I’d rumpled it. The crease would never come out entirely; it stood out like a scar, branching across the corner. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Seredith turned away and dropped the knife into the open drawer by my side. ‘Memories,’ she said, at last. ‘Not people, Emmett. We take memories and bind them. Whatever people can’t bear to remember. Whatever they can’t live with. We take those memories and put them where they can’t do any more harm. That’s all books are.’
Finally I met her eyes. Her expression was open, candid, a little weary, like her voice. She made it sound so right – so necessary; like a doctor describing an amputation. ‘Not souls, Emmett,’ she said. ‘Not people. Just memories.’
‘It’s wrong,’ I said, trying to match my tone to hers. Steady, reasonable … but my voice shook and betrayed me. ‘You can’t say it’s right to do that. Who are you to say what they can live with?’
‘We don’t. We help people who come to us and ask for it.’ A flicker of sympathy went over her face as if she knew she’d won. ‘No one has to come, Emmett. They decide. All we do is help them forget.’
It wasn’t that simple. Somehow I knew it wasn’t. But I had no argument to make, no defence against the softness of her voice and her level eyes. ‘What about that?’ I pointed to the child-shape under the sacking. ‘Why would you make a book like that?’
‘Milly’s book? Do you really want to know?’
A shiver went over me, fierce and sudden. I clenched my teeth and didn’t answer.
She walked past me, stared down at the sacking for a moment, and then slid it gently to one side. In her shadow the little skeleton shone bluish.
‘She buried it alive,’ Seredith said. There was no weight to the words, only a quiet precision that left all the feeling to me. ‘She couldn’t go on, she thought she couldn’t go on. And so she wrapped it up, one day when it wouldn’t stop crying, and she laid it on the dung heap and pulled rubbish and manure over it until she couldn’t hear it any more.’
‘Her baby?’
A nod.
I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t look away. The baby would have lain like that, curled and helpless, trying to cry, trying to breathe. How long would it have taken, before it was just part of the dungheap, rotting with everything else? It was like a horrible fairy tale: bones turned to pearl, earth turned to velvet. But it was true. It was true, and the story was locked in a book, shut away, written on dead pages. My hand tingled where I had smoothed out the endpaper: that thick, veined paper, black as soil.
‘That’s murder,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t the parish constable arrest her?’
‘She kept the child a secret. No one knew about it.’
‘But …’ I stopped. ‘How could you help her? A woman – a girl who killed her own child – like that – you should have …’
‘What should I have done?’
‘Let her suffer! Make her live with it! Remembering is part of the punishment. If you do something evil—’
‘It was her father’s, too. The man who came to burn this book. He was her father, and the child’s.’
For a moment I didn’t understand what she meant. Then I looked away, feeling sick.
There was the rustle of sackcloth as Seredith drew it back over the bones, and the creak of the box as she perched on the edge of it, holding on to the table to steady herself.
At last she said, ‘I’m not being fair to you, Emmett. Sometimes I do turn people away. Very, very rarely. And not because they’ve done something so terrible I can’t help; only because I know they’ll go on doing terrible things. Then, if I’m sure, I will refuse to help them. But it has only happened three times, in more than sixty years. The others, I helped.’
‘Isn’t burying a baby terrible?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and bowed her head. ‘Of course it is, Emmett.’
A breath. ‘You said, what books are … So every book,’ I said, ‘every book that’s ever been bound, is someone’s memories. Something they’ve chosen to forget.’
‘Yes.’
‘And …’ I cleared my throat. Suddenly I could feel the imprint of my father’s hand on my cheek, the stinging blow he’d given me years ago, as if the pain had never really faded. Never let me see you with a book again. This was what he had wanted to protect me from. And now I was an apprentice; I was going to be a binder.
‘You think,’ I said slowly, ‘you think I’m going to do what you do.’
She didn’t even glance at me. ‘It will be easier,’ she said, from a long way away, ‘if you don’t despise it. Despise books – despise the people who need help – and you despise yourself. Your work.’
‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I won’t. It’s not …’
She laughed. It was so close to her usual amused snort that my stomach twisted. ‘Yes, you can. Binders are born, not made. And you’re a binder born, boy. You may not like the idea of it much now. But you’ll grow to understand. And it won’t let you rest. It’s a great force, inside you. It’s what made you ill, when … You’re stronger in it than most binders I’ve known. You’ll see.’
‘How do you know? You might be wrong—’
‘I know, Emmett.’
‘How?’
‘The binder’s fever gave you away. You will be a good binder. In every sense.’
I shook my head. I went on shaking it, even though I didn’t know why.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘what we do is very difficult. Sometimes it makes me angry or sad. Sometimes I regret – if I’d known what the memories were, I wouldn’t have—’ She stopped and glanced away. ‘Much of the time it doesn’t even touch me. But sometimes I am so glad to see the pain go away that if that were the only person I had ever helped it would still be worth it.’
‘I’m not doing it. It’s wrong. It’s – unnatural.’
She lowered her head, inhaling so deeply I saw her shoulders move. The skin under her eyes looked as fragile as the bloom on a moth’s wing: one touch and it would brush away and leave bare bone. She said, without looking at me, ‘It’s a sacred calling, Emmett. To have another person’s memory entrusted to you … To take the deepest, darkest part away from them and keep it safe, forever. To honour it, to make it beautiful, even though no one will ever see it. To guard it with your own life …’
‘I don’t want to be a glorified gaoler.’
She jolted upright. For a long moment I thought she would hit me again. ‘This is why I didn’t tell you before,’ she said, finally. ‘Because you’re not ready yet, you’re still struggling … But now you know. And you’re lucky to be here. If you had gone to a bindery in Castleford you’d have had your scruples beaten out
