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‘Isn’t burying a baby terrible?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and bowed her head. ‘Of course it is, Emmett.’
A breath. ‘You said, what books are … So every book,’ I said, ‘every book that’s ever been bound, is someone’s memories. Something they’ve chosen to forget.’
‘Yes.’
‘And …’ I cleared my throat. Suddenly I could feel the imprint of my father’s hand on my cheek, the stinging blow he’d given me years ago, as if the pain had never really faded. Never let me see you with a book again. This was what he had wanted to protect me from. And now I was an apprentice; I was going to be a binder.
‘You think,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I’m going to do what you do.’
She didn’t even glance at me. ‘It will be easier,’ she said, from a long way away, ‘if you don’t despise it. Despise books – despise the people who need help – and you despise yourself. Your work.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t. It’s not …’
She laughed. It was so close to her usual amused snort that my stomach twisted. ‘Yes, you can. Binders are born, not made. And you’re a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand. And it won’t let you rest. It’s a great force, inside you. It’s what made you ill, when … You’re stronger in it than most binders I’ve known. You’ll see.’
‘How do you know? You might be wrong—’
‘I know, Emmett.’
‘How?’
‘The binder’s fever gave you away. You will be a good binder. In every sense.’
I shook my head. I went on shaking it, even though I didn’t know why.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we do is very difficult. Sometimes it makes me angry or sad. Sometimes I regret – if I’d known what the memories were, I wouldn’t have—’ She stopped and glanced away. ‘Much of the time it doesn’t even touch me. But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’
‘I’m not doing it. It’s wrong. It’s – unnatural.’
She lowered her head, inhaling so deeply I saw her shoulders move. The skin under her eyes looked as fragile as the bloom on a moth’s wing: one touch and it would brush away and leave bare bone. She said, without looking at me, ‘It’s a sacred calling, Emmett. To have another person’s memory entrusted to you … To take the deepest, darkest part away from them and keep it safe, forever. To honour it, to make it beautiful, even though no one will ever see it. To guard it with your own life …’
‘I don’t want to be a glorified gaoler.’
She jolted upright. For a long moment I thought she would hit me again. ‘This is why I didn’t tell you before,’ she said, finally. ‘Because you’re not ready yet, you’re still struggling … But now you know. And you’re lucky to be here. If you had gone to a bindery in Castleford you’d have had your scruples beaten out of you long ago.’
I held out my finger and slid it through the candle flame, once, twice, slowing down until I could hardly bear it. There were too many questions; I concentrated on the pain and let my mouth decide. ‘So why am I here?’
She blinked. ‘Because I was the nearest. And—’ She stopped.
Her eyes slid away from mine. She kneaded her forehead, and for the first time I noticed how flushed her cheeks were. ‘I’m exhausted, Emmett. I think that’s enough for today. Don’t you?’
She was right. I was so tired that I could feel the world spinning. I nodded, and she stood up. I reached out to help her but she ignored me. She picked her way through the narrow space back to the door.
‘Seredith?’
She paused, but didn’t turn. Her sleeve had fallen back as she leant against the wall, and her wrist was like a child’s.
‘Yes?’
‘Where are the books? If you keep them safe …’
She held her arm out to point at the circular plaque on the wall. ‘On the other side of that,’ she said, ‘there’s a vault.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Yes.’ She turned, reaching for a key that hung round her neck; then her hand tightened on it. ‘No. Not now. Another time.’
I’d only asked out of curiosity. But there was something in her face – or something not in her face, something that should have been there … I pushed my tongue into the sharp space between two of my teeth and stared at her. Strands of her hair clung to her forehead, sticky with sweat. She reeled. I stepped towards her, but she stumbled back as if she couldn’t bear me to get too close. ‘Good night, Emmett.’
I watched her turn, bracing herself in the doorway as though she was fighting to stay on her feet. I should have let her go, but I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Seredith … What happens if the books burn? Do the people die?’
She didn’t look at me. She shuffled to the stairs and began to climb them. ‘No,’ she said. ‘They remember.’
I was so tired I couldn’t think. Seredith had gone to bed; I should go too. If only I’d gone to bed an hour ago, instead of sitting down next to the stove in the workshop … Sleep. I wanted to step right off the edge of consciousness. I wanted that darkness more than anything. I wanted not to be here.
I sat down. Or rather, I found that I was already sitting, cramped on the floor with my legs folded, my back against a box. I didn’t have the energy to find a better position. Instead I wrapped my arms round my knees, put my head down, and slept.
When I woke, the first thing I felt was a kind of peace. It was almost pitch-black – the candle had gone out – and I felt as though I were drifting, disintegrating painlessly in the subtle currents of the dark. Then some of what had happened came back – but small, too far away to hurt me, like reflections in a silver cup. I got up and groped my way up the stairs, yawning. I’d thought it was the middle of the night, and the greyish light streaming through the workshop windows made me blink and rub my eyes. It was still raining, although now it was a thin quiet mizzle, and the snow only clung to the ground in a few places, grimy and pockmarked. Seredith had been right about the thaw; the post would get to us at least once more before winter really set in.
The stove had gone out. I hesitated, wanting to leave it and go upstairs to bed; but it was morning, and there was work to do … Work. I didn’t want to think about work. I crouched down and remade the fire. By the time it was going properly I was a little warmer, but the deep, cold quiet of the house needed more than the stove to thaw it. I hadn’t boarded up the broken window; but it wasn’t that, it was something else. I shook my head, wondering if my ears were playing tricks on me. It was like the way the snow had muffled every sound – or a feeling of distance, as if everything I heard was an echo …
Tea. The caddy was almost empty. I put water on to boil and went to get a new packet from the pantry. As I crossed the hall I turned my face away from the moist draught that blew in through the jagged-edged window. As soon as I’d had something hot to drink I’d find a bit of millboard—
Seredith was curled on the stairs, her head resting against the banister.
‘Seredith? Seredith!’
It was only when she moved that I knew I’d been afraid. I pulled her gently to her feet, appalled at how light she was, and the heat that was seeping from her skin. She was clammy, and her face was flushed. She muttered something, and I bent close to hear her. ‘I’m all right,’ she said. Her breath was foul, as if something was rotting inside her. ‘I was just … sitting down.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s get you to bed.’
‘I’m perfectly all right. I don’t need …’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Come on.’ I half pushed and half lifted her upwards, step after step, and then along the passage to her room. She clambered into bed and pulled the blankets over herself as if she was freezing. I hurried downstairs to get her a jug of water, and herb tea to bring the fever down, and more blankets; but when I came back into the bedroom she was already asleep. She’d undressed, and her clothes were crumpled in a pile on the floor.
I stood very still, listening to the silence. I could hear Seredith’s breathing – faster, louder than it should have been – and the faint crackle of rain against the window; but behind that, and my own blood in my ears, there was nothing but the solid emptiness of the house and the marshes beyond. I was more alone here than I’d ever been.
I sat down. In this light, sleeping, Seredith looked even older; the flesh on her cheeks and below her jaw sagged, so that the skin was stretched thin over the bones of her nose and eyes. A scab of spittle clung to the corner of her mouth. She murmured something and turned over, and her hands twitched and clutched the quilt. Her skin was a chalky, yellowish colour against the faded indigo-and-white of the patchwork, while here and there the shadow of a raindrop crawled across the cotton.
I looked around. I had never been in here in daylight. There was a little fireplace and a padded window seat, and a mossy-looking armchair, but it was almost as bare as my room. There were no pictures, or ornaments above the hearth. The only decoration on the walls was the light from the window, the faint lattice, the sliding silver of the rain-shadows. Even my parents had more than this. And yet Seredith wasn’t poor; I knew that, from the lists of supplies we sent to Castleford every week, and the sacks that Toller brought back for us. I had never thought about where her money came from. If she died—
I looked down at her face on the pillow, and a kind of panic seized me. It was an effort to stop myself from waking her up and pouring the tea forcibly down her throat; it was best to let her sleep. I could light a fire, bring damp cloths, have some honey dissolved in water for when she woke of her own accord … But I sat still, unable to leave her. It had been the other way round, so many times – that she’d watched at my bedside while I slept, as patient as stone – but she’d never made me feel as though I should be grateful. For the first time I wondered whether her brusqueness had been deliberate. My throat ached.
An hour later, through the rain, I caught the distant creak and rumble of a cart, and at last the off-key jangle of the bell. The post. I lifted my head, and a perverse part of me wanted him to go away again, to leave me in this strange, bereft peace; but I got to my feet and went down to open the door.
‘Seredith’s sick. I don’t know who to … Can you send someone?’
He squinted at me above the collar of his coat. ‘Send someone? Who?’
‘A doctor. Or her family.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. She writes letters, doesn’t she? Tell the people she writes to.’
‘I—’ He stopped, and shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But don’t count on them coming.’
He drove off. I watched until the cart was a tiny blot in the mottled expanse of brown grass and half-melted snow.
VI
The house was so quiet it was as if the walls were holding their breath. Every few hours, during that day and the days that followed, I had to go outside and listen to the dry wind in the reeds, just to be sure that I hadn’t gone deaf. I went and got a spare pane of glass from the storeroom to fix the broken window, but as I was fitting it I found myself putting down my tools with unnecessary vehemence, tapping on the glass harder than I needed to. I was lucky not to break it. And when I sat at Seredith’s bedside I coughed and fidgeted and picked at the paring callus on my forefinger. But no sound I could make was enough to break the silence.
At first I was afraid. But nothing changed: Seredith didn’t get better, she didn’t get worse. She slept for hours, at first, but one morning when I tapped on her door she was awake. I’d brought her an apple and a cup of honeyed tea, and she thanked me and bent over the cup to breathe in the steam. She’d slept with the curtains open – or rather, I hadn’t closed them for her the night before – and the sky was full of grey-bellied clouds being torn apart by the wind. Here and there the sun flashed through. I heard her sigh. ‘Go away, Emmett.’
I turned. Her face was damp, but the bright flush had left her cheeks and she looked better. ‘I mean it. Go and do something useful.’
I hesitated. Now that she was awake, part of me wanted to ask her questions – all the questions that had been brewing since the first time I walked through the bindery door; now that she had no reason not to tell me … But something inside me baulked at the idea of so many answers. I didn’t want to know; knowing would make it all real. All I said was, ‘Are you sure?’
She lay back down without answering. After a long time she dredged up another heavy breath and said, ‘Don’t you have better things to do? I can’t bear being watched.’
It might have stung, but somehow it didn’t. I nodded, although her eyes were closed, and went out into the passage with a sense of relief.
I was determined not to think, so I set myself to work. When I collapsed on the lowest stair in the hall and looked at the clock, I saw that I’d been at it for hours: cleaning and filling the lamps, scrubbing the floor and wiping out the kitchen cupboards with vinegar, sweeping the hall and sprinkling the floor with lavender water, polishing the banister with beeswax … They were jobs that my mother would have done, at home, or Alta; I’d have rolled my eyes and trod unconcerned footprints across their clean floors. Now my shirt clung to my back and I smelt rank and peppery with sweat, but I looked round and was glad to see the difference I’d made. I’d thought that I was doing it for Seredith, but suddenly I knew I’d been doing it for myself. With Seredith ill, this was no one’s house but mine.
I got to my feet. I hadn’t had anything to eat since the morning, but I wasn’t hungry. I stood for a long time with one foot on the stair above, as if there was a decision to be made: but something made me turn again and go into the passage that led to the workshop. The door was closed and when I opened it there was a blaze of daylight.
I stoked the stove extravagantly because I’d chopped the wood myself, and no one could see me wasting it. Then I tidied methodically from one side of the room to the other, straightening shelves, sharpening tools, oiling the nipping press and sweeping up. I tidied cupboards and discovered old supplies of leather and cloth I hadn’t known we had, and a stash of marbled paper at the bottom of the plan chest. I found a bone folder carved with faint scrimshaw flowers, a book of silver leaf, a burnisher with a thick, umber-streaked agate … Seredith was tidy, but it was as if she’d never thrown anything away. In one cupboard I found a wooden box full of trinkets, wrapped in old silk as if they were important: a child’s bonnet, a lock of hair, a daguerreotype mounted in a watch case, a heavy silver ring that I tilted back and forth in my palm for a long time, watching the colours slide from blue to purple and green. I put that box back carefully, pushing it behind a pile of weights, and once it was out of sight I forgot it almost at once. There was a box of type that needed sorting, and jars of dye so old they needed to be poured away, and little dry nubs of sponge that needed washing. It all gave me pleasure – an unfamiliar sensuous pleasure, where everything – the neatness of a blade, the wind in the chimney, the yeasty smell of stale paste, the logs collapsing into ash in the stove – was distinct and magnified.
But this time, when I’d finished, what I felt wasn’t satisfaction but fear, as if I had been preparing for an ordeal.
When I’d taken Seredith’s dirty clothes away, her keys had been in the pocket of her trousers. Now they were in mine. Not the key that she wore round her neck, but the keys to the other doors, the front and back of the house, and the triple-locked doors at the end of the workshop … Their weight in my pocket felt like part of my body. The sense of possession I’d had blurred into something else.
I looked out at the expanse of marsh. The wind had died and now the clouds were massed in a thick grey bank, while the glints of water lay still as a mirror. Nothing stirred; it could have been a picture painted on the window-pane. Dead weather. What would they be doing at home? It was slaughtering time, unless Pa had started early; and there were repairs to be made, tools and tack and a back wall of the barn that needed seeing to … If we were going to run a hawthorn fence across the top of the high field, as I’d suggested last year, we would need to plant it soon. My nerves tingled at the memory of sharp thorns jabbing into cold fingers. For an instant I thought I could smell turpentine and camphor, the balm Ma made to ward off chilblains; but when I lifted my hand to my nose my palm smelt of dust and beeswax. I’d sloughed that life off like a skin.
I raised my head and listened. There was no sound from anywhere. The whole house was waiting. I took the bundle of keys out of my pocket, and walked round the lay press and along the worn floorboards to the far door. My heart thudded but the three keys went into the three locks and turned cleanly, one by one.
Seredith had kept the hinges well oiled. The door swung back as easily as if someone had opened it from the other side. I don’t know why I had expected it to be stiff. My pulse sped into a sudden crescendo that sent black specks whirling across my eyes; but after a few seconds my vision cleared and I could see a pale, bare room, with high uncurtained windows like the workshop. A table of scrubbed wood, with two chairs facing each other across it. The floor and walls were bare. I put the keys down on the table and the sound of it startled me.
I had no right to be here. But I had to be. I stood still, resisting the crawling sensation at the base of my spine.
Against the mottled grey of the windows the binder’s chair stood out in silhouette. It was straight-backed and simple – less comfortable than the one nearest to the door – but somehow I knew it was Seredith’s chair. I drew the other one out from the table, hearing the legs bump as I dragged it over the uneven floor, and sat down. How many people had waited here to have their memories taken away? Enough to wear a path into the floorboards, coming and going …
How did it feel? I could imagine the sick fear in the pit of your stomach, the terror that flickered when you tried to see past the point of no return, to the person you would be … But the moment itself? To have something wrenched out of the deepest part of you – how did that feel? And afterwards, when you had a hole inside you … I saw again the blankness in Milly’s eyes as she left, and clenched my jaw. Which was worse? To feel nothing, or to grieve for something you no longer remembered? Surely when you forgot, you’d forget to be sad, or what was the point? And yet that numbness would take part of your self away, it would be like having pins-and-needles in your soul …
I took a deep breath. It was too easy to imagine sitting here, in this seat; I ought to put myself in Seredith’s chair. What would it be like to be her? To look into someone’s eyes and then do – that – to them? The thought of it made me feel sick, too. Whichever way you looked at it … Seredith had called it helping. But how could that be right?
I stood up, caught my ankle on the side of the table, and steadied myself on the back of the chair. The carving cut into my palm, not hard enough to hurt but enough to take me by surprise. I looked down at the shape of it, the gleam of bluish light on the wooden scroll.
So many times it had been the light catching on something that brought on the illness. The latticed sun falling on the hall floor, the slant of daylight seen through a half-open door … I knew how it began, the bright shape – not quite a memory – that fitted like a key into a hole in my mind, and the sickness that spilt out. And now I felt the same shock of recognition and fear. I cringed instinctively, waiting for the blackness to swallow me. It would be the end, the abyss. Now that I was here, in the place I was most afraid of … the source, the heart.
My knees gave way. I dropped into the chair, bracing myself as if for a crash. But my mind stayed steady. A beam creaked, a mouse scratched in the thatch above the window. The darkness rolled and sucked like a tide, at arm’s length; and then, instead of drowning me, it receded.
I held my breath. Nothing happened. The darkness drew back and back, until I felt exposed, drenched in grey daylight until my eyes watered.
Time passed. I looked down at my hands on the scrubbed table. When I’d left home, they’d been dead white and spidery. Now there was a callous on my left forefinger from paring leather with a knife that was too blunt, and my left thumbnail was long so that I could position a finishing tool without burning myself. But it was the shape of them – thin but not bony, strong but not bulky – that made me see them for the first time. They weren’t a farmer’s hands – not like Pa’s – but they weren’t an invalid’s hands, either. I would have known that they were a bookbinder’s hands; and not just because they were mine.
I turned them over and looked at the lines on my palms that were supposed to tell me who I was. Someone – was it Alta? – had once told me that your left hand showed the fate you were born with, and your right showed the fate you made for yourself. My right hand had a deep, long line down the centre, cutting my whole palm in half. I imagined another Emmett, the Emmett who might have taken over the farm, the way my parents always planned: an Emmett who hadn’t got ill, and hadn’t ended up here, alone. I saw him look back at me with a grin, pushing his chilblained hands into his pockets, and then turn towards home, whistling.
I bowed my head and waited for the sudden sadness to pass; but it didn’t. Something gave way inside me, and I started to cry.
At first it was as involuntary as being sick: great paroxysms like retching, each spasm driven by an unpitying reflex that made me gasp and sob for air. But slowly the urgency eased, and I had the time to catch a lungful of air between sobs; and then at last I wiped the wetness and snot off my face, and opened my eyes. The sense of loss was still sharp enough to make the tears rise again, but I blinked them away and this time I managed to master my breath.
When I raised my head the world was empty, clear, like a cut field. I could see for miles, I could see where I was. There’d been shadows at the corners of my vision for so long I’d grown used to them, but now they had gone. This quiet room wasn’t terrible, it was only a room; the chairs where two people could sit opposite each other were only chairs.
I paused for a moment, testing the place where the fear had been, as though I was checking a rotten tooth with my tongue. Nothing – or no, maybe a sharp faint echo of pain: not the dull ache of decay but something cleaner, like a gap that was already healing. There was a scent in the air like earth after rainfall, as if everything had been freshly remade.
I picked up the keys and left without locking the door behind me.
I was ravenous. I found myself in the pantry, gorging on pickles out of a jar – and then, sated, I was so exhausted I couldn’t see straight. I’d meant to take a bowl of soup up to Seredith, but I fell asleep at the kitchen table with my head on my arms. When I woke up the range had gone out and it was nearly dark. I lit it again – covering myself and the clean floor with ash – and then hurriedly warmed the soup and carried it up to Seredith’s room. The bowl was only slightly hotter than tepid, but no doubt she’d be asleep anyway. I pushed the door open with my foot and peered round.
She was awake, and sitting up. The lamp was lit, and a glass bowl of water was perched in front of it to focus the light on a shirt she was patching. She looked up at me and smiled. ‘You look better, Emmett.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes.’ She peered at me and her face changed. Her fingers grew still, and after a moment she put the shirt down. ‘Sit.’
I put the tray on the table next to her bed and drew the chair up beside her. She reached out and pushed my jaw with one finger, tilting my face towards the lamplight. It wasn’t the first time she’d touched me – she’d often corrected my grip, or leant close to me to show me how something should be done – but this time I felt it tingling on my skin.