The Telling

wider parish.’
    The silence stretched. Reverend Wolfenden looked at me with his pale grey eyes. He said, ‘Child? On your soul, child. You must tell me what you know.’
    ‘I am at a loss to know, sir, why you are so concerned with Mr Moore.’
    The Reverend’s eyes sharpened. His hands slowly separated; he took hold of the arms of his chair. He did not speak. I watched his eyebrows raise, pushing his forehead into folds.
    ‘I mean, sir, that I am sure you know more than I do. No one tells me anything.’
    ‘What,’ Reverend Wolfenden said, ‘do you actually know?’
    I couldn’t tell the Reverend about the box without suggestion of my own laxity: if I had discovered it, why had I not come straight to him with the information? And better, perhaps, that the Reverend believed the box brim-full of gunpowder than packed with books like Lyell’s. But the meetings, they were public; whatever went on there went on openly. Anything I could say about that could be heard from any quarter, should the Reverend but ask.
    My mouth was dry. I had to say something. I said what seemed most safe to say. ‘They have meetings. They exchange books; it is for the education and betterment of the men. They hold debates.’
    His pale eyes glittered. He leaned forwards.
    ‘What manner of debates?’
    ‘I don’t know, sir. Being a, being a female, women are not allowed, so, I think it must be a great addition to the parish if –’
    He waved away my words. We lumbered towards disaster. ‘What books does he possess?’
    There was a moment’s awful silence.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    He looked at me narrowly, studying my face. I felt certain he would see my guilt, my knowledge, as immediately as God had known of Eve’s.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you don’t.’
    My heart lifted, exultant. There was silence. I watched him, alert, on my nerves. His grey eyes with their pink tracery of veins, his pale hands, the reddish hair growing on their backs. I blinked, a tiny moment of darkness, and all the while he kept his eyes on me.
    ‘Sir, as I said, I can only tell you what I know, I wouldn’t like to risk a guess on such a grave matter.’
    The Reverend rubbed his hands together, palm-on-palm, with a papery kind of sound.
    ‘And who goes to these meetings?’
    ‘I don’t know.’
    When he spoke again, it made me flinch: ‘Of course you know. You live there.’
    ‘It’s just, people come once and never come again. Some come once or twice: but I am always so tired, sometimes I’m half asleep.’
    He said, ‘Tell me who comes.’
    His eyes did not leave my face. My mouth was so dry. I felt that we teetered on the brink of something, of some awful precipice.
    ‘One man,’ he said. ‘Tell me the name of one man who comes.’
    My eyes slid away from his, across the room towards the mantel, where the clock sat, with its cool china face and prickly gold casing, with its arms spread wide and low like a man driving cattle, and I caught sight of my face in the mirror behind it, the pale oval of my skin and the dark smudges of my eyes, and I got that odd feeling you get when you happen once in a while to see your own image; the way it’s familiar and strange at the same time; an uneasy kind of a feeling, of being caught unawares, of being caught staring.
    I looked back towards the Reverend. ‘Thomas Williams sir. Thomas Williams of Brunt Hill Cottage.’
    Reverend Wolfenden let his eyes fall shut. He nodded. ‘You may go about your work.’
    *
     
    The kitchen was a hell of baking. I wove my way through the noise and swelter and out into the cool dimness of the hallway. I took off my slippers, levered on my clogs and exchanged my maid’s cap for my shawl. If she noticed, let Mrs Briggs think this just another of my mysterious errands. Let her just ask Reverend Wolfenden; let her challenge him with the misuse of the maids.
    I stole out of the scullery door, around the side of the house, and down the drive. I risked being seen from any of those dark glassy windows, but this was the quickest way to get to him. The gravel crunched underfoot. The willows caught the breeze and whispered to themselves. I walked briskly, head up, as if I had every right to be walking down the drive on a sunny June morning. My facility for deceit was surprising to me.
    *
     
    I’d got as far as the gate at the far side of the low meadow when I saw him coming up from the beck, a bundle of green willow-wands on his shoulder, his head bent, and when he