The Telling

fear such a diet would upset even the soundest of constitutions.’
    ‘I suppose you’d tell me I have no constitution at all for reading?’
    ‘Indeed no, I wouldn’t dream of saying such a thing.’
    I was conscious that my hands were motionless, the fingers curling into fists, the knuckles pressing in at the sides of the basket. I was angry, like a child whose toy is snatched away in the middle of a game. If he understood the difficulty of acquiring the few books that I possessed; if he knew how hard I had to beg my mam to get a few pennies back from my wages; if he could see the magic-lantern-show I saw when I began to read; if he could have understood what a rich treasure it seemed to me, that box of books lying upstairs, overflowing with mysteries; if he could have glimpsed a fraction of how much this meant to me, then he would not have chosen the company of men like Thomas and my father over me, and he would not mock me now.
    ‘I don’t like being laughed at,’ I said.
    ‘No, of course not.’ There was a pause. My face was hot. ‘Did you think that I was laughing at you?’
    I shook my head. He regarded me with a level gaze, and I did my best to return it.
    ‘It wasn’t my intention –’ he went on; and he drew a breath as if to say something more. After a moment, he nodded. ‘I’ll leave you in peace,’ he said.
    He bent to gather his things. He stood up. I wanted to say something, to protest, but the words would not come. He ducked his head to pass under the low lintel, and climbed the stairs. I was left alone. My work lay neglected a long while.
    *
     
    The library bell jangled, but it was not my duty to answer the library bell. I had a rag and sand and was scouring burned sugar and fruit off a baking pan; Mrs Briggs would have been more careful if she’d had to clean her pans herself. I was thinking of Mr Crusoe, I was thinking of Mr Moore; I was muttering to myself, chagrined, at the memory of our parting. There was someone at the scullery door. I glanced over my shoulder. Mrs Briggs leaned against the doorjamb, her round face creased and red with the heat of the kitchen. There were damp patches on her frock. She looked at me suspiciously for a moment, her lips bunched.
    ‘You’re to lay a fire in the library.’
    I nodded, set down the pan and rag.
    ‘You, in particular, he asked for. Maggie went up, but he sent her back to ask for you.’
    I wiped my hands on my apron. ‘I’m good at it,’ I lied. ‘The way I lay a fire, it lights easy, straight away, every time.’
    ‘But it’s roasting out.’
    I shrugged. ‘It’s easy to get chilled, if all you do is sit.’
    I carried up a coalscuttle and kindling, and knocked on the library door.
    The Reverend was sitting in his wing-backed leather chair, a closed book in his hand, his thumb stuck in and squeezed between the pages to mark his place. The same binding as all the other ones; they arrived like that from his bookseller. I bobbed a curtsey to him, then knelt to lay the fire, and he sat and watched me, and let me work, until I had set the last of the coals upon the wood.
    ‘Don’t light it,’ he said.
    I sat back on my heels.
    ‘Well, my child?’
    I looked around at him. I don’t quite know what it was that did it, whether it was the dirt on my hard hands while his hands, holding his book, were soft and white as Mrs Briggs’s dough; or if it was that I was kneeling on the floor while he sat in comfort in a leather chair; or if it was because he’d set me about a pointless task, or that he’d used a contrivance to get me there which would not fool a child and would only serve to set the women downstairs against me; I don’t know if it was one of these, or all; but whatever caused it, the feeling was new and unexpected: I wouldn’t have thought it possible to feel angry like that towards a clergyman.
    ‘Did you find out what was in the box?’ he asked.
    I brushed my hands together, but it did not brush the coal dust off them, it just rubbed it deeper in.
    ‘Well?’
    I could have told the truth then, and gone back to the scullery, and worn my nails to the quick scouring baking pans, and my part in it would have been over, and whatever happened as a result of what I said would not have been my fault, since I was only doing what my pastor asked of me. But, instead, I lied.
    ‘No.’
    The Reverend’s lips narrowed to a line. ‘And why not?’
    ‘He was in the house, he kept to his room; I did not get the