The Telling

Our eyes met. I thought of what he’d said about God and the Bible, and how he must have watched me disputing with the carter and known what was said about husbands and us and we ; how he’d stared at me and laughed when I had curtseyed to him and said I’d mistaken him for a gentleman, and how he’d offered me any book of his to read, and had had the grace never once to question how I might have come to read them before he’d given me permission, which proved he was a gentleman however little he liked to own it, and the way he’d said, Nineteen and a housemaid , and shaken his head. And the way he was looking at me now as I was standing by Thomas; his expression was so sharp and thoughtful, it seemed as though he were about to speak. The moment was of vital importance; it was the crux of everything; what he was about to say mattered more than I could understand .
    ‘Had a good night then, my lass?’ Dad asked.
    The moment broke, our gaze fell away from each other, and I was left with a hint of something wonderful, something I couldn’t really believe.
    ‘It’s lovely out,’ I said. ‘Just beautiful.’
    ‘I asked Lizzy,’ Thomas said, ‘and she said she would, but I wanted to ask you too; can I take her to the Harvest Dance?’
    Dad expanded happily. ‘Of course you can, son.’
    Thomas made as if to reach out a hand towards me. I pretended not to notice. Mr Moore stood up. He turned to lift a book from where he’d left it on the windowsill. I could still feel the place on my arm where he had touched me all those weeks ago; though painless, it was almost as if I’d been branded there; if I were to roll up a sleeve, there would still be his mark upon my skin.
    ‘Goodnight,’ Mr Moore said, to no one in particular. The stairs creaked under him.
    *
     
    It was still light out when I went to bed. I thought that I might read a while. I padded over to the dresser in my shift and considered the chapbooks, the Martyrs and Saints and Pilgrims, without enthusiasm. And that was when I noticed it, slipped in between the Progress and the Bible; the thick red spine of an unknown book. I drew the volume out. The cover was soft cloth, worn about the edges so that the threads were bare, and the grey board beneath showed through.
    I could not help myself. No more than Eve. I bit deep.
    *
     
    It was a book of natural history; I’d never seen anything like it before. I was enchanted by the engravings. A bramble stem and flower; I gazed at that plate a long while in the evening light, the way the dark fruit glowed, the way the petals had that pale delicacy that they have in life, like the skin beneath the shell of a boiled egg. Rubus fruticosus , I read, spelling the words out in my head, and I was nervous, because I knew that this was Latin and Latin was religion, and Catholic at that, and that if this book was religion and Mr Moore’s I should certainly not read it; but I couldn’t leave it now.
    The bramble was near relative of the rose, with stems that arch and scramble in hedgerow and scrub. Flowers white or pink, solitary or clustered, petals five, stamens many. I turned the page. Water Avens, I read, Wood Avens, Wild Strawberry. Head of achenes, styles persistent, becoming hooked. The words were strange, but linked to such familiar things, they gained a kind of resonance and poetry. The book was a study and celebration of God’s creation: it seemed therefore that it could not be wrong in matters of doctrine. The pictures showed the plants laid out whole and in their parts against a blank background, like skinned and gutted animals. I recognized many from the hedgerows, fields, marshes and fells, and at the same time I felt that I was seeing things for the first time, entirely new. I had picked wild strawberries, and eaten them, relishing the sweet graininess of their flesh, but I had only known the plant as an animal knows it, as being good to eat. This book set each plant apart from all other plants, from all other things, from every other part of creation, and considered it for itself alone, and when that was done, it drew, as it were, a spider’s web of relation between it, and all its relatives, and everything else with which it had connection, from the beasts that ate it to the butterflies that laid their eggs on it, to the wet or dryness of the soil in which it flourished. I had never thought that there could be a book like this. I learned that sorrel was a sister to the dock, that what we call