The Book of Fires Read Online Free PDF Page B

us tonight. She can hardly come alone, the weather like this, can she?” I turn away from the window.
    “Oh, but must she walk with us?” Lil grumbles. “She creeps along like an ailing badger dragging its toenails, always moaning that her back is an agony of humpiness and that the baker won’t deliver to her anymore from the village. Small wonder, I say. She spoils the day.”
    “Elizabeth!” rebukes my mother, sharply.
    “Oh, where’s all the fun gone?” Lil adds under her breath to no one in particular, and provokes my mother’s quick and stinging palm across her cheek. We are well practiced in the art of ducking now, whether we deserve a slap or not.
    “That’s what happens when you spoil a maid.” My father’s unwanted comment comes from the settle, where he has his boots off before the fire. It is a good thing that he does not know about the spoons of honey. He was displeased enough when the rector’s wife told me I should have an education.
    “Schooling?” he’d shouted. “That’ll feed us nicely, will it? You’ll go to no school I know of!”
    And so instead the rector’s wife helped me to read after church on Sundays, or when she had a moment on a Friday. I liked the kind of words I found inside the newspapers she lent me, and in the Bible, the way that words could tell things properly. “You must learn to write next, Agnes,” she’d said. “You are a quick and clever girl; you could train to be a teacher.” And then the rector’s wife was expecting a child at last, after five long years of waiting and hoping, and there was no time to help me anymore.
     
    We wait for Mrs. Mellin a little, but of course she does not come, and by the time we are walking to Mutton’s Farm for the Martinmas feast, it is dark and quite impossible to see more than yards ahead. The lamp that my father carries casts light poorly before us, the damp air giving it a halo made of mist and light. The sounds of our talking bounce back strangely at us. Lil and I cling together as we walk, with our free hands outstretched into the murkiness; it is as though we were walking in our sleep together. William’s voice chatters on and on somewhere behind us in the dark.
    Once a year Mr. Fitton gives a great feast to keep us sweet, to keep the rents flowing in pleasantly and the pool of ready labor there to hand. My brother Ab says that Mr. Fitton has his inner eye undyingly to Lady Day and Michaelmas, when the benefit of letting land is apparent in the easy shape of gold and guineas. He can afford to get the butcher in to brown a fat sheep over a blaze of fruitwood and to stuff us with spice cake and have the prettiest girls pour out a froth of ale into our cups, Ab says. He wants to butter up his workers and his tenants, holding us over with some lurking, ancient sense of gratitude we should be feeling. My brother Ab will take a look at the people pegging away at the victuals when we get to the great barn and he will spit on the ground.
    “Fill the belly and the will sleeps,” he always says.
    My brother Ab is a knot of rage these days. He is like a horse-winch straining at its strap and on the point of breaking loose. A breaking strap can cause a grievous injury to those in its vicinity. But the village girls appreciate the strength of his opinions and the broadness of his shoulders. Myself I find some truth inside his arguments but often cannot hear the content of them through his fury. My mother says he was born big and angry, that he fought his way out of her belly crimson with rage. But it is hard to work at ease when your boots are mended so many times that their lumpen shapes are mainly composed of glue and stitching.
     
    The great barn is a blaze of light. It looms suddenly out of the mist as we round a corner, lit up like a great ship. The double doors are flung wide, and flaming torches flank the entrance, burning at the tallow greedily, quick black smoke rising and curling from the tips of the long orange