‘The echo of light footsteps on parchment’ by Kimberley Aslett

A large book with parchment pages is lying on the oak table, and you could reach out and touch it with a light finger if you wished. On it is a list of deaths in the parish, a parish that exists in name only now, on maps. The lettering is curled like tendrils of plant material, dried and falling to dust. The deaths are from fever, falls, apoplexy, trampling. Cholera. The deceased are young, mostly. Around the letters and numbers that mark the lives, there are marks on the edges of the page, like a tiny furry creature has made its way around the stories of the deaths, walking through the ink of the lives before it dried.

It might be hard for you to imagine the time when the parchment was half-blank, the year of mud roads and coaches and precarious life. In that year, a barefoot child followed a man on his journeys to the various barbers’ and doctors’ and parish churches where the bodies were taken. The child could follow the flowing black cloak easily, as it was brushed clean and made of a tightly woven wool, and a much better quality than the occupants of most streets would be likely to wear. If you dreamed this man, you would see his home as a place of stone and wood and tapestry and books, of food prepared by a cook and fires lit by a thin girl who would later eat from a wooden bowl in the kitchen.