The Telling

were a courting or a married couple, taking a pause from work together. Someone hearing us would know different.
    ‘I didn’t know what the Reverend meant by Chartist and that. Having seen some of your book, I think I begin to understand.’
    ‘It’s simple enough. Chartists support the Charter; the Charter is the statement of our demands. We want representation: a vote for the working man, and changes to the current system that will allow working men’s votes to count, and enable working men to become members of parliament. That’s the kernel of it all.’
    ‘Because of the hunger? Because of the woman and the baby? How would it help?’
    Mr Moore shifted his position, brushing the scraps of bark and grit from his palms.
    ‘Last week,’ he said, ‘in Preston, in this same county palatine of yours, four men were shot dead. Many others were wounded. The men had stopped the works to protest at dangerous working conditions, at their low wages. In striking, and inciting others to strike, they were endangering the mill-owners’ profits. So the mill-owners called in the army, and the army shot the workers.’
    I watched the lines and creases of his face; ‘No,’ I said, but I could see that he was telling the truth.
    ‘Men are cheap. There’s a glut of them; they’re to be had in plenty. But profit and property, they must be defended at all cost.’
    ‘No.’
    He was sitting forward now, leaning towards me, animated, even with the fatigue of the long day. ‘And this is what we must change. I don’t just mean money, I mean opportunity, the opportunity to be more than just a pair of hands, employed at others’ work, to be shot for stepping out of line, for insisting that there will be more to your life than work and hunger and death. In this country, privilege and property and opportunity are inherited, passed from parent to child, and poverty’s the same; like having blue eyes, a talent for music, or a weak chest. We need the vote. If we are to effect change, we must have the vote.’
    I felt a strange kind of shyness, speaking of it: ‘There is Heaven, Mr Moore. We may trust to that. That there will be consolation in the hereafter.’
    ‘What good is consolation?’
    ‘You may not believe,’ I said, ‘but I do, I always have, as long as I can remember. A world without God…’
    He raised his hand, palm turned towards me, asking me to stop; it was creased with grass marks and a fragment of bark was stuck to the ball of this thumb. ‘Even by your lights, then, it still holds true. This is not the world as God created it. Satan has worked his evil. You’ll remember, in Genesis, God created Man and Woman, not Rich and Poor.’
    Images of Sin, and of Eve and the serpent and the fruit filled my inner sight, and then Agnes, pale as the sheets on which she lay, and the bucket full of bloody cloths, and her eyes closed and her mouth open as she was crushed by the birthing pains.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in answer to my quiet. He sank back again, his palms pressed on to the earth, his arms locked. ‘Perhaps if I felt there was another world, I could rest easier about this one.’
    We sat in silence. The heat of the sun brought out the scent of the tree, a scent like moss and oatmeal. We looked across the water meadow, across the valley, towards the terraces of cottages at Melling, and beyond. There’s a house on the top of the far hills; a lane runs up to it, it stands square against the sky. I always thought I might walk there one day, knock on the door, and find out who lives there. Stand on their doorstep to look back across the valley, to see what the village looks like from there.
    ‘Perhaps it does not help to speak of God,’ Mr Moore said after a while. ‘Think perhaps of the Church; this is what bothers me most, that a man like your Reverend Wolfenden keeps a grand house and a good table and a wife dressed in silk, who is herself a luxury, a fancy toy that plays music and looks pretty and is no use or good to anyone. This is all on your goodwill, paid for by your labour, by your tithes. And what bothers me is, what law did God lay down that you, Elizabeth, must labour to keep Mrs Wolfenden in fine clothes? Did Christ insist that his priests have grander houses, better food and clothes than the rest of his flock – did Christ insist that he have priests ?’
    I was picking at a patch of parched moss, watching its fibres come apart. I looked up at him. ‘They look after us. The