Harvest

8

AM IN MR. QUILL’S GOOD COMPANY this afternoon and cannot help but dream about the sort of life I might spend with him should I escape the fleecy prospects of our fields by leaving here in his employ. At least, that is my maturing scheme. I could be gone within the week, if he takes to me and if my current master gives me leave. It is a fearful prospect, parting from Charles Kent, after what has been a lifetime of his company, his fellowship, but not as fearful as one in which his unremitting cousin is my master. So I do my best to be visibly meticulous for Mr. Quill, though — truth be told — I have embellished my expertise in readying the quality of vellum he requires for the final presentation copy of his enclosure charts. The best vellum, he says, rubbing his own inner arm by way of an example, takes weeks in preparation; even so, my brisker efforts might still be expected to produce a surface that is uniformly smooth “but textured still.” And it should be thin enough for the light of a candle to shine through it. I’ll do my best to reproduce his skin. It cannot be dissimilar to tanning leather for an apron or a shoe.

I have removed the calfskin from the sink of salted water, dung and lime where it has been soaking and bating for the past two days, since its removal from the rafter in the barn, and brought it, dripping brine and grease, past the site of Willowjack’s demise, along the farm lane and into the manor house, where the scullery corner has been set aside for chart-making. My hand is much restored, I am relieved to say. The wound has not defeated me, though it is still too tender at its center to be much use among the threshers and the winnowers and their heavy tools. But it is a relief to be working usefully after what have been almost three days of anxious idleness.

Mr. Quill requires me to prepare the skin while he makes paper audit of our fields and commons, finally transferring to the square in front of him what he has witnessed in the round. We keep our voices low so that neither Master Jordan nor his serving men catch any word of my account of this morning’s evasions and intrigues. The threats.

“I fear for us,” he says. His use of us is accidental — he has only been with us for, what? not quite four days — but it is revealing. I can tell he has surprised himself with us. Evidently Mr. Quill is putting down a root just as I am pulling up my own.

“It is the woman who must fear the most,” I say.

We are agreed that Mistress Beldam — for whom we clearly both have put down roots, despite her misdeeds and offenses, though possibly because of them — should be found and warned. It can’t be long before our novice magistrate or one of his lieutenants connects the velvet shawl to its most recent owner — there’s not one of us who hasn’t seen her wearing it, either at the morning visit to the newcomers’ den on our rest day or at the feasting barn that night. Someone is bound to talk. All that Master Kent has done by claiming the cloth as his wife’s is to gain Mistress Beldam a little time, a stay of execution, possibly, and to earn himself the final contempt of his cousin.

We could and ought to put our tools aside at once and walk off to the tenement where the bloody cloth was found. Both of us fear that Mistress Beldam will have already returned to where she evidently made her refuge overnight. And that is perilous. No doubt that trio of sidemen who currently have nothing else to do except inflate themselves as constables will be poking noses into every nook and cranny as we speak, hoping to provide some extra bodies for the Jordan court. Neither of us wants those three gentlemen to catch even a glimpse of Mistress Beldam. We understand too well the impact of her face and hair. Especially her hair, which, now it’s shaved as short and shy as rabbit fur, only intensifies her native insolence and vulnerability. She’s too inviting to the eye. Such gentlemen with time to spare will not be kind to Mistress Beldam if they find her on her own and in a tumbledown beyond the hearing of the threshing barn. We only hope she has the sense, since her revenge on Willowjack, to scurry back into the forest from where she came and make herself another nest of logs and turf — but across the parish bounds, where none of us are free to stray.

“We’ll look for her,” says Mr. Quill. His voice has thickened, just from saying it. “But not until we are”—he points a finger at his ear—“not overheard.” Steward Baynham is close by, it seems. We hear him moving in an upper room and then we hear him on the stairs. He’s flitting like a bee about a plum, and bees — as I at least have learned in these past years — adore sweet mischief more than anything. Something ugly and unusual has happened to us all. In just a few days we have become even more suspicious of the world.

“She might be anywhere,” I say. “But there is one place she’s bound to visit.” Her surviving kinsman must be fed and given drink. She will not let him wither on the branch of our village cross. She’s bound to come at night when it is safer and she can be unseen except by owls and foxes, and the moon, to comfort him and take good care of him. That’s a duty none of my neighbors are expected to assume, but one which Mistress Beldam can be certain to fulfill. So it is agreed that once the Jordan party have retired for sleep tonight, Mr. Quill and I will become like owls ourselves, round-eyed and patient, waiting on the scuttle of some little feet. We’ll be dark-feathered in our drabbest coats, and in a hideaway of leaves. And when she comes? Well, we can think of nothing else. We’re happy to seem busy with our work. And we can think of nothing else but her.

I clear away the carpeting of straw to find bare tiles and stretch the calfskin on the scullery floor. Now I can see the puckering where that little hand-reared animal, which was so moist and succulent for us at our gleaning feast, was cut along the spine, peeled off the ribs and then spread out for butchering. Her twin flanks are still joined at the girth, along an uneven ridge of skin. They provide for Mr. Quill an amply proportioned square, almost a good reach in length along each side. I arm myself with a blunt-edged knife and kneel down, holding the saturated skin firmly under both knees while I scrape away from me with my good hand. The knife dislodges any waste, any nuds of lime or tags of veal, but I have to snap out hairs at their bulbs with my fingers. The skin is not yet leathery. I should say vellumy. It’s far too coarse still, and resistant. I should have soaked it for a week or more. I have to limber it. I will not say it’s easy work. I will not say I enjoy being this intimate with an animal I’ve known and liked (and eaten, actually). But I see the task as a test. It can stand as proof to Mr. Quill that should he ever need a manservant then none can do a better job than me. So I try my best not to complain. I concentrate on smooth and thin and uniform. I am determined I will pass the lighted candle test.

At such close quarters, the smell is nauseous. What flesh has not been loosened and washed away in the soaking has begun to putrefy. I have to sit back every little while to breathe less heavy air. Stand up too quickly and I’ll faint. But slowly I can feel the calfskin surrendering to my hand. It’s thinning and it’s softening. I do not think the vellum I produce will be the finest quality. It’s not sufficiently prepared. I’m rushing it. I have no practice or proficiency. I’ve made mistakes. I doubt that it was wise to dry the skin in the smoke of its own roasting flesh. I’m not even certain if I should have steeped the skin with lime and dung. Till now, there’s not been any call for vellum hereabouts. Mr. Quill, though, does not seem dissatisfied when he steps across the room to view my progress and test it with his thumb. Evidently my surface is very nearly fibrous enough to hold yet not absorb his inks and paints.

Mr. Quill is working on his preliminary sketches. He is experimenting, hoping to discover what colored patterns he can devise to make the story of our farmscape — and our sheepscape — easy to decipher. It sounds to me, from my position on the floor, as if he’s doing women’s work. His tools are cutlery and grinding blocks, and pestle dishes hardly larger than a shell. I half expect to smell the spice of cake. Nutmeg, at least. But all I get above the rot of veal are the cloying odors of his binding gum and lye. He is clearly content in my company, speaking freely now, not whispering. It doesn’t matter if he’s overheard by any of the Jordan men. He’s only talking processes, informing me, but also reminding himself, of each step in his recipes for color. He uses words I’ve rarely heard before — like lapis lazuli and smalt. They are somehow related to the emerging blues that are already in evidence on his fingertips — and across his cheeks and in his tapered beard. I am supposed to see the difference — although the light is low in here — between the florey and the litmus and the indigo, which he displays for me on little parchment tags. He is as snug and personal with his kitchen colors as I have learned to be with clouds, let’s say, or even with the sky’s own wash. I have my blues: this blue betokens harvest days (it will not rain), and that one promises a cracking frost; another — higher, darker and more ponderous — reveals itself only silently and briefly when the sun has already withdrawn into his bedchamber but the windows of his heavens are not yet quite closed; this is the blue that says we’re free to stretch and finish work and rest.

So our afternoon progresses cozily, drawn on by the prospect of our owlish rendezvous tonight. There is a touch of winter in the room, not in its chill but in its busyness — and that is comforting. What I will miss the most, now that Cecily is gone, now that I myself am tempted to depart, are those still and icy, cloud-weighted times in the dead season, when, if I were fool enough to step outside my cottage into the cold and moonless dark, all I could expect to see would be the ducking of my neighbors’ candle flames and all that I could expect to hear, other than the cracking of the frost beneath my feet, would be the industry of far-from-summer tools. This is for us the mending time and the fixing season: boys carve their spoons from yew or plug the leaks in mugs and jugs; their dads replace the handles on their scythes and sickles, or fashion willow tines to renew the teeth in forks and rakes; their wives and daughters make new clothes or darn the old. Every home is embering before its fires in concentrated silence, and getting ready for the coming year.

And in our house, my wife and I set to work on the reeds and withies I gathered in the autumn, making trays and baskets for anyone that asked and could provide us with a ham, let’s say, or a honey pot by way of exchange. Such evenings were our most tender and consoling, no matter that the spring was far away and all we had to eat was barley bannock bread and broth, every day a Friday with no meat. So here, in Mr. Quill’s attentive company, I hear those busy sounds again. So long as I do not look up across the scullery, I am lost in lost and happy times.

For a while, the encounters and discoveries of this morning are almost forgotten in the engrossments of our work. Our talk is soft and intimate. Mr. Quill has the grace to show an interest in my story. Here is my chance to say how, now that Cecily is dead, I am eager for a change. A change and an adventure. “And not one that involves a single day of shepherding,” I add. “Though making vellum is a pleasing craft.” He nods while I am speaking. He takes my meaning, I believe. His nodding gives me reason to suppose he will discuss the matter with his host. “And you, sir?” I ask Mr. Quill. “Are there adventures calling you?”

His story is a shorter one. He has never been in love. He has no wife to widow him, and both his parents are deceased. His eldest brother has their property: the family home, a warehouse and a riverboat for trade and carriage of anything from fish to cloth. But Mr. Quill is not a wealthy man, he says, “not in possessions, not in my body … as you see. This left side is wooden from the shoulder to the ribs. A sudden palsy. Something in the bones. When I was a child.”

“So not an accident?” I mean to ask him if he was struck by lightning or injured by a bucking horse, as I overheard him say to Master Jordan last afternoon.

“That was my schoolroom jest, my regular defense against …” he starts to say, but shakes his head. He evidently does not want to mention lightning again. “No matter, though. I have been raised to understand I am unfit to work out of doors and too great an encumbrance to be employed within. I cannot help my brother in his warehouse or his boat. What use am I? In such a clumsy state, I cannot even find myself a wife. I take my happiness from this …” He indicates the paints and sketches on his desk. “Step forward, Walter. See how my colors have ennobled all my marks.”

While I’ve been working vellum from the skin, Mr. Quill has turned his scratchy charts and drawings into something odd and beautiful. There is no lettering as yet. Just shapes and lines and coloring. I recognize their intrigue and their sorcery. I’ve seen equally compound patterns, no less ineffable than these, when I’ve peeled back bark on dying trees, or torn away the papering on birches. I’ve seen them sketched by lichens on a standing stone, or designed by mosses in a quag, or lurking on the underwing of butterflies. I’ve found these ordinary abstracts in the least expected places hereabouts: I have only to lift a stone, or turn some fallen timber in the wood, or reverse a leaf. The structures and the ornaments revealed are made purposeful simply by being found. But none of these compare for patterned vividness with Mr. Quill’s designs. His endeavors are tidier and more wildly colorful — they’re certainly more blue — than anything that nature can provide. They’re rewarding in themselves. They are more pleasing than a barleycorn. “This one,” he says, “is, here and now, my true account. It’s what you have before Edmund Jordan the Younger brings in his improvements—”

“King Edmund the Second!” I suggest.

“Yes, let the man be crowned as that.”

Can I identify the barley field, Mr. Quill wants to know. I look again, hoping for some clues, from the charcoal-dark lines, perhaps, or from where the paint has crusted heaviest, or where it’s thinned and tonsured on the bubbles of the paper. It is not until he turns his painting through two quarters that I think I recognize the twists and fall of the field, the low redundant parts where barley grows on hostile soil, the sweeping upper wings where cropping is the best, the darker shading of the baulks, the snaking signature of what must be our snaking stream.

“Exactly so,” says Mr. Quill, when I indicate my answer with a finger, lifting a smudge of paint as I do so. “And here I’ve plaited in your boundary line.”

Now I can see the boggy path and Turd and Turf, not yet identified as the Blossom Marsh. There’s our top end. And there’s our deep and tall and goodly wood. Our fortress walls of thorn and scrub. Our unbuilt church. Our commons and our cottages. Our onetime safe and kindly realm.

I look again but squintingly, and not at the particulars. I’ve never before had a true sense of how our estate is shaped, how stars might shine on us, or what those hawks and kestrels see. It has been too many years for memory since I last observed our land from any greater distance than our clover hill — that first day, in fact, twelve years ago, when I arrived with Master Kent and saw, far off, from the pale green of the higher downs, the true green bowl — no, valley’s not the word — of this isolated place nesting, hidden, in those blank spaces between far rivers, nameless and beyond. But otherwise I’ve put no shape to it. Now I know the village is a profile of a brawny-headed man — a bust, in fact. His neck and shoulders are our pasturelands. Our cattle and our goats are feeding there. The four great fields make up his face. His ear — our pond — is small enough to be a child’s. He almost has a nose, where I suppose that little clovered hillock is. The forests are his hair.

It is an odd experience, unnerving in its way, to look down on our woods, our commons and our fields at once, to see them side by side, or separated only by the thickness of my thumb, when I have never seen them on the ground with such adjacency. Here the sap-green-painted fallow is seemingly attached by the madly dark blue stitching of a ridgetop copse to the gray-cum-yellow stubble of our barley field. They look like neighbors, exchanging glances through the trees. I’ve walked that thickness-of-my-thumb a thousand times. It’s easy going till you reach the ridge. The fallow field has a subtle slope, so it drains well but keeps its soil. There’s seldom any mud. But there are pebble-stones to set your feet against. You have to take the cow track at the ridge and go downhill a little with the copse thickening on your right until you find another rise, and there an open gap which lets you pass along a lane of thorns into the field where now, this afternoon, you’ll find our cattle gleaning grain. This is the point, at the brimming of the trees, where neither field can be seen. You’re too closed in. Indeed,there’s nowhere on the walk — which takes a little while and some exertion — where both the fallow and the barley field can be looked upon at once. You’d have to climb a tree for that. Or be a bird.

So Mr. Quill’s true account of here and now is not as honest as he hopes. He’s colored and he’s flattened us. No shadows and no shade. We are too mauve and blue; he’s planted longpurples everywhere. There are no climbs or slopes. The land is effortless: a lie. He hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the seasons or the nights must last. No man has ever seen this view. But it is beautiful, nevertheless. And so, come to that, although it’s hard to acknowledge it, is Mr. Quill’s map of the sheep fields that are looming over us. This chart is even busier with color, and more patterned to the eye. Its patchwork is much tidier. The fields are smaller, broken up and edged. The dark of the wood, with its clustered symbols showing trees, has almost disappeared. I cannot find an eye or ear. The brawny-headed man has lost his face.

“What do you make of these?” asks Mr. Quill. I take his question as a test. I do not want to say his paintings aren’t as honest as he thinks. But it isn’t hard for me to praise them fulsomely for what they are as pretty things, a kind of vision of the world — our little world, in fact — that I have never seen before and which has left me moved and oddly breathless. With his help these colored papers, unmarked as yet with any names or guides, make sense to me at last. They complicate to simplify. I have translated them. I can tell you where we are on them. I could stub my finger on the spot where I am standing now. But still I’m left to wonder where we’ll be on them in days and years to come. And so my breathlessness. There’s something in these shapes and lines, in these casual, undirected blues and greens, that, for all their liveliness, seems desolate.