A Sheep Looking Upward

Chapter One: A Penny a Page

The letter began, as most of Dolly Snook's letters began, with a lie so small that it barely deserved the name.

"My dearest Kitty," she read aloud, "though the road between us is long, and the mud in it is famous throughout three counties, there is not a mile of it I would not walk twice for the sake of your kindness."

Ephraim Wicks, carter, sat on an upturned bucket in the yard of the Flying Horse with his hat crushed between his hands like a man wringing out a dishcloth. He had a face the colour of boiled ham and he was crying.

"That's beautiful," he said. "That's what I meant."

"That's what you meant," Dolly agreed.

What he had actually said, standing in the yard nine minutes earlier, was: tell her I'll be through Tewkesbury Thursday and does she still keep them hens. Dolly had turned it into two hundred and forty words. There was a passage about the hens that would have done credit to a poet, and a line near the end in which Ephraim Wicks confessed that he thought of her whenever he passed a hawthorn in flower, which was not true, because Ephraim Wicks had never in his life noticed a hawthorn, but which was going to get him married before Christmas.

"Penny a page," said Dolly. "That's two pages."

"It's not two pages."

"It's two pages when I write it fair. This is the rough. In the fair copy I do the capitals with the little curls, which is what makes a woman feel she's been written to by a gentleman." Dolly held out her hand. It was red to the wrist from scouring, and the nails were bitten, and the middle finger had a hard yellow lump on it like a small horn from twelve years of holding a pen she was never supposed to have learned to hold. "Tuppence."

He paid. They all paid. That was the beauty of the trade: a man who cannot read cannot check, and a man who cannot check will believe absolutely anything about himself if you write it down in a good hand and read it back to him in a warm voice. Dolly had eleven regular customers among the carters and drovers who used the Flying Horse, and every one of them believed himself to be, in correspondence, a person of feeling.

She did not think of this as cheating. She thought of it as improvement, which was a word much in fashion in the town of Chattock that year, and she considered herself, in her way, a public benefactor.

The Flying Horse stood at the top of the market place in Chattock, in the county of Gloucestershire, and it was the sort of inn that is described in guidebooks as ancient when what is meant is damp. It leaned. It had leaned for a hundred and forty years, in the manner of a man who has decided to lean and will not now be argued out of it. The sign showed a horse with wings, painted by somebody who had seen a horse. Inside there were two parlours, a long room upstairs where the town held its meetings, eleven beds, nine of which had bedbugs of long standing and settled habits, and a kitchen in which Dolly Snook had spent the last five years of her life being indentured, scoured, shouted at, and occasionally hit with the flat of a wooden spoon.

She was seventeen. She had a thin freckled face, hair the colour of wet straw which she kept jammed under a cap, and an expression of respectful stupidity that she could put on and take off like an apron. It had cost her a great deal of practice. Underneath it she was doing arithmetic almost all the time.

She was doing arithmetic now, going up the back stairs with a jug in each hand. Three pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence. It lived in a stocking inside a hole in the plaster behind the salt box, and it had taken her four years to build, at a penny a page, and it needed to be twelve pounds by Michaelmas.

Twelve pounds was the number Mrs. Jemima Tuckett had named for the remainder of Dolly's indenture. Twelve pounds was also the number that would stop something worse, and that something worse was at this moment in the yard, lying on his stomach on the cobbles, drawing a rook in the dust with his finger.

"Isaac," said Dolly.

"That's Old Grievance," said her brother, without looking up. "You can tell because of the way his shoulders go. He's the one that stole the button."

Isaac Snook was nine. He was small even for nine, with their mother's black hair and their father's ears, and he had two great enthusiasms in life. The first was feathers; he kept them in a wooden box under the malt sacks, arranged by owner, and he could tell you the family history of every rook in the churchyard elms, because he had given them all names and did not consider this a game. There was Old Grievance, and Thomas, and Kitty, and one enormous glossy bully he called The Bishop.

The second enthusiasm — and this was the trouble, and had always been the trouble — was the truth.

It was not that Isaac was a moral child. Isaac would take an apple off a stall without a flicker. It was that his mouth had never once in nine years been persuaded to hold a fact that his brain had let in. If you asked him a question he answered it, immediately, completely, at speed, with details, to anybody, including magistrates, including excise men, including the woman from Bickenholt who wanted to know whether the Flying Horse watered its beer. He had told her. He had told her how much water, and where the bucket was kept.

Dolly loved him with a violence that occasionally frightened her, and she had spent nine years steering him around the town the way a man steers a lit candle through a hayrick.

"Isaac. Get up. Mrs. Tuckett wants the small parlour swept and if she finds you on the ground she'll—"

"Mrs. Tuckett says I'm to go to Mr. Cadge at Michaelmas," said Isaac.

Dolly stopped on the second stair.

"Say that again."

"She said it to Mr. Cadge in the passage this morning while I was carrying the ash. She said, he eats like a hog and he broke two jugs Tuesday and I'll be glad to see the back of him, and Mr. Cadge said, he's a good size, I like them that size, and she said Michaelmas then, and Mr. Cadge said Michaelmas, and then they shook hands." Isaac considered. "Mr. Cadge smells of soot and something else. Vinegar, I think. And he has a boy called Ambrose with no eyelashes."

There was a silence in the yard. Somewhere behind the stable, a hen made a remark.

"Isaac," said Dolly, very carefully, "do you know what a sweep's boy does?"

"He goes up the chimneys." Isaac frowned. "Mr. Cadge says it's healthy work and the soot keeps the damp off your chest. But John Pargiter says the boys get stuck sometimes and they light a bit of straw under them to make them go on, and their knees go all—"

"John Pargiter's a liar."

"He isn't, though," said Isaac. "Is he."

And that was the thing about Isaac. He was nine, and he could not lie, and he had therefore developed an extremely accurate sense of when other people were doing it, in the way that a man with no sense of smell learns to read the faces of people in a room.

Dolly set the jugs on the mounting block and sat down on the bottom step and put her hands over her face for exactly as long as she could afford, which was three breaths.

Then she said, "Right," and stood up, and went to find Mrs. Tuckett.

Jemima Tuckett was in the brewhouse with her sleeves rolled up over forearms like two hams in a hurry. She had been widowed at thirty-one and had run the Flying Horse for nineteen years on a diet of grievance and strong ale, and she had a genuine talent, which was for knowing to the halfpenny what everything and everybody in Chattock was worth.

"Ma'am," said Dolly. "About Isaac."

"He told you, then." Mrs. Tuckett did not look up from the mash tun. "Of course he told you. That child would tell a Frenchman where we hide the plate."

"He's nine."

"He's nine and he eats like a curate. Cadge gives me thirty shillings for him and takes him off my board, and I keep his indenture money against the jugs." She straightened. "Don't look at me like that, girl. I'm not a wicked woman. Wicked women don't work."

"If I bring you twelve pounds by Michaelmas—"

"Then I'll cancel yours and let you take him and good luck to the pair of you. I said that in March and I'll say it in September. Twelve pounds." Mrs. Tuckett wiped her hands. "And where's a skivvy going to get twelve pounds? Don't answer. I know about the letters. Penny a page, and half the carters in the west of England thinking they're Sir Somebody. I've a mind to take a cut."

"You'd be within your rights," said Dolly, with her stupid face on.

"I would." Mrs. Tuckett looked at her for a moment with something that was almost fondness and mostly appraisal. "Nine weeks, Dolly Snook. Now go and get the long room ready, the Improvement Society's sitting at seven and Sir Reginald's coming, and if there's dust on the chairs he'll write to the newspaper about the moral condition of the poor."

Dolly went. On the stairs she stopped and counted again, because she could not help it. Three pounds eleven and fourpence, at a penny a page, was eight hundred and fifty-two pages. To reach twelve pounds she needed two thousand and twenty-four more, in nine weeks, from eleven carters, in a town of two thousand people who mostly could not read.

It was not possible.

She went up and swept the long room, and set out the chairs, and put the good candles in the sconces because Sir Reginald counted them, and then she stood behind the door with the jug in her hands and listened to twelve gentlemen decide to spend sixty guineas on a balloon.

That was the fourth of August, 1785, and it is the day the trouble ought properly to be dated from, though Dolly always afterwards said it began with the soup.