Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

loop and shudder in the air. Charlie dies the day after his sister is buried. The last thing he does is to reach up, as if to pick an apple. Liza lies, one hand with her mother, one hand with death. In the hall the clock has not been wound. The hands stand at half past three. There is no fire in the kitchen. Even the cats have gone.

James becomes a reader of sounds, recognising the muttered voices of Pegg the undertaker, and Viney and the parson. Sometimes there is a neighbour, kindness overcoming caution. Often he hears Joshua, the wheezing in his chest, the sudden, thunderous oaths. Widow Dyer brings James his food, a bare cold diet, yet he eats it with great appetite, licks the plate clean.

He waits for Liza to come down like the others but the pustules on her face dry and scab over. Elizabeth holds down the girl's hands to stop her tearing at the scabs. On the morning of the twelfth day Liza sits up in bed and calls in a weary voice for her mother. Elizabeth, folding and refolding Sarah's clothes, sees the girl's blind gaze, the glutinous eyes, and goes to her, embraces her, presses the last of her strength into the girl's ribs. One has been saved, an immeasurable victory, and she notices, with something like indifference, the red marks that have risen on her own hands.

Kitty Gate is the last to catch it; a boy called Slight is the last to die. The villagers bury their dead and the burial yard is raw with turned earth. The stonecutter

has a new apprentice. Some find solace in the church, some in the bottle. Viney stables his horse, sleeps in the day and sits up at night, drinking brandy and muttering to those who ran past him into eternity; ran past him like children in a game, fleet of foot, easily ducking his clumsy hands.

There are many, mainly young, whose faces show the marks of the sickness. Passing each other in the village, they nod warily and look about themselves as though in search of their former lives. But the old rhythms re-emerge. The first laughter, the first forgetful children spinning their tops on a flagstone; the first lovers walking the paths their mothers and grandmothers walked. The fruit is ripe and must be harvested. This season there are fewer arms, fewer quick hands. The shortage leaves the others numbed, too tired to think, too weary to grieve. Apples are 7s 6d a bushel; winter will not wait on their grief. Thus time, the sheer weight of days, turns them like water on a mill-wheel paddle.

Farmer Dyer, his blind daughter and lame son, are pitied. In the aristocracy of suffering. Farmer Dyer is a lord. Not a great lord, but grand enough to be avoided, to be spoken of in a solemn voice. He appears to be losing his wits, growing wild. Goodwife Kelly, meeting Goodwife Coles on the Madderditch road, remarks that Dyer will be on the parish before Easter. The other replies with a shake of her head. Josh Dyer will be cold in the ground before then and it's a poor look-out for the children and the old mother. Who would take them in now, even as servants? A word hangs between their heads unspoken. Workhouse.

The yard, once the bright unblinking eye of the farm, becomes cluttered, overgrown, useless. The pig is sold, as are the sheep, and the grass grows high in the orchard. Christian Vogue, estate manager for the Denbeighs, rides down, speaks to Joshua from the saddle. When Liza asks what Vogue wanted Joshua will not

answer, stares at her, too ashamed to speak. James he has ceased to notice.

When drunk, the farmer calls for Liza to sing to him; lullabies. On nights when he finds no consolation in her voice he staggers into the yard to rant at the sky until exhaustion drives him in again.

In the New Year Joshua comes into the parlour where James has slept ever since his fall. He wakes the boy, shaking him and pulling him from the bed. He says: 'I've seen her! In the barn! She be an angel now, Charlie.'

Liza, a cloak around her shoulders, is standing by the back door. She reaches for her brother's arm. The three of them cross the frosted yard, a lantern swinging from Joshua's hand. They enter the barn. Tools and aromatic sacking hang from the walls; grain-seed crunches under their feet. Joshua holds up the lantern.

'There!'

Liza says: 'What is it, Jem?' She tugs at his arm.

James peers forward to where the light laps faintly against the blackness at the far end of the barn. Something is moving there, white and faintly luminous. It is several seconds before he can distinguish it, the soft S of the neck, the slender head where the eye is set like a diamond.

James says: "Tis a swan.'

'A swan? Father, Jem says 'tis a swan.'

'Glory be,' says the farmer. 'She has come back.'

The bird stays several nights and then, disturbed by Joshua's frequent visits, it leaves as suddenly as it came. Joshua does not appear troubled by its going. The change in him, the extraordinary reverse of his decline occasioned by the bird's arrival, continues. He does not drink, he shaves his face and wears his church-going clothes. Much of his time he is alone in his room, in prayer or meditation. The farm he has no interest

in. His thoughts are on higher things, and when Liza gently chides him, he smiles at her and strokes her face saying: 'Soon, wench. Soon enough.'

James knows that soon means never. He is curious, a little impatient, to see how things will end. He suspects that Joshua will one day disappear, leaving without warning, without any indication of where he has gone.

It is the spring thaw when the day finally arrives. There are violets growing on the banks at the side of the road and the first brimstone butterflies