The Book of Fires

13
Sometimes I cannot sleep for hours, and lie there in the dark. I hear shouts of drunken troubles in the street outside, or cats fighting. On a still night I can hear the watchman crying the hour outside on the main street. “Two o’clock!” “Three!”
My sister Ann at Wiston House is sixty miles from here. From this safe distance I whisper some things to her about my day. I tell her of sulfur, of charcoal, of saltpeter, and how they combine in extraordinary ways. I tell her how much I have learnt in the month I have been here already, and how, when my fingers are occupied with the tasks I am managing more thoroughly each day, I feel a kind of lightness in my head. My quick weaver’s fingers serve me well, Ann. Yours would, too, if you were here. I do not tell her anything about my belly, how it increases in roundness like an uncooked loaf. I do not say how my belly is white and perfect and dreadful to me, though there is nothing to see when I put on my clothes. I do not mention any aching inside, where my heart lies.

Occasionally I invent another conversation in my head, with Lettice Talbot, explaining to her the things I did not tell her on our journey, things I have never told anyone. I do not even whisper them; I mouth the words into the dark.
I tell her how I have never loved a man.
I tell her how, on the fourth of September last, a man took a chance of love from me and twisted it up viciously, like twisting the neck of a chicken before the plucking and boiling, but with less cause.
And I think of the way that there was a change in the calendar, so that the fourth of September, along with ten other days, was quite swallowed up when the nation moved to the new style of calendar to keep abreast of time in other places. Mrs. Blight is surely wrong, I think; time can swallow anything, in certain circumstances.
We did not take note of such a change until it was already in place. Four days we went, by accident, into the portion of the month that should have been removed immediately. Removed like deadwood, or unwanted cloth outside the pattern, cutting away at the year to make it fit its new shape cleanly, but we were taken by surprise. On Sunday at St. Mary’s, the Reverend Waldegrave told us of it. Long and thin, like a spoon wearing a cassock, he read solemnly from Psalm 104 to smooth anxieties that we may have harbored.
“He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. Thou makest darkness, and it is night . . . ; the sun ariseth . . . ; Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening,” he intoned.
“Nothing has changed,” he assured us from his pulpit. I clung to that thought gratefully; my shame was growing inside me, though I did not know it then. “Look about you,” he urged. “God’s world is unalterable in certain ways.” I loved the way he held the Good Book to his chest as though it gave him warmth.
And so we leapt with little query toward the midst of the month, going directly from the second to the fourteenth of September. Some particular days were displaced: the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, the day of the Holy Cross. There were some in the village who thought they had been robbed of something, but most took no odds on it. It was a slow realization for me at first, but I tried to hatch a sense that there was a little blessing in the loss of days for me: the fourth of September, being the day of my undoing, was quite disappeared.
It was neatly done, I told myself, over and over. There was some kind of magic in that. Surely it was a single, inadvertent kindness done to me by Parliament, I’d thought at first, so that I did not think about the consequence of what had happened to me in the bean field till it was too late.
And I am shocked when my imagined Lettice Talbot turns to me one night and says, with her beautiful red mouth shaping the words clearly:
“That is all well, Agnes Trussel, but nonetheless you have the seed of that day lodged inside you. What will you do when this thing comes? What preparations have you made?”
“I cannot think of that now,” I say to her angrily, clenching my fists, “I am asleep ! ”
Then I wake up. I must have shouted out, as I hear Mary Spurren stirring in her bed upstairs. I am shaking with misery. I cannot think, I will not think. I cannot. But the night outside is rolling on toward the morning, and what can I do to stop it? The graveness of my situation begins to dawn on me anew.