The Book of Fires

33
I dream of a jester performing a trick before a crowd, and the crowd is jeering. Lettice Talbot is there, too, and a man whose face I cannot see strokes the back of her white neck, and she is turning to him, her head falling back and her lovely eyes half-lidded, and then I feel a wrenching tug as if from some danger I had forgotten, and someone cries out, “Agnes, Agnes!” until my ears are ringing with distress. I wake with a gasp.
Mary Spurren is banging on the door. “Agnes?” she shouts, grumpily. I touch my face. My cheeks are burning as though I have stood too long at a bonfire. What is the matter with me? “Get up!” Mary Spurren calls through the door. “I won’t say it again.”
“Coming,” I reply, and then I hear her stamping down the stairs. At first I do not remember that Mr. Blacklock is away, and when I do, it is a sobering thought and the house seems different.
“Feeling slow today, are we?” Mrs. Blight says, when I go to the kitchen.
How sick the oil of savine makes me feel. My mind is quite displaced with thinking of it.
“You must go to Spicer’s for me,” Mrs. Blight says. “I need this and that. Been rushed off my feet these last few days.” I am too tired to argue that I have a pile of rocket cases to complete. Besides, Mr. Blacklock’s bench would be empty beside me. I can catch up later. He would not even know.
I fetch my cloak and wrap it about me before I venture onto the street. When I pass the pump in Mallow Square, the women gathered to draw water stop their chatter and the girl at the splashing pump stills the squeak of the handle to turn to look at me. It is too warm under my cloak. It is almost summer and the square is filled with the quick flight of swallows catching flies above the water running in the open drains.
I have to walk quite slowly; the ground is not so even underfoot. Perhaps Mr. Blacklock will not be gone as long as planned. Perhaps he will be back tonight, and we can all take supper around the table as if all were well, as if nothing could ever change but could go on forever as it has been. I have to stop at a corner and cling onto the railings while I catch my breath.
When I reach the grocer’s shop I find I cannot recall what it was that Mrs. Blight had needed. I put my basket down and hang back from the queue in the hope that it will come to me. The shop is full. In a daze I watch the housekeeper from the smart brick house on the high street select a piece of cheese, and the kitchen boy from the Star picks up a parcel and scuttles out again.
“Two strange men came into the shop this morning, Agnes Trussel,” Mrs. Spicer shouts across, on seeing me. “I thought of you.”
“Oh?” I say, and a flicker of alarm sounds, as though very far off, through the warm and sickly fog in me. “Two men?”
She wraps a chunk of cheese and hands it to the housekeeper. A slow thought struggles its way toward me as she speaks. “Up recently from Sussex, or so they said to Mr. Spicer—did not speak with them myself, as I was serving.” She holds her palm out for the housekeeper’s shilling. “What part of the county were they from?” she shouts at her husband. He shrugs. “Lewes? Cuckfield?” He shakes his head. “They were looking for someone, a thin maid. Like this, like that.” She goes on. “Mr. Spicer sent them away with a flea in the ear, didn’t you!” She looks across at him. “Nosy buggers. He does not care for too many inquiries upon his business premises. No call for poking round a district, he says, looking for trouble, stirring things up. Like I say, I thought of you, though, remembering your family was from down that way. Parish men, they could’ve been. Broad hats.”
I am faint.
I look about me. Only the shoppers going by on the street. One dog sniffing about by the step. How large the cheese looks, and with that gaping hole cut into it there on the slab. How my heart gallops blood about my chest.
I think of Mrs. Mellin’s coins pushed into my stays. I think of John Glincy’s yellow hair blocking the sun above me, and the sickening, thrusting weight of him. I think of the traveling man and his bags bound up with dirty scraps of fabric. I think of Cornelius Soul spitting on the ground before me, and Dilly Martinment’s ground-down teeth biting hard on the coins I gave to her. A bag of panic comes down over me, so that I cannot properly see inside the shop. It is too dark in here. Too full of strangers.
“Are you quite well, Agnes?” I can just hear Mrs. Spicer saying. Her voice is weak and faraway. “Very pale, you are.” And it is hard to see as I push my way out of the shop, push my way against the light flooding through the open door. I know that I am bumping into things and people are turning around to stare as I run down the street. Out in the white light the air is warm and thick and curdled to run through. Past the orange seller, across the stretch of the endless square, left, right, and I am at the front steps of the house when I remember my basket. I have left my basket on the counter.
It is so hot.
I am doubled up, panting and panting, but the lungfuls of warm air are not enough. My legs quiver with effort. And then I feel a spread of wetness down the inside of my legs under my skirt and a twisting pain feels all wrong in the base of my belly. I hold my hand out for the railing. I can hardly stand in this heat. I can’t. The stone step is heading toward me.