Harvest

7

E WAKE TO LEARN THAT Willowjack is dead. The news is brought to Kitty Gosse’s door at first light by Anne Rogers, our village piper’s mother. She is amused but evidently not surprised to find me in my spacious underclothes naked from the waist up and pulling on my breeches at her friend’s bed end. Someone “with clever hands,” she says, has taken a spike of metal, a tethering prong, from the winter tool chest in the standing barn and driven it with precision and with force into the horse’s head above her ear. The large square stone that the slaughterer took from the churchyard and used as a mallet was found in the straw, syrupy with blood, when the carcass was dragged aside. It’s sitting now on Master Kent’s mantelshelf. Plans are afoot to hunt the hand that wielded it.

“It must have been a large hand,” says Anne Rogers. “Someone big and strong. A man, of course. A man who might’ve done this sort of thing before. A man horses trust …” She hesitates because she does not want to say what she hopes each of us is thinking, that Willowjack will have known her murderer. How could a stranger get close enough to hold a prong against her head and drive it home, even if it took only a single blow? It was never easy to get close to Willowjack; even unplugging a blood tick from her ear was rewarded with a nipping. Anne Rogers means us to suspect our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, a second cousin of my wife and a man she once set her heart upon — until he married. Then he was despised.

“It might be anyone who’s similar, of course,” she adds, seeing the look on my face and then nodding at my hands.

“I have my alibi,” I say, pointing at the bed and seeming for the women’s benefit to make light of what is already upsetting me and will be insufferable for Master Kent. The knots that tie us to this tranquil place are loosening. “Besides this one hand’s not entirely mended.” I show the healing wound. The scab has darkened and is flexible. If I’m not careful I’ll be put to work again. “It’s painful still,” I promise, not quite certain why both are laughing. “I couldn’t squash a fly with this.”

“Or even strip a bit of barleycorn,” she says.

So now there are two bodies to be taken down to Turd and Turf, the master’s cherished mare and the abandoned man from the pillory. I do not know whom we should hold responsible for the horse’s death. My first suspicion lays its eggs beneath the skin of Master Jordan’s groom. I was not impressed by him when, yesterday, I showed him where his horses could be tied. He looked at Willowjack with a narrow lip, I thought. “She’d benefit from brushing down,” he said, though by any rule she was twice as fine a horse as any of his mounts. Envy can be maddening. Perhaps she’s nipped him, and he’s taken his revenge.

I could as well make out a case that lays the blame again at the feet, well, at the hands, of Brooker Higgs and the Derby twins, all three of whom are known for their great fists. Perhaps word has already leaked out — from outraged Mr. Quill, or possibly the cousin’s sidemen — that the village as we know it and our employments are to be surrendered to the yellow teeth of three thousand sheep. We’ll be outnumbered fifty to one — and soon. Our trio of bachelors would once more have cause for anger and indignation, though no more cooing doves to vent their outrage on. And no bleaters yet. They might have listened to the lovemaking last night and grown restless, naturally, wanting trills and carols of their own. They might have eaten the remaining fairy caps from the visit to the woods on what seems a thousand evenings ago. And only then they would have found the wicked pluck to hammer Willowjack, a horse that everybody loved and so the creature most deserving of their blows. But I have seen how Brooker and the twins have slunk around like chastened dogs these past few days, fearful that their dove-baiting will catch them out. The roasting of the birds was bad enough, though it was warranted to some degree. But the newcomers were punished unjustly because of our men’s deceit and silence, and now the smaller one is dead, strangled at the pillory. No, there’s not a mushroom strong enough to make these young men kill the master’s horse. They’re frightened of the shadows now. In any other place but here, they would be frightened for their lives.

Another possibility: I blush even to name my neighbor, dear John Carr. He is a placid man, greatly loved by his fellows and close to animals. John Carr can stop a drove of running cattle in their tracks, even ones made frisky by the company of bulls or young. I’ve seen him root a maddened dog to the ground with just a fingertip: one firm touch on the nose to stop the barking, and another to set the tail wagging. It’s a gift, and one that he is called upon to use whenever we’ve an animal to butcher. It was John who dispatched the little calf we feasted on the other night at Master Kent’s expense. Its skin is still soaking in brine under the rafters of the barn, though today it is among my challenges to lift it out before it’s entirely fit and attempt to fashion some serviceable vellum for Mr. Quill’s shape-shifting chart. Yes, John Carr is the village slaughterman and more than anyone I know possesses all the skills and speed it took to execute Willowjack with the calm efficiency Mistress Rogers describes. But neighbor Carr has small and stubby hands, a pair of how-to hands, worn short with work. And he is kind.

Anne Rogers will not be the only one to count our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, as a suspect, that’s for sure. One of his hands is big and strong enough to hold a hoof completely still while he’s shodding it with the other. But I discount that idea straight away, as Abel Saxton has been too intimately involved with Willowjack — her welfare and her tack, her clobber and her shoes — to wish her dead under any circumstance. The master rewards him well for his leatherwork and smithery. The man’s a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat.

I’m mystified, to tell the truth. It does not take me long, once Mistress Rogers has run off to spread the gossip of where “old Walter Thirsk” has labored overnight “again,” to mutter a rosary of names between my lips — the twenty or so men in the neighborhood tall enough to level with a horse’s ear — but still not find a likely candidate.

“It will’ve been the short one did it,” offers Kitty Gosse as she prepares our porridge for the day. I have forgotten how hare-brained and vexing she can be.

“You mean the little man that died? Yes, that does seem likely, doesn’t it?”

“Who else? If you’ve been throttled in the pillory for burning doves, and half devoured by pigs, murdering a horse is just the sort of mischief you’d enjoy,” she says with certainty. “There’s motive, isn’t there?”

“The man is dead.”

“The dead men are the ones to fear. A soul can’t rest until it’s satisfied, until the fellow is revenged.”

“He’s far too short to reach the horse’s head.” I’m trying to be reasonable.

She stares as if I am the world’s buffoon. “Everybody’s short, when they’re kneeling down,” she says, and looks at me cock-eyed. Of course, she’s right. I’ve been half-witted. The horse wasn’t standing; it was down and sleeping when it died. It was in the hollows of the night. What does a horse do, then, other than to fold itself into the straw and sleep? The killer didn’t have to be familiar. The killer didn’t have to reach. The killer didn’t even have to lift that finger-stretching rock far from the ground. The killer might have used two hands. Far from being the work of a hefty, muscle-fisted man, the killer could have been a woman or a child. Not counting widow Gosse’s ghost and his pilloried companion but including Mr. Quill and Master Kent’s six manor house guests, there are more than sixty sons and daughters of Cain who might have crept back to their cot last night with horse blood on their hands and clothes.

Indeed, that is the stain that Master Jordan wants to chase, once everyone is gathered in the threshing house ready for another day of barley work. Horses have enormous pumping hearts. A loop of blood fountained out of Willowjack’s head the moment that the prong went in. The straw is black and sticky with its splash. Whoever was responsible for this death will not have escaped entirely dry and unspoiled. All the masters need to do is find the pile of red and sodden clothes. The cottagers are told, therefore, that none of them must stray a step beyond the barn today. Their dwellings and their gardens will be searched. And we must prepare ourselves, in the absence of a lawful gibbet, to see a neighbor hanging from an oak before the end of day.

“And who are you?” That is a question no one dares to ask as Master Jordan stands before them. The cousin does not even give his name or offer the briefest account of his status and intentions. All my neighbors see is a man of blunt authority attended by three menservants who are affecting to be dangerously bored. They all four look extremely clean and pale. Spotless is the word. No worthy flea would want to spend a night with them. The menservants are dressed in matching breeches, jerkins with flaxen collars and brimless caps, like foot soldiers. From behind, where I am standing at Master Kent’s shoulder, they are indistinguishable from one another. Their lord — for it must seem that he’s at least a lord — has thrown aside the leather riding coat and padded doublet he was wearing yesterday and, as befits the summer warmth, is attired more loosely in trunk-hose — or onion pants as they might as well be called — and an embroidered linen smock. There’s not a tuft of wool on him, I see. His beard is barbered and his hair, so far as we can tell, is pinned. But what holds our attention and most persuades he is a man we should not trifle with is his high-crowned hat, his copotain, which he’s adorned not only with the Jordan family badge but with both a feather and a gemstone clip. That hat alone says power, wealth and provenance. That hat alone could purchase each of us.

In truth, this lord, this gentleman, is having trouble keeping his hat in place. He has to raise his hand and hold its brim as he describes — in gestures and in words — what he expects from us today. In brief, he wants an end to all the nonsense that has disturbed our country peace so thoroughly of late. We are too far from “ordinance and regulation,” he says. We have forgotten Benefits of Law, Just Punishment, the Dues and Customs of all citizens “and countrymen,” he adds. So far “the reckoning,” for which we all could well be held to account, comprises only property of the manor house — some buildings and some creatures of great consequence.

“Someone among you here, beneath this roof, will be found and held responsible for the theft of a mare of great value,” he says. “That person cannot expect to walk these lanes tomorrow, nor should he hope to claim a holy burial … He will meet the rotting carcass of the horse he killed, in your charnel field. He will meet his brother miscreant too — the one who foolishly thought he could set fire to barns and doves and only pay the meager price of one week, at leisure in the pillory, but has instead today been dragged by his bloody heels to join the skeletons.”

I cannot help but look for the twins and Brooker Higgs among the silent gathering. When they’re not gaping, they’re swallowing. They’re picturing the pair of carcasses already at Turd and Turf and wondering which of them now standing in the barn will sleep forever with Willowjack and with the pig-chewed, throttled newcomer. But that’s the same for everybody here. It’s as clear as any thunder cloud that troubles are approaching fast, that lightning is bound to strike a villager. This high-hatted man, whoever he might be, whatever his conjunction with the Jordan family badge, will not be satisfied until the reckoning is paid.

Master Kent himself says nothing to explain. Everyone can tell by how he hangs his hands behind his back and bows his head, nodding too self-consciously — he’s nothing but a listener today — that, whoever this new gentleman might be, their own master of the manor is balancing on a lower rung than him, and knows it. This is a new experience, and baffling. No one has seen the master standing with such anxious deference before. We’re used to knowing he’s in charge even though he’s never been too keen to remind us of that fact. He has always tried to be an even-handed, subtle Caesar in our midst, more ready to achieve his purposes by throwing an arm around our shoulders than shouting in our ears. Our Caesar now seems powerless. Of course, he has been saddened by the loss of Willowjack and might have such a heavy heart that it has dragged his tongue into his throat. We can expect him soon to lift his head and take our reins again. But, no, this evident submission to the younger man is touching on the servile now. It’s almost fearful. And made all the more so by the other man’s officious bearing, his icy forthright manners which expect and get compliance from everybody. “God bless you all,” he says at last. “And God help one of you.”

Master Kent is glad to have me at his side once we have left the barn. He needs “a calming hand.” Not only has he lost his mare, he’s had to fight to save her body from the profiteers. “My cousin tells me I am wasteful, not to have the ‘useless’ carcass baked for its grease,” he says. “I told him that the horse was far too loyal and loved for such rewards.” And Master Jordan’s reply was that he himself had valued his mastiff, Blunt, just as much. He evidently was a dog as fierce and unimpeachable as any constable. But he still yielded thirteen pounds of grease when he was too old for the job and had to be dispatched.

“I am improvident for not putting Willowjack to the same good use,” adds my master, leaning closer so that he is not overheard. “But I have insisted on my way, and won the argument … for once. If only I could always win the argument with cousin Edmund …” He puts a finger to his lips, nervous suddenly. “The two of us should hold our tongues. You understand?”

My master assumes that Mr. Quill has, by now, explained to me the cause and reason of his cousin’s country trip. He is asking that I keep secret from my neighbors not only what surely now seems obvious — his cousin’s lawful usurpment of the manor and the land — but also the details of our coming woolly plight. He hopes to win some further arguments, before any cloven hoofs make their first imprint on our land. He means first to negotiate some blunting of his cousin’s blades before he talks to us, his friends. It will have been his plan, I’m sure, as soon as he was warned, before the barley was cleared, that Master Jordan was descending by road to harvest his inheritance, to make a fight of it, to protect us with his arguments, to find some means of, say, saving at least some common ground where we — the shearers and the shepherds of next year — can let loose our beasts, to do his best, as well, to preserve some forestry. “So long as all my neighbors here are safe,” he’d say, “and they have work and food and dwellings that are assured until the thresholds of their graves, then I am equally assured your flock of sheep will meet with hospitality …”

But it has not been so. Somehow the village was already burdened by misfortune before its future rode in on a horse, before the Dream of Golden Hoofs came near. There were the fires. There were the doves. There were those raised, unfriendly bows. There was the woman and her disquieting face, breaking short the dance. There was the body at the pillory, or that much of the body left behind by pigs. It feels as if some impish force has come out of the forest in the past few days to see what pleasure it can take in causing turmoil in a tranquil place. And now, the worst — if it is right to count the death of a horse as worse than the death of a man — his Willowjack is dead. That is heartbreaking. She was Mistress Kent’s own horse. And it is frightening too, because whoever killed the mare was stabbing Master Kent as well. Of course, he cannot talk to me or open up his heart just yet. We are surrounded by the cousin’s men. And Master Jordan himself is never out of hearing. My master only offers me a shrug, a pulse of hands and chin and mouth but sadly eloquent. It says, These are the blackest days for us, old friend. I raise my eyebrows in reply. Indeed, we’ve never known a more alarming day.

We have gone beyond the hearing of the threshing barn. The flailing and winnowing continue steadily behind. Only Mr. Quill, the steward Baynham and the groom are unaccounted for, though I imagine the first two are working as an awkward pair on manuscripts and charts. I hope to be at Mr. Quill’s side this afternoon preparing paints and parchments as originally intended, but for the moment I am regarded as “cousin Charles’s fellow” and required to lead our party to the family homes, the heart of everything, identify the absent occupants by name and then stand by with Master Kent while Lucy Kent’s cousin-by-blood and his sidemen step indoors to pull away the coverings, lift the matting and the reeds, upturn all the storage chests, and shift the barrels and the benches in search of bloody rags. It’s rare for me to peer into so many private rooms, to glimpse how cramped some places are, how full the beds, how modest their possessions, how buckled is the furniture. I am surprised by neatness and by dirt, by evidence of last night’s food and evidence of none. It’s certain that you cannot tell from how a person works or how a person strolls behind her hens what kind of life they live in secrecy.

I am embarrassed when we reach the Carrs’ dwelling. John and I do not put up our feet at each other’s hearths. We are good friends but meet and talk only in the open air. We sit outside and understand that neighbors should not pry. Neighbors should be deaf and blind. “Take care,” I ask the men as they go in. But they are too impatient and detached to take much care. I sense my request has only made them more suspicious of the Carrs. I have to step away. I cannot bear to listen to the evident disruption. John will never understand why I did not go in to try to stop the breakages.

It is embarrassing as well to wait outside the widow’s house and hear the thudding of the overturning bed, still warm, as I suppose, from me and her. Still rocking, possibly. But thus far there has not been any sign of butchery, not even in Abel Saxton’s cottage. The only blood they find is on a kerchief in my place. I have to match my hand to it and have the master vouch for me, report my “courage” in the burning stable block. I evidently saved the best part of his hay. Only then can Master Jordan be persuaded I am not a suspect.

So we reach the last of the village’s twenty or so inhabited dwellings and we are allowed to rest while the sidemen go to check the sties and byres, the whitehouse and latrines, the brewing shed, the outbuildings and any nooks and crannies where a bloody shirt might readily be hid. It is Master Jordan himself who walks up the tangled path toward the tenement where Cecily was raised. And it is Master Jordan himself who almost at once reemerges into the light with a cry of satisfaction and holding a heavy, bloodstained wrap of cloth. At first the master and I think it is too dark to be the woman’s velvet shawl. But all too soon the truth is unignorable. First, the sunshine catches on its silver threads, and then the shawl is opened up and the color is confirmed, the rich and heavy Turkish mauve. Shake it one more time, I want to call out to the man, and see who topples out into that thistle bed.

Actually I hold my tongue, and so does Master Kent, even when his cousin throws the shawl across a fence and invites us to identify its owner.

“Give me her name,” the cousin says, addressing me, the villager, but one he seems to trust, though possibly only because I’m not as stolid or corn-haired as the rest.

“I truly do not have a name for her,” I say, and indeed it’s not entirely a lie. I can put a face to her. I can describe her roughly sheared scalp which must by now be softening and blackening with hair. I’d not mistake her dark and shiny belladonna eyes for any other woman’s in the village. But other than the byname Mistress Beldam conferred on her by Master Kent, she has no title of identity. “I’ve never seen one of my neighbors wearing that. By all my heart,” I say.

I leave it to my master to recognize the garment and the culprit, and do his heavy duty. He will have judged by now that the woman who spat at Willowjack also slaughtered her. She crept into the barn, where so recently she brought the dancing to an end, searched the tool chest for a spike and somehow lifted up that heavy churchyard stone to bring it down with spiteful and indignant force. From any other man but Master Kent I would expect a response of matching spite and indignation. He loved his Willowjack. But he does not even seem surprised to link the woman and the horse. He does not think her actions justified. Why visit anger on a horse? But clearly she was righteous in a way. Her kin — and still we do not know what kin he was, her father probably — was taken to the pillory on Master Kent’s command and was abandoned there to be consumed by pigs. What man with any heart could say the woman had no grounds? And so I am not surprised when Master Kent does not identify the owner of the shawl for cousin Edmund Jordan. He is prepared to blame himself for Willowjack. But neither does he hide behind a tricky truth, as I have done. Instead he says, “That shawl was my wife’s, your cousin Lucy Kent’s.” There’s not a cottager round here who’d have the means to gain a shawl like that, nor the opportunity. That much is clearly true.

Master Jordan nods. “Then who … then who lives in that derelict? It seems to me that someone’s sleeping there.”

“A vagrant, possibly. Some passing midnight pillager.” The master shakes his head, biding time by making show of his bewilderment. The tale that he eventually suggests is this: someone has come through overnight, a ruffian. He’s crept into the manor house and, finding it too occupied by lightly sleeping men, has taken leave with only Lucy’s velvet shawl as his bounty.

“It was hanging at the back of her old loom until last evening,” he explains. “Our mothy visitor means to sell it when he reaches any town, most probably — or he only meant to sleep in it, up there in that old tenement. But first he took the opportunity to steal the finest mount for his future travels.” Master Jordan is nodding yet again. “He will have chosen Willowjack, of course, rather than one of your serviceable horses, cousin Edmund,” Master Kent continues, warming to his narrative. “But Willowjack is loyal and skittish. I think we can presume the fellow took a kick from her. Or else she nipped him hard. A vulgar, violent person would have sought revenge for that.”

Master Jordan has pursed his lips. He is considering. It is not that he is such a stony-hearted moralist that he is looking forward to the gibbeting of a local man. But it will serve his purposes if through the death of this old mare he is able without cost to make his sudden mark on this inheritance. There’s nothing like a show of heavy justice — and a swinging corpse — to persuade a populace not used to formal discipline that their compliance in all matters — including those regarding wool and fences — is beyond debate. He’s made his threats and promises. He has already disturbed and violated everybody’s home. He will lose face and thereby some control if what Master Kent describes is true. The miscreant was not a local man; the miscreant has come and gone, it seems.

“So be it, then,” he says reluctantly and does not seem to mind that my master has taken up the velvet shawl, heavy with his horse’s blood, and says that he will have it washed and put back in its place, where it belongs, on Lucy’s loom.

But Master Jordan is still looking for ways to save his face and demonstrate his loyalty to justice. “That man who spends an idle week at your pillory, he was the one responsible for burning down your farm buildings and slaughtering your doves? Is that correct?” he asks eventually, smiling almost. My master only dips his chin. Not quite a yes. “And he, I think, has promised to revenge himself on you?”

“That’s true — but only in the heat of his dismay. Besides, he is securely fixed and cannot have visited any injury on Willowjack, except by sorcery,” the master says.

The cousin is not listening. “I do not mean to blame the horse on him, unless of course your proposal of sorcery can be proven. But we must question him,” he says. “At least I think I owe it to your dignity, dear cousin, to lay the charges of sedition and incitement at his feet. You are my witness. He has said that he has plans to murder you. Now I am unwittingly the master of this place and so discover myself to be its de facto magistrate. I think it’s time we took his case to court. I say so with a heavy heart.”

Here he turns full circle, sweeping the horizon, taking in the width and span of us. It’s clear the conversation’s at an end. He is maddened by our way of life. He is exasperated by the disarray he has discovered in our village. He sighs dramatically, to leave us in no doubt. We’ve brought these troubles on ourselves. And he will bring them to a sudden and impatient end if needs be. I catch his eye. “So, Walter Thirsk,” he says, just listing me. He’s wondering, I think, how useful I might be. I nod, admitting to my name, no more. But possibly he takes it as compliance on my part. He sees me as a man who not so long ago — twelve years — must have seen this village as he sees it now, a slow-paced commonwealth of habit, custom and routine, of wasting time and sauntering, of indolence.

Again he circles, but this time he is smiling. He lifts his arms and, palms up like a preacher, spreads his fingers, at all the land in sight. “Nothing but sheep,” he says, and laughs out loud. His joke, I think, is this: we are the sheep, already here, and munching at the grass. There’s none more pitiful than us, he thinks. There’s none more meek. There’s none to match our peevish fearfulness, our thoughtless lives, our vacant, puny faces, our dependency, our fretful scurrying, our plaints. I can tell he wishes he could see the back of all of us. He’ll put an end to all the sauntering. He will replace us with a nobler stock.