ordinary human blood. But Mr Noah saw something else in it, or imagined he did, as he was impressed by Manning’s air of authority. ‘Yes. It is most dark.’
People only see what they have decided to see. I have learned this lesson one hundred times over, but it was still new to me then. My mother winced every time that dagger touched her, but to Manning she was faking it.
‘See her cunning? Mark the counterfeit of pain on her face. She has made some kind of trade, it would appear. The most unusual death of John Gifford appears to be the price of her son’s eternal youth. Quite a malevolent trade.’
‘We have nothing to do with John Gifford’s death. I helped thatch his roof. That is all. My mother never even knew him. She stays in the cottage most of the time. Please, stop doing that!’
I couldn’t watch any more. I grabbed Manning’s arm. He hit the dagger handle against my head, then his other hand grabbed my throat and he repeatedly struck the handle in the same spot as my mother wailed and I thought my skull might smash open. I was on the floor. Dazed and silent and wishing my body was as strong as an eighteen-year-old’s body should have been.
And then he, Manning, spotted another flea bite, this time on my mother, near her belly button, like a little red moon above a planet.
‘The same mark as on the boy.’
My mother trembled. Robbed of her clothes she could no longer speak.
‘It’s a flea!’ I said, my voice pained and desperate and cracked. ‘An ordinary flea bite.’
And I pressed my hands into the stone of the floor, to stand back up. But there came another stamp against the back of the skull.
And after that, everything went dark.
I sometimes repeat this in a dream. If I fall asleep on the sofa I remember that day. I remember the bulbs of blood on my mother’s skin. I remember the people at the doorway. And I remember Manning and his foot, stamping down, jolting me awake through the distance of centuries.
You see, everything changed after that. I am not saying my childhood had been perfect before this point but now I often want to climb back into that time before. Before I knew Rose, before I knew what would happen to my mother, before, before, before . . . To cling to who I was, right at the beginning when I was just a small boy with a long name who responded to time and grew older like everybody else. But there is never a way into the before. All you can do with the past is carry it around, feeling its weight slowly increase, praying it never crushes you completely.
London, now
At lunch break I nip to the supermarket down the street and buy myself a pastrami sandwich, some salt and vinegar crisps and a small bottle of cherry juice.
There is a queue for the checkout assistant so I do what I normally resist and use the self-service checkout.
Like the rest of the day so far, it does not go well.
The disembodied female voice keeps telling me of an ‘unidentified item in bagging area’, even though the only items in the bagging area are the items I had just scanned.
‘Please ask a member of staff to assist you,’ she – the robot future of civilisation – adds. ‘Unidentified item in bagging area. Please ask a member of staff to assist you. Unidentified item in bagging . . .’
I look around.
‘Hello? Excuse me?’
There are no members of staff. Of course there aren’t. There is, however, a group of teenage boys all wearing variations of the Oakfield uniform (white shirts, and a few green and yellow ties) all in the queue, holding drink cans and packets of food and looking in my direction. They say something, identifying me as a new teacher. And then there is some laughter. I feel the most familiar feeling of all: that I am living in the wrong time. And I stand there, just staring at the screen and listening to the voice, my head aching, and my soul slowly wondering if Hendrich was right. Maybe I shouldn’t have come back to London.
*
As I walk along the corridor to the staff room I pass the woman with glasses. The one who I had seen in the park, reading. The French teacher Daphne had told me about. The one who had stared at me in that disconcerting way. She is wearing red cotton trousers and a black polo-neck and shiny patent flat shoes. Her hair is pulled back. A confident, civilised look. She smiles.
‘It’s you. From the park.’
‘Oh yes,’ I say, as if I was only just remembering at that moment. ‘That was you. I’m the new history teacher.’
‘How funny.’
‘Yes.’
Her smile is also a frown, as though I confuse her. I have lived long enough to know this look. And fear it.
‘Hello,’ I say.
‘Hello there,’ she says, with a slight French accent. I think of the forest. My mother singing. I close my eyes and see a sycamore seed spiralling beneath a hard blue sky.
I feel a familiar sense of claustrophobia. Confinement. As if this world is never big enough to hide in.
And that is it.
I have to keep walking, as if I can also walk away from what she might be thinking.
After my first day teaching, I sit at home next to Abraham with his head on my lap. He is asleep, lost in dog dreams. He flinches and twitches, like a stuttering image, stuck between two moments. He whimpers a little. I wonder what memories he is reliving. I put my hand on him, stroking to soothe him. Slowly, the movement stops. He makes no sound but that of his breath.
‘It’s all right,’ I whisper. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s all right . . .’
I close my eyes and I see the towering form of William Manning as clear as if he is in the room.
Suffolk, England, 1599
William Manning stared at the darkening sky, his expression severe. There was something theatrical about him, as if this was just a show. This was very much the nature of the times – this era of Marlowe and Jonson and Shakespeare – everything was theatre. Even justice. Even death. Especially that. We were nearly ten miles from Edwardstone but the whole village was there. You might imagine that in the sixteenth century witch trials were a regular occurrence. They were not, not really. They were a rare entertainment, and people came from miles around to watch and jeer and feel safe in a world where evil could be explained and found and killed.
Manning spoke to me, but also the crowd. He was an actor. He could have been one of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.
‘Your fate will be decided by your mother. If she drowns, her innocence shall be shown, and you shall live. If she lives, and survives the stool, then you – as the progeny of a witch – will be sent to the gallows alongside your mother and dealt with there. Do you understand?’
I stood by my mother, on the grassy bank of the River Lark, with my legs and wrists in irons, just as hers were. She – dressed again – was shaking and shivering like a wet cat despite the warm day. I wanted to talk to her, to comfort her, but knew any communication between us would be seen as a plot or a plan to conjure malevolent forces.
Only when they pulled her closer to the riverbank, closer to the stool, did words burst out of my mouth.
‘I’m sorry, Mother.’
‘It’s not your fault, Estienne. It’s not your fault. I am sorry. It is mine. We should never have come here. We should never have come to this place.’
‘Mother, I love you.’
‘I love you too, Estienne,’ she said, a sudden