tell her it was all right, I’d go, they wouldn’t have to worry about me any more; but my throat was too dry from the reaping.
‘A few more days. Robert, the other apprentices don’t go until after the harvest – and he’s still not well, a couple of days …’
‘They’re younger than he is. And he’s well enough to travel, if he did a day in the fields.’
‘Yes, but …’ She moved towards him and caught his arm so that he couldn’t turn away. ‘A little more time.’
‘For pity’s sake, Hilda!’ He made a choking sound and tried to wrench himself away. ‘Don’t make this any harder. You think I want to let him go? You think that after we tried so hard – fought to keep a pure house – you think I’m proud of it, when my own father lost an eye marching in the Crusade?’
Ma glanced at Alta and me. ‘Not in front of—’
‘What does it matter now?’ He wiped his forearm across his face; then with a helpless gesture he flung the mug to the floor. It didn’t break. Alta watched it roll towards her and stop. Pa turned his back on us and bent over the dresser as if he was trying to catch his breath. There was a silence.
‘I’ll go,’ I said, ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ I couldn’t look at any of them. I got up, hitting my knee against the corner of the table as I pushed back my chair. I struggled to the door. The latch seemed smaller and stiffer than it usually was, and the clunk as it opened echoed off the walls.
Outside, the moon divided the world into deep blue and silver. The air was warm and as soft as cream, scented with hay and summer dust. An owl chuckled in the near field.
I reeled across to the far side of the yard and leant against the wall. It was hard to breathe. Ma’s voice hung in my ears: That bloody witch will put a curse on us. And Pa, answering: She already has.
They were right; I was good for nothing. Misery rose inside me, as strong as the stabbing pains in my legs. Before this, I’d never been ill in my life. I never knew that my body could betray me, that my mind could go out like a lamp and leave nothing but darkness. I couldn’t remember getting sick; if I tried, all I saw was a mess of nightmare-scorched fragments. Even my memories of my life before that – last spring, last winter – were tinged with the same gangrenous shadow, as if nothing was healthy any more. I knew that I’d collapsed after midsummer, because Ma had told me so, and that I’d been on the way home from Castleford; but no one had explained where I’d been, or what had happened. I must have been driving the cart – without a hat, under a hot sun, probably – but when I tried to think back there was nothing but a rippling mirage, a last vertiginous glimpse of sunlight before the blackness swallowed me. For weeks afterwards, I’d only surfaced to scream and struggle and beg them to untie me. No wonder they wanted to get rid of me.
I closed my eyes. I could still see the three of them, their arms round one another. Something whispered behind me, scratching in the wall like dry claws. It wasn’t real, but it drowned out the owl and the rustle of trees. I rested my head on my arms and pretended I couldn’t hear it.
I must have drawn back instinctively into the deepest corner of darkness, because when I opened my eyes Alta was in the middle of the yard, calling my name without looking in my direction. The moon had moved; now it was over the gable of the farmhouse and all the shadows were short and squat.
‘Emmett?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Alta jumped and took a step forward to peer at me.
‘What are you doing there? Were you asleep?’
‘No.’
She hesitated. Behind her the light from a lamp crossed the upper window as someone went to bed. I started to pull myself to my feet and paused, wincing, as pain stabbed into my joints.
She watched me get up, without offering to help. ‘Did you mean it? That you’d go? Tomorrow?’
‘Pa meant it when he said I didn’t have any choice.’
I waited for her to disagree. Alta was clever like that, finding new paths or different ways of doing things, picking locks. But she only tilted her face upward as if she wanted the moonlight to bleach her skin. I swallowed. The stupid dizziness had come back – suddenly, dragging me one way and then another – and I swayed against the wall and tried to catch my breath.
‘Emmett? Are you all right?’ She bit her lip. ‘No, of course not. Sit down.’
I didn’t want to obey her but my knees folded of their own accord. I closed my eyes and inhaled the night smells of hay and cooling earth, the overripe sweetness of crushed weeds and a rank hint of manure. Alta’s skirts billowed and rustled as she sank down beside me.
‘I wish you didn’t have to go.’
I raised one shoulder without looking at her and let it drop again.
‘But … maybe it’s the best thing …’
‘How can it be?’ I swallowed, trying to fill the crack in my voice. ‘All right, I understand. I’m no use here. You’ll all be better off when I’m – wherever she is, this binder.’
‘Out on the marshes, on the Castleford road.’
‘Right.’ What would the marshes smell of? Stagnant water, rotting reeds. Mud. Mud that swallowed you alive if you went too far from the road, and never spat you back … ‘How do you know so much about it?’
‘Ma and Pa are only thinking about you. After everything that’s happened … You’ll be safe there.’
‘That’s what Ma said.’
A pause. She began to gnaw at her thumbnail. In the orchard below the stables a nightingale gurgled and then gave up.
‘You don’t know what it’s been like for them, Emmett. Always afraid. You owe them some peace.’
‘It’s not my fault I was ill!’
‘It’s your fault you—’ She huffed out her breath. ‘No, I know, I didn’t mean … just that we all need … please don’t be angry. It’s a good thing. You’ll learn a trade.’
‘Yes. Making books.’
She flinched. ‘She chose you. That must mean—’
‘What does it mean? How can she have chosen me, when she’s never even seen me?’ I thought Alta started to speak, but when I turned my head she was staring up at the moon, her face expressionless. Her cheeks were thinner than they had been before I got ill, and the skin under her eyes looked as if it had been smudged with ash. She was a stranger, out of reach.
She said, as if it was an answer, ‘I’ll come and see you whenever I can …’
I let my head roll back until I felt the stone wall against my skull. ‘They talked you round, didn’t they?’
‘I’ve never seen Pa like that,’ she said. ‘So angry.’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘He hit me, once.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘well, I suppose you—’ She stopped.
‘When I was small,’ I said. ‘You weren’t old enough to remember. It was the day of Wakening Fair.’
‘Oh.’ When I glanced up, her eyes flickered away. ‘No. I don’t remember that.’
‘I bought … there was a man, selling books.’ I could recall the clink of my errand-money in my pocket that day – sixpence in farthings, so bulky they bulged through my trousers – and the heady, carefree feeling of going to Wakening Fair and slipping away from the others, wondering what I’d buy. I’d wandered past the meat and chickens, the fish from Coldwater and the patterned cottons from Castleford, paused at the sweetmeat stall and then turned towards another a little further away, where I’d caught a glimpse of gold and rich colours. It was hardly a stall at all, only a trestle table guarded by a man with restless eyes, but it was piled high with books. ‘It was the first time I’d seen them. I didn’t know what they were.’
That curious, wary expression was on Alta’s face again. ‘You mean …?’
‘Forget it.’ I didn’t know why I was telling her; I didn’t want to remember. But now I couldn’t stop the memory unfolding. I’d thought they were boxes, small gilt-and-leather chests to hold things like Ma’s best silver or Pa’s chessmen. I’d sauntered over, jingling my money, and the man had glanced over both shoulders before he grinned at me. ‘Ah, what a golden-haired little prince! Come for a story, young sir? A tale of murder or incest, shame or glory, a love so piercing it was best forgotten, or a deed of darkness? You’ve come to the right man, young sir, these are the crème de la crème, these will tell you true and harrowing tales, violent and passionate and exciting – or if it’s comedy you’re after, I have some of those too, rarest of all, the things people get rid of! Have a look, young sir, cast your eyes over this one … Bound by a master in Castleford, years ago.’
I hated the way he called me young sir, but the book fell open as he passed it to me and I couldn’t give it back. As soon as I saw the writing on the pages I understood: this was lots of pages all squashed together – like letters, lots of letters, only in a better box – and a story that went on and on. ‘How much is it?’
‘Ah, that one, young sir. You have wonderful taste for a young ’un, that’s a special one, a real adventure story, sweeps you off your feet like a cavalry charge. Ninepence for it. Or two for a shilling.’
I wanted it. I didn’t know why, except that my fingertips were prickling. ‘I only have sixpence.’
‘I’ll take that,’ he said, clicking his fingers at me. The wide smile had gone; when I followed his darting gaze I saw a knot of men gathering a little way off, muttering.
‘Here.’ I emptied my pocketful of farthings into his palm. He let one drop, but he was still staring at the men and didn’t stoop to pick it up. ‘Thank you.’
I took the book and hurried away, triumphant and uneasy. When I reached the bustle of the main market I stopped and turned to look: the group of men was advancing on the man’s stall, as he threw the books frantically into the battered little cart behind him.
Something warned me not to stare. I ran home, holding the book through my shirt-cuff so that I didn’t stain the cover with my sweaty fingers. I sat on the barn steps in the sun – no one would see me, they were still at the fair – and examined it. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen. It was a deep, heavy red, patterned with gold, and it was as soft to the touch as skin. When I opened the cover, the scent of must and wood rose up as though it hadn’t been touched for years.
It sucked me in.
It was set in an army camp in a foreign country, and at first it was confusing: full of captains and majors and colonels, arguments about military tactics and a threat of court martial. But something made me go on reading: I could see it, every detail, I could hear the horses and the snap of wind against the canvas, feel my own heart quicken at the smell of gunpowder … I stumbled on, absorbed in spite of myself, and slowly I understood that they were on the eve of a battle, that the man in the book was a hero. When the sun rose, he was going to lead them to a glorious victory – and I could feel his excitement, his anticipation, I felt it myself—
‘What in hell’s name are you doing?’
It broke the spell. I clambered instinctively to my feet, blinking through the haze. Pa – and the others behind him, Ma with Alta on her hip, everyone back from the fair already. Already … but it was getting dark.
‘Emmett, I asked what you were doing!’ But he didn’t wait for an answer before he plucked the book away from me. When he saw what it was his face hardened. ‘Where did you get this?’
A man, I wanted to say, just a man at the fair, he had dozens and they looked like boxes of jewels, in leather and gold … But when I saw Pa’s expression something shrivelled in my voice box and I couldn’t speak.
‘Robert? What …?’ Ma reached for it and then pulled away as if it had bitten her.
‘I’ll burn it.’
‘No!’ Ma let Alta slip staggering to the ground, and stumbled forward to catch Pa’s arm. ‘No, how could you? Bury it!’
‘It’s old, Hilda. They’d all be dead, years ago.’
‘You mustn’t. Just in case. Get rid of it. Throw it away.’
‘For someone else to find?’
‘You know you can’t burn it.’ For a moment they stared at each other, their faces strained. ‘Bury it. Somewhere safe.’
At last Pa gave a brief, curt nod. Alta gave a hiccup and started to whimper. Pa shoved the book at one of the farmhands. ‘Here. Package this up. I’ll give it to the gravedigger.’ Then he turned back to me. ‘Emmett,’ he said, ‘don’t ever let me see you with a book again. You understand?’
I didn’t. What had happened? I’d bought it, I hadn’t stolen it, but somehow I had done something unforgivable. I nodded, still reeling from the visions I’d seen. I’d been somewhere else, in another world.
‘Good. You remember that,’ Pa said.
Then he hit me.
Don’t ever let me see you with a book again.
But now they were sending me to the binder; as though whatever danger Pa had warned me against had been replaced by something worse. As though now I was the danger.
I looked sideways. Alta was staring down at her feet. No, she didn’t remember that day. No one had ever spoken about it again. No one had ever explained why books were shameful. Once, at school, someone had muttered something about old Lord Kent having a library; but when everyone snickered and rolled their eyes I didn’t ask why that was so bad. I’d read a book: whatever was wrong with him, I was the same. Under everything, deep inside me, the shame was still there.
And I was afraid. It was a creeping, formless fear, like the mist that came off the river. It slid chilly tendrils round me and into my lungs. I didn’t want to go anywhere near the binder; but I had to.
‘Alta—’
‘I have to go in,’ she said, leaping to her feet. ‘You’d better go up too, Em, you have to pack and it’s a long way to go tomorrow, isn’t it? Good night.’ She scampered away across the yard, fiddling with her plait all the way so I couldn’t glimpse her face. By the door she called again, ‘See you tomorrow,’ without looking round. Maybe it was the echo off the stable wall that made it sound so false.
Tomorrow.
I watched the moon until the fear grew too big for me. Then I went to my room and packed my things.
II (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
From the road, the bindery looked as if it was burning. The sun was setting behind us, and the red-gold blaze of the last sunlight was reflected in the windows. Under the dark thatch every pane was like a rectangle of flame, too steady to be fire but so bright I thought I could feel my palms prickle with the heat. It set off a shiver in my bones, as if I’d seen it in a dream.
I clutched the shabby sack in my lap and looked away. On the other side of us, under the setting sun, the marshes lay flat and endless: green speckled with bronze and brown, glinting with water. I could smell sodden grass and the day’s warmth evaporating. There was a rank mouldering note under the scent of moisture, and the vast dying sky above us was paler than it should have been. My eyes ached, and my body was a map of stinging scratches from yesterday’s work in the fields. I should have been there now, helping with the harvest, but instead Pa and I were bouncing along this rough, sticky road, in silence. We hadn’t spoken since we set off before dawn, and there was still nothing to say. Words rose in my throat but they burst like marsh-bubbles, leaving nothing on my tongue but a faint taste of rot.
As we jolted along the final stretch of track to where it petered out in the long grass in front of the house I sneaked a look at Pa’s face. The stubble on his chin was salted with white, and his eyes were sunken deeper than they’d been last spring. Everyone had grown older while I was ill; as if I’d woken up and found I’d slept for years.
We drew to a halt. ‘We’re here.’
A shudder went through me: I was either going to vomit or plead with Pa to take me home. I snatched the sack from my lap and jumped down, my knees nearly buckling when my feet hit the ground. There was a well-trodden path through the tufts of the grass to the front door of the house. I’d never been here before, but the off-key jangle of the bell was as familiar as a dream. I waited, so determined not to look back at Pa that the door shimmered and swayed.
‘Emmett.’ It was open, suddenly. For a moment all I took in was a pair of pale brown eyes, so pale the pupils were startlingly black. ‘Welcome.’
I swallowed. She was old – painfully, skeletally old – and white-haired, her face as creased as paper and her lips almost the same colour as her cheeks; but she was as tall as me, and her eyes were as clear as Alta’s. She wore a leather apron, and a shirt and trousers, like a man. The hand that beckoned me inside was thin but muscular, the veins looped across the tendons in blue strings.
‘Seredith,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
I hesitated. It took me two heartbeats to understand that she’d told me her name.
‘Come in.’ She added, looking past me, ‘Thank you, Robert.’
I hadn’t heard Pa get down, but when I turned he was there at my shoulder. He coughed and muttered, ‘We’ll see you soon, Emmett, all right?’
‘Pa—’
He didn’t even glance in my direction. He gave the binder a long helpless look; then he touched his forelock as if he didn’t know what else to do, and strode back to the cart. I started to call out but a gust of wind snatched the words away, and he didn’t turn. I watched him clamber up to his seat and click to the mare.
‘Emmett.’ Her voice dragged me back to her. ‘Come in.’ I could see that she wasn’t used to saying anything three times.
‘Yes.’ I was holding my sack of belongings so tightly my fingers ached. She’d called Pa Robert as if she knew him. I took one step and then another. Now I was over the threshold and in a dark-panelled hall, with a staircase rising in front of me. A tall clock ticked. On the left, there was a half-open door and a glimpse of the kitchen beyond; on the right, another door led to—
My knees went weak, like my hamstrings had been cut. The nausea widened and expanded, chewing on my insides. I was feverish and freezing, struggling to keep my balance as the world spun. I’d been here before – only I hadn’t—
‘Oh, damn it,’ the binder said, and reached out to take hold of me. ‘All right, boy, breathe.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and was proud of how distinctly I’d shaped the consonants. Then it all went black.
When I woke, there was sunlight dancing on the ceiling in a billowing net, water-wrinkles that overlapped the narrow rectangle of brightness that spilt between the curtains. The whitewashed walls looked faintly green, like the flesh of an apple, marred here and there with the solid froth of damp. Outside a bird whistled over and over again as if it was calling a name.
The binder’s house. I sat up, my heart suddenly thumping. But there was nothing to be afraid of, not yet; nothing here but myself and the room and the reflected sunshine. I found myself listening for the sounds of animals, the constant restlessness of a farmyard, but all I heard was the bird and the soft rattle of wind in the thatch. The faded curtains billowed and a wider band of light flared across the ceiling. The pillows smelt of lavender.
Last night …
I let my eyes rest on the opposite wall, following the bump and curve of a crack in the plaster. After I’d fainted, all I could remember was shadows and fear. Nightmares. In this clean daylight they seemed a long time ago; but they’d been bad, dragging me over and under the surface of sleep. I’d almost fought clear of them, once or twice, but then the weight of my own limbs had pulled me under again, into a choking black blindness like tar. A faint taste like burnt oil still lingered in the back of my mouth. They hadn’t been as bad as that for days. The draught raised goose-pimples on my skin. Fainting like that, into Seredith’s arms … It must have been the fatigue of the journey, the headache, the sun in my eyes, and the sight of Pa driving away without a backwards glance.
My trousers and shirt were hanging on the back of a single chair. I got up and dragged them on with clumsy fingers, trying not to imagine Seredith undressing me. At least I was still wearing drawers. Apart from the chair and the bed, the room was mostly bare: a chest at the foot of the bed, a table next to the window, and the pale, flapping curtains. There were no pictures, and no looking-glass. I didn’t mind that. At home I’d looked away when I walked past my reflection in the hall. Here I was invisible; here I could be part of the emptiness.
The whole house was quiet. When I walked out on to the landing I could hear the birds calling across the marsh, and the tick of the clock in the hall below, and a dull banging from somewhere else; but underneath it all was a silence so deep the sounds skittered over it like pebbles on ice. The breeze stroked the back of my neck and I caught myself glancing over my shoulder, as if there was someone there. The bare room dipped into gloom for a second as a cloud crossed the sun; then it shone brighter than ever, and the corner of one curtain snapped in the breeze like a flag.
I almost turned and climbed back into bed, like a child. But this house was where I lived, now. I couldn’t stay in my room for the rest of my life.
The stairs creaked under my feet. The banister was polished by years of use, but the dust spun thickly in the sunlight and the whitewashed plaster was bubbling off the wall. Older than our farmhouse, older than our village. How many binders had lived here? And when this binder – Seredith – died … One day, would this house be mine? I walked down the stairs slowly, as if I was afraid they’d give way.
The banging stopped, and I heard footsteps. Seredith opened one of the doors into the hall. ‘Ah, Emmett.’ She didn’t ask me if I’d slept well. ‘Come into the workshop.’
I followed her. Something about the way she’d said my name made me clench my jaw, but she was my master now – no, my mistress, no, my master – and I had to obey her.
At the door of the workshop she paused. For an instant I thought she’d step back to let me go first; but then she strode across the room and bundled something swiftly into a cloth before I could see what it was. ‘Come in, boy.’
I stepped over the doorsill. It was a long, low room, full of morning light from the row of tall windows. Workbenches ran along both sides of the room and between them were other things that I didn’t have names for yet. I took in the battered shine of old wood, the sharp glint of a blade, metal handles dark with grease … but there was too much to look at, and my eyes couldn’t stay on one thing for long. There was a stove at the far end of the room, surrounded by tiles in russet and ochre and green. Above my head papers hung over a wire, rich plain colours interspersed with pages patterned like stone or feathers or leaves. I caught myself reaching up to touch the nearest one: there was something about those vivid kingfisher-blue wings hanging above my head …
The binder put her bundle down and came towards me, pointing at things. ‘Lay press. Nipping press. Finishing press. Plan chest – behind you, boy – tools in that cupboard and the next one along, leather and cloth next to that. Waste paper in that basket, ready for use. Brushes on that shelf, glue in there.’
I couldn’t take it all in. After the first effort to remember I gave up and waited for her to finish. At last she narrowed her eyes at me and said, ‘Sit.’
I felt strange. But not sick, exactly, and not afraid. It was as if something inside me was waking up and moving. The looping grain of the bench in front of me was like a map of somewhere I used to know.
‘It’s a funny feeling, isn’t it, boy?’
‘What?’
She squinted at me, one of her milky-tea eyes bleached almost white by the sun on the side of her face. ‘It gets you, all this. When you’re a binder born – which you are, boy.’
I didn’t know what she meant. At least … There was something right about this room, something that – unexpectedly – made my heart lift. As if, after a heatwave, I could smell rain coming – or like glimpsing my old self, from before I got ill. I hadn’t belonged anywhere for so long, and now this room, with its smell of leather and glue, welcomed me.
‘You don’t know much about books, do you?’ Seredith said.
‘No.’
‘Think I’m a witch?’
I stammered, ‘What? Of course n—’ but she waved me to silence, while a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
‘It’s all right. Think I’ve got this old without knowing what people say about me? About us.’ I looked away, but she went on as if she hadn’t noticed. ‘Your parents kept books away from you, didn’t they? And now you don’t know what you’re doing here.’
‘You asked for me. Didn’t you?’
She seemed not to hear. ‘Don’t worry, lad. It’s a craft like any other. And a good one. Binding’s as old as the alphabet – older. People don’t understand it, but why should they?’ She grimaced. ‘At least the Crusade’s over. You’re too young to remember that. Your good fortune.’
There was a silence. I didn’t understand how binding could be older than books, but she was staring into the middle distance as if I wasn’t there. A breeze set the wire swinging, and the coloured papers flapped. She blinked and scratched her chin, and her eyes came back to mine. ‘Tomorrow I’ll start you on some chores. Tidying, cleaning the brushes, that sort of thing. Maybe get you paring leather.’
I nodded. I wanted to be alone here. I wanted to have time to look properly at the colours, to go through the cupboards and heft the weight of the tools. The whole room was singing to me, inviting me in.
‘You have a look round if you want.’ But when I started to get to my feet she gestured at me as if I’d disobeyed her. ‘Not now. Later.’ She picked up her bundle and turned to a little door in the corner that I hadn’t noticed. It took three keys in three locks to open it. I glimpsed stairs going down into the dark before she put the bundle on a shelf just inside the doorway, turned back into the room and pulled the door shut behind her. She locked it without looking at me, shielding the keys with her body. ‘You won’t go down there for a long while, boy.’ I didn’t know if she was warning or reassuring me. ‘Don’t go near anything that’s locked, and you’ll be all right.’
I took a deep breath. The room was still singing to me, but the sweetness had a shrill note now. Under this tidy, sunlit workshop, those steep steps led down into darkness. I could feel that hollowness under my feet, as if the floor was starting to give. A second ago I’d felt safe. No. I’d felt … enticed. It had turned sour with that glimpse of the dark; like the moment a dream turns into a nightmare.
‘Don’t fight it, boy.’
She knew, then. It was real, I wasn’t imagining it. I looked up, half scared to meet her gaze; but she was staring across the marsh, her eyes slitted against the glare. She looked older than anyone I’d ever seen.
I stood up. The sun was still shining but the light in the room seemed tarnished. I didn’t want to look in the cupboards any more, or pull the rolls of cloth out into the light. But I made myself stroll past the cupboards, noting the labels, the dull brass knobs, and the corner of leather that poked a green tongue round the edge of a door. I turned and walked down the aisle of space, where the floor was trodden smooth by years of footsteps, of people coming and going.
I came to another door. It was the twin of the first one, set into the wall on the other side of the tiled stove. It had three locks, too. But people went in and out – I could tell that from the floorboards, the well-trodden path where even the dust lay more lightly. What did they come for? What did she do, the binder, beyond that door?
Blackness glittered in the corners of my eyes. Someone was whispering without words.
‘All right,’ she said. Somehow she was beside me now, pulling me down on to a stool, putting weight on the back of my neck. ‘Put your head between your knees.’
‘I – can’t—’
‘Hush, boy. It’s the illness. It’ll pass.’
It was real. I was sure. A fierce, insatiable, wrongness ready to suck me dry, make me into something else. But she’d forced my head down between my knees and held me steady, and the certainty drained away. I was ill. This was the same fear that had made me attack Ma and Pa … I clenched my jaw. I couldn’t give in to it. If I let myself slip …
‘That’s good. Good lad.’
Meaningless words, as though I was an animal. At last I straightened up, grimacing as the blood spun in my head.
‘Better?’
I nodded, fighting the acid creep of nausea. My hands were twitching as though I had the palsy. I curled them into fists and imagined trying to use a knife with fingers I couldn’t trust. Stupid. I’d lose a thumb. I was too ill to be here – and yet … ‘Why?’ I said, and the word came out like a yelp. ‘Why did you choose me? Why me?’
The binder turned her face to the window again and stared into the sunlight.
‘Was it because you were sorry for me? Poor broken-minded Emmett who can’t work in the fields any more? At least here he’ll be safe and solitary and won’t upset his family—’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘What else could it be? You don’t know me. Why else would you choose someone who’s ill?’
‘Why else, indeed?’ There was an edge to her voice, but then she sighed and looked at me. ‘Do you remember when it began? The fever?’
‘I think I was …’ I took a breath, trying to steady my mind. ‘I’d been to Castleford, and I was on my way back – when I woke up I was at home—’ I stopped. I didn’t want to think about the gaps and nightmares, daytime terrors, sudden appalled flashes of lucidity when I knew where I was … The whole summer was ragged, fever-eaten, more hole than memory.
‘You were here, lad. You fell ill here. Your father came to get you. Do you remember that?’
‘What? No. What was I doing here?’
‘It’s on the road to Castleford,’ she said, with a faint smile. ‘But with the fever … you remember it, and you don’t. That’s partly what’s making you ill.’
‘I can’t stay here. This place – those locked doors. It’ll make me worse.’
‘It will pass. Trust me. And it will pass more quickly and more cleanly here than anywhere else you could go.’
There was a strange note in her voice, as though she was almost ashamed.
A new kind of fear tugged at me. I was going to have to stay here and be afraid, until I got better; I didn’t want that, I wanted to run away …
She glanced at the locked door. ‘In a way,’ she said, ‘I suppose I did choose you because you’re ill. But not in the way you think. Not out of pity, Emmett.’
Abruptly she swung round and pushed past me, and I was left staring at the dust that swirled in the empty doorway.
She was lying. I’d heard it in her voice.
She did pity me.
But perhaps, after all, she was right. There was something in the silence of the old house, the low rooms filled with steady autumn sunlight and the still order of the workshop, that loosened the dark knots inside me. Day after day went by, until the place wasn’t new or strange to me any more; then week after week … I learnt things by heart: the crinkling reflections on my ceiling, the gappy seams in the patchwork quilt on my bed, the different creak of each tread under my foot when I came downstairs. Then there was the workshop, the gleam of the tiles around the stove, the saffron-and-earth scent of tea, the opalescent gloop of well-mixed paste in a glass jar … The hours passed slowly, full of small, solid details; at home, in the busyness of farm life, I’d never had the time to sit and stare, or pay attention to the way a tool looked, or how well it was made, before I used it. Here the clock in the hall dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.
The tasks Seredith gave me in the workshop were simple and small. She was a good teacher, clear and patient. I learnt to make endpapers, to pare leather, to finish with blind or gold tooling. She must have been disappointed at the way I fumbled – how I’d paste a page to my own fingers, or gouge a square of pristine calfskin with a sharp centre-tool – but she said nothing, except, occasionally, ‘Throw it away and start again.’ While I practised she’d go for a walk, or write letters or lists of supplies to be ordered by the next post, sitting at the bench behind me; or she’d cook, and the house would fill with the smell of meat and pastry. We shared the rest of the chores, but after a morning bent over painstaking work I was glad to chop wood or fill the copper for laundry. When I felt weak I reminded myself that Seredith had done it all on her own, before I came.
But everything I did – everything I saw her do – was preparing materials or practising finishing; I never saw a block of pages, or a complete book. One evening when we were eating dinner in the kitchen I said, ‘Seredith, where are the books?’
‘In the vault,’ she said. ‘Once they’re finished, they have to be kept out of harm’s way.’
‘But—’ I stopped, thinking of the farm, and how hard we all worked, and how it had never been enough; I’d argued continually with Pa, asking for every new invention to make it as productive as possible. ‘Why don’t we make more? Surely, the more we make, the more you can sell?’
She lifted her head as if she was about to say something sharp; then she shook her head. ‘We don’t make books to sell, boy. Selling books is wrong. Your parents were right about that, at least.’
‘Then – I don’t understand—’
‘It’s the binding that matters. The craft of it, the dignity. Say a woman comes to me for a book. I make a book for her. For her, you understand? Not to be gawped at by strangers.’ She slurped soup from her spoon. ‘There are binders who only think to turn a profit, who care about nothing but their bank balance, who, yes, sell books – but you will never be one of them.’
‘But – no one’s come to you …’ I stared at her, thoroughly confused. ‘When am I going to start using what you’re teaching me? I’m learning all these things, but I haven’t even—’
‘You’ll learn more soon,’ she said, and stood up to get more bread. ‘Let’s take things slowly, Emmett. You’ve been ill. All in good time.’
All in good time. If my mother had said it, I would have snorted; but I stayed silent, because somehow it was a good time. Gradually the nightmares grew fewer, and the lurking daytime shadows receded. Sometimes I could stand for a long time without feeling dizzy; sometimes my eyes were as clear as they used to be. And after a few weeks I didn’t even look twice at the locked doors at the end of the workshop. The benches and tools and presses murmured comfort to me: everything was useful, everything was in its place. It didn’t matter what it was all for, except that a glue brush was for glue, and a paring knife for paring. Sometimes, when I paused to gauge the thickness of a scrap of leather – in places it had to be thinner than a fingernail or it would fold badly – I would look up from the dark scurf of leather shavings and feel that I was in the right place. I knew what I was meant to be doing, and I was doing it – even if I was only practising. I could do it. That hadn’t happened since before I was ill.
I missed home, of course. I wrote letters, and was half glad and half miserable to read their replies. I would have liked to be at the harvest supper, and the dance; or rather, I would have liked it, before … I read that letter over and over again, before I crumpled it up and sat looking out past my lamp-flame into the blue dusk, trying to ignore the ache in my throat. But the part of me that yearned for music and noise was the old, healthy part; I knew that silence, work and rest were what I needed now. Even if, sometimes, it felt so lonely I could hardly bear it.
The quiet days wore on, as if we were waiting for something.
When was it? Perhaps I’d been there a fortnight or a month, the first day I remember clearly. It was a bright, cold morning, and I’d been practising gold tooling on a few odd scraps of leather, concentrating hard. It was difficult, and when I peeled away the foil to see an uneven, indistinct print of my name I cursed and rolled my neck to ease the ache out of it. Something moved outside, and I looked up. The sun dazzled me, and for a moment all I saw was a shape outlined against the light. I narrowed my eyes and the glare softened. A boy – no, a young man, my age or maybe older – with dark hair and eyes and a pale, gaunt face, watching me.
I jumped so much I nearly burnt myself on the tool I was using. How long had he been there, watching me with those black stony eyes? I put the tool carefully back on to the brazier, cursing the sudden tremor that made me as clumsy as an old man. Who did he think he was, lurking there, spying?
He knocked on the glass. I turned my back on him, but when I looked over my shoulder he was still there. He gestured sideways to the little back door that opened on to the marshes. He wanted me to let him in.
I imagined him sinking gently into the mud, up to his knees, then his waist. I couldn’t bear the thought of speaking to him. I hadn’t seen anyone except Seredith for days; but it wasn’t just that, it was his stare, so steady it felt like a finger pressing between my eyes. I kept my face averted from the window as I swept the parings of leather to the ground, tidied the scraps of gold foil into their box, and loosened the screw of the hot type-holder so that I could tap the letters out on to the bench. In a minute they’d be cool enough to put back into their tray. A spacer, like a tiny brass splinter, fell to the floor and I bent to pick it up.
When I straightened to flick it on to the bench, his shadow still hadn’t moved. I sucked the sting out of my burnt finger and conceded defeat.
The back door had swollen – when was the last time it had been used? – and stuck in the frame. When I managed to get it open my heart was drumming with exertion. We stared at each other. At last I said, ‘What do you want?’ It was a stupid question; he clearly wasn’t a tradesman with a delivery, or a friend of Seredith’s here for a visit.
‘I …’ He looked away. Behind him the marsh shone like an old mirror, tarnished and mottled but still bright. When he turned back to me his face was set. ‘I’ve come to see the binder.’
I wanted to shut the door in his face. But he was a customer – the first one since I’d arrived – and I was only an apprentice. I stepped back, opening the door wider.
‘Thanks.’ But he said it with a sort of effort, and stood very still on the step, as if walking past me would soil his clothes. I turned and went back into the workshop: now he was inside he was no longer my problem. He could ring the bell or call for Seredith. I certainly wasn’t going to stop work for his sake. He hadn’t apologised for disturbing me, or watching me.
I heard him hesitate, and follow.
I made my way back to the bench and bent over the piece of tooling I’d been working on. I rubbed at one of the words to see if I could make the letters a bit clearer. The tool had been too hot on the second try – or I’d let it linger too long – and the gold had blurred; the third was a little better but I hadn’t pressed evenly. There was a chilly draught from the open workshop door, and quiet footsteps. He was behind me. I’d only looked at him for a second, but I could still see his face as clearly as if it was reflected in the window: white, smudged with shadows, with red-rimmed eyes. A deathbed face, a face no one would want to look at.
‘Emmett?’
My heart skipped a beat, because he shouldn’t have known my name.
Then I realised: the tooling. EMMETT FARMER. It must have been just large enough for him to read from a few feet away. I picked up the leather and slammed it over, face down. Too late, of course. He gave me a crooked, empty smile, as if he was proud of noticing, as if he was pleased that I’d blenched. He started to say something else.
I said, ‘I don’t know if the binder is taking commissions at the moment.’ But he went on looking at me with that odd, thirsty half-smile. ‘If that’s what you’ve come for. And she doesn’t sell books.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since harvest-time.’ He had no right to ask; I didn’t know why I answered, except that I wanted him to leave me alone.
‘You’re her apprentice?’
‘Yes.’
He looked round at the workshop, and back at me. There was something too slow, too deliberate in his look to be mere curiosity. ‘Is it a – good life?’ A twist of contempt in his voice. ‘Here, alone with her?’
The sweet scorched smell of the tools on the stove was making my head ache. I reached for the smallest, an intricate centre-tool that never came out properly in gold. I wondered how it would feel to bring it down on the back of my other hand. Or his.
‘Emmett—’ He made it sound like a curse.
I put the tool down and reached for a new piece of leather. ‘I have to get on with this.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Silence. I cut the leather into a square and fixed it to a piece of board. He was watching me. I fumbled and nearly caught my thumb with the scalpel. It felt as if there were invisible threads tangled between my fingers. I turned to him. ‘Do you want me to go and find Sere— the binder?’
‘I – not yet. Not just yet.’
He was afraid. The realisation took me by surprise. For an instant I saw past my own resentment. He was as frightened and miserable as anyone I’d ever met. He was desperate. He stank of it, like fever. But I couldn’t pity him, because there was something else, too, in the way he looked at me. Hatred. He seemed to hate me.
‘They didn’t want me to come,’ he said. ‘My father, I mean. He thinks binding is for other people, not us. If he knew I was here …’ He grimaced. ‘But it’ll be too late when I get home. He won’t punish me. How could he?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to wonder what he meant.
‘I wasn’t sure. I didn’t think …’ He cleared his throat. ‘I heard she’d chosen you and I thought I’d come and – but I didn’t think I wanted – until I saw you there …’
‘Me?’
He took a breath and reached out to brush a speck of dust off the nipping press. His forefinger trembled, and I could see the pulse beating at the base of his neck. He laughed, but not as if anything was funny. ‘You don’t care, do you? Why should you? You’ve got no idea who I am.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Emmett,’ he burst out, stumbling on the syllables, ‘please – look at me, just for a second, please. I don’t understand—’
I had the sensation that I was moving, the world racing past me too quickly to see, the speed drowning out his words. I blinked and tried to hold on, but a sickening current lifted me up and whirled me downstream. He was still talking but the words sang past me and away.
‘What’s going on?’ Seredith’s voice cut him off.
He spun round. Red crept over his cheeks and forehead. ‘I’m here for a binding.’
‘What are you doing in the workshop? Emmett, you should have called me at once.’
I tried to master the nausea. ‘I thought—’
‘It wasn’t Emmett’s fault, it was mine,’ he said. ‘My name is Lucian Darnay. I did write.’
‘Lucian Darnay.’ Seredith frowned. A strange, wary expression swept over her face. ‘And how long have you been talking to Em— to my apprentice? Never mind.’ Her eyes went to me before he could answer. ‘Emmett?’ she said, more softly. ‘Are you – well?’
The shadows swirled round me, blacking out the corners of my vision; but I nodded.
‘Good. Mr Darnay, come with me.’
‘Yes,’ he said, but he didn’t move. I could feel his desperation pulsing out in dark waves.
‘Come,’ Seredith repeated, and at last he turned and moved towards her. She reached for her keys and started to unlock the door at the far end of the workshop; but she didn’t look at what she was doing, she looked at me.
The door swung open. I caught my breath. I didn’t know what I had expected, but there was a glimpse of a scrubbed wooden table, two chairs, a hazy square of sun on the floor. It should have been a relief, but a tight claw closed round my chest. It looked so tidy, so austere – and yet …
‘Go in, Mr Darnay. Sit down. Wait for me.’
He drew in a long, slow breath. He glanced at me once, the fierceness in his eyes as unreadable as a riddle. Then he walked to the door and through it. When he sat down he kept his back very straight, as if he was trying not to shake.
‘Emmett, are you all right? He should never have …’ Her eyes searched my face for a reaction they didn’t find. ‘Go and lie down.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Then go and mix up a jar of paste in the kitchen.’ She watched me walk past her. I had to make an effort to take smooth steps and not stagger. Black wings were beating around me and it was hard to see where I was going. That room, that quiet little room …
I sat down on the stairs. The light lay on the floorboards in a silvery lattice. The shape of it made me think of something – half-remembered nightmares, a flash of Lucian Darnay’s face, his hungry black eyes. The darkness hung in front of me for a long time, like a fog; only there was something new in it, a flash like teeth, sharper than I could bear. Not hatred – but something that would have torn me apart if it could.
Then it closed round me, and I was gone.
III (#u22348aca-de5e-5b5f-a8a0-6a4893ca99e4)
I surfaced gradually into a grey soft day and the muffled sound of rain. There was another noise too, one I couldn’t identify right away: I stared at the ceiling and wondered idly what it was. A swish, a pause, a human breath, swish … After a long time I turned my head, and saw Seredith sitting at the table beside the window, her head bent. There was a kind of wooden frame set up in front of her, and piles of folded paper. She was sewing the folded pages together, along one way and then the other, and the thread whispered as it pulled taut. I watched her for a long time, lulled by the rhythm of it: in, pull, out, over, in … She tightened a stitch, cut the thread, reached for the spool, cut a new length, and tied it on. The room was so quiet I heard the little click as the knot bit. She looked round, and smiled. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I …’ I swallowed, and the sharp dryness in my mouth brought reality back. I ached all over. My wrist stung, like a Chinese burn. I glanced sideways, confused for a second. I was tied to the bed with a strip of whitish cloth. The fabric was rucked up into a narrow fold that cut into my flesh, as though I’d fought to get away.
‘You were having terrors,’ Seredith said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘No.’ Or did I? An echo of screams, a flash of dark eyes watching me …
‘Never mind. Now you’re awake I’ll untie you.’
She stood up, putting her needle down carefully on the half-sewn pile of paper, and bent over me to pick with gnarled fingers at the knot. I lay still, not looking at her. What had I done? Had I gone mad, again? Last time, when it got really bad, I’d hit out at Ma and Pa. Alta had been afraid to come near me. Had I attacked Seredith?
‘There.’ She dragged the chair to my bedside and settled into it with a sharp breath. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘No.’
‘You will be. Five days you’ve been out.’
‘Out?’
‘Two more days of rest. At least. Then you can try getting up.’
‘I’m fine. I can get up now.’ I wrenched myself into a more upright position, and grabbed the side of the bed to steady myself against the sudden drag of dizziness. Slowly the spinning stopped, but it had taken all my strength and I let my head drop back on to the pillow. I squeezed my eyes shut, forbidding myself to cry. ‘I thought I was getting better.’
‘You are.’
‘But—’ I didn’t want to think about how it must have been, one frail old woman against her crazed, hallucinating apprentice. I might have hurt her, or worse …
She shifted. ‘Open your eyes.’
‘What?’
‘Look at me. That’s better.’ She leant towards me. I smelt soap and glue and the leather of her apron. ‘It was a relapse. But the worst is over.’
I turned my face away. I’d heard Ma say that before, and every time it’d had slightly less conviction.
‘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.
‘Emmett?’ Seredith said. ‘What are you doing in here?’
I turned to the bench. In this light my tools looked like pewter, and a silver smear of glue glinted on the wood like a snail’s trail. The pile of finished endpapers was all shades of grey: ashes-of-roses, ashes-of-peacock, ashes-of-sky.
‘I thought I asked you to sort out the stores.’
A draught flicked a fine sand of ice against the window and set a wire swinging above my head. There were more papers hanging there; more dim wings, more pages than we could ever use.
‘I finished. I made more endpapers.’
‘What? Why? We don’t need—’
‘I don’t know. Because it’s something I know how to do, I suppose.’ I looked round. There were rolls and rolls of book-cloth, piled like logs on the shelf, all sombre and shadowy in this silvery half-dusk. The cupboard below held goatskins, a box of leather scraps, bottles of dye … And next to it – the door was swinging open, the catch needed seeing to – the boxes of tools glinted dully, their tiny elaborate feet poking up into the light. Reels of gold foil gleamed. In front there were presses, another long bench, the board-cutter, the plough … ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘All this – to decorate books that you don’t even sell.’
‘Books should be beautiful,’ Seredith said. ‘No one sees, that’s not the point. It’s a way to honour people – like grave-goods, in olden times.’
‘But whatever happens in your locked room … that’s the real binding, isn’t it? You make books for people, in there. How?’
She made a sudden movement, but when I looked at her she was still again. ‘Emmett …’
‘I’ve never even seen—’
‘Soon.’
‘You keep saying—’
‘Not now!’ She staggered, caught herself and dropped into the chair by the stove. ‘Please, not now, Emmett. I’m tired. I’m so tired.’
I walked past her, to the locked door. I ran my hand down over the three locks. It took an effort. My shoulder prickled with the impulse to pull away. Behind me Seredith’s chair scraped on the floor as she turned to look at me.
I stayed where I was. If I waited long enough, this fear would pass: and then I would be ready. But it didn’t. And underneath it, like a sickness I hadn’t known I had, was a black misery, a sense of loss so strong I could have wept.
‘Emmett.’
I turned on my heel and left.
In the next few days we didn’t speak of it again; we only talked about the chores and the weather, treading carefully, like people edging across new ice.
IV (#ulink_c5ac94db-6309-5157-8f78-82f56e43a677)
I woke out of a dream of fire. I opened my eyes and blinked away the flickering red light. I’d been in a palace, a maze made of flames, so high and hot they sucked the air out of my lungs, and for a moment I thought I caught the bitter scratch of smoke in my throat; but the room was dark and when I breathed all I could smell was the subtle metallic scent of snow. I sat up, rubbing my eyes.
Knocking. That was what had woken me: a hard pounding at the front door that hardly paused. And someone shouting. There was a bell jangling too, a continuous clanging like an alarum.
I dragged myself out of bed and pulled on my trousers. The boards were cold under my bare feet, but I didn’t bother about shoes. I stumbled out into the passageway and stood there for a second, listening. A man’s voice, breathless. ‘I know you’re there!’ The door juddered in its frame. ‘Come out or I’ll smash your fucking windows. Out!’
I clenched my fists. At home Pa would have reached for his rifle, and when he swung the door open whoever was there would have stammered and fallen silent. But this wasn’t my house, and I didn’t have a rifle. I crossed the passageway to knock at Seredith’s door. ‘Seredith?’ I didn’t have time to wait for an answer. I pushed it open and peered round, trying to make out where her bed was. I’d never been in this room. ‘Seredith, there’s someone outside. Are you awake?’
Nothing. I could just see the pale crumple of her pillows and rucked sheets, next to the window. She wasn’t there. ‘Seredith?’
Something muttered in the darkness. I whirled round. She was curled in a chair in the corner of the room, shielding her head as if the sky was about to fall. Her eyes were open, gleaming at me. Her face was so pale it seemed to hover in the air. ‘Seredith. There’s someone knocking at the door. Should I answer? What’s going on?’
‘Come for us,’ she muttered, ‘they’ve come, I knew they would, the Crusade, the Crusade …’
‘I don’t understand.’ My voice wavered and I clenched my fists. ‘Should I open the door? Do you want to talk to him?’
‘The Crusaders, come to burn us all, come to kill us – nowhere to run now, hide, hide in the cellar, don’t give up the books, die with the books if you must—’
‘Seredith, please!’ I dropped to my haunches in front of her, so that my eyes were at the same level as hers. I pulled gently at one of her wrists, trying to uncover her ear. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you want me to—’
She recoiled. ‘Who – get away from me – who who who—’
I rocked backwards, off balance. ‘It’s me! Seredith, it’s Emmett.’
Silence. The pounding stopped. We stared at each other through the dense grainy dark. I could hear her hoarse breathing, and my own. There was the smash of glass from downstairs. ‘Hey!’ the man yelled. ‘Come out here, you old bitch!’
Seredith shuddered. I tried to take her hand but she scrabbled backwards into the corner of the room, scraping frantically at the plaster. Her face was gleaming with moisture and her mouth was half-open. For a second she’d known who I was, but now she was staring past me, her lips trembling, and I didn’t dare touch her again.
I stood up. She caught at my shirt and tugged. I nearly fell. ‘Seredith.’ I peeled her fingers away one by one. They were brittle and clammy, and I was afraid that I’d break the bones. ‘Let go of me. I have to—’
I pulled too hard, and she cried out. But as she shook the pain from her wrist, her eyes seemed to clear. ‘Emmett,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I was dreaming. Help me back to—’
‘It’s all right. I’ll go. You stay here.’ I walked into the passage on shaking legs.
The man’s voice rose, clearer now that the window had gone. ‘I’ll smoke you out! You come out here and talk to me, witch!’
I don’t know how I got to the bottom of the stairs, or slid the bolts on the front door, but suddenly I was in the open doorway. The man in front of me startled and stepped back. He was smaller than I’d expected, and his face had a pointed, ratty look. Behind him more dark figures turned their heads. One of them had a torch. So I had smelt smoke.
He squared up to me as if he thought he was as tall as I was, though he had to tilt his head back to look me in the eye. ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m the witch’s apprentice. Who the hell are you?’
‘Get her down here.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want my daughter back.’
‘Your daughter? She’s not here. No one’s here but—’ I stopped.
‘Don’t try to be smart. You know what I’m talking about. You bring her book out here, right now, and give it to me. Or—’
‘Or what?’
‘Or we burn this house to the ground. And everything in it.’
‘Look around you. It’s been snowing. These walls are three feet thick. You really believe you can just set light to the house? With one torch? Why don’t you and your makeshift army—’
‘You think we’re that stupid?’ The man gestured to his friend, who hefted a covered bucket and grinned. A slosh of liquid dribbled over the side and I smelt oil. ‘You think we’d come all this way to make empty threats? You want to take me seriously, son. I mean it. Now bring me that book.’
I swallowed. The house had thick walls, and there was snow on the thatch; but I’d seen the barn at Greats Farm on fire one winter, and I knew that if the flames took hold … ‘I don’t know where it is,’ I said. ‘I—’
Seredith’s voice said, from behind me, ‘Go home.’
‘That’s her,’ one of the dark figures said. ‘The old woman. That’s her.’
The man glared over my shoulder. ‘Don’t you order me, you old hag. You heard what I said to your – whatever he is … I want my daughter’s book. She had no right coming here to you.’
‘She had every right.’
‘You mad old bitch! She sneaked out without my permission, and then she comes home half-empty – looks at me like she doesn’t even know who I am—’
‘It was her choice. All of it was her choice. If you hadn’t—’
‘Shut up!’ He jerked forwards; if I hadn’t been there maybe he would have hit her. I caught a whiff of sour beer on his breath, mixed with something stronger. ‘I know your lot. I’m not having you sell my daughter’s book to some—’
‘I don’t sell books. I keep them safe. Now leave.’
There was a silence. The torchlight danced on the man’s face. He glanced backwards, licking his lips, and his friends stared at him. His hands opened and closed like claws.
A breeze ruffled the grass and set the torch-flame fluttering. For a moment I felt a damp breath on my cheek, blowing away the scent of smoke; then it died, and the flames leapt upwards again.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, we’ll do it your way.’ He grabbed the bucket of oil from the other man, and lumbered heavily back to the door. ‘I want that book burnt. If you won’t bring it to me, I’ll burn the house down with the book in it.’
I tried to laugh. ‘Don’t be a fool.’
‘I’m warning you. You’d better come out here.’
‘Look at us – an old woman and an apprentice, you can’t really—’
‘Watch me.’
My grip tightened on the door frame. The blood was thrumming in my fingers so hard that it felt like the wood might leap out of my grasp. I looked at Seredith. She was staring at the man, white-faced, her hair straggling over her shoulders. If I’d never seen her before I could have believed she was a witch. She said something too low to catch.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘she’s old, she hasn’t done anything wrong, whatever happened to your daughter—’
‘Whatever happened? She was bound, that’s what happened! Now, you move out of the way, or I swear I’ll burn you along with everything else—’ He lunged at me and dragged me forwards. I stumbled away from the door, surprised by the strength of his grip; then I flung my arm up to break his hold. I staggered to the side but by the time I got my balance someone had grabbed me from behind. The other man swung his torch in front of me as if I was an animal. The heat prickled on my cheeks and I blinked away stinging tears. ‘And you,’ he shouted, through the doorway, ‘you come out too. You come out and we won’t hurt you.’
I tried to pull away from whoever was holding me. ‘You mean you’ll just leave us out here in the snow? Miles from anywhere? She’s an old woman.’
‘Shut up!’ He turned on me. ‘I’m being kind, warning you at all.’
I wanted to throttle him. I forced myself to take a deep breath. ‘Look – you can’t do this. You could be deported – you don’t want to risk that.’
‘For burning a binder’s house to the ground? I’ve got ten friends’ll swear I was in the tavern the whole night. Now, get the old bitch out here or she’ll get smoked into a kipper with the rest.’
The front door slammed. A bolt shot home.
Melted snow ran off the roof in a sudden dribble, as if a pool had formed and overflowed. The breeze lifted and died again. I thought I heard it whine in the broken window. I swallowed. ‘Seredith?’
She didn’t answer. I pulled away from the man who’d been holding me. He let me go without a struggle.
‘Seredith. Open the door. Please.’ I leant sideways to peer through the jagged space where the window had been. She was sitting on the stairs like a child, her legs crossed neatly at the ankles. She didn’t look up. ‘What are you doing? Seredith?’
She murmured something.
‘What? Please, let me in—’
‘That’s it. The bitch wants to burn.’ There was a strident note in his voice, like bravado; but when I looked back at him he gave me a wide rotten-toothed grin. ‘She’s made her choice. Now get out of the way.’ He lurched forwards and sloshed oil on the wall by my feet. The smell rose like a fog, thick and real.
‘Don’t – you can’t – please!’ He went on grinning at me, unblinking. I turned and hammered at the last shards of glass in the window, smashing them away with the side of my fist; but the window was too narrow to get through. ‘Seredith, come out! They’re going to set the house on fire, please.’
She didn’t move. I would have thought she couldn’t hear me, except that her shoulders rose a little when I said please.
‘You can’t set fire to the house while she’s in it. That’s murder.’ My voice was high and hoarse.
‘Get out of the way.’ But he didn’t wait for me to move. Oil splashed on to my trousers as he went past. He poured the last dregs against the side wall and stood back. The man with the torch was watching, his expression open and interested, like a schoolboy’s.
Maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Maybe the snow on the roof would quench it, or the walls would be too thick and too damp. But Seredith was old, and the smoke would be enough to kill her, if she was inside.
‘Hey, Baldwin. Get the other bucket. Round the side.’ He pointed.
‘Please. Please don’t do this.’ But I knew it was no good. I spun round and threw myself against the door. I pounded on the wood with my fists. ‘Seredith! Open the door. Damn you, open the door.’
Someone caught my collar and pulled me back. I choked and nearly fell.
‘Good. Keep him back. Now.’
The man with the torch grunted and stepped forwards. I scrabbled desperately to break free. The seam of my shirt ripped and I almost fell into the space between the torch-flames and the door. The smell of oil was so strong I could taste it. It was on me, on my trousers and hands; the smallest leap of a spark and I’d be on fire. The burning torch hovered in front of my eyes, a spitting mass of talons and tongues.
Something thudded into my back. I’d walked backwards into the door. I leant against it. Nowhere to go now.
The man raised the torch like a staff and tilted it until it was right in front of my face. Then he lowered it. I watched it flicker, almost touching the base of the wall, almost close enough to catch.
‘No.’
My own voice; but not my own. My blood rose and sang in my ears like a flood, so loud I couldn’t hear myself think.
‘Do this and you will be cursed,’ I said, and in the sudden quiet it was as though another voice spoke underneath mine. ‘Kill with fire and you will perish in fire. Burn in hatred and you will burn.’
No one answered. No one moved.
‘If you do this, your souls will be stained with blood and ash. Everything you touch will go grey and wither. Everyone you touch will fall ill or run mad or die.’
A sound: faint, faraway, like something drawing closer. But the voice coming from inside me wouldn’t let me pause to listen. ‘You will end hated and alone,’ it said. ‘There will be no forgiveness, ever.’
Quietness spread out around me like a ripple in a pond, deadening the hiss of the wind and the scratch of the flames. But inside that quiet there was something new, ticking, like drying wood or leaves falling.
The men stared at me. I looked round, meeting their eyes, letting the other voice look through me. My hand rose to point at the man who had threatened me, steady as a prophet’s. ‘Go.’
He hesitated. The ticking broadened into a crackle, then a hiss, then a roar.
Rain.
It fell in ropes, as sudden as an ambush, blinding me, driving through hair and clothes in seconds. Icy water ran down the back of my neck and sprayed off my nose when I gasped with the shock of it. The man swung his torch sideways to catch the shelter of the overhanging roof, but the wind blew a curtain of rain over it, and then there was no light at all. There was shouting, a few stifled, panicked cries, and the sounds of a man stumbling in the dark. ‘He called down the rain – fuck this, let’s go – the magic—’
I blinked, but there were only blurred shadows, running and disappearing like wraiths. Someone called, someone answered, someone grunted and swore as he tripped and struggled to his feet; and then the noise retreated, I heard a far-off mutter of voices and horses, and they were gone.
I shut my eyes. I was soaked to the skin. The marsh hissed and rumbled under the rain, answering, echoing. The thatch whispered its own note as the wind hummed through the broken window. There was the smell of mud and reeds and melted snow.
I was cold. A spasm of shivering took hold of me and I leant forward, bracing myself as if it came from outside. When it was over I blinked the water off my eyelashes and blew the strings of rain away from my mouth. The dark had lessened, and now I could make out trembling, silvery edges to things: the barn, the road, the horizon.
I turned round and stared through the window. Even now it made my neck tingle, to turn my back on the vast emptiness where the road was. But I’d heard them go. I called softly, ‘Seredith? They’ve gone. Let me in.’
I wasn’t sure if I could really see her, or whether my brain was inventing the ghostly blur in the darkness. I wiped the water out of my eyes and tried to make her out. She was there, sitting on the stairs. I leant as close to the edge of the broken glass as I could. ‘Seredith. It’s all right. Open the door.’
She didn’t move. I don’t know how long I stood there. I murmured to her as if I was trying to tame an animal: the same words, over and over again. I started to forget what was my voice and what was the rain. I was so cold I went into a sort of dream, where I was the marsh and the house as well as myself, where I was slippery wet wood and claggy mud … When at last the bolt was shot back, I was so stiff and shrammed that I didn’t react straight away.
Seredith said, ‘Come in, then.’
I limped inside and stood dripping on the floor. Seredith rummaged in the sideboard; I heard the scratching of match after match as she tried to light the lamp. At last I crossed to her and gently took the box. We both jumped at my touch. I didn’t look at her until the lamp was burning and I’d put the glass chimney over the flame.
She was trembling, and her hair was sticking out in a clump; but when she met my eyes, she gave me a wry almost-smile that told me she knew who I was. She reached for the lamp.
‘Seredith …’
‘I know. I shall go to bed, or I’ll catch my death.’
That wasn’t what I’d been going to say. I nodded.
‘You’d better go too.’ She added, too quickly, ‘You’re sure they’ve gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Silence. She stared at the lamp, and in the soft light her face could have been young. At last she said, ‘Thank you, Emmett.’
I didn’t answer.
‘Without you, they would have burnt the house down before the rain came.’
‘Why didn’t you—’
‘I was so afraid when I heard them knocking.’ She stopped. She took a pace towards the staircase, and turned back. ‘When they came, I dreamt … I thought they were the Crusade. There hasn’t been a Crusade here for sixty years, but … I remember them coming for us. I must have been your age. And my master …’
‘The Crusade?’
‘Never mind. Those days are over. Now it’s only a few peasants, here and there, that hate us enough to murder us …’ She laughed a little. I’d never heard her say peasants like that, with contempt.
Something inside me tipped. I said, slowly, ‘But they didn’t want to murder us. Not really. They wanted to burn the house.’ A pause. The flame bobbed, so I couldn’t tell if her expression had changed. ‘Why did you lock yourself in, Seredith?’
She reached for the banister and began to climb the stairs.
‘Seredith.’ My arms ached with the effort to stop myself reaching for her. ‘You could have died. I could have died, trying to get you out. Why the hell did you lock yourself in?’
‘Because of the books,’ she said, turning so suddenly I was scared she’d fall. ‘Why do you think, boy? Because the books have to be kept safe.’
‘But—’
‘And if the books burn, I will burn with them. Do you understand?’
I shook my head.
She looked at me for a long time. She seemed about to say something else. But then she shivered so violently she had to steady herself, and when the spasm had passed she seemed exhausted. ‘Not now,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she’d come to the last of her breath. ‘Good night.’
I listened to her footsteps climb to the landing and cross to the room where she slept. The rain swirled through the broken window and rattled on the floor, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
I was aching all over with cold, and my head was spinning with tiredness; but when I shut my eyes I saw flames spitting and clawing at me. The noise of the rain separated into different notes: the percussive hiss of water on the roof, the whisper of the wind, human voices … I knew they weren’t real, but I could hear distinct words, as if everyone I had ever known had surrounded the house and was calling to me. It was fatigue, only fatigue, but I didn’t want to fall asleep. I wanted … Most of all I wanted not to be alone; but that was the one thing I couldn’t have.
I had to get warm. My mother would have parcelled me up in a blanket and wrapped her arms round me until I stopped shivering; then she would have made me hot tea and brandy, sent me to bed and sat beside me while I drank it. The familiar ache of homesickness threatened to overwhelm me. I went into the workshop and lit the stove. Outside there was a hint of light, a crack between the clouds and the horizon; it was later than I’d realised.
It occurred to me, vaguely, that I had saved Seredith’s life.
I brewed tea, and drank it. The flames dancing in my head began to subside. The voices grew fainter as the rain slackened. The stove creaked and clicketed and smelt of warm metal. I sat on the floor, leaning against the plan chest, with my legs spread out in front of me. From this angle, and in this light, the workshop looked like a cave: mysterious, looming, the knobs and screws of the presses transformed into strange rock formations. The shadow of the board cutter on the wall looked like a man’s face. I rolled my head round, taking it all in, and for a second I was filled with a fierce pleasure to have saved it all: my workshop, my things, my place.
The door at the end of the room was ajar.
I blinked. At first I thought it was a trick of the light. I put down my cold mug of tea and leant forward, and saw the gap between the door and the jamb. It was the door on the left of the stove: not the room where Seredith took people, but the other door, the one that led down into the dark.
I almost kicked it shut. I could have done that, left it unlocked but closed, and gone to bed. I almost did. I reached out gently with my foot, but instead of pushing it shut I edged it open.
Blackness. An empty shelf just inside, and beyond that a flight of stairs going down. Nothing more than I’d seen before. Nothing like the bare light-filled room behind the other door, except for the cold that breathed from it.
I stood up and reached for the lamp. I wasn’t sleepy any more. Tension pricked in my fingertips and itched between my shoulder blades. I pushed the door wide open and went down into the dark.
It smelt of damp. That was the first thing I noticed: a thick, muddy scent like rotting reeds. I paused on the stair, my heart speeding up. Damp was almost as bad as fire; it brought mould and wrinkled paper and softened glue. And it smelt of age and dead things, smelt wrong … But as I turned the corner of the staircase and lifted the lamp, what I saw was nothing out of the ordinary: a little room with a table and cupboards, a broom and a bucket, chests that were marked with a stationer’s label. I almost laughed. Just a storeroom. At the far end – although it wasn’t far, only a few steps across – there was a round bronze plate in the wall, like a solid wheel, intricate and decorative. The other walls were piled high with chests and boxes. The air felt as dry as it had upstairs; perhaps I’d imagined the smell.
I turned my head, half thinking I’d heard something. But everything was perfectly still, insulated from the noise of the rain by the dense earth beyond.
I put down the lamp and looked about me. There was a drawer balanced on a pile of boxes, full of broken tools waiting to be repaired or thrown away, and a row of glass bottles filled with dark liquid that looked like dyes or ox gall for marbling paper. I nearly tripped over three fire-buckets of sand. On the table there was a humped parcel wrapped in sackcloth, and some tools. I didn’t recognise them; they were thin, delicate things with edges like fish’s teeth. I brought the lamp closer. Next to the bundle there was another cloth, spread out to cover something. This was where Seredith worked, when I was upstairs in the workshop.
I reached out and unwrapped the bundle, as gently as if it was alive. It was a book-block, neatly sewn, with thick dark endpapers threaded with white, like tiny roots reaching through soil. The blood sang in my fingertips. A book. The first book I had seen, since I’d been here; the first since I was a child, and learned that they were forbidden. But holding it now I felt nothing but a kind of peace.
I brought it to my face and inhaled the smell of paper. I almost opened it to look at the title page; but I was too curious about what was under the other bit of sacking. I put the block down and drew back the cloth. Here was the cover Seredith had been making. For a moment, before I understood what I was seeing, it was beautiful.
The background was black velvet, so fine it absorbed every glint of light and lay on the bench like a piece of solid darkness. The inlay stood out against it like ivory, shining softly, pale gold in the lamplight.
Bones. A skeleton, the spine curled like a row of pearls round pale twigs of legs and arms, and the tiny splinters of toes and fingers. The skull bulged like a mushroom. They were smaller than my outstretched hand, those bones. They were as small and fragile as a bird’s.
But it wasn’t … it hadn’t been a bird. It was a baby.
V (#ulink_aaecdbef-78a7-5f9d-aca4-67bf1b4e490d)
‘Don’t touch it.’
I hadn’t heard Seredith come into the room, but some distant, watchful part of me wasn’t surprised to hear her voice. I didn’t know how long I had been standing there. It was only when I stepped back – carefully, as though there was something here I was afraid to wake – that I felt the stiff chill in my joints, the pins-and-needles in my feet, and knew it had been a long time. In spite of my care I knocked my ankle against a box, but the hollow sound was muffled by the earth beyond the walls.
I said, ‘I wasn’t going to touch it.’
‘Emmett …’
I didn’t answer. The wick of the lamp needed trimming, and the shadows jumped and ducked. The bones gleamed against their bed of black. As the light danced back and forth I could have made myself believe that they were moving; but when at last the flame steadied they lay quiet.
‘It’s only a binding,’ she said. She shifted in the doorway, but I didn’t look at her. ‘It’s mother-of-pearl.’
‘Not real bones.’ It came out like mockery. I hadn’t meant it to, but I was glad, fiercely glad, at the way it cut through the silence.
‘No,’ she said softly, ‘not real bones.’
I stared at the shining intricate shapes on the velvet until my eyes blurred. At last I reached out and pulled the cloth down over them; then I stood looking down at the coarse brown hessian. Here and there, where the weave was loose, I could still see the smooth edge of a femur, the nacreous curve of the skull, a miniature, perfect fingerbone. I imagined her working on them, crafting tiny shapes out of mother-of-pearl. I shut my eyes and listened to my blood pounding, and beyond that the dead quiet of walls and earth.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you do.’
The lamp murmured and guttered. Nothing else moved.
‘You know already.’
‘No.’
‘You know, if you think about it.’
I opened my mouth to say no, again; but something caught in my throat. The lamp-flame flared, licked upwards and then sank to a tiny blue bubble. The dark took a step towards me.
‘You bind – people,’ I said. My throat was so dry it hurt to speak; but the silence hurt more. ‘You make people into books.’
‘Yes. But not in the way you mean.’
‘What other way is there?’
She walked towards me. I didn’t turn, but the light from her candle grew stronger, pushing back the shadows. ‘Sit down, Emmett.’
She touched my shoulder. I flinched and spun round, stumbling back into the table. Tools clattered to the floor and skittered away. We stared at each other. She had stepped back too; now she put her candle down on one of the chests, and the flame magnified the trembling of her hand. Wax had spattered the floor; it congealed in a split second, like water turning to milk.
‘Sit down.’ She lifted an open drawer of jars off a box. ‘Here.’
I didn’t want to sit, while she was standing. I held her gaze, and she was the first to look away. She dumped the drawer down again. Then, wearily, she bent to pick up the little tools I’d knocked off the table.
‘You trap them,’ I said. ‘You take people and put them inside books. They leave here … empty.’
‘I suppose, in a way—’
‘You steal their souls.’ My voice cracked. ‘No wonder they’re afraid of you. You lure them here and suck them dry, you take what you want and send them away with nothing. That’s what a book is, isn’t it? A life. A person. And if they burn, they die.’
‘No.’ She straightened up, one hand clutching a tiny wood-handled knife.
I picked up the book on the table and held it out. ‘Look,’ I said, my voice rising and rising, ‘this is a person. Inside there’s a person – out there somewhere they’re walking round dead – it’s evil, what you do, they should have fucking burnt you.’
She slapped me.
Silence. There was a thin high ringing in the air that wasn’t real. Automatic tears rose in my eyes and spilt down my cheeks. I wiped them away with the inside of my wrist. The pain faded to a hot tingling, like salt water drying on my skin. I put the book down and smoothed the endpaper with my palm where I’d rumpled it. The crease would never come out entirely; it stood out like a scar, branching across the corner. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Seredith turned away and dropped the knife into the open drawer by my side. ‘Memories,’ she said, at last. ‘Not people, Emmett. We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any more harm. That’s all books are.’
Finally I met her eyes. Her expression was open, candid, a little weary, like her voice. She made it sound so right – so necessary; like a doctor describing an amputation. ‘Not souls, Emmett,’ she said. ‘Not people. Just memories.’
‘It’s wrong,’ I said, trying to match my tone to hers. Steady, reasonable … but my voice shook and betrayed me. ‘You can’t say it’s right to do that. Who are you to say what they can live with?’
‘We don’t. We help people who come to us and ask for it.’ A flicker of sympathy went over her face as if she knew she’d won. ‘No one has to come, Emmett. They decide. All we do is help them forget.’
It wasn’t that simple. Somehow I knew it wasn’t. But I had no argument to make, no defence against the softness of her voice and her level eyes. ‘What about that?’ I pointed to the child-shape under the sacking. ‘Why would you make a book like that?’
‘Milly’s book? Do you really want to know?’
A shiver went over me, fierce and sudden. I clenched my teeth and didn’t answer.
She walked past me, stared down at the sacking for a moment, and then slid it gently to one side. In her shadow the little skeleton shone bluish.
‘She buried it alive,’ Seredith said. There was no weight to the words, only a quiet precision that left all the feeling to me. ‘She couldn’t go on, she thought she couldn’t go on. And so she wrapped it up, one day when it wouldn’t stop crying, and she laid it on the dung heap and pulled rubbish and manure over it until she couldn’t hear it any more.’
‘Her baby?’
A nod.
I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t look away. The baby would have lain like that, curled and helpless, trying to cry, trying to breathe. How long would it have taken, before it was just part of the dungheap, rotting with everything else? It was like a horrible fairy tale: bones turned to pearl, earth turned to velvet. But it was true. It was true, and the story was locked in a book, shut away, written on dead pages. My hand tingled where I had smoothed out the endpaper: that thick, veined paper, black as soil.
‘That’s murder,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t the parish constable arrest her?’
‘She kept the child a secret. No one knew about it.’
‘But …’ I stopped. ‘How could you help her? A woman – a girl who killed her own child – like that – you should have …’
‘What should I have done?’
‘Let her suffer! Make her live with it! Remembering is part of the punishment. If you do something evil—’
‘It was her father’s, too. The man who came to burn this book. He was her father, and the child’s.’
For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I looked away, feeling sick.
There was the rustle of sackcloth as Seredith drew it back over the bones, and the creak of the box as she perched on the edge of it, holding on to the table to steady herself.
At last she said, ‘I’m not being fair to you, Emmett. Sometimes I do turn people away. Very, very rarely. And not because they’ve done something so terrible I can’t help; only because I know they’ll go on doing terrible things. Then, if I’m sure, I will refuse to help them. But it has only happened three times, in more than sixty years. The others, I helped.’
‘Isn’t burying a baby terrible?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and bowed her head. ‘Of course it is, Emmett.’
A breath. ‘You said, what books are … So every book,’ I said, ‘every book that’s ever been bound, is someone’s memories. Something they’ve chosen to forget.’
‘Yes.’
‘And …’ I cleared my throat. Suddenly I could feel the imprint of my father’s hand on my cheek, the stinging blow he’d given me years ago, as if the pain had never really faded. Never let me see you with a book again. This was what he had wanted to protect me from. And now I was an apprentice; I was going to be a binder.
‘You think,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I’m going to do what you do.’
She didn’t even glance at me. ‘It will be easier,’ she said, from a long way away, ‘if you don’t despise it. Despise books – despise the people who need help – and you despise yourself. Your work.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t. It’s not …’
She laughed. It was so close to her usual amused snort that my stomach twisted. ‘Yes, you can. Binders are born, not made. And you’re a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand. And it won’t let you rest. It’s a great force, inside you. It’s what made you ill, when … You’re stronger in it than most binders I’ve known. You’ll see.’
‘How do you know? You might be wrong—’
‘I know, Emmett.’
‘How?’
‘The binder’s fever gave you away. You will be a good binder. In every sense.’
I shook my head. I went on shaking it, even though I didn’t know why.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we do is very difficult. Sometimes it makes me angry or sad. Sometimes I regret – if I’d known what the memories were, I wouldn’t have—’ She stopped and glanced away. ‘Much of the time it doesn’t even touch me. But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’
‘I’m not doing it. It’s wrong. It’s – unnatural.’
She lowered her head, inhaling so deeply I saw her shoulders move. The skin under her eyes looked as fragile as the bloom on a moth’s wing: one touch and it would brush away and leave bare bone. She said, without looking at me, ‘It’s a sacred calling, Emmett. To have another person’s memory entrusted to you … To take the deepest, darkest part away from them and keep it safe, forever. To honour it, to make it beautiful, even though no one will ever see it. To guard it with your own life …’
‘I don’t want to be a glorified gaoler.’
She jolted upright. For a long moment I thought she would hit me again. ‘This is why I didn’t tell you before,’ she said, finally. ‘Because you’re not ready yet, you’re still struggling … But now you know. And you’re lucky to be here. If you had gone to a bindery in Castleford you’d have had your scruples beaten out of you long ago.’
I held out my finger and slid it through the candle flame, once, twice, slowing down until I could hardly bear it. There were too many questions; I concentrated on the pain and let my mouth decide. ‘So why am I here?’
She blinked. ‘Because I was the nearest. And—’ She stopped.
Her eyes slid away from mine. She kneaded her forehead, and for the first time I noticed how flushed her cheeks were. ‘I’m exhausted, Emmett. I think that’s enough for today. Don’t you?’
She was right. I was so tired that I could feel the world spinning. I nodded, and she stood up. I reached out to help her but she ignored me. She picked her way through the narrow space back to the door.
‘Seredith?’
She paused, but didn’t turn. Her sleeve had fallen back as she leant against the wall, and her wrist was like a child’s.
‘Yes?’
‘Where are the books? If you keep them safe …’
She held her arm out to point at the circular plaque on the wall. ‘On the other side of that,’ she said, ‘there’s a vault.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Yes.’ She turned, reaching for a key that hung round her neck; then her hand tightened on it. ‘No. Not now. Another time.’
I’d only asked out of curiosity. But there was something in her face – or something not in her face, something that should have been there … I pushed my tongue into the sharp space between two of my teeth and stared at her. Strands of her hair clung to her forehead, sticky with sweat. She reeled. I stepped towards her, but she stumbled back as if she couldn’t bear me to get too close. ‘Good night, Emmett.’
I watched her turn, bracing herself in the doorway as though she was fighting to stay on her feet. I should have let her go, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Seredith … What happens if the books burn? Do the people die?’
She didn’t look at me. She shuffled to the stairs and began to climb them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They remember.’
I was so tired I couldn’t think. Seredith had gone to bed; I should go too. If only I’d gone to bed an hour ago, instead of sitting down next to the stove in the workshop … Sleep. I wanted to step right off the edge of consciousness. I wanted that darkness more than anything. I wanted not to be here.
I sat down. Or rather, I found that I was already sitting, cramped on the floor with my legs folded, my back against a box. I didn’t have the energy to find a better position. Instead I wrapped my arms round my knees, put my head down, and slept.
When I woke, the first thing I felt was a kind of peace. It was almost pitch-black – the candle had gone out – and I felt as though I were drifting, disintegrating painlessly in the subtle currents of the dark. Then some of what had happened came back – but small, too far away to hurt me, like reflections in a silver cup. I got up and groped my way up the stairs, yawning. I’d thought it was the middle of the night, and the greyish light streaming through the workshop windows made me blink and rub my eyes. It was still raining, although now it was a thin quiet mizzle, and the snow only clung to the ground in a few places, grimy and pockmarked. Seredith had been right about the thaw; the post would get to us at least once more before winter really set in.
The stove had gone out. I hesitated, wanting to leave it and go upstairs to bed; but it was morning, and there was work to do … Work. I didn’t want to think about work. I crouched down and remade the fire. By the time it was going properly I was a little warmer, but the deep, cold quiet of the house needed more than the stove to thaw it. I hadn’t boarded up the broken window; but it wasn’t that, it was something else. I shook my head, wondering if my ears were playing tricks on me. It was like the way the snow had muffled every sound – or a feeling of distance, as if everything I heard was an echo …
Tea. The caddy was almost empty. I put water on to boil and went to get a new packet from the pantry. As I crossed the hall I turned my face away from the moist draught that blew in through the jagged-edged window. As soon as I’d had something hot to drink I’d find a bit of millboard—
Seredith was curled on the stairs, her head resting against the banister.
‘Seredith? Seredith!’
It was only when she moved that I knew I’d been afraid. I pulled her gently to her feet, appalled at how light she was, and the heat that was seeping from her skin. She was clammy, and her face was flushed. She muttered something, and I bent close to hear her. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. Her breath was foul, as if something was rotting inside her. ‘I was just … sitting down.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
‘I’m perfectly all right. I don’t need …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Come on.’ I half pushed and half lifted her upwards, step after step, and then along the passage to her room. She clambered into bed and pulled the blankets over herself as if she was freezing. I hurried downstairs to get her a jug of water, and herb tea to bring the fever down, and more blankets; but when I came back into the bedroom she was already asleep. She’d undressed, and her clothes were crumpled in a pile on the floor.
I stood very still, listening to the silence. I could hear Seredith’s breathing – faster, louder than it should have been – and the faint crackle of rain against the window; but behind that, and my own blood in my ears, there was nothing but the solid emptiness of the house and the marshes beyond. I was more alone here than I’d ever been.
I sat down. In this light, sleeping, Seredith looked even older; the flesh on her cheeks and below her jaw sagged, so that the skin was stretched thin over the bones of her nose and eyes. A scab of spittle clung to the corner of her mouth. She murmured something and turned over, and her hands twitched and clutched the quilt. Her skin was a chalky, yellowish colour against the faded indigo-and-white of the patchwork, while here and there the shadow of a raindrop crawled across the cotton.
I looked around. I had never been in here in daylight. There was a little fireplace and a padded window seat, and a mossy-looking armchair, but it was almost as bare as my room. There were no pictures, or ornaments above the hearth. The only decoration on the walls was the light from the window, the faint lattice, the sliding silver of the rain-shadows. Even my parents had more than this. And yet Seredith wasn’t poor; I knew that, from the lists of supplies we sent to Castleford every week, and the sacks that Toller brought back for us. I had never thought about where her money came from. If she died—
I looked down at her face on the pillow, and a kind of panic seized me. It was an effort to stop myself from waking her up and pouring the tea forcibly down her throat; it was best to let her sleep. I could light a fire, bring damp cloths, have some honey dissolved in water for when she woke of her own accord … But I sat still, unable to leave her. It had been the other way round, so many times – that she’d watched at my bedside while I slept, as patient as stone – but she’d never made me feel as though I should be grateful. For the first time I wondered whether her brusqueness had been deliberate. My throat ached.
An hour later, through the rain, I caught the distant creak and rumble of a cart, and at last the off-key jangle of the bell. The post. I lifted my head, and a perverse part of me wanted him to go away again, to leave me in this strange, bereft peace; but I got to my feet and went down to open the door.
‘Seredith’s sick. I don’t know who to … Can you send someone?’
He squinted at me above the collar of his coat. ‘Send someone? Who?’
‘A doctor. Or her family.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. She writes letters, doesn’t she? Tell the people she writes to.’
‘I—’ He stopped, and shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t count on them coming.’
He drove off. I watched until the cart was a tiny blot in the mottled expanse of brown grass and half-melted snow.
VI (#ulink_d7507669-24ed-5eb0-89fe-d9c476ea9657)
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.
VII (#ulink_8de72d76-9d04-5e7e-969d-b09fa26f2d8e)
I slept in the parlour, huddled in a spare blanket. The settee was shiny horsehair and so slippery that in the end I had to brace myself with one foot on the floor to stop myself sliding off. When I woke up it was freezing and still dark, and I ached all over. I was disorientated; for a moment I thought I was outside somewhere, surrounded by the dim hulks of winter ruins.
It was so cold I didn’t even try to go back to sleep. I stood up with the blanket still wrapped round my shoulders and staggered stiffly into the kitchen. I stoked the range and boiled a kettle for tea, while the last stars faded over the horizon. There was a clear sky, and by the time I’d drunk my tea and made a pot to take upstairs the kitchen was full of sunlight.
As I crossed the landing I heard my bedroom door open. It struck me for the first time how familiar the sound had become: I knew, without thinking, that it was my door and not Seredith’s.
‘Ah. I was hoping for shaving water. Never mind, tea will do. In here, please.’
I blinked away the after-image of the kitchen window that was still hovering in my vision. De Havilland was standing in my doorway in his shirtsleeves. Now it was light I could take in his appearance better – the ringlets of lightish, greyish hair, the pale eyes, the embroidered waistcoat – and the disdainful expression on his face. It was difficult to tell how old he was: his hair and eyes were so washed out that he could have been forty or sixty. ‘Hurry up, boy.’
‘This is for Seredith.’
For a second I thought he was going to object. He sighed. ‘Very well. Bring another cup. The hot water can come later.’ He pushed ahead of me and went into Seredith’s bedroom without knocking. The door swung closed and I caught it with my elbow and backed into the room after him.
‘Go away,’ Seredith said. ‘No, not you, Emmett.’
She was sitting up, her face haloed by wisps of white hair, her fingers clasping the quilt under her chin. She was thin, but there was a good colour in her cheeks, and her eyes were as sharp as ever. De Havilland gave her a thin smile. ‘You’re awake, I see. How are you feeling?’
‘Invaded. Why are you here?’
He sighed. He brushed a few nonexistent specks of dust off the moss-coloured armchair and sank into it, hitching his trousers up delicately at the knee. He turned his head to take in the room, pausing here and there to note the cracks in the plaster, and the scarred foot of the bed, and the darker diamond of blue where the quilt had been patched. When I put the tray down beside the bed he leant past me to pour tea into the solitary cup, and sipped from it with a flicker of a grimace. ‘This is tiresome. Suppose we stop wasting time and behave as if I was concerned for you,’ he said.
‘Rubbish. When have you ever been concerned for me? Emmett, will you get two more cups, please?’
I said, ‘It’s all right, Seredith, I’m not thirsty,’ just as de Havilland said, ‘One will suffice, I think.’ I clenched my jaw and left without looking at him. I went to the kitchen and back as quickly as I could, but when I glanced at the cup as I reached the top of the stairs I saw a feather of dust curled round the inside. If it had been meant for de Havilland I would have left it, but it wasn’t. By the time I opened Seredith’s bedroom door, swinging the cup from my finger, Seredith was sitting bolt upright with her arms crossed over her chest, while de Havilland lolled back in his chair. ‘Certainly not,’ he said. ‘You’re an excellent binder. Old-fashioned, of course, but … Well. You would be useful to me.’
‘Work in your bindery?’
‘You know my offer still stands.’
‘I’d rather die.’
De Havilland turned to me, very deliberately. ‘So glad to see you finally managed to find your way back to us,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to pour Seredith a cup of tea before she expires of thirst.’
I didn’t trust myself to reply. I poured dark tea into the clean cup and gave it to Seredith, cradling her hands in mine to make sure that she held it securely. She glanced up at me and some of the ferocity went out of her face. ‘Thank you, Emmett.’
De Havilland pinched the bridge of his nose with his finger and thumb. He was smiling, but without warmth. ‘Times have changed, Seredith. Even apart from the question of your health, I wish you would reconsider. This lonely existence, miles from anywhere, binding ignorant, superstitious peasants … We have worked very hard, you know, to better our reputation, so that people begin to understand that we are doctors of the soul and not witches. You do the craft no credit at all—’
‘Don’t lecture me.’
He smoothed a strand of hair away from his forehead with splayed fingers. ‘I am merely making the point that we learnt from the Crusade—’
‘You weren’t even alive during the Crusade! How dare you—’
‘All right, all right!’ After a moment he leant over and poured himself another cup of tea. By now it was like dye, but he didn’t seem to notice until he took a sip and his lips wrinkled. ‘Be reasonable, Seredith. How many people have you bound, this year? Four? Five? You can’t have enough work to keep yourself busy, let alone an apprentice. And all peasants with no understanding of the craft at all. They think you’re a witch …’ He leant forward, his voice softening. ‘Wouldn’t it be pleasant to come to Castleford, where binders command some respect? Where books command respect? I am quite influential, you know. I attend some of the best families.’
‘Attend them?’ Seredith echoed. ‘A binding should be once a lifetime.’
‘Oh, please … When pain can be alleviated, who are we to withhold our art? You are too set in your ways.’
‘That’s enough!’ She thrust her tea aside, slopping it over the patchwork. ‘I am not coming to Castleford.’
‘This inverse snobbery is hardly in your best interests. Why you prefer to rot away in this godforsaken place—’
‘You don’t understand, do you?’ I had never heard Seredith struggle to control her anger, and it made my own gorge rise. ‘Apart from anything else, I can’t leave the books.’
He put his cup down on its saucer with a clink. The signet ring on his little finger glinted. ‘Don’t be absurd. I understand your scruples, but it’s quite simple. We can take the books with us. I have space in my own vault.’
‘Give you my books?’ She laughed. It sounded like a twig cracking.
‘My vault is perfectly safe. Safer than having them in the bindery with you.’
‘That’s it, is it?’ She shook her head and sat back against her pillows, gasping a little. ‘I should have known. Why else would you bother to come? You’re after my books. Of course.’
He sat up straight, and for the first time a hint of pink seeped into his cheeks. ‘There’s no need to be—’
‘How many of your own books actually end up in your vault? You think I don’t know how you pay for your new bindery and your – your waistcoats?’
‘There’s nothing illegal about trade binding. It’s merely prejudice.’
‘I’m not talking about trade binding,’ she said, her mouth twisting on the words as if they tasted bitter. ‘I’m talking about selling true bindings, without consent. And that is illegal.’
They stared at each other for a moment. Seredith’s hand was a white knot of tendons at her throat; she was clutching the key she wore round her neck as if it was in danger of being wrenched away from her.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ de Havilland said, getting to his feet. ‘I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Neither do I. Why don’t you go home?’
He gave a theatrical sigh, raising his eyes to the cracked plaster on the ceiling. ‘I’ll go home when you’re better.’
‘Or when I’m dead. That’s really what you’re waiting for, isn’t it?’
He made a little mocking bow in her direction and strode towards the door. I leant back against the wall to let him pass, and he caught my eye and started, as if he’d forgotten I was there. ‘Hot water,’ he said. ‘In my bedroom. Immediately.’ He slammed the door behind him with a bang that made the walls tremble.
Seredith looked at me sidelong and then ducked her head, plucking at the quilt as if she was checking that the pattern was complete. When she didn’t say anything, I cleared my throat. ‘Seredith … If you want me to make him leave …’
‘And how would you do that?’ She shook her head. ‘No, Emmett. He’ll go of his own accord, when he sees that I’m recovered. It won’t be long.’ There was something sour in the way she said it. ‘In the meantime …’
‘Yes?’
She met my eyes. ‘Try not to lose your temper with him. You may need him, yet.’
But that flicker of complicity wasn’t much consolation, as the days went on and de Havilland showed no sign of leaving. I couldn’t understand why Seredith put up with him, but I knew that without her permission I couldn’t tell him to go. And knowing that it was my own fault that he was there didn’t make it easier to bite my tongue when he poked quizzically at the lumps in a salt-pork stew, or threw me a couple of shirts and told me to wash them. Between my chores, looking after Seredith and the extra work he made, there was no time for anything else; the hours passed in a blur of drudgery and resentment, and I didn’t even set foot in the workshop. It was hard to remember that a few days ago, before de Havilland came, I’d felt as if the house belonged to me: now I was reduced to a slave. But the worst thing wasn’t the work – I’d worked harder than this, at home, before I got ill – it was the way de Havilland’s presence filled the house. I’d never known anyone who moved so quietly; more than once, when I was stoking the range or scrubbing a pan, I felt the chill touch of his gaze on the back of my neck. I turned round, expecting him to blink or smile, but he went on watching me as if I was a kind of animal he’d never seen before. I stared back, determined not to be the first to look away, and at last he let his eyes travel past me to what I was doing, before he drifted silently out of the room.
One morning he passed me at the foot of the stairs as I carried a basket of logs in for the range. ‘Seredith is asleep. I’ll have a fire in the parlour.’
I clenched my jaw and dumped the wood in the kitchen without answering. I wanted to tell him to build his own fire – or something more obscene – but the thought of Seredith helpless upstairs made me swallow the words. De Havilland was a guest, whether I liked it or not; so I piled a couple of logs against my chest and carried them across the hall to the parlour. The door was open. De Havilland had turned the writing desk around and was sitting with his back to the window. He didn’t look up when I came in, only pointed to the hearth as if I wouldn’t know where it was.
I crouched and began to brush the remnants of the last fire out of the grate. The fine wood ash rose like the ghost of smoke. As I started to lay kindling I felt that creeping sensation at the base of my skull; it felt like a defeat to glance round to see if he was looking, but I couldn’t stop myself. De Havilland leant back in his chair and tapped his pen against his teeth. He regarded me for what felt like a long time, while the blood began to hum in my temples. Then he smiled faintly and turned his attention back to the letter he was writing.
I forced myself to finish the fire. I lit it and waited until the flames had taken hold. Once it was burning well I stood up and tried to brush the grey smears off my shirt.
De Havilland was reading a book. He was still holding his pen, but it lay slackly between his knuckles while he turned the pages. His face was very calm; he might have been looking out of a window. After a moment he paused, turned back a page, and made a note. When he’d finished he caught sight of me. He put down his pen and smoothed his moustache, his eyes fixed on mine above the stroking hand that covered his mouth. Abruptly his vague, interested expression gave way to a gleam of something else, and he held out the book.
‘Master Edward Albion,’ he said. ‘Bound by an anonymous binder from Albion’s own bindery. Black morocco, gold tooling, false raised bands. Headbands sewn in black and gold, endpapers marbled in red nonpareil. Would you care to have a look?’
‘I—’
‘Take it. Carefully,’ he added, with a sudden sharp edge in his voice. ‘It’s worth … oh, fifty guineas? Certainly more than you could ever repay.’
I started to reach out, but something jarred in my head and I pulled back. It was the image of his face, utterly serene, as he read: words he had no right to, someone else’s memories …
‘No? Very well.’ He put it on the table. Then he looked back at me, as if something had occurred to him, and he shook his head. ‘I see you share Seredith’s prejudices. It’s a school binding, you know. Trade, but perfectly legitimate. Nothing to offend anyone’s sensibilities.’
‘You mean—’ I stopped. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant, but he narrowed his eyes as if I had.
‘It’s unfortunate that you’ve been learning from Seredith,’ he said. ‘You must be under the impression that binding is stuck in the Dark Ages. It’s not all occult muttering and the Hwicce Book, you know – oh.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘You’ve never heard of the Hwicce Book. Or the library at Pompeii? Or the great deathbed bindings of the Renaissance, or the Fangorn bindery, or Madame Sourly … No? The North Berwick Trials? The Crusades, presumably even you know about the Crusades?’
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Бриджет Коллинз
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: ‘I wish I had written it’ Erin KellyImagine you could erase your grief.Imagine you could forget your pain.Imagine you could hide a secret.Forever.Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition and prejudice – but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse.He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes, and within each he will capture something unique and extraordinary: a memory. If there’s something you want to forget, he can help. If there’s something you need to erase, he can assist. Your past will be stored safely in a book and you will never remember your secret, however terrible.In a vault under his mentor’s workshop, row upon row of books – and memories – are meticulously stored and recorded.Then one day Emmett makes an astonishing discovery: one of them has his name on it.THE BINDING is an unforgettable, magical novel: a boundary-defying love story and a unique literary event.