Harvest A Novel (22 page)

I am too cold and clear to sleep a moment more. So I stand up naked from my bed, pull on my boots and the abandoned Jordan smock for warmth, wrap myself inside the Beldam shawl and make my way outside. I mean, I think, to lay a trap for her. Or at least to test if she is living still, if she is walking out at night to tend her man and see on whom else she might exact continuing revenge for her father’s death. I have to say the thought of that, the thought of her out in the night with a piece of stone gripped in one hand as her mallet and a spike of metal in the other, plus the image that I already have of Mistress Beldam luring Mr. Quill into the woods and the sudden sweeping of her length of wood, the bloody compost of the forest floor, makes me as nervous of the dark as any foolish townsman ever was.

THE SKY IS CLEAR BUT IT IS TOO EARLY
for the moon to have fully crested the trees. I am determined to go down to the pillory. I’ll hang the shawl close to the husband, but beyond his reach. She’ll not miss it if she comes. Even in the flattest darkness its silver threads will glint and give away its place. But now that I am shivering outdoors and reminded by the deep-brewed quiet how neighborless I am, I lose my nerve. I am not ready yet to face the husband. I don’t want to chance the black and empty lanes tonight. So I only spread the velvet shawl out on the stone bench in the manor porch, exactly where her father has been spread, though I don’t believe Mistress Beldam knows that
detail. I touch its nap. I say farewell. I do not think that she will come at once.

I suppose she must have come at once. Because I’ve hardly regained Master Jordan’s bed and laid my still-bruised head along the pillow of my arms, too tense and worried for sudden sleep, when I catch sounds that must be animal. The weather and the trees are random in their calls and songs. They are not rhythmic but unarranged and stray. These padding feet and footsteps are spaced and patterned. What I can hear is something on the outside of the house, something careful, something delicate and small. I do not dare to move inside my bed. I’ll give away my sleeping place. The manor boards are loose and squeakier than mice. But by the time I’ve reached cautiously across the bed to pick up a candle holder in case I need to defend myself, should I need to hold her off, should I need to capture her, the sounds or footsteps have retired. The manor house is mine alone again. And finally I dare to sleep, though I am nervous what I’ll dream or what I’ll find when I wake up.

At dawn, I find the velvet shawl has gone. I cannot tell what that means to me because I do not know myself. Of course, it shows the woman is alive, unless some fox or badger has a taste for velvet shawls. But equally it indicates the chilling, thrilling probability that while the world around her sleeps, Mistress Beldam has been roaming like a living ghost throughout our lanes and corridors. She never sleeps. She’s haunting us. She is patrolling every part of us. And now that all my neighbors have departed, and Mr. Quill, perhaps, is sleeping with the cadavers, I am the only one who’s left for her. Last evening she must have seen my coming home, my shoulders down. She will have seen where I decided to sleep. Last night, I must suppose, she will have watched the manor house and seen me standing, fearful as a child, at the porch door, dressed in Master Jordan’s embroidered smock, every bit the gentleman, and wrapped in the beyond-her-station shawl. She
will have seen me spread out her shawl on the stone porch bench. And when I closed the door on her I cannot think it rested in its place for any longer than a breath. She has been cold these last few nights. She has her purple velvet back again.

This is not what I expected when I agreed at Master Kent’s prompting to serve as a Jordan man. I thought that though I would be troubled by my compromise, I would nevertheless find it comfortable to pass a little extra time in his employ among the places I have known and loved, indeed among the places where I have been known and loved myself. It would be a luxury, in fact. I’d have some privacy in which to grieve. Some autumn peace. But, standing here this morning in the deep shade of the manor porch, looking down onto the bench’s cold and naked stone, I feel nothing but alarm, the rising, clenching fear of death. I was a fool to stay behind. I’ve had my chances to escape. I should have run down yesterday from Clover Hill and joined the pageant on its way to town. Perhaps, I should have left the village with the Carrs the other afternoon or with any other neighbors who could tolerate my company. Here’s the truth of it: I should have got out of here as soon as Cecily died. I never could prove brave or blond enough to stay.

It’s tempting even now to pack up and leave at once. I’m not indentured to this place, after all. I have no witnesses who’ll care if I depart ahead of time. I’ve given Master Jordan my reluctant nod. But we hardly touched when we shook hands on it. My fingers only clacked against his rings. In the end it’s not the nod or the clacking that are bound to keep me here. It’s Master Kent’s wide-stretched eyes of yesterday, and what I came to understand last night that they mean to me, what it is I have to do, what I should start, before I go, the folds and trenches I must leave behind. And so I dress, and arm myself with the old short sword with which the first Edmund Jordan is reputed to have felled a cattle thief more than thirty years ago and
which, from the brown-stained point, I suspect has been used again more recently. Then I search the manor house for the master’s chain of mostly unused keys. Mistress Beldam’s husband need not serve his sentence out, so long as he agrees to help me with the plow.

I can only guess what he’s thinking as I approach the pillory. I know that he will recognize at once how uneasy and shamefaced I am. There is no hiding it. My body feels as tense and knotted as a yew. I want to smile at him, to show I mean him well and that the blood-tipped sword I’m carrying need not be a cause for alarm, so long as he does not make it so himself. But the muscles in my face are not relaxed enough. My smile of greeting is fixed and artificial. I’m feeling sick to the stomach, actually. With apprehension, I suppose. But at least I’ve had a comfortable bed for the night and nearly enough sleep and I am thinking clearly. I know how I intend to spend the day. I cannot do it on my own.

If he is feeling any fear of me, my frozen face, the sword, my troubled bustle of intent, he does not have the strength to show it. I haven’t thought how weakened he will be from staying still and doing nothing for so many days. We thought his and his father-in-law’s punishment was mild when we sent them to the pillory for only seven days. That and the snapping of their bows, the clipping of their heads. “Count yourselves as fortunate,” they were told. In other places, less hospitable than here, they might have expected a beating and a hanging. But, now that I am looking at him in the light—our past encounters have been largely in the dark—I can see how summer has sapped out of him, how he has paled, how he’s hanging drily from the cross of wood. His arms were thick and oaky when they cuffed him there. I cannot say that they have become thin exactly, but they are certainly not muscular. They’re drained of blood and energy. His wrists and throat are still bruised purple from when he has attempted to pull himself free. His eyes are hollowed out, from lack of proper sleep,
perhaps. His lips are crusted; orange funguses, dry cracks. And his neck is swollen with insect bites and red with sores where he’s tried to itch them on the wood.

“I have the key,” I say to the crown of his head, blackened now with new thick growth. He will not look at me. “I’ve stolen it.” His forehead furrows. He might mean, So what? Or, Not before time. Or, My itchy neck is ready for your sword. Take off my head, and let’s be done with it.

“I’ve stolen it,” I say again. He needs to know I’m taking risks for him. “I have been instructed not to let you go until you’ve served every moment of a week. But I think you know, I’m the only friend you’ve had about these parts. I’ve never wished you any harm …” His forehead furrows for a second time: So what? “I’m free to walk away, if you prefer.”

“Do what you will.”

“What is your name?” I need to make a friend of him.

“It’s mine to keep,” he says.

I’m tempted—momentarily convulsed by the impulse, in fact—to bring the sword down sharply on his neck. He is enraging me. I do not feel I’ve earned his disrespect. Instead, I only lay it flat across his infuriating forehead, and slowly tell him with my mouth no distance from his ear what his situation is: “There’s no one else can help you now. There’s no one left excepting me. And, as you see”—I rattle them—“I am the master of the keys.”

“Say what you want from me.”

“I want a little help with farming. For a day.” This time he nods. A day of farming is a task he understands. “And there are other recompenses … for the time you’ve spent … with us.” I tell him briefly that the villagers have gone. The masters and the sidemen too. So he is free, as soon as we have finished with the field, to walk among our cottages and help himself to anything he wants. There’re animals that
he can take. And winter food. And if he chooses he can fill a wagon with our produce and our implements and draw them to the nearest marketplace. “I’ll make the pair of you”—he lifts his eyes, to mark my slantwise mention of his wife—“quite rich. For just a single day of labor in my field.”
My
field, indeed. My true and only field. “What do you say?”

“I say you are the man who holds the sword. I say you are the master of the keys.”

I hope to be less clumsy with the keys, but I can’t tell without testing them one at a time which will shoot the lock. My hand is shaking. I have to drop the sword down on the ground, so that I can use both hands. I put my foot onto the shaft, so that he cannot snatch it up as soon as he’s released. Of course, he’s in no state to snatch at anything. He sinks down to his knees the moment that I lift off the topmost beam. I’ve freed him to collapse. I let him sit and rub his legs and arms, while I stand back deciding if it’s safe to trust the man. I think I’ve bought him with my promises of wealth. In all honesty, he could freely rub the blood back into his limbs, then club me to the ground and still be free to help himself to anything he wants, including my short sword. But there has been something in his manner that I trust. A scheming man would not have treated me with such disdain. He’d not have told me, Do what you will. A scheming man would have been more eager to offer help and quick to let me know his name. A scheming man would have lied, and he’d have made promises to break.

I take a chance and leave him recovering in the grass while I walk back along the lane toward the manor house. I mean to fetch him water and a little bread and cheese. I pick up windfalls for the man on my way back. I’m half expecting him to have fled, or armed himself with one of the churchyard stones, the sort his wife used if she murdered Willowjack, and used again on Mr. Quill last night, in dreams. But he is still sitting by the pillory. His back is resting on its shaft. His
legs are stretched out across the ground that he has scuffed for the past few days. He evidently still has pins and needles in his feet and arms. He is flexing his shoulders, and in pain. But I can tell that, not so long ago, he’d been a tough and worthy man. He’s cut a bit of barley in his time. He looks much like a weary harvester, glad to have his apple, bread and cheese.

I tell him I’ll return when he has eaten and is stronger. That frown again. But this time it’s a frown that gives me confidence. The meal I’ve brought to him and he’s accepted signifies a truce. He’s broken bread with me. I do not think he’s had such hospitality from any other villager or either of the masters. I take a further chance, and put the short sword at his feet. “Defend yourself if anybody comes,” I say, though it doesn’t make any sense for me to take that risk. No one will come. No one except his wife, perhaps, or Mr. Quill, unlikely though that seems. But I’ve shown I trust him, and hold his future welfare close to me. Laying down my sword has made a comrade out of him, a fellow victim of the world. I am the scheming one, it seems. If Mistress Beldam’s watching us, and I suspect she is, she will see that I’m a friend. I even whistle as I walk away to show how confident I am in him, and her.

But as soon as I’m out of earshot I let my whistling stop. Now I am talking to myself, drawing up a list of things to do. At first it feels like any other day at summer’s end. There’s fuel to cut and stack. There’s field keeping and hedge trimming that must be done. There’re falling walls and damaged barns to fix. This is the season of repair. It also is the season of prepare, when we make ready for the coming spring. I know that I will need some oxen for my task. We have a team of four allowed to pasture on the fallow fields and in the commons. They are sweet-natured animals, despite their crescent horns and deep bullish dewlaps. They have only to rest and eat all day and contend with nothing but the flies. The one thing they have to bother
them is work, and that’s sporadic hereabouts. It saves them from the butcher, though. So long as they are strong, they’ll not end up as beef or leather. We’ll not make cups out of their horns, or fashion bobbins, toys and dice out of their bones, or even boil down their hoofs for glue, until their natural deaths. Our oxen lead an easy life.

I can’t remember exactly where we have tethered them, and so I have to go from gate to gate until I catch sight of their white snout patches and the insides of their comical pink ears. Their bodies—donkey-gray and mottled—blend in with the undergrowth. There’re only two of them today. The smallest of the four. My neighbor families have taken the other two with them, first to draw their carts of family goods and then, perhaps, to trade them at the next village they reach. I rope the remaining pair, lead them on their strong, bone-weary legs down the lane and tie them at our tool barn, where they’re content to graze on fence weeds by the door. Oxen do not have the reasoning of horses and so they tend to be more pliable and patient. They’re steadier; their winter keep is cheaper too. A horse will smell the saddle in another room or hear the pulling on of riding boots and start to kick in protest. An ox won’t know he’s needed for draft work until the moment that he has to pull—and even then he can’t be bothered to protest.