Kay The Book of Days

'Richly imagined and skillfully crafted' The Spectator
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80075-350-1
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

'At least that post-Reformation sovereignty of the word still yields novels as richly imagined and skilfully crafted as this' The Spectator Longlisted for the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Longlisted in the 2024 HWA Crown Awards ANNO DOMINI 1546. In a manor house in England a young woman feels the walls are closing around her, while her dying husband is obsessed by his vision of a chapel where prayers will be said for his immortal soul. As the days go by and the chapel takes shape, the outside world starts to intrude. But as the old ways are replaced by the new, the people of the village sense a dangerous freedom ... Reader Reviews 'A must read ... Characters that one cares about, beautifully structured, a real page turner' 'A jewel of a book' 'Beautifully written' 'Atmospheric and compelling'

Francesca Kay grew up in Southeast Asia and India, and has subsequently lived in Jamaica, the United States, Germany and now lives in Oxford. Her first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers, and her second novel, The Translation of the Bones, was longlisted for the 2012 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her third novel, The Long Room, was published in 2016; The Book of Days is her fourth.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kay, Francesca

Leseproben

The tenth day of the month of April

Caught on the daylight that comes glancing through the clear glass of the windows on the south wall, the stone dust dances, drifts away and invisibly falls. Stone-taste in the mouth, a breath of dust and bone. New light from the east where there was dark before, and dust on light-beam dancing, dancing to the music of mallets striking stone, a ringing and a rhythm. Jack the elder and Jack the younger taking turns and swinging forward, pulling back, and the stone dust rising as the old wall shudders and yields. A scatter of bright paint across the floor.

A ceremony this, the knocking through, that should have witnesses besides a pair of Jacks, the mason Simm and me. It marks the start of something new. But in the village they are afraid of newness and convinced that when the wall is breached, the roof will fall in too. Even the priest and the churchwarden are keeping at a distance for fear of shattered skulls. They should have greater trust in Simm. He may be saying his prayers this minute to the patron saint of masons but he has also driven iron bars into the stones above the intended rupture and made temporary buttresses from tree trunks; we will be quite safe. Although he was surprised to see me, he did not turn me away and simply warned me to beware of flying chips of stone. Yes, I will be, I remember that a young lad lost an eye last year to a nail that came arrowing straight at him from a piece of timber. Today, the men have bound lengths of cloth about their mouths and noses, and they squint cautiously beneath their caps.

If it were fresh stone that they worked, Simm would call the tune. He is the master musician of the band, the one who hears most clearly the inner note of every new block, who tests it, tapping gently with a chisel, listening, tapping again, ear cocked for the stone’s response. Stone speaks; it says to him: strike here, this is the place for the first cut, here will I break open for you, clean as chalk, clean as the bark of a beech tree lately felled. I have heard Simm whisper to a stone. And seen him tasting one; he tells the provenance of stone by tongue as well as eye, and by his sense of smell. When it is freshly cut, he says, limestone gives off a charnel scent, an autumn air of earth and dying leaves, as if it held within it a remembrance of a time before its form was solid.

But it is not new stone that makes this dust, it is stone that is part of a wall so old that no one knows how long it may have stood here. Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, there was an altar by this wall on which a bank of tapers burned, as they have always burned for untold years, and today the fragments of that altar are stacked up on a barrow. And in the wall itself, where Lazarus once was, for centuries emerging from his tomb still swaddled in his grave-clothes, there is now a widening hole. To make things new, we must destroy, my lord my husband said; but the new will bring great glory.

Jack and Jack work fast. Between the inner face and the outer wall a narrow gap is filled with rubble and crumbled mortar. Jack the elder reaches in and pulls out a length of bone.

Sheep’s bone, Simm says without looking. Throw it on the barrow.

He has a wooden template, the outline of an arch, a graceful shape like a wishbone or like the tips of fingers meeting, which he is holding at the ready. There is still a way to go but now the hole is wide enough to admit a slender person. Little Jack looks enquiringly at the mason.

Yes, why not, Simm says, and Jack crawls through to the far side, one leg first, then folded body, the other leg hauled after. Framed by jagged stone he reappears, his broad grin signalling success.

May I see too?

Simm shakes his head. You will break your ankle on the unsteady pile.

But Jack says he can make a sort of ledge for me from the tumbled stone and help me to jump down. She is but a thin creature, he says to Simm in a whisper that is not as quiet as he thinks. He scrambles back and offers his hand and I take it before Simm can stop me.

Climbing in is as easy as crossing a stile, but as soon as I am there, I feel trapped. The chapel is only half-built; it has a makeshift roof of rushes, the spaces left for windows want mullions and glass, and nothing stops the light from streaming in. But it is still a prison. Women are enclosed by men, in chantries and in tombs. I have a sudden fear that these four walls are drawing closer. Damp and mud-smell now, and Jack’s sweat, the leather of his jerkin and the stone dust, and pools of chilly water on the ground, for winter, having freely played through the scant thatch and the empty windows, has only just retreated, and there has been much rain. I shut my eyes and try to imagine the place when it is finished, to see the traceries of stone, to hear the chanting that it is made for, but I cannot; I must go back into the full light of the sun.

How is it that the seasons turn so fast? Here is a conjuring overnight of green – or white and green – new leaves and cherry blossom, wood anemones and hawthorn in drifts of pure whiteness, as if these green days could not quite surrender their memories of snow.

I should return to the house, now that I have seen what is happening in the church, but it is too hard to forsake this world of light for the stale air of a sickroom. I shall go to the river instead, there is no one here to see me and I will not be long. Such depths of sadness there have been in these past months, and such dark days that I almost stopped believing in the existence of the sun. Weeks of snow, with storms to follow, and then a Lenten spell of pewter skies and rain so fierce it flooded fields, made rivers of the furrows and tadpoles of the seed. Linen, clothing, paper, straw, everything was sodden, and men were fearing for the grain and the waterlogged feet of cattle. Everywhere the sickly bloom of mould. And then it changed. As if the skies had wept their fill, the rains stopped suddenly and left behind this well-washed world of colour.

Simm predicted yesterday that this fine weather would hold at least a week and therefore the building work could recommence. I was not so sure this morning. At dawn, a mist lay thickly on the water meadow or, more exactly, hung above it, like a cloud that is tired of holding itself high but wary of sinking to the ground, lest it be enveloped by the dew. However, Simm was right, and now that mist has disappeared, burned away by sunshine. This April day is already hot as June, and it is good to walk alone through the long grass and the world’s awakening to water that is likewise welcoming the sun’s return and reflecting it in a million discs of gold.

Here the willows, like the thorn trees, are misted in soft green and it is quiet but for the chatter of ducks preoccupied with nests, and the soliloquy of water. No, soliloquy is not the right word, the river does not talk to itself, it converses with its banks and the stones that it flows over. Listen to its voice change when it meets a clutch of roots and must eddy round it, or when it combs through a skein of weed.

When I walk by myself I talk to myself aloud. It is the only way I know of knowing what I think. How else to trap elusive thought but in a net of words? Although there is no call for thought when walking by the river; it conduces to the stilling of the mind. In the continual movement of the water, the dapple and the patterns that it makes of light, in the quicksilver flash of a fish so swift that it might have been imagined had it not left a testament in ripples, it is possible to lose oneself. The river has its own purpose and is indifferent to mine.

I am ever hopeful of the kingfisher, that heart-lifting dart of flame and sapphire-blue. He is in hiding, though, this morning – and why should he be generous with his jewel colours? – but there is a heron, standing so stock-still on the riverbank that at first I mistake it for a dead branch lodged above the water. And, strangely, the bird remains there, unafraid, until I come so close to it that I can see each feather of its schoolman’s cap, its cruel beak and the yellow roundel of its eye. For a while we contemplate each other, bird and woman, until it tires of me and takes slow, meditative, ungainly flight downstream. Yes, and its departure tells me that it is time to go back through the grass-scent and the cuckooflowers to the churchyard and the shadow of the yew tree, and from there to the darkness of the house.

The hangings are drawn back around the bed but the one window is closed and the air lies flat and heavy. He is leaning against pillows, red and gold embroidered, a gaudiness that by contrast turns his skin to parchment. His daughter Agnes sits beside him on a stool.

Do they make progress? he says to me in greeting.

They do. There is an opening almost as wide as a door now, in the north wall. I stepped through it.

And the roof is sound?

It is.

Good. And the Easter sepulchre?

It is broken. The mason Simm could not remove it in one piece but he thinks the stone can be reused. What should he tell the people of the parish? They love that altar.

We will put something finer in its place and the people will be happy. Ask the mason to come to me this afternoon. If this weather stays and the carpenters make haste, he can send for the stone-carvers from Tewkesbury. They are working with my chosen imager at present and he might make the journey with them. If he does, so much the better.

The weather is fair indeed. Will you rise and go to dinner...