Harvest Read online

  It is only now I can address myself to Mistress Beldam, and Master Kent’s request, instruction actually, that I should hunt her down and bring her to his barn. I have seldom disappointed him before. I take great pride in that. My father was his father’s clerk. My mother was his milk nurse. We are almost of an age and so must have been ear-to-ear when we were nuzzling infants, growing plump on the same breasts. I do not want to say he is my brother; our stations are too different. But we were playmates in his father’s yards. He sometimes shared his books with me, and I was let to write and read and calculate. I managed these less clumsily than him, I dare to say. I have been his serving man since both of us were satin-chinned. I was the only one he brought with him when Lucy Jordan agreed to be his wife and he took charge of these estates and this old manor farm. And he was friend enough to me to let me go from his direct employ when I discovered my own wife, my own sweet Cecily, and found such unexpected solace, for a man most used to market towns, in working with her and her neighbors in these isolated fields. I told him I was in love with Cecily, her hearty laugh, her freckled throat, her sturdiness, but also with the very crumble of this village earth. He said, “Then you should go and plow the earth.” That is my history.

  I will not forget those early playmate days or my family debt to Master Kent. I have always taken it as my particular duty to speak up on his behalf among my neighbors, if anyone’s disgruntled. Or even to venture a casual word to him myself about any negligence or grievance that could damage his standing here. If Master Kent has ever taken me aside, to ask me to assess his stock, perhaps, or prune his fruiting trees, or patch some damage to his roof, I have done so at a snap and without a murmur or requiring an advantage in return. I do not mean to paint myself as some enameled saint, haloed by obedience. I have been sensible—and loyal, in both our interests. To all of our advantages, let’s say. Despite the shared and joshing friendship of our youths, I’ve never said, Your roof can wait. There’re our own oxen need attending to. Or asked, What have you hanging at your sides, Charles Kent? They look like arms and hands to me. So prune your orchard trees yourself. No, I have warranted his respect by always helping him. So he relies on me and will be distressed—and disappointed, probably—if I go to him tomorrow to report I did not even try to bring the woman to his barn because my hand was painful. He’ll think, Why does it take a pain-free hand to do what I have asked? He hasn’t said that I should lift Mistress Beldam above my head and carry her.

  Therefore, instead of squelching home, drying off, pulling on my quilted cap and sleeping out the storm, I only call in briefly to change my breeches and find my wide-brimmed hat and a leather jerkin. My one idea is to hurry down our lanes toward the clearing at The Bottom, where I saw this morning’s darkest plume of smoke. No, yesterday morning’s; the midnight has departed from us already. She will have sought the leaking shelter of her tumbled den. Where else? I will collect her there.

  My thoughts are not entirely generous. Mistress Beldam has a hold on me, not like the enduring hold of my Cecily, but something new and different, something more uncomfortable. On first sight, my wife was at once a homely prospect, pretty, lively, comforting and warm. She left me calm and full of hope. To hold her on our marriage night—well, in truth, before our marriage night—was to arrive at a lasting destination from which I could not imagine departing for all and any of the years ahead. However, she was not the lightning strike that minstrels sing about. But that first sight of Mistress Beldam has put me out of character. Since seeing her in shaven silhouette I feel as if I have been feeding on Brooker Higgs’s fairy caps. And now that I’m expecting to discover her, now that I am getting close to where she must have taken refuge, my head begins to dance with darker and more spectral lights; my heart is rippling; I feel a sudden fearlessness and then a sinking fear. I have been widowed for too long. If there’s a moon behind these clouds, it is sensual and blue. There is wanting in the air, and sorcery.

  Clearly, I am not the only one to think it so. There are men about. I hear the splash of other feet and catch a glimpse of walking figures, too tall and too broad-shouldered to be the woman we are hunting for. No doubt they’re catching sight of me as well and saying to themselves, That wide-brimmed hat belongs to Walter Thirsk. What business can an old goat such as him have on a night like this, and so late? At least my errand is not clandestine. I’m doing what our master has desired. I do not have a wife or family to hide it from, like some of these other maddened figures in the night. I have not sinned against the woman yet, except the sin of thinking it, of thinking that she might not want to sleep alone in that great barn but would prefer a cottage bed. I will dry her with my damaged hand. My damaged hand will pay amends to her.

  The den is hard to find but gradually my eyes have grown accustomed to the dark. The cloud to some extent has thinned. There is no moonlight but there is at least a muffled promise of the dawn to come, enough to make out shapes and outlines. There’s the great black wall of trees, now heavily and noisily shedding water. And there’s the pile of what was once her hurried, rough-and-ready walls. I’d call her name. It doesn’t matter if my lurking neighbors hear. Let them understand that I have come with proper cause. But we have been too remiss in our hospitality. We do not have the woman’s name. “Mistress Beldam” will not do. Just “Mistress,” then. I call it out. But no reply. And no response when I step forward like a moonstruck youth with shaking hands to pull aside the sacking and the timber. The forest is a din of rain. Beyond the cascades and the waterfalls, I hear the fidgeting of feet that might belong to anyone or anything, a cough that could be human or a fox, the crack of snapping wood. I call out “Mistress” twenty times, to no avail. She must have taken refuge in some other den. Or else she hears but will not answer me.

  4

  S LUCK WOULD HAVE IT, I have been assigned to be Mr. Quill’s assistant for the week. My wounded hand excuses me from hard work in the threshing barns. Master Kent insists on it. Once more he proves himself my friend. I shouldn’t try to grip tools or carry anything, he warns. Any pressure and I’ll burst the cushioning of water-whelks and blisters that are already forming at the edges of the burn. I’m not fit for laboring, “And never was,” he wants to say. (Perhaps he would employ me as his man again.) The grain can be separated from the chaff without my help for the next few days. My greater duty is to save my hand. There’re men and women both of us could name who’ve lost a limb and then their lives because a wound has not healed properly. I have to keep it cold and dry but open to the air, so that the savaged skin at the center can peel away or form a crust. At the moment it’s too swampy to dry and harden. It’s oozing liquids of the sort I’d normally expect to run out of my nose. And the pain, though not as searing as it was, is almost more than I can bear. It is unforgiving. I have not had a wink of sleep all night, well, that much of the night I spent shivering in bed and not out in the rain hunting for the sorceress. And now I walk with one hand raised and cupped in front of me. I am a beggar for the day, I’m told. My neighbors look into my palm, raise their eyebrows, wish me well, but I suspect they’re jealous of my easy occupation. Already they have labeled me Quill-Carrier-in-Chief. They think we’ll make a comic pair: the stumbler and the beggar, both damaged on the left and with only a couple of useful hands between them.

  Still, I’m not so wounded that I want to avoid the gleaning field before my hands-free working day with Mr. Quill begins. Our boys have been at the edges of the stub since first light, keeping off the birds with stones, clapping-boards and slings but not stepping on the field itself. That’s not their privilege. Their dawn chorus prises us from bed and hurries us out of our cottages for an early meeting with our Queen.

  Our village has been washed and muddied by the storm, but the clouds have cleared. It promises to be a steep and sunny day. Already it is bright and hot enough for us to shelter under rye-straw hats. We all feel harvest-worn to some degree, not thick-headed from last night’s ale—well, not only that—and no
t only burned back to the soul by yesterday’s two fires and the smoke-stained turbulence that followed them, but fatigued by all the mutual labors of the year. Daily duties have deferred our weariness till now, then sapped us even more by giving us a day of rest. Our muscles are not used to it. An unused muscle stiffens like a drying rag. In this we are at one with everything we see and hear and smell. Despite the sweating soil and the enameling of puddles from the midnight storm, the land itself is harvest-worn. So are the lanes. We have been too occupied until today to see how beaten down by wheels and hoofs our cartways have become. They’re shiny, worn away and sinking in from the season’s slog and grind, and from our animals’ exertions. Each step we’ve taken since the last frost at winter’s end—an age ago—has left its imprint on our earth.

  What wind there was yesterday after we dispatched the final sheaf gathered up and spread much of the lighter, finer chaff. The village has been freckled by the chaff. The service trees between our dwellings and the gleaning field are still embroidered with it and with straw, despite the rain. On the way between the harvest and the stackyard, unsecured bundles of cut barley have dropped on the verges from our wagons and our barrows, providing pickings for the ruddocks and the dunnocks to contest, and there are signs in the disrupted soil that someone’s pigs are on the loose and have been snouting for fallen grain. There is a silent ripeness to the air, so mellow and sappy that we want to breathe it shallowly, to sip it richly like a cordial. No one who knows the busy, kindly, scented universe of crops and the unerring traces of its calendar could mistake this morning’s aromatic peace and quiet for anything but Gleaning Day.

  Now that we are gathered at the entry to the field, we stay and wait. With the sudden ending of our dance last night and the interruptions of the storm, we failed to nominate our Queen. Such negligence is bound to bring bad luck. We’ve never woken up before on Gleaning Day without a pretty sovereign to rule the stub. But Master Kent has said that we can settle it this morning. So all the girls and unwed lasses have put on their fineries, or more exactly borrowed firstly from their mothers’ ribbon bags or dowry chests and then from their gardens and our hedgerows, making yellow drapes and garlands for themselves from tansy, ragwort and hawkweed blooms. Some of the more ambitious ones have smeared their cheeks and forearms with a golden petal paste. They look both pestilent and regal.

  We can already see Master Kent bobbing high above the hedges of the manor lane as he rides toward us on his Willowjack. He too has made an effort for the day. His best high hat, usually reserved for marriages and funerals, is sashed with two woven cloths, one lemon-yellow, one apple-green, his wife’s heirlooms. She was fond of brightness. Now we have some moments to inspect our girls and choose which one we’ll raise our voices for. Here is a chance as well to look out across and down the sloping barley field and offer thanks, not to some higher being but to the soil itself. Can it really be almost a year since we last led out our oxen and took our plows to it, fixing our eyes on the leaf-bare treetops in the dell to keep our furrows straight and true, on what I recall to be a dull and chilling day? Then once the cold had nipped the clod, we came again for harrowing, flattening ridges to provide the fine tilth that best comforts barley, picking out the surface stones. Can it really be half a year since spring, when we fixed our eyes again on those same tops to see them fattening with leaf and we spread out across the field in rows to broadcast seed, throwing our grain forward equally and to the swing of every step, spreading tiny vows with a plentiful hand? This year the first warm rains were late. The field was slow to blush with green, and what early shoots dared show themselves were shy and flimsy. We watched the barley with anxiety, first fearing drought and then, once our plants reached knee-height, praying that the sky would spare us gales.

  That is our custom. We are daily nervous for the crop—though there are times, for me at least and especially at night in my cold cot, when I resent the tyranny of nervousness. I hear the stress and thrust of wind and unaccountably my spirits lift. My dreams are thrilled of late by flattened fields. I wake ashamed and cannot meet my neighbors’ eyes. They might imagine I’ve fallen out of love with them, and fallen out of love with here.

  When I first came to these vicinities I thought I’d discovered not quite paradise, but at least a fruitful opportunity—some honest freedom and some scope. Some fertile soil! I’d never known such giving land and sky. I do remember my first week, and—still my master’s serving man—walking through the commons to the forest edge and not daring to go in, but touching everything. I’d found a treasury. I know I pushed my nose against a tree and was surprised by the ancient sweetness of the bark. I know I stood and studied ants, not guessing yet what antlike labors were awaiting me. I know I picked a flower for my cap. And then I set my eyes on Cecily and saw a chance to build a future here. I wooed her by working at her elbow in her fields, attending to the hunger of her soil. My labor was an act of love. My unaccustomed muscles grew and ached for her. I put my shoulder to the plow for her. I became as tough as ash for her. I had no choice. The countryside is argumentative. It wants to pick a fight with you. It wants to dish out scars and bruises. It wants to give you roughened palms and gritty eyes. It likes to snag and tear your arms and legs on briars and on brambles every time you presume to leave the path. But this was precisely what I most liked about this village life, the way we had to press our cheeks and chests against a living, fickle world which in the place where I and Master Kent had lived before only displayed itself as casual weeds in cracks or on our market stalls where country goods were put on sale, already ripe, and magicked up from God knows where. It didn’t matter if it rained or blew all day and night in town. We pulled on caps. We slammed our doors and windows tight. The weather wasn’t any threat to us. Back then, the sun was neither enemy nor friend.

  I cannot say I long for that again, but I am less content than I should be. I have my portion and my place. I’m fortunate. But twelve years here is not enough to make me feel utterly at home—not when I haven’t truly got a home and haven’t had since Cecily was pilfered by the fever, that overwhelming midnight pillager, as brutal as a fox. Without my Cecily, my labor has no love in it. It’s only dutiful. I’ll never be a Rogers or a Derby or a Higgs, so woven to the fabric of the place that nothing else and nothing more seem possible. Their best riches are their ignorance of wealth. I’m not a product of these commons but just a visitor who’s stayed. And now that these latest visitors have come—these three encroachers on our land; this lurching fellow and his charts—I am unnerved. I am reminded that there is another world clear of the forest tops, a world beyond the rule of seasons, a redrawn world, as Mr. Quill has said, where there are “hereafters.” I stand at the threshold of the gleaning field and wonder what the future has in mind for me.

  Master Kent arrives in his cheerful hat and drives my troubled dreams away. In addition to the sashes around his brim, he has also knotted his ankles with golden ribbons and decorated Willowjack’s mane with yellow strings. Mr. Quill, who has accompanied them on foot, is trimmed at calf, cuff and throat in ribbons, a merry pillory of cloth. He is all smiles, of course. It’s hard to read a face that always wears a masking smile. The master does not dismount—I think he feels that ceremony should keep him in the saddle; he also looks a little frail today and unusually anxious—but he manages to make a pleasant speech, addressing us from aloft like a huntsman talking fondly to his hounds or beaters. This is “a noble day,” he says, as usual. Anything we glean is ours to keep, of course. We are free to take any remaining barley we find to our kitchen pots, for stew or beer or stover. We do not need to add it to the common wealth, or store it in the stackyard for any general benefit. After us will come the livestock, he says, in order of their station: our cattle will be loosed into the field to reduce the stubble, then the geese, for fattening, and finally our hogs will be allowed to root and nose the soil. Surprisingly, he does not mention as he usually does each year that the hogs will precede the plow. This bar
ley field is set aside for next year’s winter-planted wheat (beer before bread, as ever) and so we need to go about its plowing soon, before the summer parts from us. Perhaps I’m surprised with no good cause, but his silence on this matter, his preference for “finally our hogs,” instead of “finally the oxen and the plows,” is startling. The organization to all of our advantages that he revealed last night might be more substantial than a dream, or an ambition that need not bother us just yet. It’s possible that Master Kent does not expect our plows to be in use again. Our final harvest might have come and gone.

  There is happier business to distract us, though. Master Kent suggests that it would be a pleasing courtesy for Philip Earle—our Mr. Quill, our fiddler—to choose the Gleaning Queen: “He surely can be counted on to be an even-handed judge.” The girls and lasses are brought forward to pout and curtsey in a line for him. He does his smiling best to be judicial but we cannot help but notice that he rests his eyes for longer on the older girls and that these older girls are more blushing than their sisters and more bodily. It’s not that Mr. Quill is a handsome or a well-built man, though his seeming wealth and kindness are bound to be attractive. Nor is there any sense that Mr. Quill himself is bidding for a bride. It’s just that this procedure has tows and currents which would not trouble us if every daughter in the line had yet to grow her breasts. The fathers there are both awkward and seduced themselves. They see their own daughters and their neighbors’ daughters in a new, inconsistent light.