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

are flying over the hedgerows. Joshua has not been seen since the previous evening. As darkness comes, Liza, hoarse from calling, sends James to fetch Tom Purely. Tom comes back with James. The Widow is already red-eyed, silently keening. Tom takes a lantern and sets off to go around the farm. James goes with him but Tom is less friendly than in the old days. He is not alone in thinking the boy is somehow at the root of the family's disasters.

They do not have a long search. Joshua is in the barn, at the back where there are still feathers from the swan. At first they do not see him, but the light catches the nail-heads in his boots. He is lying face down in his dark suit, his knife gripped tight in his right hand. There is blood, a black pool that frames his head. Tom inches closer; the light trembles in his hand. He reaches down, takes a hold of Joshua's shoulder and slowly turns him until he lies upon his back. Above the slashed throat the mouth seems to smile still and the open eyes gaze upward as if, in his last agony, Joshua Dyer had seen something wonderful moving in the air above him. Tom runs out of the barn, hollering. James stays in the dark a moment, nudges the corpse with his foot as if to be sure the farmer is gone, then turns, feels his way into the yard, pauses, looks one last time at the star-illumined litter of the place, then fetches from his room dead Charlie's winter coat.

Dawn finds him walking steadily on the Bristol road, a parcel tucked beneath his arm. In Blind Yeo, in a dead house, a girl cries and cries his name. No one comes.

FOURTH

Tain, friends, is from the devil. It is his touch, his caress. His venemous embrace! Who here has not heard a man in agony cry out and curse his God . . . Or a woman in childbed, blast the unborn infant's ears with groans and shrieks . . . The loving parent is transformed into an ogre. The child by pain is parted from his prayers, the good man from his goodness. It is a hell on earth! It casts us into the flame while yet we live . . . And doctors! We know how much they may do! We know how their ministrations can double our suffering . . . And then they rob us when we are too weak, too much out of our wits to boot them down the steps of our house. Death is sweet release. Think now, I ask you, think now of your greatest suffering, of a day, a night, when some raging pain in your tooth or bowels, in your skull, in your leg ... a burn from the fire, a fall from your horse, or one of the thousand noxious diseases that rend us from within. Remember, how each and every one of you, in your torment, would have exchanged your skin with the most wretched in the kingdom, just but you might have a minute, nay, a half-minute's relief.

Tea, I tell you this: it shall come to you again, and worse than you have known before, worse tenfold. You are the candle; your suffering is the flame. It feeds on you! What would a man not then give to have at hand some inexpensive remedy he might himself

administer? Think of that, friends. Think what you would not give for such a boon . . .' Gummer pauses to let the words do their work. He is in good voice today and there is a good crowd to hear him, as many perhaps as fifty, crammed into the stale, grassy, boozy air. There is the sound of money, very faint, but quite audible to Gummer.

James, who has heard the speech a score of times, twists about to take a better view of the people he will shortly be performing for. Farmers in hot broadcloth steaming like cattle; apprentices in fustian, hungry for any diversion, something to hoard in memory and nibble at through the tedium of the week. Market women in linen caps and gowns, some with their chapped hands clutched by local beaux in leather waistcoats. At least two faces he recognises from other fairs; professional showmen. One walks a high-wire, the other sells charms to protect against gunshot wounds, or the clap, or toothache. They will recognise him, of course, but there will be no trouble. An unofficial guild exists between the showmen. A good new act is more an asset than a threat. More punters, more excitement. Purse strings loosen.

The woman beside James delivers a surreptitious dig to his ribs. It means: 'Keep still. Draw no attention to yourself.' The woman's name is Grace Boylan, former prostitute, though still available to those who favour a larger, motherly sort of whore. Gummer says she has a good face, that is, a face that betrays almost nothing of her character. Nor does she play her part too strongly like the strumpet they used in Devizes who waved her arms and wailed like a village Thisbe. The crowd laughed at her and things went dangerously wrong. Grace behaves herself; she is credible. Best of all, she is oddly unmemorable.

Gummer draws a handkerchief from his sleeve and wipes his brow. He is dressed in a good black coat, part parson, part physician. The sweat is real enough; so too are the heat and the breath and the gawping hundred-eyed creature gazing up at him.

The deceit is very physical; the hard but stylish end of the market. It is something to be proud of, and Gummer is proud. His sole ambition, from his brathood in some unspeakable neighbourhood of an English city, has been to become Marley Gummer, and by virtue of his unstinting effort, his unerring eye for another's weakness, he has achieved it. Mentally, he w^alks through fields of cloth of