The Book of Fires

5
In the morning I try to swallow bread to quell my sickness, and when the bell rings at eight I take my bundle outside and join the carrier. The passengers have swelled in number, and I find I have to squeeze my way up onto the bench at the back of the wagon. When we leave the town the morning light shows a countryside choppy with hills, dotted with brightly golden copses and small farms and hamlets. Spiders’ webs catch at the damp between the stems of dead hemlock and milk parsley. Plumes of smoke climb into the air from abundant chimneys and we see many people working the fields and driving goats and oxen. We stop for carts more frequently, even at this hour. The land seems teeming with its population.
One of the new passengers sits very upright on the bench. There is a glossiness about her. She has a fine, fancy patterned shawl over her shoulders, and her mantua is made of silk bearing woven sprigs of flowers and birds. She seems tall and narrow, with a head of brown curling hair under her bonnet. Her face is pale as a china cup. High on the cheekbones two luscious spots of blush are painted on like raspberries. She is fresh and bright. I cannot stop watching her, until her eye catches mine and she smiles directly at me. I look away hastily, my own cheeks flushing in ordinary patches on my face.
Her hands are long and bony, and she knocks them together through her white kid gloves from time to time as though eager to reach her destination, or as if she is filled with an impatient kind of song or energy that must escape by any means. Under her boots is a small leather case. I have a feeling that her eyes are on me, but then she turns and begins to listen to the fat woman talking to the unpleasant woman with the daughter. I fold my arms carefully across my stomach and do not hear them. I pray no one will speak to me. I am bad, spoiled. I am best not spoken to; I am like an apple rotting slowly away once the worms have got in. A rotten apple touching the skin of a good one in the store will taint the others till they fester together.
The day is milder than the day before. There is no sunshine, but the clouds are high and pale, and the air has about it the nameless sweetness that earth gives off before the great frosts begin.
After some time the woman pulls off a glove and eats some fruit with her bare hand, swallowing quickly and not letting juice drip on her dress. I am startled when she leans across to me, her long fingers reaching out to offer me a plum. I take it gratefully and bite. It is late in the season for such a good one, sour and pleasant at once. The bloom on it is like a mildew on its perfect skin. “Thank you, ma’am,” I say.
She pulls on her glove.
“My name is Lettice Talbot,” the woman says, as if to set up conversation. The voice she has is light and coaxing, like a child’s. “Some people call me Letty.” I spit out the stone of the plum and throw it onto the road.
“What an uncommon name,” I answer, out of manners.
“I like it very much,” the woman replies, which is a strange answer, and makes me think somehow that she has chosen it herself.
I cannot think of any other thing to say to her. A curious smell comes away from Lettice Talbot’s clothing when she moves about; as sweet as beeswax, or the dusty odor of roses that have been kept to dry inside a cupboard, or something else I cannot place. It is a good, intriguing smell that makes me want to sit a little closer to her.
At noon we roll over White Down Hill and descend into the village of Leatherhead. The inn is adjacent to the blacksmith’s, and as we pass I look into the darkness of his shop and see white-hot coals flaring and dulling with the roar of the bellows. From the yard of the inn we can still hear the regular metallic clang and ring of a hammer on hot iron against an anvil. In the silence that follows I know well the hiss of a horseshoe going into cold liquid, and the smell of a scorched hoof as the warm shoe is nailed on.
The jolting slows and stops.
“We can take something to eat here.” Lettice Talbot gets down immediately over the tailgate and calls up to me, brushing dirt from her palms. The harnesses clink as the ostlers unbuckle the horses. The horses are sweating and breathing heavily.
“How stiff we become on the back of this cart, our legs stuck out over the road like a crate of dead fowls!” She looks doubtfully toward the pullets at the front of the wagon, and then laughs, as though something wicked had occurred to her. A dog barks.
“Are you not hungry?” she asks. I suppose I must eat. “I’ll bet your last fair meal was another life ago. Am I right, sweetheart?” She beckons me to descend.
“There is abundant time for an inn-dinner at the Rose and Crown,” she reassures me, as if she traveled frequently this way, and the sun breaks through the clouds as we cross the yard.
Inside, my eyes accustom to the darkness. There is a fire blazing in a broad hearth, and a savory smell of woodsmoke and ale. Two men glance up at us and then back to some papers spread out on a table. The girl drawing ale from a barrel at the hatch directs us to a bench. We have our backs to the sunlight that falls through the leaded window, blue with smoke from the fire. The brick floor is swept. The miserable man wearing the greatcoat takes a solitary seat on the far side of the room, opening his mouth to order something made with beef, then rubs his belly. He keeps his coat on. There is loud laughter from the porch and then the room seems filled with stir and levity.
How has my life changed so quickly? I feel small away from home. I feel dizzy with it.
“What shall we have?” Lettice Talbot says brightly. “Why not oysters!” The girl wipes a cloth over the table and brings some for us, with hard sallow cheese and bread. There is a lot of greasy red hair escaping from her cap. She looks at me as she puts them down, then goes away. The food is salty and good, and we eat hungrily without conversation. The girl comes back to remove the dish of empty shells, and Lettice Talbot claps her hands.
“Brandy!” she suggests.
“Brandy?” I say doubtfully. I don’t mention that I have never tasted it. The girl brings a jug and pours out one glass. The liquid is a bright brown as it catches the sunlight. “Drink up,” Lettice Talbot coaxes, pushing the glass toward me and smiling kindly.
“But you have none,” I say.
“No, no,” she says, “it is for you—you look as though you need it! ”
So I swallow it down. It is hot, as though it had within it something of the fire itself.
“Where are you headed, sweetheart?” Lettice Talbot asks. I cannot think at first of what to say. As she leans forward, I see a little locket is tied at her neck on a piece of yellow velvet, flashing in the light. The gem set upon it breaks up the brightness sharply into separate colors, as a drop of water might, catching the sunshine after rain. Her neck is smooth and white above the ribbon. She sees me looking and her hand goes to the locket as if to hide it with her fingertips.
“How did you come by such a lovely thing?” I exclaim.
“It’s not real,” she says quickly. “Not a proper diamond.” And then she smiles and asks again where I am going. She stares at me when I do not answer, and so I have to embark upon the story I have been making up inside my head.
“I am traveling at a day’s notice up to London,” I say, “to stay with an aging cousin suffering from an illness of some gravity.” My voice sounds like it is reciting lessons.
“Where does she live? ” Lettice Talbot asks. I think quickly.
“Within the city walls. She has rooms in a small house, and the servants do not like her and all of them have left her service. She is quite alone.” I make my face look sorry and anxious as I talk, which is not difficult. My fingers touch my lips as though they know that I am telling lies.
I add with effort that she needs someone to carry water from the pump and cook up broths and sago, and take the slops away; in short the heavy, bending, stirring tasks she cannot do.
“What sickness is she suffering?” Lettice Talbot asks, and pours more brandy for me from the jug.
“Bronchitis,” I say without a hesitation. I know about bronchitis; my grandmother died all curled up with coughing up dark slimy matter, suffocated by her own lungs when they failed within her, the doctor said. Dr. Twiner was a costly body to have stepped inside the house. It seemed scandalous to me that he gained his guineas whether his patients lived or died. The regretful countenance he fixed upon his shiny, well-fed face was glib and practiced, and melted away as he ducked his head out of the threshold toward the lane. I watched his diminishing form swinging his polished cane all down the track until the rowans hid him from my view. My mother propped his bill behind the salt box before she sat down suddenly in front of the fire as though her legs were broken, and sobbed there for a week. She was different in those days; it was still possible to guess a little of what she thought on any matter. For one whole week she was too loose and grieved to cook, or clean the babies. Then on the seventh day she set her lip straight and stiffened quite perceptibly throughout the funeral, as though the cold draft that was blowing in under the door of the church was freezing her in more ways than one. The framework of her manner became a shape to hold her feelings in, and from that day on, her outward disposition did but rarely alter.
The room in the inn has darkened.
It occurs to me how, once the lies have started, it should become both easier and more necessary to go on fabricating a pretense. I must construct the lies quite fully, like a makeshift house, and live inside them. Lettice Talbot taps her long fingers on the tabletop, then unbuckles her case to take out a little bottle. She tweaks out the stopper, puts her finger to the hole and tips it up. She presses the wetness lightly to her neck, and an intense, giddy scent the color of pinks and creamy whites and oranges envelops us. I am almost dazed by it.
How can I tell whether she is listening to me if she does not answer? And yet it is discourteous, I think, to be deceiving her like this. Her eyes are roving around the room as I talk; she is taking things in. I will have to check myself. It will not be long before my conscience has become quite fat with secrets.
I hold my glass up by the stem and tilt the drop of brandy that remains, and, feeling a sudden, foolish need to share a truth and not a lie with her, I laugh and say that drinking it is like drinking fire. I regret my words immediately, but this is no matter because Lettice Talbot does not hear. She has stood up and begun to wrap her patterned shawl more closely around her for the next stage of our journey. How clean and new her clothes are. She pulls on her gloves, and with unease I catch a glimpse of what has happened to her wrists.