This year he seems himself more, but the parcel - a heavy, expensive look to it - worries her. She knows the minds of men like Joshua. Her own father was the same; happy to argue all night to fix the price of a ewe or a bushel of apples, but show him something new, something novel, and he would part with his money as though he were heir to a dukedom. No wonder the
quacks and showmen never went without what was good. Fine mounts and fine cloth on their backs.
She says: Tou bought something, then. Something useful.'
Out of the corner of her eye she can see the Widow scowling at her. 'Ay,' she says, seeing her husband colour. He gives her a half-offended, half-angry look, which in the early days of their marriage might have brought an exchange of blows, and then a tumble in their new bed. Her needling sharpened their appetites then, but work, sickness, children, the constant wrestling with the weather, with animals that seemed to know only how to die, all that had worn the life out of them, so that they live only in fits now, in spasms. They hold each other's gaze a moment, then Joshua turns his back on her, pushes his hands close to the flames.
Tood,' he says.
The children step quietly away from him.
He eats. The food dulls his temper. When he has finished, he wdpes the grease from his face and lights his pipe from a taper. He reaches along the table and pulls the parcel towards him, so that it sits on the table between himself and Liza. It is trapped in coarse sacking, exudes a faint distinctive odour of oily wool. He cuts the string with the knife he has been eating Mdth, pushes the parcel closer to the girl. He says: 'Tis for all of you, but as the wench has more sense and age, it's to stay with her to show you as she pleases.' To the boy he says: 'Bring that candle up, Charlie. There. Set it by her.'
Liza, with the gravity of a child queen examining the gift of a foreign court, unfolds the sacking until she has uncovered a polished wooden box about the size of the family Bible. There is a brass catch at the front. She looks over at her father. He says: 'Open it, then, girl. It'll not open of itself
She fumbles with the catch, frees it, opens the box, and stares in at its contents, then looks round at the others. All the faces, with the exception of her father's, show the same excited puzzlement as
her own. Inside the box is a wooden disc, white, mounted with dehcate wires and globes of varying circumferences and colours; red and blue, one black and white, one golden, greater than the others. Around the edge of the white disc are the names of the months and pictures from the zodiac. At the side is a handle like the handle of a little coffee grinder.
She runs her finger over the golden globe. Joshua says: 'Hot, baint it.' His face is fierce with pleasure.
'Baint hot,' she says.
'Hot in summer, cold in winter. All day you see 'im, but at night he's gone.' He has devised the riddle on the ride home and is well pleased with it.
'I see it!' Elizabeth has forgotten for the moment the probable expense. She claps her hands. 'This is the sun, and this is our world . . . and this is the moon?'
Joshua says: 'An' this is Mercury, and this Venus. Venus for love and Mercury for summat else. Turn the handle there, Liza. There, like so.' He places his hand over the girl's. 'See?'
Cogs, the secret workings of the machine, bite and turn. The globes begin to move, each with a motion of its own, slow and stately, like bishops dancing a minuet. The children sit, bewitched, hardly breathing.
"Tis called a horrory,' says Joshua, his voice almost a whisper: 'An' that's Greek for everything.'
Widow Dyer nods sagely; Sarah and Charlie clamour for their turn, and in the liquid of the infant's eyes, the toy universe gently spins - the crab, the lion, the virgin - month after month, year after year.
It is James Dyer's earliest memory.
The kitchen is his first world. The fire jabbing at the irons, light shivering in the backs of copper pans. A cosy abattoir where creatures of the air, the field, the river are shorn and gutted and pampered for the flames. The servant, Jenny Scurl, is an alchemist of the flesh, transforming the corpse of a rabbit or the heaped, snowy carcass of a goose, her fingers thick as bottle-necks; tearing, scraping, cutting, tearing out the roots of guts and stuffing the tender hollows with onions, boiled eggs, sage, parsley, rosemary, chopped apple, chestnuts. To amuse the children she skins eels live.
James lives in the lower regions, crawHng on the stone floor beneath the kitchen table where the shadows are haunted by thin, nameless, determined cats who sit beside him, watching feathers drift and flour shiver down, and who fight him in the war of scraps, finding him a hardier opponent than his predecessors. Unnoticed, he spends half his days there following the women's wooden heels and woollen-cased ankles beneath the sea-edge of their petticoats - to and fro, to and fro; never still.
Later, after a score of unprotested falls, he learns to scale the kitchen chairs, sitting, his feet barely reaching to the end of the seat, soundlessly accepting the knocks and caresses, the dabs of bread or sweet pastry that come his way. Increasingly, his muteness draws the attention of the adult world. Some take him for a moon-calf, witless, and bounce him on their knees, talking to him as they would to the dog. The women coddle him for his blue eyes, for the comical gravitas of his
