Harvest Read online

  But Brooker and the twins are not practiced at deceit. They’d not succeed as players on a stage as so many other renegades and cutthroats do, escaping justice in a guise. Their guilt is on display for everyone to see. They are too noisy and too keen, especially when Master Kent himself comes down, wrapped in the sleeveless mandilion his wife wove for him in the winter of her death, and stands in shock beside his rescued mare, well back, beyond the heat, to watch his stable disappear. His home and peace of mind are scorched. The guilty men do what they can to make him notice them, make him see how loyal and tireless they’re prepared to be on his behalf. Unlike the rest of us, Master Kent included, they’ll not admit to at least some errant, childlike fascination with the flames, the old and satisfying way they turn such solids into ash and air. Instead, they lead the rush to bring in water from the pond and cisterns. They make too great a show of beating back the flames with spades. The blaze has made their tongues as dry as hay. They show no fear. It is as if their lives depend upon the quenching of this fire.

  Of course, they are the ones—and Brooker Higgs especially; he is the orator—who organize the hunt for those responsible. It is clear at once—as soon as he suggests it—that nobody is ready to believe his claim that such a fire was caused by chance or by the natural overheating of a rick. A good rick’s as solid as a cottage, bricked with sheaves. It can sweat, and bake itself. But what could have kindled it? There was no lightning overnight. No one burning farm waste close by sent a vagrant spark across the master’s garths. No one slept in the stable block by candlelight. The master cannot be accused of having gone up among the doves with his tobacco pipe. No, this was done maliciously. Brooker is nodding his agreement. Whoever caused “this devil’s work,” he suggests, pointing at the black remains of the ricking ladder, which only this morning he and his own accomplices leaned against the stable wall for access to the dovecote, probably intended to make off with the master’s doves. To eat. Now who among them has so empty a stomach that they would need to steal a neighbor’s food? Why only last evening the master himself said he would kill a calf to mark the end of harvest and their election of the Gleaning Queen. So who among them would steal and eat a dove and then find themselves too glutted to enjoy the veal? No, the finger of suspicion points not at a villager—the very thought!—but at a stranger.

  There’re newcomers, come out of nowhere to the edges of our wood, somebody says, precisely as Brooker hopes they will. This informer waves his hands toward the far side of the fields and that other damper, blacker plume of smoke that all of us with eyes have seen this morning on our way to save the stable. From where we stand their smoke is still bending darkly on a breeze across the treetops.

  “We’ll call on them, I think,” says the master mildly. “We’ll call on them to test what answers they provide, but not before we’ve dampened everything and made my buildings safe.” He looks around and shakes his head. This has been a blow for him, another burden to survive. His eyes are watery. Perhaps it’s only smoke that makes them watery. “Well …” he says, looking toward the smudgy sky above the newcomers, and lets his comment hang. He means that he is heavy-hearted at the thought—the logical suspicion, in fact—that the second plume of smoke will lead him to the dove-roasters. And then he knows his duty will demand a firm and heavy hand.

  I understand that this is the moment when I should raise my own hand and say my piece, report the dry moonball. Or at least I should take Brooker Higgs aside to nudge him in the ribs. But I hold my tongue instead. A moonball isn’t evidence. Nor is bad playing. Besides, I sense the mood is to let this drama run its course and die back with the flames. Today’s a rest day and we want the air to clear—to clear of danger and to clear of smoke—so that we can enjoy ourselves as we deserve. This evening there’s ale to drink, there’s veal to eat, and we will choose the prettiest to be our Gleaning Queen. I’m sure I’m not the only one who elects to hold his tongue and does not, as he should, put up his hand. We do not wish to spoil our holiday, nor will we value bales of straw and doves above our neighbors’ sons.

  In fact, my hand—the left—is too damaged to be raised. I was among the foolish volunteers who tried to roll some of the burning bales into the yard toward the line of water buckets so that we might save at least some of the master’s winter feed, his great bulging loaves of hay. I soaked my neckcloth in a water pail and tied it round my mouth against the smoke, and then, with neighbor Carr at my side, went into the stable block beneath the cracking timbers to see what we could save. We put our hands and chests against the closest bale, braced our legs against the paving flags, and pushed. The bale lurched forward, only half a turn. We braced to push again but this time my one hand plunged into the burning straw and smoldered for a moment. My fingertips are burned. There’s not a hair below my wrist. My palm is scorched and painful beyond measure. I have to say a roasted man does not smell as appetizing as a roasted dove. The damage is severe. The skin is redder than a haw. I do my best to chew the pain, to not create a further spectacle. Still, I am not starved of sympathy. Even the master himself takes me by the shoulders in a hug to show his pity and concern. He knows a farmer with an injured hand is as useful as a one-pronged pitchfork. No use at all, especially at harvest time. No wonder I am more concerned at the moment with my own flesh than with any stranger’s. Now I have to go back to my house and make a poultice for the wound from egg white and cold flour. Then a pinch of salt to pacify the blisters. I will have to be an invalid today. Today, at least, I will have to sit and watch the world. Whatever’s bound to happen when my neighbors reach those newcomers who’ve set up home on the common outskirts of our fields will happen without me.

  2

  HE VILLAGE IS AFLAME, but not with fire. This morning, once the master’s stable blaze was deadened and so drenched it could hardly cough a puff of ash, my neighbors were in a bold and rowdy mood. The air was swarming with anxieties. With Master Kent, mindful of his horse’s dung, riding politely at their rear on his recovered mare, they took the carting lane beside the manor house and strode with devilry in their steps—the kind that can flourish only on a day when there’s no other work to do—toward the one remaining twist of smoke. Some of them were armed—or is it fairer to say equipped?—with sticks and staves, and “meaner implements,” John Carr reports. We’re not a hurtful people, hereabouts. But we feel naked without tools. And it makes sense in such a distant place as this, where there is little wealth and all our labors are spent on putting a single meal in front of us each day, to be protective of our modest world and fearful for our skinny lives. Master Kent may own the fields. His titles, muniments and deeds are witness to the truth of that. The manor comes to him by right of marriage, through the old master, Edmund Jordan, and his only daughter, Lucy Kent, both deceased and buried not a hundred paces from my home in the churchyard with no church.

  But what are documents and deeds when there are harvests to be gathered in? Only toughened hands can do that job. And Master Kent, for all his parchmenting, would be the poorest man if all he had to work his property were his own two hands and no others. He’d be blistered by midday, and famished ever after. What landowner has ever made his palms rough on a scythe or plow? Ours are the deeds that make the difference. No, our ancient understanding is that, though we are only the oxen to his halter, it is allowed for us to be possessive of this ground and the common rights that are attached to it despite our lack of muniments. And it is reasonable, I think, to take offense at a ruling—made in a distant place—which gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it—and to see these vagrants off, beyond our cherished boundaries. It’s true, of course, that some of us arrived this way ourselves, and not so long ago. I count myself among those aliens. But times have changed. Our numbers have decreased in the years since I arrived as my master’s manservant. Stomachs have fallen short of acres. We’ve lo
st good friends but not had much success with breeding their inheritors or raising sturdy offspring. We’re growing old and faltering. Harvests have been niggardly, of late. There’re days in winter when our cattle dine and we do not. Why should we share with strangers?

  Anyway, what can you tell about a newcomer from smoke, except that he or she is wanting? Or demanding? We’ve heard from the occasional peddler, tinker or walk-through carpenter—who’ve hoped, and failed, to make a living in our midst—how there are cattle thieves beyond the woods, how travelers are stopped and robbed, how vagabonds and vagrant families descend upon a settlement to plunder it, like rooks and crows, and then move on. We have to ask ourselves, why have these people arrived just as the harvest is brought in. Is this another act of God? Bad luck, in other words, and not a soul to blame? A saint might think it so. A saint might want to welcome them and shake them by the hands. But we, more timorous than saints, might prefer to keep our handshakes to ourselves. Besides, to touch a stranger’s flesh is dangerous. Do not embrace a soul until you know its family name, we say. We have been fortunate this year. No deaths from plague and only one appalling death from sweating fits so far. But contagion is known to be a crafty passenger, a stowaway. I can imagine hidden sores and rashes on the backs and buttocks of our visitors. And I can see why blaming them for what the twins and Brooker Higgs have done might be a blessing in disguise. No, I was glad to be at home this morning and not among my neighbors, even though it meant I missed the first sighting of this creature who has so charred us with her fire.

  I sat outside the cottage with my injured hand resting open on my knee, its palm turned up, and let the fresh air salve the wound. It was a rare event to have the row of dwellings to myself or, that’s to say, to share them only with our poultry and our pigs. The quiet was curative, but it was also chilling in a way to survey, from the oaken bench I built myself from timber that I felled myself, the makeshift byres that once were family cottages. There was the creeper-throttled derelict next door to the Carrs’ home, which when I first arrived was never free of voices; and then the unkept garden at widow Gosse’s place, where her husband used to stand and boast his colworts and his radishes, his double-marigolds and thyme; and, after that, set away with its own path, the rubble of the tenement where Cecily, my wife, was raised. No, we have tenancy to spare, and could easily provide some newcomers a place to live, if the village was only minded to be less suspicious of anyone who was not born with local soil under their fingernails. Some extra working hands might be of value in the coming days, especially since my own left hand will be of little use and we are so hard-pressed for younger men and women. I rapped my good hand on the bench until my knuckles hurt. I did not deserve to feel relaxed.

  These are the moments when I most miss greater places—the market towns, the liberties of youth, the choices that I had and left behind. My land-born neighbors now are ditched and fenced against the outside world. They are too rooted in their soil, too planched and thicketed, to be at ease with newcomers. They are not used to hospitality and do not want to be. There’s not a village, sea to sea, that receives fewer strangers. In all the years since my and Master Kent’s arrival not one other new soul has settled here for long, or hoped to. Who, after looking at this place and with no secret interest or association, would choose to make a home among these frowning residents? But I am now part of it and part of them. I have become a frowner, too, and I have learned to make do with the kindom of close relatives, where anyone who is not blood is married to someone else who is. One family’s daughter is another’s niece, another’s aunt, and yet another’s daughter-in-law. And if you’re not a Saxton or a Derby or a Higgs yourself, you have a score of relatives who are. We live in a rookery. A cousinry, let’s say. And just like rooks we have begun to sound and look the same. So many grumps, so many corn-haired blonds, so many wavy, oval beards, so many beryl eyes, so many thickset arms and legs, that no one needs to mention them, or even notice them, unless reminded by an out-of-pattern visitor like me. But even I have found myself with thickset arms and legs, though I arrived as thin and gawky as our Mr. Quill.

  The latest dwelling on our lands is by all reports a poor affair. Our hurried newcomers have only dragged some fallen timber from the wood and woven out of it, uncut, a square of fences better suited to restrict a pair of pigs than to house a family. These walls are fit for men who prefer to crawl rather than stand. They’re pargeted with earth and leaves, and roofed with the kind of sacking that can stop neither the light nor the rain. Is this den enough to confer squatting rights? No one is sure. Though if it is, foxes, badgers, even moles could lay claim to their common rights and help themselves to fowl and fruit and firewood from our land. But then it is not expected that these newcomers, these funguses that seek to feed on us, these dove-slaughterers, will choose to stay among us for a second night once they’ve discovered how thin—and dangerous—our welcome is. They’ll travel on. We’ll walk them to our boundaries and set them on the way, glad to be of help.

  The open hearth that sent up such a green-black plume at dawn was dead by the time my neighbors and Master Kent arrived at the shadowed clearing near The Bottom, where our land is cliffed by woods. Even Mr. Quill had lurched along behind them, his parchment book in hand, as ever with such gentlemen, making notes and marking shapes and hoping not to be excluded from the dramas of the day. Though the smoke had run its course and some tidy housekeeper had already kicked away the remaining ashes and twigs, the confirmation that my neighbors were expecting—and Brooker and the twins were praying for—was on the ground for all to see. Bird bones, gnawed clean. Christopher Derby, the elder of the twins and usually the quieter, pointed at the remains with all the authority his index finger could muster and said, “Our dear guests’ meal. One of the master’s birds.” Last night the newcomers had evidently gnawed on dove, as if they were “great lords at banqueting,” though by the looks of it, according to my neighbor John Carr, who took the trouble to push his inspecting toe through the scraps and leftovers, this dove had dark feathers, short bones and a yellow beak. None of my other neighbors wished to be dissuaded, though. It was easier to believe that by a further cunning the arsonists had disguised their plunder as a blackbird.

  There was no sign of any living bones about the den, and when its overnight inhabitants were summoned with a shout and beating implements to give an account of themselves, no one appeared. Brooker Higgs was the first to raise his stick and strike the dwelling on its roof, expecting, with a single blow, to bring it to the ground and earn himself some cheap applause. His stick produced an unexpected clonk as dull and firm as a bag of chaff, but the roof, after seeming to adjust itself, fell in. What thickset man cannot bring down a length of sacking? But the hurried timber walls were stouter than they looked.

  Other men stepped forward with heavier tools and would have finished the task had not, before the second blow, a pair of strangers—a young mop-headed youth with a feathery, novice beard and a shorter, older man, the father, probably—stepped out of the trees with longbows raised and drawn to the ear. In common with every other man about these parts, they clearly knew how to loose an arrow if called upon. They seemed baffled rather than belligerent. They looked, in other words, more innocent than any of us would have liked. Their squinted eyes and furrowed foreheads said, “What kind of villainy is this that takes a cudgel to a poor man’s home?”

  The twins and Brooker Higgs no longer wished to be numbered among the front rank of their more aggressive neighbors, and not only because the strangers’ arrows seemed to be pointing at Brooker’s chest. He was the only one who’d done any damage yet and so was the most deserving of some punishment. He heeled his way into the crowd until his chest was not the first in line, and then—no fool—he let himself drop shorter. The women called their children to their sides and also backed away. The widow Gosse, I’m told, fainted and fell into some nettles. The other, more stalwart men made narrow with themselves, turning their shoulders to the a
rrowheads and tucking their elbows into their waists, protecting their soft organs.

  Master Kent dismounted from Willowjack and stood behind her. He was not being cowardly but sensible. The men spread out, widening the strangers’ target and already calculating in their heads that the odds were on their side, that twenty sturdy men standing on their own God-given land with sticks and even one or two keen sickles were more than a match for two newcomers and a pair of arrows. As soon as those two arrows were released, no matter what damage they might do, the game was over and the beating could begin. As I’ve said, we’re not a hurtful people. We are, though, fearful, proud and dutiful. We do what must be done. But at this moment, so I’m told, the mood was murderous. Two poacher-arsonists were facing us with bows. We’d never known such disrespect and brazen sacrilege. The day had darkened suddenly.

  Mr. Quill, for such a malformed man, showed the greatest bravery. Or was it simply courtesy? He clumsied forward wearing that ready, foolish smile which had kept us company in yesterday’s field. For a moment it was thought he meant to strike the den himself and earn the recompense of being augered through the heart by a hardened poplar arrow shaft. Indeed, one of the strangers turned his bow on Mr. Quill, secured his hold on the fletchings and string, and said in an accent no one there had heard before, “Step well away.” But the master’s chart-maker did not step well away. He had other plans. What those plans were, my neighbors never discovered. Four or five of them took advantage of what they would later describe to me as Mr. Quill’s shrewd diversion. While he distracted them with his determined smile, holding out his palms to show they had nothing to be fearful of, our bolder men edged closer to the newcomers. Two more steps and it would be done. If Mr. Quill was sacrificed in their attempt, then that might be a price they could afford. He was no cottager. They hadn’t grown used to him. No matter that his scratchings would be incomplete. I will not say they may have thought his death convenient.