The Telling

muddled mess fell into a straight clear thread. I saw why the Reverend was so interested in Mr Moore. I saw that the Reverend was afraid. I felt it too: the force of this intelligence, this facility with words, this faith, all trained upon the state of things, a state of things that I had only known as I had known the ground I walked upon, as something that was there, God-given, unchanging and unquestionable. I shivered . The world seemed a different place. A darker place. I turned the page.
    I found them in such miserable circumstances, six of them crowded into the one room, a damp and stinking cellar. There, all the necessary activities of life took place, in such crowded and miserable conditions that I find it impossible to recall without shuddering. The father was instructing his eldest daughter in the working of the loom; though it had provided him with such meagre support in life, he was unable to offer her better.
Such light as entered the place, from a grille high up in the wall, was frequently obscured by the passing of people in the street. The only furniture was the loom and a heap of straw; when it rained, the room flooded ankle-deep. On wet nights, the mother told me, there could be no rest for anyone, since there was nowhere to lie down.
The youngest was a child of fifteen months, and still at the mother’s breast. When I asked why it was not weaned, the mother told me that there was little enough to feed the older children, if she did not feed it herself, she must take something for it from the other portions. She must have considered me to have a physician’s brief, for she told me that in the winter past, when she had been brought very low by fever and bad food, that her husband had found her  in a swoon, and the child at her breast, by then a hungry nine-month-old, had sucked not milk, but blood.
     
    I slammed the book shut. Sunlight poured in through the window; a blackbird was singing in the garden. One of my stockings needed darning at the heel; a hairpin pressed into the back of my head. None of it was real, not as real as what I’d just read. I had to speak to Mr Moore.
    But there was no escape until the washday was done. I had to go back, and comport myself as if nothing were amiss, until the last of the linen was dry and hefted back up to the houses to air, the five o’clock bell was fading from the air, and everyone was heading for Mrs Goss’s house for tea. Only then could I slip away, back down the lane, without protest. I knew that it would not go uncommented on. The women had seen me arrive late, and they had seen me leave now. I couldn’t help that. My mam would be saying that I was a good girl, but close, terrible close, and that you wouldn’t suspect a thing unless you knew, I kept it that much to myself, but there would be a wedding there before the year was out. And the others would agree that Thomas was a fine young man, and that I would be lucky to have him, with his twenty pounds a year from the baskets alone. And it was true: Thomas was, in his way, a fine young man; he just wasn’t right for me. I came down the lane, my feet thumping on the packed-hard mud and stones, to where the ways part, one path heading across the shorn meadow towards the Williamses’ willow holts, the other climbing the hill towards Storrs.
    The rooks wheeled high above the trees. I crossed the beck by the wash-house, and climbed the hill. Halfway up the hillside an oak tree stood, casting a pool of shade. I spread my shawl on the mossy turf underneath and sat down. The path passed close by and from where I sat I could see a good stretch in both directions. Mr Moore must come that way to return home at the end of his working day. If I waited there, he must pass me too. I waited.
    The bells chimed the quarter, then the half-hour. I bit at the dry tag of skin beside my thumbnail. I heard voices from above, from the cusp of the hill. The men’s figures were dark against the sky. I started to my feet. They came down the track, and I could see them clearly. Mr Moore was in company with two men, in shirtsleeves and britches, leather tool bags slung over their shoulders . They were talking; Mr Moore said something and the others laughed. They were workers on the Hall; I recognized them from the meetings, but they weren’t village men. I came forward, to the edge of the shade, and hesitated there. He was almost past: I opened my lips, determined to speak, but before I had to, Mr Moore’s tread