Harvest

11

HAVE FORGOTTEN MASTER JORDAN’S GROOM. I suppose I should have guessed how jealous he would be of the sidemen and the time they spent with female captives in the gallery. I am sure he will have overheard the quizzing and the probings and would have liked to creep upstairs to make his contribution. But he was not allowed. You’re just the horses man, they will have said. And so his comrades had the pleasure. He had none. He had to be the guard outside Master Kent’s bed-parlor. He was ungratified, and therefore he’ll be dangerous. Already, he has been left with too much leisure on his hands these past few days. Of all the Jordan party, he has had the least to do. Once he has fed and groomed his mounts and let them loose on the master’s edges to crop on wayside grass, the body of the day is his to waste. He wanders idly through our village lanes and makes a nuisance of himself with any pretty face he meets. He bothers livestock and scrumps our fruit. He pokes his nose through gates and doors that should be barred to him. He is the only one, as yet, who has the inclination and the time to test out rotten apples and putrid curses on Mistress Beldam’s husband at the pillory. He is the only one who’s been constant in his hunt for the woman herself. Today his efforts have been redoubled because, as he now understands from the events of last night at the manor house, in which he sadly has not played a satisfying part, there is a free-roaming sorceress to lay his hands upon and one not set aside only for those pampered sidemen to enjoy.

It is his misfortune, though, to be spotted standing and facing me, while I sit on my bench hoping for a greeting from a neighbor. He wants to know where I suppose a woman of her kind might find some secret refuge from where she can emerge at night to carry out her killings. I do not think he knows what enemies he’s made for simply being in the Jordan crew. How can he guess, in all his innocence, that I’m not popular today and that being in my company will not seem widely sociable? Certainly, he should have calculated for himself how rash it is, the morning after such occurrences, to walk into our village midst with nothing for protection except a length of rein. I must suppose he hopes to lead a chastened Mistress Beldam to his master on the knotted end of it.

On any other day but this he would be safe. We’d all be threshing, winnowing and sacking, and would shrug him off as nothing but a nuisance, as nothing worthier than chaff. But our women and our Gleaning Queen are still unaccounted for, beyond that talk of witchery. I know better than to enlighten them with Master Kent’s distressing news; they will not trust a word I say. What’s more, our three sons whose beds were cold and empty last night are still missed and missing from their homes. The master and myself are not the only ones to have despairing hearts. So we — yes, we; I still say we—are as tense and volatile as wasps. No one, not a single soul of us, has taken to their tools today. Even I, with my scarred hand, have not gone early to the manor house to labor on the thinning of the vellum square, its pumicing and chalking. I have no duty there, not even if the Chart-Maker returns. I can be of no use to him, except perhaps to find him and warn him about the welcome he’ll receive. I will hunt for him. I have a duty to the man. But since I last saw him scuttling in Mistress Beldam’s steps, I do not like to contemplate where he might be. I fear his injury. I fear that he is intimate with her. So, for the moment, I am sauntering about the lanes or loafing on my outside bench, approachable, but listless with unease.

Our village would seem leisurely to any passers-by. At least, our hands are idle. But this is not a feast day with pleasures to anticipate. We won’t be dancing to Thomas Rogers’s pipe tonight, or Mr. Quill’s fiddle, come to that. Our sluggishness is no more purposeful than our scurrying. Already our village fabric is unraveling. The harvested barley is uncared for. A sack has toppled, and spilt. No one is even seeing off the rats. There are sour cattle droppings waiting to be spread, molehills to be kicked over, cow ticks to be removed, unless we want our animals enfeebled by the theft of blood. Whoever was the gong-farmer this morning has not done his duty. The barrow is still clean and free from flies, and the latrines are not worth visiting. Our pigs have not yet received their morning scraps. That diseased bough from the Kips’ old cherry tree has fallen finally, and blocks a path, but none of the Kips has dragged it away or offered it an axe; there’s two night’s winter fuel there at least. Anyone that chances on it barely gives it a glance, but steps around the trunk with a vacant face. The cattle are protesting on the common land, heavy with milk. A gate hangs loose — the rarest sight — and cocks and hens are walking free as if they know these lanes will soon be theirs. But there are greater matters to resolve than hens. A congregation has been called, I hear, for noon. I will not go, of course. Until that time, my neighbors are as bored and puzzled as a pack of parlor cats with nothing close to scratch. With nothing close to scratch, that is, until they see me talking to the groom, not telling him where Mistress Beldam might have found her hideaway.

He is a smaller man than any of the Jordan constables, and lighter even than the steward, who, though quite short, is built of oak. That’s not to say the groom isn’t dangerous — but he’d be more dangerous to women or to the horses in his charge than to Lizzie’s father, Gervase Carr, a quietly violent man when it most counts. Where is his daughter, he wants to know, asking roughly but from a distance, at first. The groom just shrugs, but doesn’t turn. He knows enough about the weighing of the world to judge that a gentleman’s groom will tip the scales more heavily than a clodhopper. Gervase takes a step forward toward the bench where I am sitting and toward the groom’s back. Another half a dozen steps and he will be able to reach out and seize this fellow by his scruff. “It’s Lizzie Carr I’m talking of. You’ve seen her, haven’t you? She’s just a little twig of a girl. Your master has her at the house—”

“She’s owned up to all her wickedness,” the groom replies. He really ought to step away. Instead, he turns around finally. He miscalculates the situation he is in, although he can’t but be surprised to see the swelling crowd at Gervase Carr’s shoulder. He attempts a quip. “If she’s a twig, then she’ll burn very nicely with those other sorcerers,” he says, pushing out his hands as if to warm them at a fire. “We’ll have a bit of charcoal from her yet.”

It’s Lizzie’s mother who reaches him first. Gervase is slow to take the groom’s full meaning and is looking more puzzled than alarmed. But his wife is cut from quicker stock. She takes the fellow by the ear. She has two sons, and so she’s practiced at that art. She twists, and then she has him by the hair. Gervase is next. His wife has marked the way. Then all I know is, there’s a sudden rush. The others jostle in. A body hits the far end of my bench and I have tumbled backward, falling awkwardly and with no dignity into the pebbled rain ditch at the foundings of my cottage. A second blow topples me before I can get back on my feet. A booted foot has kicked me in the face. An accident, I hope. But I am wise enough to keep myself rolled up, like a hedgehog, with my back turned to the oddly quiet scrum. No one is calling or saying anything. All I hear is thud on thud, a farming sound, a livestock sound. A thousand stinging grievances are settling on the groom; a hundred angry, waspy fists are hurting him. He might still walk away with bruises and not wounds but then one of the Saxton lads decides to outdo his brothers by stepping forward with his pruning blade and widening his victim’s quipping mouth, from lip to cheek, with one efficient strike.

Without the sudden show of blood, which leaves its mark not only on a dozen of my neighbors but also across my bench and breeches, nothing would have stopped the punching, I’m sure of it. But blood unsettles us. We step away from it. Unless it’s ours, we have to wipe it off at once. And so the beating of the groom loses its nerve as quickly as it was found. Gervase Carr retreats to swab his bloody knuckles in the grass. The Saxton lad runs off to wash his blade. Two sisters spit on each other’s aprons to help scrub out the appalling splashes. Everybody checks their clothes.

Quite soon we are alone once more, the Jordan groom and I. I’m stunned and angry and alarmed, slow to stand and find my footing. He’s hardly moving, but he’s certainly alive. A dead man never made such noise. But I’m the only one to hear his pain, and I’m the only one, I have to say, who hasn’t hit the man. I’m glad he has survived to stand as witness to that truth — if that mouth can ever speak again.

The lane has emptied suddenly. They’re running now. There’s not a person in the village who won’t have realized at once, with the spurting of the groom’s blood and the gory gaping of his face, that everything has changed for the worst. It’s almost safe to roast our master’s doves; it’s possible to kill our master’s mare and not be caught for it. But beating up and cutting through a Jordan man will throw us all at the mercy of a less forgiving outside world, one that will not rest or let us rest until its duty has been done, until its justice has been satisfied. God bless us all, and God help all of us. There isn’t one of us — no, them—who’s safe.

I’M NOT SURPRISED THIS AFTERNOON to see it is the Carrs and Saxtons who leave the village first. They know they have the most to fear. It was their fists and their pruning knife that did the greatest damage. There’s no escaping punishment. Even neighbor John and his wife, Emma, have been persuaded that it’s best to pack their burdens and their sorrows in a shoulder bag and join his brother’s family in their flight. No one with that name is safe, not once the groom has dripped his blood-blinded way back to the manor house and shown the stabbing and the beating he’s endured for being nothing else but Master Jordan’s loyal man.

John is hollowed out, a husk. His shoulders slope not only from the weight of his bundles and packs but also, seemingly, from having to leave behind the bones and body of his customary life. This will be a bitter day for him, for all of them. He does not look at me when he steps away from his front door for what could be the final time — we made our lasting peace this morning, in the darkness of my room — but should he have chosen to I would not have tested him on the fate of his young niece. What else are they supposed to do? I know it’s not their intention to abandon Lizzie coldly to her fate. But there are other Carrs to think of now, other Carrs to be protected first. They need to make them safe beyond our bounds, and then I’m sure there must be other plans to make the family whole again. A farmer knows to gate the herd before he hunts the stray. Fleeing now can make no difference. And staying in the village would not secure the girl. She’d still be orphaned; her parents are the instigators of the beating and so cannot expect to live, once enforcers have arrived. Already they have heard the whinnying of a horse, protesting at its saddle and its reins. And they have harkened to the hoofbeats of a rider — Mr. Baynham, I would guess; the sidemen will be needed now, to bruise and bully us — setting off up the same lane along which he descended when the Jordan party first arrived. It is not long before the village hears the four blasts on the steward’s saddle horn to let us know that he has ridden into safer ground.

Our village is not purposeless this afternoon. It’s like another working day. Except it’s busy with the tying up of bundles and the stitching up of skins. It’s busy with farewells, from which I find myself excluded. I only watch, and hug my neighbors in my dreams. The next to confess their departure are the Higgs and Derby families. For them it is an easier choice. Their sons have gone ahead of them. They’re following. They’ll be reunited on the road. Each of the four remaining family men takes a corner of the winnowing screen which serves as old mother Derby’s litter. She shares it with their luggage and their clothes, but does her best to keep it light by lying still, with her knees drawn up against her chest. There are no tears as they set off, so far as I can tell. They’re being calm and competent. They are not fools. It’s best to get away before the trouble really starts. They’ve guessed what Mr. Baynham’s mission is. He’ll come back either with a pack of twenty sidemen, meaner than the three already here, or a troop of soldiers, armed for a battle and disappointed if they can’t start one. That saddle horn has sounded their defeat.

At first, some of the more reluctant families, the ones who’ve hardly punched the groom and so imagine they’ll be spared the very worst of punishments, say they’ll take the risk and stay. They have not quantified the risk; they’ve only quantified the loss. The tally they draw up contains the anxious and the menial—“We haven’t finished sacking up our barley yet. What happens to the hens?”—but also the weighty legacies of family and land, too weighty to be carried on their backs. “We’ve plowed these fields since Adam’s time,” they say, counting back the granddads on their fingertips. They’re ancient families. They’ll not easily be driven out before the torrents of the law, to disappear in towns or villages where their names and faces cannot ring a bell, robbed of their spirits and their futures, as well as of their fields. But people who have bounced between feast and famine all their lives are nothing if not tough-minded and hard-nosed. A sack of barley is not worth a life, they realize, as they watch the afternoon sun dip into the latticework of trees. They’re short of time. And so they start to gather up their things. There’ll be no plowing if you’re dead, or anchored to the wall of some dark cell. Besides, departures do not need to be final, they tell themselves. The prodigal comes home. The swallows and the swifts return in spring. It’s prudent, though, to fear the worst and run for cover if the clouds are black enough. And the clouds are clearly black enough today. No matter how these ancients play it through their minds, the stabbing of a master’s man, on top of everything, must mean the end of their tranquillity. They’ll have to find tranquillity elsewhere. Surely life beyond these fields cannot be as sinister and dangerous, as fearsome, loathsome and bizarre, as Master Kent has claimed when he is drunk and telling them of imps and oceans, tree fish, mermaids, cannibals, men with hoofs and women who lay eggs. He is only teasing them. Surely, he is only teasing them.

So the numbers swell throughout the afternoon, until finally everybody I have known in this placid line of cottages accepts that it’s best to put some distance between themselves and Master Jordan’s men, especially that groom, especially his freshly carved gargoyle face. They shudder at the thought of him. Once the decision has been made, I can see — and I’m surprised and touched by it — a kind of determined, turbulent happiness taking hold. If there is grief and anger in the air, there is also jollity. Some of the younger ones are almost smiling with relief as they set off to cross our village limits for the first time in their lives, relieved to get away before they’re caught, of course, but also glad that what’s ahead of them is not predictable. They’ve found a reason to stride bravely off. Their hearts are leaping and their heads are clear. They’re free at last, and filling up with hope with every step. Perhaps they will encounter marvels on the way.

Most of them take the widest lane, the one that Mr. Baynham followed on his horse, because it means they at least can lead a cow or goat with them, or carry their hens and geese in baskets on their barrows and their carts. The Kips even succeed in putting an ox between the shafts of a hay wagon and setting off with almost everything they own, including all their stoppered bottles of cordial and their gleaning sacks. Of course, their names are going with them too. All of the village names that count are moving out. Soon they will have gone beyond the hoof-trod paths and drift-ways on The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman, and will have reached the wonder of a graveled surface, the wagon ways of post-horn carriages, packhorse trains and carting loads. They will have joined the restless, paler people of the towns.

Only the Carrs and Saxtons take the slower, deeper, forest route, despite their lifelong dread of going for too long without the certainty of either daylight or the moon. The trees at the forest’s heart might not have seen a human face before. There might not even be a path. That means these neighbors cannot draw their carts or take with them any of their more valuable animals. They’ll leave them to find forage of their own. “Let them eat wool,” I mutter at my neighbors’ backs, making light as best I can of all their troubles, present and forthcoming, their lamentable hereafters, as Mr. Quill has titled them. But going by the forest route does mean they’re safe at least from mounted pursuit. With any luck they’ll not be caught, they’ll not be hunted down like deer. Who knows, within a day or two they might have reached another line of bounds and someone else’s common ground, where they can put up their hut — four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof — and light a fire. They’ll build a place; they’ll lay a hearth; they know the custom and the law. Their smoke will give them liberty to stay.

I AM IN KITTY GOSSE’S BED AGAIN. She isn’t stretched out at my side, of course. Tonight the only fingers fanned across my abdomen are my own. I’ve not laid eyes, or hands, on her since early yesterday. Her absence is an agony. I am surprised to feel so sick of heart because, of late, my wider carings have been narrowed by my wife’s too recent death. Kitty and I have not been honeyed lovers, after all, but falling short of that — something simpler, I suppose, something less affecting. But, still, the knowledge of her torments at the manor lies leaden in my stomach, a heavy, undigested stew which increases in its girth the more I ponder it. I’m brimming now with fret and bile, because of her.

I hope to find escape in sleep. But before I even try to sleep, before I dare to fall asleep, I have to tidy up the mess left by the three sidemen during their ransacking, the same three men who pained my Kitty Gosse. I had my choice of many beds, of all the village beds, in fact. There’s not a neighbor’s home that’s closed to me. But the habits of half a lifetime will not be shed so suddenly. I don’t feel free to trespass in their forsaken rooms, let alone rest my head and body in someone else’s dents, without their first inviting me. I think I’m hoping to recover some of their trust even though they are too far away and too long gone to witness my timid, loyal observance of our country practices or even care what I might do. But Mistress Gosse’s home has on occasion let me in quite willingly, and so I am pressed into dents that do, to some extent, belong to me.

I could not have slept comfortably in my own bed — at least, I did not want to take the risk. What I must regard as John Carr’s final, kind advice — that I was named as part of a conspiracy and should, therefore, pack up, move out and save myself, is unsettling still. My head is bustling with bitter, bruising possibilities. If Master Jordan’s men are looking now for Mr. Quill, no doubt they would be pleased to capture his assistant too, his vellum-maker, his companion on the bounds. It’s all too easy to imagine what might occur if I were sleeping in my bed at home, wrapped up in my own rough cloth inside my own rough room. I’d be woken by the breaking open of the door. They’d drag me by my ankles to the manor house. My cheekbone’s already cracked today, and hurting; it’s fractured, possibly. My jaw is stiff. Chewing on the apple and the stub of bread I had for supper was hard work. So I will be punished all the more if I am bounced among the windfalls in the lane. I see myself laid out on the long bench in the porch on stone already moist and cold from Mistress Beldam’s father’s corpse. I am the one who sleeps with Willowjack. My everlasting paradise is Turd and Turf. I take the blame for everything.

I must remind myself that Master Kent has told me otherwise. He says I am not counted as a suspect. I’m ashamed to say, the opposite is true. I’m taken by his cousin for a man he can “rely upon,” that was the way he phrased it. Unlike neighbor Carr, Master Kent was privy to last night’s excesses, even though a floorboard blocked his view, and so his word has some authority. He promises I’ve not been named by widow Gosse. He could be wrong entirely or the circumstances might change, of course: each day the story of our lives is forced onto a different track. Nothing seems impossible. But my instinct almost persuades me he is right. There has been something in the way Master Jordan looks at me — he’s weighing me; I’m livestock in his eyes — to make me wonder if he hopes one day to find me useful, a beast of burden he can put to work. He must realize I’m truly not a villager. He knows I used to be the manor man. He sees I stand apart. I’m separate. Indeed, I haven’t felt as separate in years. Perhaps it’s just as well, this recent, saddening detachment from the drove. I almost welcome it. These loose roots might save me yet.

So I find some calm in Kitty Gosse’s bed, though fleetingly. My naps are fly-by-night and fugitive. I cannot stay asleep. Because the demons come again. They’re taunting me with: You’re Master Jordan’s donkey now; You don’t deserve kind neighbors and good friends; you did deserve that hearty kicking when you toppled from your bench into the rain ditch this afternoon; There’s more and worse to come for you; watch out. I imagine for a second time that breaking open of my door, that dragging of my body by its ankles through the night. It is not the sidemen beating me but Saxtons, Rogerses, Gosses, Derbys, Kips and Carrs. Yes, someone that I must have thought of as a neighbor or a friend has struck me in the face today. The bruises have flowered on my cheek and the pain is ripening, I find myself so saddened and incensed that I can hardly hope for the salve of lasting sleep.

Counting sheep is not the remedy. The night itself is also keeping me awake. Its wind is pelleting its buckshot stars across the sky. The trees cry out already for their departed friends. Abandoned animals are demanding care, despite the dark. It is as if they know I’m here and are impatient for my services. I ought to drag my aching face out of the widow’s bed and attend to them, attend to everything and anyone that needs me in the night. For there is no forgetting there are other human hearts out there, more damp and cold than mine. I’m haunted now by the thought of Mr. Quill, not only by the fear that he’s been caught, but also by Master Kent’s report that the missing man slept elsewhere. The last time I saw him was at the pillory. One moment he was putting his finger on my hand, the next he was almost out of sight, crashing through the sore-hocks in Mistress Beldam’s traces, and her scent.

I am not being generous or sensible. What does it matter if he captured her? What loss is it to me? Indeed, it might be best if that were so, if he caught up with her elsewhere and hushed her cries to tell her of the danger she was in. But then surely he would have gone back to the manor house at once, his duty done, his conscience clear, and not slept elsewhere. And I am bothered by the thought, the tormenting drama, actually, of that cropped head on Mr. Quill’s bent chest. I almost put his lips on hers. I almost see his graceless body — bared, as white as moonlight — in her arms. I am so bothered that I placate the tension with my hands, alone in widow Gosse’s bed, where so many times of late the tensions have been stroked away by her. Of course, I’m left more bleak than I began. My loneliness is evidenced in wasted seed and empty cottages.

Who are my neighbors now? I’m counting them on gluey fingers. My tally is the strangest one. There’s not a willing soul remains within our bounds who entirely belongs to these commons and these fields. Apart from Kitty Gosse, Anne Rogers and Lizzie Carr, if they’re alive, no one who’s stayed was born close by. No one who’s stayed has family. My reckoning provides me with just seven bodies freely sleeping under a roof: four Jordan men — the steward has already ridden off for help — the two masters of the manor and dissenting cousins, and myself (though not quite sleeping yet). There is the husband at the pillory, of course. I must remember him. He has no roof. And then the missing couple, unaccountable, the sorceress, the Chart-Maker. I have to say it: beauty and the beast.

I force myself to concentrate. If I can only ponder on a single task — forget the woman, Mr. Quill, my bruises and the neighbors who provided them, all talk of sorcery, the horrors of the coming dawn … no, stop. If I can only find a single task to think about, to practice in my weariness, I will sleep. I know that I will sleep. Labor is the gateway to a night of rest. I take myself off to the barn. I close my eyes and fly there like a bat. And there I find discarded tools. And I commence — at least restart — the threshing of our barley crop. Quite soon I’ve made a rhythm with my flail. My neighbors should be proud of me. I work the thump, until it’s beating with my heart. I dream of plows and oxen, furrows, grain.