Harvest A Novel (19 page)

I am not being generous or sensible. What does it matter if he captured her? What loss is it to me? Indeed, it might be best if that were so, if he caught up with her elsewhere and hushed her cries to tell her of the danger she was in. But then surely he would have gone back to the manor house at once, his duty done, his conscience clear, and not slept elsewhere. And I am bothered by the thought, the tormenting drama, actually, of that cropped head on Mr. Quill’s bent chest. I almost put his lips on hers. I almost see his graceless body—bared, as white as moonlight—in her arms. I am so bothered that I placate the tension with my hands, alone in widow Gosse’s bed, where so many times of late the tensions have been stroked away by her. Of course, I’m left more bleak than I began. My loneliness is evidenced in wasted seed and empty cottages.

Who are my neighbors now? I’m counting them on gluey fingers. My tally is the strangest one. There’s not a willing soul remains within our bounds who entirely belongs to these commons and these fields. Apart from Kitty Gosse, Anne Rogers and Lizzie Carr, if they’re alive, no one who’s stayed was born close by. No one who’s stayed has family. My reckoning provides me with just seven bodies freely sleeping under a roof: four Jordan men—the steward has already ridden off for help—the two masters of the manor and dissenting cousins, and myself (though not quite sleeping yet). There is the husband at the pillory, of course. I must remember him. He has no roof. And then the missing couple, unaccountable, the sorceress, the Chart-Maker. I have to say it: beauty and the beast.

I force myself to concentrate. If I can only ponder on a single task—forget the woman, Mr. Quill, my bruises and the neighbors who provided them, all talk of sorcery, the horrors of the coming dawn … no, stop. If I can only find a single task to think about, to practice in my weariness, I will sleep. I know that I will sleep. Labor is the
gateway to a night of rest. I take myself off to the barn. I close my eyes and fly there like a bat. And there I find discarded tools. And I commence—at least restart—the threshing of our barley crop. Quite soon I’ve made a rhythm with my flail. My neighbors should be proud of me. I work the thump, until it’s beating with my heart. I dream of plows and oxen, furrows, grain.

12

ASTER JORDAN SEEMS A CALM
and happy man today. He says I’m just the hand he’s looking for. Indeed, when I walk across to the manor house as soon as it is light with nothing clear in mind except to show my damaged face and take the consequences, he meets me at the door himself and leads me from the porch into the room where he is eating breakfast. He has me sit. He offers me his bread and ale, though not the cold meats and the cheeses. He’s being civilized but thrifty. I cannot tell what’s happened overnight but clearly it is to his satisfaction. Even Master Kent, when he comes in and sits with me on my side of the table, seems less ashen and less shaky than he has for several days. This morning he’s breathing from a deeper pool. It is as if a truce has been brokered and both men claim the victory.

But first—to earn my bread and ale, it seems—they ask for my account of what happened in the village yesterday. Has anyone remained, they want to know. Did anybody speak of their return? And when my answer to both questions is a no, Master Jordan claps his hands, his signature for being pleased, and laughs out loud.

“What frightened mice your neighbors are,” he says. “And so the meek shall inherit the world!” He means his sheep, of course.

Edmund Jordan might seem a very pleasant man when he is relaxed and smiling. I do not find him dangerous. And so I risk a question of my own, though I select it carefully. I will not ask about the girl and women in his keeping, even though they cannot be detained more than fifty paces from his table. I cannot seem to be concerned for them, if they are witches in his view. I dare not even mention Mr. Quill. I’m too associated with the Chart-Maker already. Instead, with a nod of apology to both men for my temerity, I say, “I worry that my dear master is deposed entirely.” I reach an arm out, stretch along the bench, until I can lay my hand on Charles Kent’s elbow. This is my show of loyalty. This is my reminder that we once drank at the same breast. I’m stepping back into his yard. That seems my only option now.

“You should not squander any fluster on your master, Walter Thirsk,” he replies, then pauses, smiles, tips his head, says “Water! Thirst!,” laughs merrily and claps his hands. I’ve never seen a man so happy with himself so early in the day. He leans across the table to lay a hand on each of our forearms. “Your master is my cousin through marriage, as you know. He’s family. He’s country kin. I cherish him, of course. No, my benefit is that he benefits. We have a plan. We leave today. We leave with cousin Charles in our good company.”

Now I am required to listen to a lecture on the principles of stewardship. The province of a hundred people out of every one hundred and one is to take and not provide direction, he says. He mentions Profit, Progress, Enterprise, as if they are his personal Muses. Ours has been a village of Enough, but he proposes it will be a settlement of More, when finally he’s fenced and quickthorned all the land and turned everything—our fields, the commons and “the wasted woods”—into “gallant sheep country.” “And, as misfortune has it,” he
concludes, marking that Misfortune with a happy show of teeth, “the villagers who most would benefit from these advances have preferred instead—as one, it seems—to impose their villainy on my good groom and then seek another place where their idle subsistencies can flourish. So the land has come back to the Lord, I mean myself, who owns this property of soil. I have the chance to start from scratch. Or, as our Mr. Earle might say, I have the chance to start on a spotless sheet of parchment.”

“Has Mr. Earle finished with his charts?” I ask. I cannot see the risk in that.

“Ha, Mr. Earle will never finish it, I think.”

“You mean because he is accused?”

“Accused of what?”

“Of unclean magic, can I say?”

Master Jordan leans across the table again and presses his thumb into my forearm. “Your face is very cruelly bruised,” he says. His smile has thinned. “I hope the injury has no cause to spread. I would not want to see your other cheek as scarred. No. Again, you must not squander any fluster there. You will not. That is what I say. Magic, clean or otherwise, and sorcery … such things? We should not mention them again.” And on those words, as if ordained, the first sunlight of the day finds passage through the red-black canopy of sentry beeches and lays a glossy stripe across the tabletop. At last I understand the hope in Master Kent’s face, and his composure in these torrential times. His resignation too. There’ll be no trials. There’ll be no burning at the stake. There’ll just be progress of a sort.

What the cousin proposes and my master Kent supports, with many nods and nudges of his knee on mine but without speaking a word, is that when the Jordan party leaves, as leave it must by noon today, with the three prisoners in tow, I am to stay behind to be the new master’s ears and eyes. His steward has already ridden off
to organize the purchase of the sheep—so not to summon soldiers, then—and in the coming months I can expect the arrival of hired hands who will lodge in our empty cottages while trees are cut, and hedges struck, and drystone walls and winter folds built. I can expect, as autumn comes, a pair of shepherds to arrive, or even three perhaps, and they will carry with them coins for my wage. But for the coming weeks I can count only upon myself for company. “Yourself and Mr. Pillory,” he says. “It is my reckoning the man has three more days to serve. Today, tomorrow and the last. As you are honest, do not show him leniency, but set him free only when the hour veritably lets him free. I have your word?”

Master Kent nods encouragement. He will explain when we’re alone, he seems to mean.

“You have my word.” I hate myself for saying so.

“Then start your day in my employ by preparing our five horses for the journey. My groom has not the heart or face for it. He’s keeping to his bed. I thank him for that. He is a fiercely ugly man today.” Master Jordan stands at the table, offers me his hand. I cannot help but reach across and shake it briefly. My finger joints clack against his rings. His palms are cool and vellum-soft and smooth.

Master Kent comes with me to the orchard, where, carelessly, since the groom’s disablement, the horses have been left untethered overnight. We could be mistaken for ranking equals as we walk at each other’s shoulders down the lane, two graying men of more than middle years, no trace of finery, bulked up and burnished by our living on the land.

“I thank you, Walt,” he says, taking my hand. We are old friends again. “I cannot say how glad I was to see your face today. Despite your bruises. I feared you would have fled like everybody else. I’d not have blamed you if you had. I’ve been tempted to take flight myself. I’ve even thought to take a light to it, my home, and finish off what
was begun in my dovecote and my lofts. Rather than be witness to …” He does not want to list the changes that will come. “These are sad and hasty times. In what … five days, six days? … the village has been … lost to me. It has been lost to all of us.”

Nevertheless Master Kent has managed, he reports, to salvage at least some advantage from the exodus. As soon as his cousin learned the village was cleared out, dispersed and chivvied by alarm, as Master Jordan always must have intended, his interest in the captives and in any talk of sorcery waned quite suddenly. A triumphant stillness flooded through the manor house. Any mention of Mr. Earle, my Mr. Quill, was rewarded only with a yawn. Mistress Beldam didn’t matter anymore. Alchemy and sorcery were trifling affairs compared to the Land of Progress he proposed.

“And so I risked an intercession on behalf of little Lizzie and the women,” says Master Kent. “If my cousin counted their undoubted sins—their foolishness, let’s say—a minor matter, surely he could end their punishments. It would be kind and wise of him, and honorable, of course—the man loves honor almost as much as he worships wool—to end their punishments.”

“You do not mean that I should end their suffering at once?” the cousin teased. “Is it your plea that I must let them meet their Maker straight away? Can I use faggots from your log pile for their fire?”

“I propose you let them meet their Maker in their own good time, and for the moment let them walk afar, untethered.”

“Walk afar as sorcerers and sinners?” Master Jordan was amused by his older cousin’s unproductive tenderness.

“No, only walk afar as country folk who have been sundered from their families, and will do nothing worse than follow them, and never trouble you again. Nor trouble me … my conscience, that’s to say.”

“We would not want your conscience to be bruised or even tested, cousin Charles.”

And that is what Edmund Jordan has consented to—although he clearly wants to number me among the many forfeits Master Kent has to pay. If I agree to stay behind and watch over his land until the sheep have taken charge and tainted our earth with their yellow splashes, then he’ll agree to “untether the witches.” “But they’ll not step free on the estate of Edmund Jordan the Younger,” he says. His lands are closed forever to Rogerses, Gosses and Carrs. “Their greatest sorcery has been to make the clock stand still. Their mischief is to shade my path. I’ll not pardon them for that.” So the girl and the two women will be escorted off in custody and released only the moment they reach the marketplace, three days away. Master Kent will keep them company to make sure his cousin honors his word. “It is my wish to witness it,” he says. “To see that widow, daughter, wife walk freely in the free streets of a town. But, for myself, I cannot think that I will ever come back to this place.”

Now he has me in his arms, and we are almost toppling onto the apple-strewn ground beneath the horses hoofs. Any hawk looking down on the orchard’s cloistered square, hoping for the titbit of a beetle or a mouse, would see a patterned canopy of trees, line on line, the orchard’s melancholy solitude, the jewelry of leaves. It would see the backs of horses, the russet, apple-dotted grass, the saltire of two crossing paths worn smooth by centuries of feet, and two gray heads, swirling in a lover’s dance, like blown seed husks caught up in an impish and exacting wind and with no telling when or where they’ll come to ground again.

13

T IS MIDDAY ALREADY AND I AM WAITING
with the horses in the courtyard’s remaining rectangle of shade. The manor’s outline is straight-edged and motionless. Its sharpness has unsettled them. They resisted their saddles this morning, and are still peevish and resentful. Being in the sun under open skies and busy trees was preferable to this. Up till now, the last few days have been among the most unruffled of their lives. What space and liberty. They’ve not been fed before on hay as fresh as I’ve provided for them or, until yesterday, on such an uninterrupted abundance of apples. Had the groom been working and not nursing his cut face, he would have tethered them away from apples—especially the bitter codlings—and the fermenting colic they will cause, the fatal torsions and the windy flux. But I don’t care about the welfare of these strangers’ horses. I’ve watched them munch. I’ll let them suffer from our fruits. I will not wish Godspeed on them. By this time tomorrow they could well be too sick for traveling and my masters might be required to exercise their own legs for once. But for the moment the cobbles are clacking with hoofs and the air is murky with horses’ breath. They will not settle, no matter what
I whisper in their ears. They know that soon they will be laden down with panniers and men.