Harvest A Novel (21 page)

Instead, I hold my nerve and let them go forward without me, without the afterthought of Servitude or the extra burden of my Shame. I hurry along the cattle path and down the far side of the hill, into the sunshine again. Here, in warmer light, I dare to slow my step. I want to bide my time and make the most of what remains of this upsetting day. I am not ready to face the choices I must make or even guess what they might be. I do not want to see the manor house or any of the cottages. I do not want to face the pillory. My eyes are not entirely dry just yet. My mood is tumbling again. I’m suffering what Cecily used to call my wilts. But it is a mood that will pass, in my experience, with every step I take into the open and deserted fields. These poisonous and leaden squalls are familiar to me, as bewildering
in their coming as they are swift in their going, though lately the wilts have become more frequent. Cecily’s parting is to blame. Without her love, I am an empty pod. I’m mourning her in tiny episodes, and will do, I suppose, until the mourning is complete. That day will never come, I think—and hope. There’s solace in the thought that I will never finish missing her. And I suppose there’s solace in the certainty that I will never finish missing here. I know I will not, cannot, must not, stay.

So I let the grieving have its way, as I escape from Clover Hill. I can allow myself to wallow like a village pig in the mud of my self-pity for a few more steps. I’m prone to that. I’m prone to feeling sorry for myself and feeling all the better for the indulgence. I allow my sadness to run its course, before I raise my head and, forging through a blizzard of thistledown which is falling up from the ground and supported by a breeze too soft for me to feel, I will myself to recognize what country folk are born to recognize, the amity in everything. Our fields are medicine. All days prove good to those that love the open air.

I pass our crest of great shade oaks, their first acorns and their summer leaf-fall cracking underfoot, and reach our flatter and more open ground, hardworking land, as flinty, thin and grizzled as a laborer. Here are pippinjays to keep me silent company. The four or five I see this afternoon are too busy defacing pears and crabs to speak or even notice me. And there are finches in the quicksets as I walk. For the time being, at least, they’re not short of anything to eat. They have the pick and peck of filberts, berries, hips and seeds. The hedges are heavy laden and grinning red with spoils, as if some puck has laid his magic wand upon their branches and ordered them to gem. This is the age of mushrooms too. It’s a mistake to think that, just because the barley’s in, the land has lost its openhandedness. Each weed and tree enjoys a harvest of its own.

Yet every plant and creature also knows that summer’s in retreat. The wayside dandelions have whitened slightly in the last few days. They’re growing pale with age. The year is leaving us. As are the swallows. A dozen or so are already vit-vitting overhead, preparing for their chinless journeys south. They always feel the chilling and the thinning of the air before we do, and understand when it is time to leave. I should not mind their parting. They’ve taken all the summer flies they can. They’ve kept our cattle company enough. They need to look elsewhere. Somewhere better, I suppose. For all its warmth, the sunlight is slanting lower than it was a day ago. What sky is blue is more thinly so this afternoon. The woodland canopies, viewed from this sloping field, are sere or just a little pinched with rust, the first signs of the approaching slumber of the trees. Come, maids and sons of summer, get ready for the winter ice. Your day is shortening. The air is nipping at your cheek; the cold is tugging at your wrist. The glinting spider’s thread will turn in a little while to glinting frost. It’s time for you to fill your pies with fruit, because quite soon the winds will strip the livings from the trees and thunder through the orchards to give the plums and apples there a rough and ready pruning, and you will have to wait indoors throughout the season of suspense while weather roars and bends outside. The dead leaves fly. They’re cropped and gathered to the rich barn of the earth.

14

OW THERE ARE ONLY FOUR OF US
. I hope that there are four of us. Mistress Beldam herself cannot be anywhere but near. Tonight will be her husband’s fifth in the pillory. Mr. Quill is missing still, of course. Tomorrow I will search for him, or what remains of him. My greatest wish is that I’ll discover nothing of the man—my mapmaker, my onetime greatest hope. Let’s trust that someone from the manor house went out on the night of confessions when Mr. Quill was elsewhere, on a rescue mission of his own, to warn him never to return, to let him know he is named as the master sorcerer, the witches’ ringleader; that his ill-shaped, flimsy life is swinging on a thread of gossamer, and could soon be swinging from a sturdy noose. But who might that savior have been? Not any of the sidemen, that’s for sure. Or the groom. They wouldn’t have taken the risk, they wouldn’t have cared enough. The steward, Baynham, is a possibility. His educated conscience might have troubled him. I cannot say the man is bad, from what I’ve seen. He’s just a spaniel, sluggish, loyal, obedient. As am I, so far.

I suppose some of my neighbors might have been the good Samaritans,
unwittingly. That’s easy to imagine. Catching Mr. Quill on his way home late that night, they would not have resisted the opportunity to chastise him for the troubles he brought upon them, nor the chance to let him know what Mr. Baynham blurted out at the manor door before suggesting they collect faggots for a public burning at the stake: “I hear that there is witchery about. Three of your she-devils are in our custody.” I cannot, though, imagine Mr. Quill running off at that. I cannot see him scurrying away. He’s proved himself a brave, outspoken man before, unheeding of the dangers in his path, or insensible to them, an heroic innocent. Instead I see him striding even more speedily and erratically toward the manor house to have his say. He would have pulled that daughter and those women free. No, that is not the answer I am hoping for.

Master Kent, of course, was privy to those goings-on. He would have done his best to warn his chart-maker and house guest of the dangers. Who knows, he could have pulled his topcoat on over his night chemise and gone out on the hunt. He could have had the fortune to discover Mr. Quill on his way home. They would have startled each other in the lane, and then exchanged their whispers and their hugs. At the very least he might have marked a warning on a piece of chart and left it in the porch for Mr. Quill to find. But surely Master Kent would have told me if he’d helped the man escape or, at the very least, persuaded him to stay away. He knows I have become an intimate. Yet, now I think of it, something was left unspoken the morning he came into my home with all that grim news to impart. “And what occurred when Mr. Quill returned last night?” I’d asked. And Master Kent had put his hand across his mouth with some embarrassment—as if to hide a lie, perhaps—and said, “He has not come back to the house, not yet. He will have slept elsewhere …” That
elsewhere
takes on a better shape than it has done before. I’d only thought
elsewhere
was Mistress Beldam’s arms. I think now that possibly it was
my master’s hint to me that our good friend was safe.
Elsewhere
was not within our parish bounds.

But still I’m troubled by the walking nightmares I’ve had on my way down from Clover Hill. In these, my friend is wrapped up in a vellum shift, and colorless. Or he is melting in the flames, his flesh running off his bones like candle wax. The sidemen have discovered him and made a makeshift gibbet; the sidemen have discovered him and left him bleeding on the forest floor; our pigs have finished him. Or else my neighbors catch him in their lanes. They’re not unwitting good Samaritans on this occasion. It’s late and dark. There’s no one there to witness them or to blame them for their violence. They treat him like they will treat the groom on the next afternoon. He’s kicked and bruised. He might survive, but someone has a pruning knife and Mr. Quill is coppiced and he’s pollarded. There’s not a limb remaining on his trunk. And once again the pigs have finished him.

And if Mr. Quill has been discovered and dispatched, why not Mistress Beldam? We’ve not found any sign of either of them for two days now. So why not Mistress Beldam too? I see her sprouting head pushed and nuzzled like a turnip on the ground, a sweet and tiny dainty for the pigs. I see her spread out with the Chart-Maker among the carcasses at Turd and Turf. But then another, likely fear envelops me, a less than sweet and dainty one, but more believable, given what we know of her already, her grief and anger at her father’s death. The woman who might well have slaughtered Willowjack, the woman who must still be looking for revenge, has run off through the sore-hocks with Mr. Quill a dozen midnight steps behind. He thinks he’s chasing her and will then have the chance to rescue her. But she is luring him. She means him to follow her. She even slows enough to give this halting man the chance to almost reach her back. Another twenty paces and she’s his, he thinks. She’s at his fingertips. If only she had longer hair instead of meager fur, he could grab hold of her. They reach the
open ground where the open fire was built, the day that they arrived. They reach the corridors of trees, behind. The darkness closes in on them; it pulls on its mantle and closes out the moon. She turns and faces him. “I’ve come to warn you, sister,” Mr. Quill begins to say. He does not see the length of wood come swinging at his head. He feels only the first of fifty blows. But I feel every one of them, a thorough pounding in my head that will not end until I know if this is fantasy or truth. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow, I will have to go to search for them, the living or the dead. But now I need to find some peace in sleep. Today has been the second hardest in my life.

Despite convention and civility, I spend the night, the first for many years, in the manor. I am its current master, after all, or at least the highest in ascendancy that still inhabits this discarded place. After me the bats can call it home. Again, I have my choice of beds, I have my choice of unmade beds. It is clear where the damaged groom has slept. He’s left a crusty tracery of blood. And then there is a dormitory of sorts: straw is spread out deeply across the boards in a chamber off the musty upper gallery above my harking master’s bed-parlor, where the sidemen passed their time—the torture room. It stinks of men and suffering.

Master Jordan himself has left his traces in his room, mostly the smell of rosewater from his casting bottle and the soiled embroidered linen smock that he was wearing when he came to shake his fist at everybody in the threshing barn and in which, I must suppose, he’s slept. I take his bed. He’s made it comfortable, or at least ordered it to be made comfortable by one of his serving men. He’s evidently turned down anything from Master Kent’s supply of chaff mattresses and rough, hap-harlot coverlets, and made instead a cushioning of carpets, cloth and arrases that he has covered with one of Lucy Kent’s old riding capes. It is not quite up to the flock that he is used to. This is hardship for the man. He’s had no spaniels sleeping at his feet or any
supper tray of dainties on the side. But I am finding his bed unusually comfortable.

At first I do not recognize what Master Jordan has folded up and lately used as a pillow for his head. The room is dark. But when I put my own head down, I suspect the pillow by its texture. I can’t have ever pressed my cheek into a velvet shawl before, although I’ve dreamed of it recently. At first I think I’ve put my face on mole. I’ve caught moles, hares and rabbits in my time. I’ve felt the thick pile of them, brushed my lips and skin with them. There’s nothing living that’s more silky than a mole. But mole will never smell as good as this. Behind the slightly breaded flavor of Master Jordan and his splash of rosewater, I pick up—despite its recent washing out of blood, horse blood, perhaps, its stain of Willowjack—the warm and musty scent of her. I lift it and I turn it in the half-dark hoping to confirm it is the Beldam shawl. It seems too dull and colorless. I try to make the cloth show mauve. It will not oblige. But there are moonlit, silver threads for sure, glistening almost wetly like snail tracks. The first time I saw this in its full finery was at the ending of our feast and dance. She had it round her shoulders then, at the entrance to the barn, and she was looking Turkish underneath its weighty, lordly weave. The last time I saw the velvet cloth it was heavy with blood and thrown across a fence in the cottage lane below the Saxton derelict. “Give me her name,” my latest master demanded of me. “By all my heart, I truly do not know her name,” I’d said.

So I am satisfied that this is the woman’s shawl. I have to confess I try to sleep with it and her. I try to summon her to me by whispering into her velvet pelt. I stroke myself with it and her. I press it close up to my nose and nuzzle her. Her recovering hair would feel like this, I think. And can I say I take some strength from her? For while these lengthy hours pass, while I am sunk into these lonely furrows of the night, I think I find or dream or have delivered to me by the spirits of
the shawl a sense of what I ought to do before King Edmund, as Mr. Quill and I once christened him, vassals me entirely. I wake to a chilling clarity, as if my body has been swept with frost. Frost and furrows. That’s the prompt. I know my duty now. I have to put the earth to plow. The time has come to put the earth to plow, no matter what the Jordans say. The frost will finish what the plow begins. Winter will provide the spring.