A moon, tight as a fist, is planted in the west above the estuary. Dogs all over the moor, in farmyards where the muck glitters like diamonds, bay at its brilliance. Even the beagles of Coverton Hall press together blindly in their kennels, a velvety mass, and howl. The skaters are touched by it too: midwinter madness; the year's seductive zero.
A bottle smashes on the ice. A figure drags himself to the bank. 'Zatyoujoshua?' The figure leans back against the base of an alder, nods his head and vomits a stream of warm cider between his knees. A young woman with a shawl tight about her shoulders draws up
on the ice beside him. She says: 'You're mistaken if you think I shall carry you home. Useless man!'
He ignores her. The voice is scolding, but there is a bubble of hilarity in it, and when a second woman sweeps by and catches her arm, she lets herself be taken.
The air is set ringing from the single high note of a fiddle. A cheer goes up, and the fiddler, an old man, his skull wrapped in a woollen sling, begins a medley of dance tunes, music as familiar to them as the sounds of their own voices - 'Get Her Bo', 'Jumping John', 'Joyful Days Are Coming'. The skaters, sweating in the polar air, dance and fall and clutch at each other with new strength. More come, easing themselves down the bank on to the ice. There is no fear the ice will break. It is hard as bone.
The fiddle stops. The dancers stop, their breath like gauze masks as they look up. Shooting stars! Above Pigs' Green, above Ladyfield; a first, then a second burst. A dozen arms reach up, pointing. The dogs, suspicious of the sudden quiet, fall silent.
Elizabeth Dyer is on her skates by the bank in a block of darkness ten yards beyond the edge of the lantern light. She is twenty-nine, mother of three children, wife of the yeoman, Joshua Dyer. The skates she wears she has had since she was fourteen. Recently she has suffered from indefinable sorrows. Tonight the sky draws a tide of blood through her, so strong she feels in danger of floating up, disappearing over the rooftops of the village.
From behind her comes a soft, granulous footfall; she does not turn to see who it is, and when a hand - not her husband's hand, not any farmer's hand, but a hand long and light and smooth -slips beneath her shawl and presses her breast, she remains looking up, though the stars have flickered out and the sky has resumed its stillness. In his haste, the stranger loses his balance; he slips and drags them both down on to the ice, his weight on top of her, knocking the wind out of her. They writhe in a heap, yet neither tries to stand. Her skirts are up. She knows she has the
strength to fight him, to fling him off her. Instead, she gropes towards the bank, scrabbhng until she catches hold of a root, cold as brass, and clutches it with both hands, anchoring them, her and the stranger, like some clumsy vessel wallowing off a black coast. He hangs from the bones of her hips, jabs several times before he succeeds in entering her. It is over in seconds: a half-dozen thrusts; the dig of his nails; his breath hissing between his teeth. Then he drifts away from her, her shifts and petticoats and gown falling like curtains.
She remains there long enough, her knuckles numb around the tree-root, to be sure that he has gone. Her body is trembling a little; she has a sharp vision of a man making his escape between hedges of fine lace, across hard, empty fields. She is amazed at her calmness. The risk has been huge and senseless. She cannot explain it. She eases herself up, touches the back of her dress, pulls her shawl tight about her shoulders and skates back towards the lights. The fiddler is playing again, jigging clumsily on the bank. A woman friend takes her arm, skates at her side a moment.
'Don't this air make your skin smart, girl?'
It does, Martha, it does.'
'You won't have no trouble from your Joshua tonight.'
'No, Martha, I think not,' and Elizabeth skates free, feeling as she goes a lick of the man's seed, already cold, on the inside of her thigh.
The child is born in September, in a room hot with fire and the breath of women. The women crowd around the bed. Mrs Llewellyn, Mrs Phillips, Mrs Rivers, Mrs
Martha BeU. Mrs CoUins from Yatton, Mrs Gwyny Jones from Failand and Joshua's mother, the Widow Dyer, who fiUs her nostrils with Virginia snuff and looks over the midwife's shoulder The midwife is sweating out her gin. She has not had a mother die on her for almost a year, but she wiU not answer for this one The infant won't emerge. It has been hours now, though she can feel the crown of its head, the wisps of sopping hair, like weeds in the river.
Elizabeth Dyer is growing weaker. Her lips are pale, the skin grey around her eyes. The midwife has seen it often enough, how they pass beyond you, no more screaming, turn their faces to the waU. Another hour or two, then, God wiUing, mother or infant wiU be dead; then nothing more will be expected of her. Perhaps the child is dead already.
Liza Dyer, nine years old, stands, caught between the curves of the women's dresses, looking on. She holds the fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other. Her face reveals a normal terror 1 he others note it, remembering their own initiations at the side of birth-beds and death-beds.
Mrs
