Harvest

4

S LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, I have been assigned to be Mr. Quill’s assistant for the week. My wounded hand excuses me from hard work in the threshing barns. Master Kent insists on it. Once more he proves himself my friend. I shouldn’t try to grip tools or carry anything, he warns. Any pressure and I’ll burst the cushioning of water-whelks and blisters that are already forming at the edges of the burn. I’m not fit for laboring, “And never was,” he wants to say. (Perhaps he would employ me as his man again.) The grain can be separated from the chaff without my help for the next few days. My greater duty is to save my hand. There’re men and women both of us could name who’ve lost a limb and then their lives because a wound has not healed properly. I have to keep it cold and dry but open to the air, so that the savaged skin at the center can peel away or form a crust. At the moment it’s too swampy to dry and harden. It’s oozing liquids of the sort I’d normally expect to run out of my nose. And the pain, though not as searing as it was, is almost more than I can bear. It is unforgiving. I have not had a wink of sleep all night, well, that much of the night I spent shivering in bed and not out in the rain hunting for the sorceress. And now I walk with one hand raised and cupped in front of me. I am a beggar for the day, I’m told. My neighbors look into my palm, raise their eyebrows, wish me well, but I suspect they’re jealous of my easy occupation. Already they have labeled me Quill-Carrier-in-Chief. They think we’ll make a comic pair: the stumbler and the beggar, both damaged on the left and with only a couple of useful hands between them.

Still, I’m not so wounded that I want to avoid the gleaning field before my hands-free working day with Mr. Quill begins. Our boys have been at the edges of the stub since first light, keeping off the birds with stones, clapping-boards and slings but not stepping on the field itself. That’s not their privilege. Their dawn chorus prises us from bed and hurries us out of our cottages for an early meeting with our Queen.

Our village has been washed and muddied by the storm, but the clouds have cleared. It promises to be a steep and sunny day. Already it is bright and hot enough for us to shelter under rye-straw hats. We all feel harvest-worn to some degree, not thick-headed from last night’s ale — well, not only that — and not only burned back to the soul by yesterday’s two fires and the smoke-stained turbulence that followed them, but fatigued by all the mutual labors of the year. Daily duties have deferred our weariness till now, then sapped us even more by giving us a day of rest. Our muscles are not used to it. An unused muscle stiffens like a drying rag. In this we are at one with everything we see and hear and smell. Despite the sweating soil and the enameling of puddles from the midnight storm, the land itself is harvest-worn. So are the lanes. We have been too occupied until today to see how beaten down by wheels and hoofs our cartways have become. They’re shiny, worn away and sinking in from the season’s slog and grind, and from our animals’ exertions. Each step we’ve taken since the last frost at winter’s end — an age ago — has left its imprint on our earth.

What wind there was yesterday after we dispatched the final sheaf gathered up and spread much of the lighter, finer chaff. The village has been freckled by the chaff. The service trees between our dwellings and the gleaning field are still embroidered with it and with straw, despite the rain. On the way between the harvest and the stackyard, unsecured bundles of cut barley have dropped on the verges from our wagons and our barrows, providing pickings for the ruddocks and the dunnocks to contest, and there are signs in the disrupted soil that someone’s pigs are on the loose and have been snouting for fallen grain. There is a silent ripeness to the air, so mellow and sappy that we want to breathe it shallowly, to sip it richly like a cordial. No one who knows the busy, kindly, scented universe of crops and the unerring traces of its calendar could mistake this morning’s aromatic peace and quiet for anything but Gleaning Day.

Now that we are gathered at the entry to the field, we stay and wait. With the sudden ending of our dance last night and the interruptions of the storm, we failed to nominate our Queen. Such negligence is bound to bring bad luck. We’ve never woken up before on Gleaning Day without a pretty sovereign to rule the stub. But Master Kent has said that we can settle it this morning. So all the girls and unwed lasses have put on their fineries, or more exactly borrowed firstly from their mothers’ ribbon bags or dowry chests and then from their gardens and our hedgerows, making yellow drapes and garlands for themselves from tansy, ragwort and hawkweed blooms. Some of the more ambitious ones have smeared their cheeks and forearms with a golden petal paste. They look both pestilent and regal.

We can already see Master Kent bobbing high above the hedges of the manor lane as he rides toward us on his Willowjack. He too has made an effort for the day. His best high hat, usually reserved for marriages and funerals, is sashed with two woven cloths, one lemon-yellow, one apple-green, his wife’s heirlooms. She was fond of brightness. Now we have some moments to inspect our girls and choose which one we’ll raise our voices for. Here is a chance as well to look out across and down the sloping barley field and offer thanks, not to some higher being but to the soil itself. Can it really be almost a year since we last led out our oxen and took our plows to it, fixing our eyes on the leaf-bare treetops in the dell to keep our furrows straight and true, on what I recall to be a dull and chilling day? Then once the cold had nipped the clod, we came again for harrowing, flattening ridges to provide the fine tilth that best comforts barley, picking out the surface stones. Can it really be half a year since spring, when we fixed our eyes again on those same tops to see them fattening with leaf and we spread out across the field in rows to broadcast seed, throwing our grain forward equally and to the swing of every step, spreading tiny vows with a plentiful hand? This year the first warm rains were late. The field was slow to blush with green, and what early shoots dared show themselves were shy and flimsy. We watched the barley with anxiety, first fearing drought and then, once our plants reached knee-height, praying that the sky would spare us gales.

That is our custom. We are daily nervous for the crop — though there are times, for me at least and especially at night in my cold cot, when I resent the tyranny of nervousness. I hear the stress and thrust of wind and unaccountably my spirits lift. My dreams are thrilled of late by flattened fields. I wake ashamed and cannot meet my neighbors’ eyes. They might imagine I’ve fallen out of love with them, and fallen out of love with here.

When I first came to these vicinities I thought I’d discovered not quite paradise, but at least a fruitful opportunity — some honest freedom and some scope. Some fertile soil! I’d never known such giving land and sky. I do remember my first week, and — still my master’s serving man — walking through the commons to the forest edge and not daring to go in, but touching everything. I’d found a treasury. I know I pushed my nose against a tree and was surprised by the ancient sweetness of the bark. I know I stood and studied ants, not guessing yet what antlike labors were awaiting me. I know I picked a flower for my cap. And then I set my eyes on Cecily and saw a chance to build a future here. I wooed her by working at her elbow in her fields, attending to the hunger of her soil. My labor was an act of love. My unaccustomed muscles grew and ached for her. I put my shoulder to the plow for her. I became as tough as ash for her. I had no choice. The countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you. It wants to dish out scars and bruises. It wants to give you roughened palms and gritty eyes. It likes to snag and tear your arms and legs on briars and on brambles every time you presume to leave the path. But this was precisely what I most liked about this village life, the way we had to press our cheeks and chests against a living, fickle world which in the place where I and Master Kent had lived before only displayed itself as casual weeds in cracks or on our market stalls where country goods were put on sale, already ripe, and magicked up from God knows where. It didn’t matter if it rained or blew all day and night in town. We pulled on caps. We slammed our doors and windows tight. The weather wasn’t any threat to us. Back then, the sun was neither enemy nor friend.

I cannot say I long for that again, but I am less content than I should be. I have my portion and my place. I’m fortunate. But twelve years here is not enough to make me feel utterly at home — not when I haven’t truly got a home and haven’t had since Cecily was pilfered by the fever, that overwhelming midnight pillager, as brutal as a fox. Without my Cecily, my labor has no love in it. It’s only dutiful. I’ll never be a Rogers or a Derby or a Higgs, so woven to the fabric of the place that nothing else and nothing more seem possible. Their best riches are their ignorance of wealth. I’m not a product of these commons but just a visitor who’s stayed. And now that these latest visitors have come — these three encroachers on our land; this lurching fellow and his charts — I am unnerved. I am reminded that there is another world clear of the forest tops, a world beyond the rule of seasons, a redrawn world, as Mr. Quill has said, where there are “hereafters.” I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field and wonder what the future has in mind for me.

Master Kent arrives in his cheerful hat and drives my troubled dreams away. In addition to the sashes around his brim, he has also knotted his ankles with golden ribbons and decorated Willowjack’s mane with yellow strings. Mr. Quill, who has accompanied them on foot, is trimmed at calf, cuff and throat in ribbons, a merry pillory of cloth. He is all smiles, of course. It’s hard to read a face that always wears a masking smile. The master does not dismount — I think he feels that ceremony should keep him in the saddle; he also looks a little frail today and unusually anxious — but he manages to make a pleasant speech, addressing us from aloft like a huntsman talking fondly to his hounds or beaters. This is “a noble day,” he says, as usual. Anything we glean is ours to keep, of course. We are free to take any remaining barley we find to our kitchen pots, for stew or beer or stover. We do not need to add it to the common wealth, or store it in the stackyard for any general benefit. After us will come the livestock, he says, in order of their station: our cattle will be loosed into the field to reduce the stubble, then the geese, for fattening, and finally our hogs will be allowed to root and nose the soil. Surprisingly, he does not mention as he usually does each year that the hogs will precede the plow. This barley field is set aside for next year’s winter-planted wheat (beer before bread, as ever) and so we need to go about its plowing soon, before the summer parts from us. Perhaps I’m surprised with no good cause, but his silence on this matter, his preference for “finally our hogs,” instead of “finally the oxen and the plows,” is startling. The organization to all of our advantages that he revealed last night might be more substantial than a dream, or an ambition that need not bother us just yet. It’s possible that Master Kent does not expect our plows to be in use again. Our final harvest might have come and gone.

There is happier business to distract us, though. Master Kent suggests that it would be a pleasing courtesy for Philip Earle — our Mr. Quill, our fiddler — to choose the Gleaning Queen: “He surely can be counted on to be an even-handed judge.” The girls and lasses are brought forward to pout and curtsey in a line for him. He does his smiling best to be judicial but we cannot help but notice that he rests his eyes for longer on the older girls and that these older girls are more blushing than their sisters and more bodily. It’s not that Mr. Quill is a handsome or a well-built man, though his seeming wealth and kindness are bound to be attractive. Nor is there any sense that Mr. Quill himself is bidding for a bride. It’s just that this procedure has tows and currents which would not trouble us if every daughter in the line had yet to grow her breasts. The fathers there are both awkward and seduced themselves. They see their own daughters and their neighbors’ daughters in a new, inconsistent light.

Mr. Quill is thinking now, dramatically considering. He strokes his waxy, trowel-shaped beard to our amusement. Our laughter is lusty and excessive. We watch him looking out above our heads; perhaps he’s expecting guidance from the trees, or hoping to catch sight of Mistress Beldam in her velvet shawl. Possibly our lopsided fiddler, our evenhanded judge, means to raise his hand for her and have her step inside our ring to be the Gleaning Queen. The men turn round and stare toward the woods and to where some of them at least, to my certain knowledge, hunted for her under last night’s rain and where all of them, I’d guess, have wandered in their dreams. I half expect but dread to find a complicit smile on one of their faces, the smile of some quick-thinking lad who turned a profit from the rain by finding Mistress Beldam in distress and then providing somewhere snug for both of them to pass the night.

The judge opts sweetly for the one we least expect. He picks little Lizzie, John Carr’s niece, and one of our suspected spares. She is not five years old, a gawky girl and hardly pretty yet. But she has clearly done her best to decorate herself. She is by far the yellowest. Her happiness at being chosen is innocent and unconcealed. So Mr. Quill has made a gentle choice, avoiding older girls. She does not want to let him take her hand, however. She steps back when he draws close, a little frightened by his smile and his lopsided gait. So Master Kent takes care of her. He removes the green sash from his hat and bends down from his saddle to drop it on Lizzie Carr’s head. Her crown. She is to keep the cloth, he says. The older girls are hugely jealous now.

Lizzie Carr’s father and her uncle, John, make a chair for the Queen by joining hands across each other’s wrists and take her to the edges of the stub. She’s not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do. She only knows she is the center of attention, not all of it well-meaning. Her own sister has already pinched and hurt her leg. She’d like either to run away and hide or to give vent to tears. But Master Kent has dismounted and come forward to help her from her chair. “Take off your slippers, go barefoot, take the first step on the field,” he whispers to her. “All you need to do is find a single grain, just one. Then we will cheer. And you will be our Queen for one whole year.” He pushes her shoulder gently, and she does what he has said, blessing the stub with her bare toes. The stalks are too tough on her feet at first, but she takes a few wincing steps, finding balder ground. And there she drops down to her knees and leans forward to search for her grain. The sash falls from her head. It is the field’s only splash of green. But Lizzie Carr does not retrieve it yet. She has found more than a grain, she’s found a complete ear, perfectly intact, as long and broad as a man’s best finger, its awns as spiky as a teasel head. She’s old enough to know how to separate out the barleycorn by running her fingers against the bristles. She blows into her palm to winnow off the flake. And now she’s holding out her hand to show her barley pearls to us. The moment is always a rousing one. Our labors are condensed to this: a dozen tokens of our bread and drink, each tucked and swaddled in the oval of a grain, and sitting on a child’s undamaged skin. What should we do but toss our hats and cheer?

Mr. Quill is at my shoulder. He’s grateful that I’m helping him, he says. He understands that I am handicapped today but all he has in mind for me is gentle work. He will be indebted if I can walk the village bounds with him, naming everything I see. He hopes as well that I can provide a shoulder for his bag of charting tools, and later use my single hand to help prepare his color pots of paint and prepare the calfskin still drying in the dancing barn for vellum. He needs it urgently for Master Kent’s land chart. Normally, I would not wish to miss my gleaning spoils. I could expect to come away with sufficient grain for some private ale and porridge flour, as well as winter feed for George and Gorge, the pair of long, flat-sided pigs I share with John Carr and his family. But Mr. Quill proposes something more pleasing, and an opportunity when everybody else is double-bent and studying the stub to settle what has happened overnight to Mistress Beldam.

Master Kent stands back with us, enjoying the noisy rush of gleaners, their concentrated, thorough scampering. Already many of my neighbors have gathered up a worthy gleaner’s sheaf; they hold it in their resting hands, a drooping horse’s tail of flaxen stalks, while their working hands peck and pick across the stub like hens. The master has tucked a barley ear under his hat’s remaining yellow sash, for good luck. He needs good luck. He knows my search for the woman failed. She did not seek shelter in his barn. He bashfully admits he waited for her there until “the hour was insensible,” meaning I suppose that when he finally retreated to his bed the casks of ale were empty. But he’s more troubled than can be accounted for by ale or even by the seeming disappearance of a woman who two days ago was unknown to him and only yesterday he ordered to be shorn. He was embarrassed and at first a little shamed this morning, as he rode past the pillory at a polite distance, he reports, to be yowled at so stridently and manically and with such uncivil language by the younger of the two fastened men. No, he will not repeat the words on such (again) a “noble day”: “It was as if I were the felon, in some way. The man’s a ruffian, no doubt of it. I am a callous killer, it seems, and worse. He says he’ll be revenged, and curses me. He shouted, ‘Murder, Murder!’ as I passed.” The father did not even lift his head, and that in some way was an even heavier rebuke, he says.

It’s just as well, I suppose, that I haven’t yet succeeded in alleviating the short one’s punishment by dragging up a log or stone for him to stand on. The men are proving insolent. But Master Kent can shrug off their insults. Any doubt he’s had that they were rogues deserving of the pillory has been rudely shouted away. No, something weightier is troubling him this morning, something weightier even than the recent and costly loss of his stable and his doves. He has not looked so sunken and reduced since the day his wife, Lucy, and their infant girl both died in childbirth. I raise my eyebrows and tip my head to let him know he’s set me wondering and that I am concerned for him.

“Come find me in my chambers, Walt, when Mr. Earle dismisses you this evening,” he says, using the familiar form of my name, unusually. “There are some matters to be shared.” He puts a single finger to his lips. He trusts me to stay silent.

Mr. Quill is not a man who can move quickly. He’s more the hedgehog than the fox. He’s careful and he’s leisurely. He doesn’t mean to miss a thing. But his slow company is satisfying. I am required to take my time and look at everything anew. The ridge and furrow of our daily lives become less commonplace in the shadow of his scrutiny.

“Where will you take me first?” he asks, and the question itself confers on me some pleasing status and authority. I am grateful for his thoughtfulness.

“We inspect The Bottom, then ascend,” I suggest, smiling to myself, for The Bottom is the dank depression which we know too as Turd and Turf. It’s marshland, lower even than the brook, and so we count it safe to use not only as a charnel place for carcasses and skeletons and any animal too sick in death to be eaten but also as our open privy. It drains into itself, its own wet turf. The wooden closed latrines that we have built closer to the dwellings are more convenient, especially in the middle of the night and during winter, but many of us — though mainly men — prefer to empty bowels where Nature will take care of it, remove the stench as soon as it’s produced. Our closed latrines hang on to smell, even when the gong farmer — we take our weekly turns at being him — pegs up his nose, wraps up his mouth, picks up his shovel and barrows it away. You cannot shovel up a smell. You’ll never see a barrow-load of smell.

As we arrive at Turd and Turf, I make our progress as noisy as I can and raise my voice, letting it carry on the echo. Anyone who has preceded us will be glad of some warning, especially as I have a recent stranger at my elbow who might not welcome the entertainment of chancing on a working arse. But I do not expect to discover anybody here, even though it is a place where on normal days there are many tasks to carry out other than squatting with a furrowed brow and hoping for some solitude. There’re rushes to collect for lights, ferns to pull for litter, clay to dig for bricks, peat and turves to cut for winter fuel and roofs. Today, though, I can account for all of us — well, all of us that I can name; not Mistress Beldam, though I live in hopes for her. They’re gleaning barley until noon, and then will be gathered on the threshing floors and barn as late as dusk today and every day into the hungry months until the job is done. No, Mr. Quill and I will have the margins and the commons to ourselves.

The path is overgrown here, and purposely neglected. It is portcullised by ivy vines, providing some seclusion for its visitors. I open up a gap for him until we’re standing at the edges of The Bottom, our feet in mud from last night’s rain but — I check — nothing less desirable. The marsh, where it’s not shaded by curtains of beech and oak, is steaming, its vapors thickened and shaped by sunbeams. The air is unusually stewed and balmy today. If it wasn’t for the flat blue sky, troubled only by the white pulses of a lifting mist, it could seem that thunderstorms are on their way. Otherwise, everything’s familiar: the dome of cattle bones, the usual ruminating pigs feasting on unhealthy pannage, the swollen carcass of another of their kind that’s died from cysts, the sinking, timbered path we use to barrow out our turves, the glint of oily water where the quagmire is deepest and the squelch is loudest, the coppiced hedge of goat-willows from which we take our sallow poles and behind which any man in need of privacy might clutch his knees and murmur to himself without an audience. There is no sign of Mistress Beldam here.

Mr. Quill is too delighted by our tour to notice anything that does not bring him pleasure. The smell is worse than usual but, if he is aware of it, it does not bother him. He mistakes it for the unaffected countryside. He does not remark on the bones even, with their regiments of flies. He only says it is a peaceful and secluded place and “humbling” in its beauty. He is blind to all the knot and thorn of living here. He takes hold of my arm in his excitement. He’s pointing at the far side of the clearing and a swathe of longpurples, tall and at their strident best, as are the birds today, despite the nets that we have set for them. “Listen to them juking,” he says. He holds a finger up and cocks his head. A finch commands him Pay Your Rent. A thrush complains of Tax Tax Tax.

I am a little shamed by Mr. Quill, in truth. I don’t wish to beat a drum, but there is something of myself in him, something that is being lost. I remember well my first encounter with The Bottom soon after my arrival here as Master Kent’s man. It was, I have to say, a privy trip. And it was spring. The longpurples had hardly come to blade. But there were tall-necked cowslips nodding on the banks and king-cups, fenny celandines and irises in the mire. The trees were imping with infant leaves that seemed as attentive and pert as mice ears. So I was struck and “humbled” by the beauty too, and only later by the carnal stench. I was an innocent. In that first season I tumbled into love with everything I saw. Each dawn was like a genesis; the light ascends and with the light comes life. I wanted to immerse myself in it, to implicate myself in land, to contribute to fields. What greater purpose could there be? How could I better spend my days? Nothing I had seen before had made me happier. I felt more like an angel than a beast.

My new neighbors were amused by me, of course, my callow eagerness. For them an iris bulb was pig fodder; celandines were not a thing of beauty but a gargle for an irritated throat; and cowslips were better gathered, boiled and drunk against the palsy than stared at in the open privy.

“Where have we buried ourselves?” Master Kent once asked in that first year. “Will nobody talk with me about anything but the fattening of grain and hogs?”

“Beer and bacon’s all that matters here,” I said, sighing in agreement, because in those early days I feared that only those who had been cradled in this place could endure its agonies. But once I found my Cecily and put a hand to husbandry myself, I soon turned into one of them, a beer and bacon man who knew the proper value of an iris bulb. It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow, is inflexible and stern. It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait. There’s not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not let us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and forearms burned as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools. The clamor deafens us. But that is how we have to live our lives.

So it is an affecting experience this morning — and, I’m happy to discover, more valuable than gleaning — to be reminded of my younger self by Mr. Quill’s good humor. “How should I name this place?” he asks, as we part the ivy vines again and climb to higher ground.

“No name,” I say. “A marsh. A marsh. What should we call a marsh? We’re dull. We have our names for animals but, no, not for the marsh.” I prefer not to have him spoil his charts with The Bottom, or Turd and Turf, or even the Charnel House.

“The Blossom Marsh, perhaps,” he says.

“Yes, scratch that down.”

We continue at our snail-like pace, beating the bounds of the village. I lead Mr. Quill along the same route we follow every spring as a community, when we take annual stock of what we have in hand and what we hope to have in bud or shoot. That’s when we bump our children’s heads against the boundary stones, so that they’ll not forget where they and all of us belong, and we challenge them to eat the grass they’re kneeling on and taste the fodder with the mouths of cattle. Normally this would be our day for reconciling grievances but in company and in the open air, where grievances cannot be aired except with moderation and a placid voice. I can predict already what will be grouched about next year, if next year ever comes. One of the Higgs women, let’s say, will want her family stints increased. Now that they have another mouth to feed at home, she’ll feel they should be granted rights to common graze a further pig or, failing that, some extra geese. Thomas Rogers’s mother will complain that the laystalls where we throw our cooking waste for composting are too close to her cottage; she has to suffer all our kitchen smells and endure everybody’s flies. “We have to put up with your piping son,” we’ll say. An older man as usual will repeat the enduring grumble — with not as easy a voice as he supposes — that the Derby twins for all their youth and energy are too often late to field and then too early to depart. But this coming spring there will not be the usual coo-coo-coo about the master’s thieving doves: “They take our grain; he takes their eggs; we see no benefit.”

Today this beating of the bounds is not a stock-taking and I will not be forcing Mr. Quill onto the ground to bump his head against our boundary stones or require him to chew on grass. He does not see the parish with the dutiful eyes of a laborer or cottager. He does not want to hear our grievances or have me list the details of our working lives. He does not note that someone needs to drag the tangleweed off our pond if we hope to tempt some mallard to our traps, or what grand oak is now so frail and honeycombed that over winter it has lost its crown and bared its once proud head in preparation for our axes, or which land we ought to set aside next year for turbary and which we ought to save, so that the peat and turf can fatten and recuperate, or where the best reeds are for our thatching, or where the best supply of wood for firing can be found, or what walls and fences need attending to and which of us might do that job the best.

He does want, though, to stand in his yellow trim of ribbons and mark the detail and the beauty of each view. He’s keen for me to name the plants. He makes a note of them and sometimes plucks a leaf or flower for pressing in his book, his personal “Natural History.” It seems that listing them is his way of knowing them. I can easily put a name to all the herbs we discover on our way: the herbs for medicines, the herbs intended only for our beasts, the killing herbs, the devil’s herbs, the herbs reserved for those already dead, the drunkard’s herbs, the herbs with magic properties. I even name some of the weeds for him, though sometimes I invent the words. There ought to be a plant called purgatory. And another one called fletch. I point out prickly eringes, whose roots, he ought to know, can be prepared into a love potion. I show him burdock leaves, for wrapping butter in. And almond leaves for keeping moths away from clothes. He thinks I am the wisest man.

I suspect he is unimpressed by our local place-names, however. He’d like me to put bright names to them, so that he can mark them down in ink, together with their measured angles and their shapes. But they’re only workaday. “East Field,” I tell him. “West Field, South Field. John Carr’s flax garth. The Higgses’ goose pen. Hazel Wood. The Turbary. The Warren.” We give directions in our titles, I explain, or we name a family, or we say what’s growing there. We are plain and do not try to complicate our lives.

“I have a pair of pigs called George and Gorge,” I say finally. “And Mr. Kent calls his horse Willowjack, even though she’s a mare, a Jill and not a Jack.” Those are the best names I can offer him. We do not even have a title for the village. It is just The Village. And it’s surrounded by The Land, I add. Even Master Kent’s freeholds and muniments do not provide a name. We’re written down only as The Jordan Estate or The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman. “He is deceased.”

“That is unusual,” Mr. Quill agrees, but does not mark it down. Instead, for once and with evident effort, he frowns away the smile from his face and, first checking that we are not observed, takes me by the arm. “I have a heavy confidence,” he says, “which Master Kent is keen that I should share with you but with no other. There is another gentleman … we are awaiting him … another Jordan, actually, who has his claims upon”—Mr. Quill makes a circle with his arm, beating our bounds with a single gesture—“all this.”

And here at last I start to understand my master’s evident distress. Old Edmund Jordan and his wife produced a daughter, Lucy, but not a son. So when her father died soon after Lucy married Master Kent, the manor and the property was her sole inheritance, which by legal document was to be divided equally on her death among her male heirs by blood, “her envisaged sons,” Mr. Quill explains.

“There are no sons,” I say. “She died in childbirth only this spring, but even that child was a girl … Master Kent is Mistress Lucy’s single heir.”

“Not so. He is not blood. A husband is not blood. There is a cousin, though. Also Edmund Jordan. Those changes Master Kent proposes and which he has employed me to mark down are not his own. You cannot think he wishes them. Those sheep, these charts which I prepare, indeed, are demanded by the cousin. And he arrives today to make good what he counts as his entitlement.”

We have regained the higher ground before the impact of this news sinks in. The gleaning field is already empty. Today it is difficult for me not to see heavy meaning in its emptiness. There is no hint of green; not even Lizzie Carr’s cloth crown remains. The acres seem to undulate and fall so endlessly and with such monotony of harvesting and tillage, such space and depth, that any bottom to them is lost not in the clouds or mist but in the duskiness of distance. What little pickings may be left are given over now to our cows and uninvited birds. Wild pigeons pause and jerk, full of fussy self-esteem and grain. I try to people it but I can hear only the weird and phantom bleats of sheep.

The Queen and all her subjects have taken to the threshing barn and are too busy when I arrive with Mr. Quill to want to stop and hold a conversation with our inquiring visitor. The flail cannot cease its knocking on the floor just because of him. Every swing of it means food. There is today’s allotment of sheaves to spread and barley ears to set aside; there’s chaff to shake and separate from grain in wicker baskets; and then — unless we want weed bread or horse loaf — there’s grain to sieve before it’s sacked for storage in our lofts. What’s left or dropped becomes the property of mice and rats and hogs. I plunge my good hand into a half-filled sack. It sinks up to my elbow as easily as if I’ve dipped it in a pond. Indeed, the grains run through my fingers in a liquid stream. I’ve known better harvests, years when the barleycorn was fat and milky. You couldn’t pull a plumper bogey from your nose, we’d say. And I’ve known hungry years when yields were fibrous and parched, and we survived the winter on dry bones. Today the grains are good enough, but only good enough. We will not starve; we will not fatten either.

Mr. Quill and I stand away from the great open doors and downwind from the winnowing, watching like gentlemen at a cockfight. He has his hands folded behind his back, perhaps aware of his soft and unworked palms, but certainly conscious of the price that everyone in front of him will pay for Mistress Lucy’s failure to produce a son. I do my best to not betray his unhappy confidences on my face. I let my damaged hand hang loose on show so that nobody is in any doubt why I am not helping them today but still expect and still deserve my flour and my malt. I know my teasing neighbors. Their suspicion of anyone who was not born within these boundaries is unwavering. Next time they catch me sitting on my bench at home with a cup and slice, they are bound to wonder if it tastes all the sweeter for not being earned with labor. Do I need any help, perhaps — given my mangled hand — lifting the barley cake to my lips? Or any help with chewing it?

I hurry Mr. Quill away. He’s smiled enough, I think. But he is in such a considerate mood he will not leave the barn until he has said farewell to everyone. He is not rewarded with replies. The one or two who break their labor and lift their chins to look at him are only baffled. What is this stranger getting at? When no one plans on going anywhere today, what is the purpose of farewell?

We find ourselves at last back in the lane which will take us past the blackened timbers of the stable and the ashes of baled hay and toward the turret of the manor house. We’ve brushed the dust and chaff from our shoulders, heads and beards, though Mr. Quill’s waxed wedge is still not clear of barley waste. We’re deep in somber conversation. It has been a restful and a pleasant walk, despite the weight of what I’ve learned. Yet I feel as if I’ve made a conquest and also been beguiled. I like the man. And I’ve recognized an opportunity in him, a way to turn these changes to my benefit.

It is not until we near the church ground that I realize I’ve hardly given any thought today to Mistress Beldam or her men. I feel uneasy, suddenly. Disloyal. Indeed, I’m doing what I can to not catch sight of the wooden pillory. And I succeed. Or I succeed until we have very nearly reached the orchard, where the lane-grass is bouldered with fallen fruit. I start to kick the largest apples down the path. I’m in a restive mood, of course. And with good cause. But Mr. Quill has spotted Master Kent. From where we are, we can see only our mounted master’s head and shoulders, his best high hat and lemon sash. He’s circling the cross and talking loudly to himself. His voice is splintered and alarmed. He’s rocking to and fro in the saddle, beating his thighs with his fists. And, as he has many times before on this piece of prospective holy ground, he is reciting obsequies and intercessions for the dead.