Harvest A Novel (15 page)

What is not yet clear—at least not clear to me because it seems that, for the moment, I am not included in the village circles—is how the two women became involved. Anne Rogers is the fiery sort, I know. It’s never wise to disagree with her, even if you’re family. And Kitty Gosse is mulish when she wants to be. If they were working at the entry of the barn, in plain sight of the lane, and witnessed Lizzie being taken off by those three coarse and stony men, who only this morning were party to the prophecy that we should expect to see a neighbor hanging from an oak by sundown—“God bless you all, and God help one of you,” he’d said—I can’t imagine them standing aside. I can imagine, though, a tug of war between the women and the men, with this year’s Gleaning Queen the scrap of flesh they were fighting for. The women wouldn’t have stood a chance. They’d have been outnumbered, for a start; outmuscled too. But it might have taken some kicking and some bruising before they admitted defeat and allowed themselves to be dragged away like sows to face the consequences of their meddling.

No doubt the sound of Anne Rogers’s battling voice reached the barn. Everybody would have hurried out, glad of the excuse to put
down tools and see the last tugs of the struggle in the lane. Those clod-heads in their matching uniforms who were so churlish and so dangerously bored earlier in the day were now setting upon two village women and a child and dragging them off to who-knows-where and with who-knows-what in mind. Of course, the threshing and the winnowing came to an early end at once. This would have been the moment, I am sure, when Brooker and the twins, our arsonists, judged it best to pack and go before their secrets were uncovered. They wouldn’t want to decorate that sundown oak.

I know my neighbors well enough to share their anger and alarm—though it seems they’re still not so keen to have me in their company and sharing anything this evening. They reply to any simple question I might put with, Why are you asking that? and, Who needs to know? They’re closing ranks already and I am not included, despite my dozen years of standing at their shoulders. Old friends avoid my eyes. They duck away from me. Even John Carr is reluctant to talk. He hardly offers me a phrase. My once darker hair is clashing with their blond again. It is their reminder that I am the master’s man before I am a villager, that I have spent my afternoon with Mr. Quill, preparing for the coming of the sheep, and not with them, helping with the wintering of grain. I did not join them when they faced drawn arrows at the newcomers’ den. I did not join the dancing in the barn. I did not even join the gleaning of the barley field, and that was inexplicable. They know that when their cottages were so roughly pulled apart this morning, I was there to witness it but not to stop it. The knowledge that I spent last evening naked in the widow’s bed will not have come as a surprise, but then it will not have done me any favors either. The half of the village most related to Kitty and Fowler Gosse will see me as a poacher; and the other half are Saxtons or Saxton kin and will count me as a traitor to my—and their—sweet Cecily. The envious men will be the most outraged. Many of my neighbors nurtured a
seedling for Kitty Gosse and will resent my success. Maybe even one or two of their wives might once have nurtured shoots for me. I must have represented all the world for them when I arrived, and then when I became a widower … well, I had sweet-natured offers, let me say, but stepped away from all but one of them. So I cannot condemn my neighbors for closing ranks. These are nervous, jealous times for all of them.

And I know their expressions well enough, even in this evening gloom, to understand that these are also dangerous times for me. If there are offerings to be made, if there’s a name that should be whispered loud enough for this new master to overhear, a name that might conveniently connect a suspect with a crime or might divert suspicion from a native-born, better it is mine than any of their men’s, better I’m dragged off to sleep with Willowjack than anybody else. Unlike the twins and Brooker Higgs, already lost to us, it seems, I never was a local tree, grown in this soil from seed, to die where I was planted. I can be done without, and with no lasting harm. I’m no great sacrifice.

I do not blame them, honestly. I’m not a person they should trust, not at the moment anyway. I’ve not been loyal of late, or even tried to cling on to their love. I have kept too many secrets and too many confidences to myself. I have not told them what I overheard in the manor house gallery or what Mr. Quill has divulged to me about the older Edmund Jordan’s will and its entitlements. I plead guilty to the charge of being too tight-lipped, though I might say my silence was judicious rather than dishonest: I cannot serve each master and each friend with equal shares. I do not even know myself who it is I want to please, besides myself, or where I most want finally to rest my head. In Mr. Quill’s employ, I think, although there’s something in his colored charts, his hawk-high version of the world, that makes me wonder if he is too skittish and too vulnerable for me with his never-fading smile, his wooden lurch. He said as much himself this
afternoon: “I am the roughest piece of furniture.” You won’t be comfortable with me, in other words. I am reminded of that country saw, Only a fool would strap a saddle to a wooden bench and hope to ride it home.

Perhaps, now that I am fallowed by the cottagers, I ought to speak my piece to Master Kent, persuade him to reemploy me as his man. He might let me move back to the manor house. I’ll take the attic rooms again. He’ll need an ally when his cousin claims command, however distantly, and when the sheep invade his fields. He is my only brother in a way, though I cannot think he is my family. But whatever future I can devise for myself, I cannot be lighthearted about the present. I am furrowed sad tonight to see the village back away from me. My neighbors leave me standing on my own. Now I wonder if I’ve been a fool about this place; my restlessness is just a curse, a moling demon in my heart whose mischief is to have me leave the only acres that can provide me happiness. But then I understand too well, from what I’ve heard and seen, that any happiness—or at least the lands that nurture it—will not survive the autumn frosts.

So I stay a little to the side, forgotten or at least ignored in the shadows, and do not add my voice to theirs as they discuss what should be done about their disappearing sons, the pair of women who are held, and little Lizzie Carr. We’re the majority, they protest. We must be listened to. I hear the word
petition
. I could tell them, had they not decided to be deaf to me, that numbers amount to nothing in such matters. Dissent is never counted; it is weighed. The master always weighs the most. Besides, they can’t draw up a petition and fix it to the doorway of the church as other places do. It only takes a piece of paper and a nail, that’s true. But, even if they had a doorway to a church, none of them has a signature.

Of course, the loudest voices are the ones that want to arm themselves with sticks and blades and march up to the manor house like
maddened geese to save their goslings from the law. But they are only honking, making warning sounds. Nobody wants to storm the manor house, not with Master Kent inside, not with the echoes and impressions it has hoarded in its corridors. Besides, those three sidemen look menacing. They will be used to seeing off a crowd, the angrier the better, for then the greater their excuse for banging heads, and breaking bones, and leaving scars and bodies.

Some other neighbors say it’s best to let the evening run its course: the master’s bound to intercede on their behalf. There’ll be some displeased questioning of the women, no doubt. There’s been a scuffle, after all. And who can say that Kitty Gosse and Anne Rogers weren’t too fierce and fiery in the lane? That’s no surprise. It might be wise to let the matter boil and steam tonight. It makes no sense to lift a scalding pan. It’s best to let the water settle first, and cool. So, wait, is their advice. The three arrested villagers will be home by midnight, or by tomorrow midnight at least, and none the worse for wear.

It is the Saxton cousins, those two comic grunters who were once so famously divided by the partition of a pig, who suggest the favored strategy. They will not arm themselves. They will not wait like children while the water cools. Instead, they will present themselves at the manor house tonight—at once—as meekly as they can. They will wear smiles, remove their caps, and let the masters understand that any troubles that have occurred in these past days have been the work of newcomers and that they propose tomorrow, at first light, to search the alcoves of their land until the culprit—here they mean Mistress Beldam—is caught or driven far away or the victim of an accident.

I am not there to witness their entreaties at the manor, nor to make my own appeal for Kitty Gosse, as I should, because when we reach the unbuilt gateway to our unbuilt church, I discover Mr. Quill—as was arranged this afternoon, though in the mêlée I’ve forgotten it—in conversation with the one surviving tenant of our
pillory. It is his third night fastened here. My neighbors do not even pause or lift their caps for either of the men; their business at the manor house is more urgent. But there is a stifled, communal cry and a shaking of heads. The night is swarming with a hundred tuts. Clearly they’re unsettled and displeased to discover this new conjunction, these two contrary outsiders unified in whispering. They see that Mr. Quill has spread his arm across the young man’s shoulder. They see the gap between the mouth and ear. And it is disturbing. Yet every one of them will admit in their heart of hearts that we have not been just to this ragged, shaven visitor and certainly not to the older man, who died; his fate is far too cruel to contemplate. That is why no one has come in these few days to throw windfalls at the remaining captive or to cuss at him, for fun, as would have happened if he were genuinely culpable of anything more serious than not belonging here. And that is equally the reason why none of us has been more kind, offering to share his burden of bereavement, a crust and rind, at least, a gift of ale. A greeting, anyway. A wave. We’ve been ashamed, I think. And bewildered, truth be told. Bewildered by ourselves. These are not the customary village ways. Our church ground has been desecrated by our surliness. Our usual scriptures are abused. This body on the cross is not the one that’s promised us. Yet, once again, it’s Mr. Quill who teaches us our shortcomings. It’s Mr. Quill who’s intimate and kind. It’s Mr. Quill who’s valiant. It will not make him popular.

The woman and the man are husband and wife, Mr. Quill explains as we settle down with churchyard stones as our bench for our long wait for Mistress Beldam to appear. They are fugitives from sheep, exiles from their own commons, six or seven days away on foot. They’ve come to us because their ancient livelihoods have been hedged and fenced against their needs. And the man who died was Beldam senior, her father. This, I suspect, is information neither
of us has hoped to hear. Our imaginations have been fed by having her as a sister and a widow, a woman, that’s to say, free of ties and so within our grasps. We are, the pair of us, one bachelor, one widower, unspoken for—but now we are required to feel less ravenous. A married woman’s out of bounds, in principle at least. But, though I cannot speak for Mr. Quill, my attraction for the woman, based on that glimpse of her in the lamplit dancing barn and on the recent sight of her blood-soaked shawl, has not abated but only quickened at the knowledge of her kinship to this man. The marriage of an older woman to a thin-bearded youth is something that appeals to me. I can imagine being younger, being him … well, I will stop. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.

Except I cannot stop. I find myself too keen to catch the woman stepping through the night. I can see her stretching on her toes to kiss the cheek and ear where just a while ago Mr. Quill almost pressed his lips. I can see her kneading all her husband’s muscles and his joints, to drive away the stiffness and the pain of three nights hanging on the cross. I can see her taking from a wrap a supper she has foraged from the woods—there’s apples there aplenty now, and blackberries, and game. And I can hear them whispering: she’s saying that his sentence is almost half served and that he must endure; she’s saying how our village will be punished for its sins; she’s promising the fire they lit to stake their claim on common ground will be remade and lit again; she’s drawing bows and firing arrows at the night; she’s making love to him.

Mr. Quill is silent too. His hands are gripping tightly onto his knees. The moonlight catches us infrequently tonight but when it does I see the paint stains on his fingers and knuckles—some blues and greens, some luster work—and I can tell that apart from his plain
cap he has dressed himself in finer and more gentlemanly clothes than those he wore for me this afternoon. He’s like a decorated strippling at a fair, come to spy himself a girl. We sit like this in brewing silence for a while, busy with conjectures of our own and only lifting our heads slightly whenever we’re disturbed by snapping twigs, a shifting animal, a bat, the hint of footsteps coming close, raised voices from the manor house, and all the usual, rowdy ardors of a fading summer night.

It is, I think, the husband who hears her coming first. The top beam of the pillory rattles, bone on wood, as he tries to turn his shoulder and his head. I do not know if he’s aware that Mr. Quill and I are sitting only twenty paces from his back. I do not know what Mr. Quill has said to him or what arrangements they have made, if any. I wouldn’t be surprised if Young Beldam (he has a name of sorts, at last) calls out to her. A warning. There are other men about, he’ll say. Best run. But he says nothing, only whistles lightly, no more than the whistle of a breeze. I think he wants to let her know, as she comes close, that he still has breath in his lungs. She will not find another corpse.

Mr. Quill touches the back of my hand with a single finger and lifts his chin to point toward our left, where beyond our tumble of stones the church ground falls away a little into a ditch backed by thorn scrub and sore-hocks and, then, the groping nighttime silhouette of trees. He cocks his head. I do the same, until I hear the rustling. It could be another roaming pig, come to feast on someone else’s shins, but it’s too delicate and purposeful.