The Telling

and seeing nothing, would frown and start to scold. I was leaving myself scant time to get the work done, all the pinning and cutting and sewing. I’d end up having to go in my Sunday dress after all, and what would Thomas think of that. Perhaps he’d take the hint, I wanted to say, but instead I’d begin some half-hearted excuse; that just when I was going to ask, Mrs Wolfenden had gone out on a morning call; my work had kept me from the house and out of the family’s company; the lady had been out of sorts and it hadn’t seemed right to trouble her; I’d speak to her tomorrow.
    ‘If I were your age, and in your position,’ Mam said, ‘I’d have asked her pretty smartish. I’d have the dress nearly finished by now. I’d have thought of little else.’
    It was September already. There was only one meeting that month, when the moon was full, since it was too dark otherwise for people to find their way home afterwards without ending in a ditch. It was a noisy meeting: voices were raised behind the closed door, and three of the men left before it was ended. Mr Gorst didn’t come, though his eldest boy did; and there were others who had often come before but didn’t now. There were newcomers too; Methodists and other non-conformists, people we never met from one season’s end to another, walking in miles from the hill-farms and the hamlets above Docker, walking back by moonlight. They arrived with furrowed brows and left in huddles, muttering.
    There was a book waiting for me, every evening, squeezed between the Progress and the Bible on the dresser shelf. Some books were left for several days, giving me time to become so deeply engrossed in them that I moved in a haze, a dream of them. Some books were there overnight, and disappeared like mist in the daytime, while I was at work. I’d go to the shelf when I got home, and there would be an unknown book waiting. It became almost a joke: Mr Moore would sit, cool as the September day, and he’d glance up at me with his brown eyes, his gaze level and uncharged, as if he were innocent of everything, and I would take the book, and return his gaze coolly, and sit down to read. All the unfinished stories: they wrapped themselves around me like vapours, trailed after me like mist.
    *
     
    ‘Not much more than a week now,’ Mam said, jolting me out of my reading. ‘Till the dance. Sall’s coming home for her holiday, and can help with the trimming of the dress, if it’s ready for trimming .’ She was folding linen, her face lined with vexation and bother. ‘Have you even spoken to Mrs Wolfenden?’
    ‘It’s not easy,’ I said, my eyes pulled back down to the book.
    ‘It’s perfectly easy. You just ask her. You’re a good girl. You deserve a treat once in a while.’
    ‘It’s not my place. Alice is her maid. I’m just a housemaid; it’d be too much of a presumption. I’ll do fine in my Sunday dress.’
    ‘If you don’t ask her tomorrow,’ Mam said, ‘I’ll march down there and ask her myself.’
    *
     
    The ewer was warm and heavy in my hands. I walked carefully with it, conscious of each step of the stairs, looking at the pretty flower pattern and the shiny glaze; I tapped on the door, pushed quietly through and put the ewer down on the washstand. Mrs Wolfenden sat up from her pillows, all creamy cotton and frills, her hair in braids, and blinked around her.
    I spoke softly. ‘Madam?’
    She was startled to see me, and tried to conceal it. ‘I expected Alice.’ She held to the sheets as if she were resisting the urge to pull them up over her head and hide, as if I were a penny-dreadful villain come to ravish her, as if I were the big bad wolf. That she could be so nervous of me made me nervous too.
    ‘I was given some cloth madam,’ I said, clumsy and reluctant. ‘To make a dress, but there isn’t a pattern to be had that’s not been twice around the parish already, and we thought that I might ask you, since you would have something newer, and less seen, that would suit the fabric well.’ She eyed me uneasily. ‘Not anything new ,’ I added; ‘last year’s, perhaps, or whatever you have that you wouldn’t mind me using.’
    Her voice was dry with nerves. ‘What cloth have you got?’
    ‘Tea-dyed,’ I said.
    Her eyebrows rose. ‘Really?’
    ‘Yes, ma’am.’ The fabric was clearly too fashionable, too much of her world, to be thought appropriate for someone like me.
    ‘Of course, yes.’ She seemed to shake herself. ‘I