The Telling

Queen Anne’s lace, elsewhere others call cow parsley.
    The light faded and my eyes were sore. I let the book fall shut. That night, my dreams were tangled and overgrown, and blossomed with white flowers.
    *
     
    That day at the vicarage was the bottling of plums. The kitchen was all steam and scalds and burning sugar and bad temper. I didn’t care: the book would be there when I got home. I’d slip it into my apron pocket and say I was going over to see Agnes. Then I’d head down to the river, sit on the shilloe, where Thomas and I had gone the night before, and read for an hour or so undetected.
    But when I returned the book was gone. There was another in its place; a small blue volume. I turned around to Mr Moore, my lips parting to challenge and complain. Mam was setting the kettle and Dad was hanging up his jacket. Mr Moore sat at the fireside, his eyes rigidly set upon his book, his lips pursed tight as if to hold back a smile. I realized I could not risk saying anything.
    My dad sat down and started talking to Mr Moore. Thomas was a good lad, he was saying, but his father was a villain, which is how he’d got to be so prosperous, more prosperous than other folk. Mr Moore closed his book, keeping his thumb between the pages to mark the place, and set his face in a listening expression. The only thing for it, Dad said, was to make more baskets, and if that meant making them faster and less well, what matter, since as it was no one else seemed to recognize their quality anyway.
    Dad occupied with complaining, I took the book down, examined it discreetly. The pages were thick and creamy. It was by Reverend John Milton, and called Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books . I glanced over again at Mr Moore. It seemed to me that although his eyes were fixed on my father’s flushed face, his attention was somehow directed towards me. I watched his profile. I watched the lines around his eyes. They seemed to deepen, even though his lips did not smile. I slid the book into my pocket.
    ‘I’m just popping over to Agnes’s for an hour or so,’ I said; no one seemed to notice.
    *
     
    The sand martins skimmed over the river, catching flies. The willows made a screen from passers-by. Those first lines were more difficult than anything in Mr Lyell’s Geology , and there were no engravings or plates to admire; but I would not be put off, I would not be beaten. With persistence, I got the pattern of the verse, the way the meaning stretched and twisted and slid through the lines. Since it was written by a clergyman, I read it without qualm, and was soon caught up in the familiar inevitability of the story. I didn’t notice the passing of the hours, the dimming of the light, the striking of the bell; it was only when I started to shiver in the evening chill that I realized that it was late, and that I would be in trouble. I had to run most of the way home.
    The kitchen was empty. No one had sat up, worried or angry, waiting for me. I made my bed, and lay in the last glow of the fire, and read about Sin, who was beautiful, and lived in Heaven, and whose father was Lucifer himself, and who I hadn’t read of before, not as a person, not in the Bible. Sin never had a mother, but was born straight out of her father’s head, and he left her to grow up in the company of angels, and when she was grown, Lucifer met her again, and saw how beautiful she was, and wanted her. He had his way with her. When Lucifer was cast out of Heaven, she was cast out too, and fell when all the other rebellious angels fell; but she was alone, outcast from their company, which was a double cruelty, since she had not been so much rebellious, as obedient and abused. Fallen and alone, kept in utter darkness, she was made keeper of the Gate of Hell, entrusted with a key and made to wait there, and forbid passage to anyone who came that way. A baby was born, a son to her father, and the child was Death, and he grew up fast, a demon of a child, and he forced himself on her. She grew hideous and serpent-like in her dark maternity, and bore to Death a swarm of vile creatures, which crawled and clawed all over her and in and out of her, and bit at her and sucked her blood, and she lived there in darkness, loathsome and tormented, till Lucifer came to the Gate of Hell, seeking his escape, radiant with the light of his own beauty. He didn’t know her for his daughter and the woman he had ruined, she was so hideously transformed; Lucifer, for all his