Read The Book of Fires for Free Online

flames like a hot, stirred fluid.
    We are quite late. Inside the barn the air is warm and sweet and close. Lamps hang from the beams. There is a galloping, churning fire in the central hearth, smoke twisting up to the holes in the high ceiling. Jim Figg and Jim Hickon from the village are sawing at their violins and Mr. Tucker’s little boy beats at the skin of a drum. Girls younger than myself are dancing, their shoes kicking up a chaffy dust into the air. Disturbed by the smoke billowing about beneath the trusses of the roof, a bat flutters up and down the length of the barn. It cannot get out.
    He is here of course, John Glincy. When he sees that I am here, he picks up his jugful of ale and sidles over. I hate it when I feel like this. I hate him and his rough hands on my shoulders in front of my father, and his dog that shoves its nose between my legs. I shrug him off.
    “Could do worse than that, Ag,” John Glincy shouts over his plate on the bench opposite me when we sit down at the trestles to eat, and I wish that he wouldn’t, his beer slopping over the slats. He is a drunkard and a lech. He is not to be trusted. How could I trust him? I do not even look him in the eye at first. Worse than what? I do not understand him. So much is bad. I am bad, my badness multiplying. And it is now too late anyway. If I stay here my fleshly crime will remain, growing under my skin by increments till its limbs push at my belly, and the results of my thievery will stay pressed to my skin from the outside. I will be found out. It is too much to think otherwise.
    The cooked meat tastes of nothing to me. I just chew and swallow. Even now I am watching the door in case someone should enter with a warrant for my arrest, crying out before the assembled crowd, “ Agnes Trussel . . . for the dishonest purloining of twelve pieces of gold from Susan Mellin, deceased, with other coinage, the suspicion of murder of the victim aforementioned falling upon her ...”
    “Jumpy tonight, Ag.” He grins as he reaches around from behind me, but I don’t like it at all and push him off. I don’t want to be touched, and I tell him so.
    “I should prefer to run to the post bridge over the river Arun and throw myself in, and I shall not do that either,” I spit out at him. He does not know I am with child, nor will he ever.
    “But the law is binding in that respect,” he says mockingly. “You envowed yourself to me. I can use that, see, and ensure your bindedness. You will find it’s up to me.” He finds it funny. He takes a pull of ale from his jug. Wetness glistens at the corners of his mouth.
    “What a lie you would have employed then for your own bad uses, John Glincy,” I retort. “I have made no such vow, nor will I ever.” I am sickened by the very thought of it. I am near to tears in my confusion.
    “Aye,” he says, and then he bends and speaks quietly inside my ear. His mouth is hot. “But I’ve had you, Agnes.” He has stopped smiling.
    And he is right.
    “See”—John Glincy thrusts his foul face up to mine—“that’s where the difference is, your lie against mine.” And he walks away from me across the room and turns his yellow head about and raises his jug to me and grins again, wider.
    What a twist and tangle it all is. I am lost in it; how I wish that I could shut my mind tight and make it vanish. The music reels on, making me dizzy. When I open my eyes again after a moment, I go straight to Lil and shout that I am tired and not so well, that I shall go home to lie down. She nods as though she has not heard me; her cheeks are pink and flushed.
    “Whatever’s the matter, Miss Misery-Me? Dance! Dance!” She tugs at my arm till I get up and dance a quadrille with her, though my heart is not in it.
    “Mrs. Mellin did not come.” She leans and shouts to me above the noise, pushing some hair back into her cap. Her breath is sweet with ale.
    “No,” I say. “She said her leg was bad.”
    Lil’s face is thoughtful