The Telling

his friends. With scant distraction, it was hard to keep the images of Mr Moore’s capture and imprisonment at bay: I saw him shivering with fever in a gaol cell. I saw him lying in a ditch, a sabre wound in his side, flies buzzing in his open eyes. Every passing cart or wagon or walker made my heart race with possibility, but it was never him. It was a torment to remain at home when any moment might bring a message from him, but never did. When Thomas called, I walked out with him.
    And a month had gone.
    Mam got the tonic bottle down, started dosing me with it again. It smelt particularly foul; worse than before; I could barely keep it down. She had something else for my father, another bottle that she’d got Thomas to fetch from the apothecary in Hornby. She took it up to him in the evenings and would sit with him a while to give me some relief. The house seemed terribly quiet. The boys stayed long hours at their masters’ and now mostly took their meals there. We worked on baskets; little whitework ladies’ baskets that Thomas had asked us to make for him to sell on Hornby Market.
    *
     
    ‘Have you come to an agreement with him?’
    Mam was turning the edge of the basket lid. We had been sitting in silence for a half-hour; I’d been lost in reverie. The sudden words made me start, and I didn’t catch her meaning.
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Thomas. When are you going to marry him?’
    ‘Mam, no, don’t –’
    ‘Don’t you don’t me!’ she snapped, suddenly cross. ‘It’s too late for don’t , miss. If you didn’t want to marry him you should have said that to him .’
    ‘Said what?’
    ‘ Don’t .’ She just looked at me, her lips compressed, her cheeks flushed. Then she put down the basket, and touched my arm, and said that we could make it right. They could get the banns read, there would be plenty of time, and no one thought much of a baby born seven or eight months after a wedding, it happened all the time, and it would put an end to all the talk, I must know there had been talk, even I couldn’t have missed noticing it.
    There had been no blood that month. I knew that she was right. I went up to my room, and I took the folded paper that Mr Moore had given me out from where I kept it, tucked between my stays and my shift. I read the direction he had written. A house on Fell Lane, Lancaster. The ink was already smudged and soft; the stamp was black and beautiful, with a young girl’s head on it, her hair ringleted and pretty. I’d been so happy. I’d never thought I’d need it. So I hadn’t told him – I’d been too ashamed to tell him – that I couldn’t write. I’d thought that he would come to teach me. I’d thought that there’d be years.
    *
     
    I left that night, following the way he was to have gone, along the river path to Lancaster. It was still and clear, the ground hard with frost. There were boys out setting snares for rabbits down near Thrush Gill. I thought I saw Ted’s pale thatch of hair in the moonlight, but wasn’t sure, and they didn’t notice me, and I hoped the keeper didn’t notice them. I tried not to think of my dad, the way the flesh had fallen from his bones, the yellow tint to his skin. If I saw any of them again, it would not be for many years.
    I followed the silver glimmer of the river, the thick shadow of the riverbank. I climbed the rise up through the trees. Birds twittered in the undergrowth; something passed through the long grass; I glimpsed it in the corner of my eye; the trailing brush of a dog fox. I came out of the trees to the parish marker, where we’d sat at Easter, and had our dinner spread on blankets. Below, the river rattled over shilloe; ahead, the arched stonework of Loyn Bridge caught the moonlight then lost itself in the woods on the far bank. Soon, I was beyond the bridge, skirting open meadow; keeping to hedgerows, copses. The light grew. The sun was rising over the hills to my left as I passed Caton; it flooded the valley with lilac and lavender light; birds were breaking out into song. Halton was just waking as I passed through. I came to a vast bridge, spanning the entire valley, pillars studding the meadow and river like petrified giants. I was dizzied just with looking up at it. The path turned to the hillside; steps rose up the flank of the bridge. I climbed up, thinking to find the road into town, but it was the navigation, a great weight of water suspended in the sky. A heavy skewbald mare came clopping slowly along,