The Telling

waited while someone at the head of the party unfastened it. We were next to Agnes’s house and as I glanced at her side window I saw a faint light burning inside. A jar of flowers had been set on the windowsill; a few campions and Queen Anne’s lace screened the room. Beyond, faint in the dim light of a single rush, softened by the ripples and bulges in the glass, a movement caught my eye. She was in the rocking chair, gently rocking the child. Her skin was shades of shadow-blue and gold in the dim rush-light; her bodice was open to expose her breast and her head was bent to watch the baby feed. She must have been unconscious of almost everything, perhaps even halfasleep; she didn’t seem to notice the noise of the passing hay-timers . I felt a warm flush of tenderness and guilt. I missed her.
    The workers on the new Hall were not spared to help, even with the Oversbys’ hay. They must have lived on short commons those weeks, with their landladies out in the fields. They must have welcomed the end of that time as much as we did, with the last drift of hay shut up tight into the final barn to wait the winter. The farmers sent pies and pastries and cheeses and fruit, and we had our dinner on trestles on the green. I drank Haytime Ale and ate a slice of pork and apple pie, and slipped into the hazy trance of bodily exhaustion. Joe Stott had brought his fiddle, and Thomas asked me to dance, but I shook my head and smiled at him, and told him I was way past dancing, there wasn’t a single step left in me that I didn’t need to get me home.
    Long before the celebrations ended I was making my slow way back along the village street. The moon was pale in the still-blue sky; there were no stars yet; fiddle music drifted from up on the green. There was a candle burning gold in Mr Moore’s room. I ignored it. I slept like a stone.
    *
     
    Haytiming done, Dad came back from Storrs and the Williamses’ with a faggot of willow-wands on his shoulder, and pale cold foul temper on his brow. I ducked out into the garden and listened to the raised voices from within the house. Greaves was a bastard, my father said. It was lies, all lies, that he could get his baskets better and cheaper elsewhere, because whose baskets were better nor cheaper than ours? Mam made some placating remark, which I couldn’t hear, but must have been to do with the fine lot of willow he’d brought back, and how she and I would have it turned into baskets in no time, and we’d sell them at Hornby Market if not at Storrs. Williams was a thief, Dad announced; whatever else might be going on, it had to be said now loud and clear that old man Williams was a swindler and a crook. He’d charged Dad twice as much as usual for the willow.
    ‘Coming to the end of the season, that was his excuse.’
    ‘Well, we are, I suppose,’ Mam answered.
    Dad swore; there was a scuffle then a sudden crash. I went back in; the tea canister lay on the floor, dented, the tea all spilt on the flagstones. Mam was crouched beside it, scooping the tea back into the canister. Dad stood flushed, his gaze challenging. I crouched down beside Mam and quickly checked her face. She didn’t seem to have been hit, she was just a little pale and contained-looking, a lid firmly pressed down on her feelings. I helped her gather up the tea.
    ‘You’re a good girl, Lizzy,’ she said.
    It was meant to annoy Dad as much as please me. He snorted. ‘Aye, right. The model child.’
    He turned and thumped up the stairs, and we could hear him for an hour afterwards, debating noisily with Mr Moore, as we picked grit out of the tea leaves until I suggested that it would probably sink and get left in the pot, and no one would really notice it.
    So now Mam and me had another batch of greenwork to do, at twice the cost and expecting half the payment, and with our hands already raw and weeping, our limbs still stiff and aching from the pitchfork and the scythe. The sap stung my sores, and then began to numb them; willow has this virtue, that it can make you numb. My flesh seemed to cure, like bacon, my palms taking on the darkened hardness of dried meat, and the bitter smell of willow. Even at the vicarage, when I scrubbed pewter or polished brass or silver, or waxed the hall boards for the second time that day, even if there was tallow or baking or a roast spitting in the oven, I could smell the bitterness of willow about me. It was worn into my flesh; I could taste it in my mouth, every moment,