Harvest Read online

  “That is unusual,” Mr. Quill agrees, but does not mark it down. Instead, for once and with evident effort, he frowns away the smile from his face and, first checking that we are not observed, takes me by the arm. “I have a heavy confidence,” he says, “which Master Kent is keen that I should share with you but with no other. There is another gentleman … we are awaiting him … another Jordan, actually, who has his claims upon”—Mr. Quill makes a circle with his arm, beating our bounds with a single gesture—“all this.”

  And here at last I start to understand my master’s evident distress. Old Edmund Jordan and his wife produced a daughter, Lucy, but not a son. So when her father died soon after Lucy married Master Kent, the manor and the property was her sole inheritance, which by legal document was to be divided equally on her death among her male heirs by blood, “her envisaged sons,” Mr. Quill explains.

  “There are no sons,” I say. “She died in childbirth only this spring, but even that child was a girl … Master Kent is Mistress Lucy’s single heir.”

  “Not so. He is not blood. A husband is not blood. There is a cousin, though. Also Edmund Jordan. Those changes Master Kent proposes and which he has employed me to mark down are not his own. You cannot think he wishes them. Those sheep, these charts which I prepare, indeed, are demanded by the cousin. And he arrives today to make good what he counts as his entitlement.”

  We have regained the higher ground before the impact of this news sinks in. The gleaning field is already empty. Today it is difficult for me not to see heavy meaning in its emptiness. There is no hint of green; not even Lizzie Carr’s cloth crown remains. The acres seem to undulate and fall so endlessly and with such monotony of harvesting and tillage, such space and depth, that any bottom to them is lost not in the clouds or mist but in the duskiness of distance. What little pickings may be left are given over now to our cows and uninvited birds. Wild pigeons pause and jerk, full of fussy self-esteem and grain. I try to people it but I can hear only the weird and phantom bleats of sheep.

  The Queen and all her subjects have taken to the threshing barn and are too busy when I arrive with Mr. Quill to want to stop and hold a conversation with our inquiring visitor. The flail cannot cease its knocking on the floor just because of him. Every swing of it means food. There is today’s allotment of sheaves to spread and barley ears to set aside; there’s chaff to shake and separate from grain in wicker baskets; and then—unless we want weed bread or horse loaf—there’s grain to sieve before it’s sacked for storage in our lofts. What’s left or dropped becomes the property of mice and rats and hogs. I plunge my good hand into a half-filled sack. It sinks up to my elbow as easily as if I’ve dipped it in a pond. Indeed, the grains run through my fingers in a liquid stream. I’ve known better harvests, years when the barleycorn was fat and milky. You couldn’t pull a plumper bogey from your nose, we’d say. And I’ve known hungry years when yields were fibrous and parched, and we survived the winter on dry bones. Today the grains are good enough, but only good enough. We will not starve; we will not fatten either.

  Mr. Quill and I stand away from the great open doors and downwind from the winnowing, watching like gentlemen at a cockfight. He has his hands folded behind his back, perhaps aware of his soft and unworked palms, but certainly conscious of the price that everyone in front of him will pay for Mistress Lucy’s failure to produce a son. I do my best to not betray his unhappy confidences on my face. I let my damaged hand hang loose on show so that nobody is in any doubt why I am not helping them today but still expect and still deserve my flour and my malt. I know my teasing neighbors. Their suspicion of anyone who was not born within these boundaries is unwavering. Next time they catch me sitting on my bench at home with a cup and slice, they are bound to wonder if it tastes all the sweeter for not being earned with labor. Do I need any help, perhaps—given my mangled hand—lifting the barley cake to my lips? Or any help with chewing it?

  I hurry Mr. Quill away. He’s smiled enough, I think. But he is in such a considerate mood he will not leave the barn until he has said farewell to everyone. He is not rewarded with replies. The one or two who break their labor and lift their chins to look at him are only baffled. What is this stranger getting at? When no one plans on going anywhere today, what is the purpose of farewell?

  We find ourselves at last back in the lane which will take us past the blackened timbers of the stable and the ashes of baled hay and toward the turret of the manor house. We’ve brushed the dust and chaff from our shoulders, heads and beards, though Mr. Quill’s waxed wedge is still not clear of barley waste. We’re deep in somber conversation. It has been a restful and a pleasant walk, despite the weight of what I’ve learned. Yet I feel as if I’ve made a conquest and also been beguiled. I like the man. And I’ve recognized an opportunity in him, a way to turn these changes to my benefit.

  It is not until we near the church ground that I realize I’ve hardly given any thought today to Mistress Beldam or her men. I feel uneasy, suddenly. Disloyal. Indeed, I’m doing what I can to not catch sight of the wooden pillory. And I succeed. Or I succeed until we have very nearly reached the orchard, where the lane-grass is bouldered with fallen fruit. I start to kick the largest apples down the path. I’m in a restive mood, of course. And with good cause. But Mr. Quill has spotted Master Kent. From where we are, we can see only our mounted master’s head and shoulders, his best high hat and lemon sash. He’s circling the cross and talking loudly to himself. His voice is splintered and alarmed. He’s rocking to and fro in the saddle, beating his thighs with his fists. And, as he has many times before on this piece of prospective holy ground, he is reciting obsequies and intercessions for the dead.

  5

  HE YOUNGER EDMUND JORDAN HAS not traveled here before. He alerted us to his arrival with six blasts on a saddle horn as soon as he and a party of five—his steward, a groom, and three sidemen—gained first sight of our valley this afternoon. But they descended through our lanes and ways without encountering a working hand. I think Master Jordan must have counted on something busier and grander. Certainly he was dressed for that. At least he expected to be welcomed at the manor house and given time to rest before attending to matters of estate. But he was greeted not by offers of stabling and refreshments but first by the remains of a newly burned-out barn and then by the sight of his host and cousin-in-law, Charles Kent, at the head end of a mutilated corpse. Mr. Quill, his fixed smile now signifying his revulsion, was at the other end, while I, still excused from carrying because of my injury, followed on, leading Willowjack. They must have looked the strangest pair in their yellow gleaning cloths, their hands and breeches black with blood, their shoulders sagging from the weight as they finally reached the courtyard of the manor house and hoisted the body onto the long stone bench in the porch before an audience of these mounted visitors.

  I don’t know why we thought we could revive the man. Clearly he was dead and had been dead long enough for someone’s loose pig to chance upon the corpse and tear out pieces of his foot and calf. One leg was so badly damaged that Mr. Quill had to lift the body from the knees and tolerate what remained of the gnawed limb banging up against his own. But at moments such as this it would take a heartless man not to at least attempt some healing. Besides, once the three of us had gathered at the foot of the pillory and comprehended what had happened to the eldest of the newcomers, we were quickly in a hustle to escape the curses of the younger man. I have never seen such anger and such despair. His state was all the worse for his still being fastened in the pillory. His wrists and throat were purple with bruising. It looked as if he’d tried to pull himself free and didn’t care whether or not he left his head and hands behind.

  None of us had the expertise to make repairs, although we knew we had to be the first … to what? To make amends? So we did what little could be done—mostly wiping off the blood, closing the wounds enough to hide the grinning white of bone, changing the man’s expression from one of wide-eyed agony to that of someone
sleeping through a nightmare, and finally covering our newcomer in a shroud of baling cloth. Master Kent spoke a prayer, not quite out loud. It was as if he hoped to smuggle into the usual formulations an intercession for himself, asking for forgiveness possibly for being party to this death. I have to say I prayed myself, a rare event. But I could sense the thunder and the lightning closing in on us. A mighty storm of reckoning was on its way, if there was any justice in the world. The air was cracking with the retributions and damnations that, in my hearts of hearts, I knew that some of us deserved. I prayed that this was just a dream and that soon the couldn’t-care-less clamor of the sunrise birds would rouse me to another day, a better day, a bloodless one, one in which, despite my hand, I’d do my common duty and drag up a log or stone to make that short man tall. I prayed that Time would turn back on its heels and surprise us with a sudden billowing of breath beneath the baling cloth. I might just as well have cried out for the Derby twins to bring their haul of golden shawls to jolt this man alive again.

  This is my calculation, shaped once more without recourse to any constable or magistrate. Or any doctor, priest or undertaker, come to that. Yes, it’s just as well—again—that we are so far from civil practice, because a constable or magistrate would have the will and power to lay bare the causes of this man’s loose head and disfigured limbs. Here’s what took place. Sometime between my sodden visit to the pillory last night and Master Kent’s encounter with the two punished men this morning, when the younger was so manically uncivil, the elder man slipped or toppled from his stretched toes and snapped his neck. It might have been the rain that made him fall. Let’s hope his accident was sudden and he was sleeping. Or, God forbid, it could have been his living efforts to fight off a hungry hog that made him flail his body to and fro until his bones were split. Of course, it might have been a stopping heart. I hope it was a stopping heart. Or something unexceptional. Whatever happened, it is clear that the father did not fail to lift his head for Master Kent this morning as an insolent rebuke but because he was already dead.

  I’m not the only one who will blame himself, and will have good cause to blame himself. As soon as we established the body on the porch bench this afternoon and were standing back, shamed and bloodied by our efforts and not daring yet to turn and face the mounted visitors, I saw the looks on Master Kent’s and Mr. Quill’s faces. A player in the theater could not devise a greater exhibition of guilt. And once the word has spread, there will be many villagers who will regret their scythes and sticks of yesterday morning and others who will run out to their sties with fingers knotted for good luck to see if any of their pigs has broken free or already seems too satisfied by the taste of foot and calf to want its customary peels or brewing mash. And if the Derby twins and Brooker Higgs have any tenderness for strangers—a subject open to debate, I know—they will surely want to hurry naked to the woods to flay themselves with whips. This is a death that touches all of us, though we still do not even know the fellow’s name.

  But for the moment we are required—and thankful—to be hospitable. The four gentlemen by birth—that’s Mr. Quill, Master Kent, his cousin and the steward—are first ushered into what passes nowadays as the parlor to the manor house. The three sidemen take care of luggage and panniers. I am assigned, as any common servant, to lead the way with Willowjack and show Master Jordan’s groom where in the absence of a stable block their horses might be stalled. By the time I return, both chastened and annoyed by the groom’s presumption and disdain—how does the solemn custody of saddles make a man superior?—the gentlemen have disappeared into the upper rooms. I can hear the hum and mutter of their voices, and once or twice I recognize enough to know that the master is giving an account of what has happened at the pillory and his cousin is expressing his dismay that what was evidently once a fine manor house has ended up “as shabby and as threadbare as a beggar’s sack.”

  I hope to overhear the better. I remove my shoes so that I might move quietly through the rooms. I know that I am not expected to join the gentlemen. I should not offer any words of my own. Master Jordan will have recognized my station from the clothes I wear, especially my rye-straw hat, and from the ripened color of my hands and cheeks. But I am determined to be the spy, though whether I am spying for myself or for my neighbors or for the master himself is not yet clear to me. Hearing them might make it so.

  I see the inside of the house with a stranger’s eyes, for once. Certainly, the manor is not a place to make us cottage-dwellers jealous. We have no need of windows, or an upper floor. All we require for our estate is earth for carpeting, rubble-walls, and a pair of hearty crossbeam timbers to keep the roof from falling in. But people of a finer pedigree want cosseting. We have heard reports of prodigy houses in other country villages, where gentlemen and ladies take their rest in timbered beds as sturdy as galleons and closed off from the great glass window light by curtains and softened with flock mattresses. They sleep in fine linen or silky camlet sheets with spaniels at their feet, while in the many chambers of the house the servants rise at dawn to put a shine on tile floors, buff up chairs with cushioned arms, shake out the moths and motes from the painted hangings, the tapestries and Turkey work, and put out breakfast trays of dainties—the suckets, comfits, carroways we’ll never get the chance to taste. I’ve heard of yeoman palaces with lakes and deer parks in their grounds and so rich inside that a hungry mastiff is deployed all day to guard a cupboard where the mistress hides her costly silverware and brass and a casket full of jewelry. Indeed, when I was young and not yet come to this far place, I served Master Kent in a stone-built, courtyard residence with peacocks in a walled garden, a castellated tower, more than forty rooms and just as many helping hands whose only task was keeping house.

  Master Kent’s home has no such finery and so no need of any mastiffs, or even any spaniels. If there is any luxury or opulence, it has been well concealed, or it has been untended. The manor was busier and more cared for when Lucy Kent was alive. Its rooms were used and always sweet with juniper smoke or strews of lavender. Some of our wives attended her each day, to help her dress and keep it clean and be her kitchen maids. But with her passing, her widower has preferred to simplify his life. The ancient gallery has been closed until this afternoon, as have all the sleeping rooms upstairs. Their fine wood paneling has begun to fade and scab for want of polishing. Mr. Quill is quartered comfortably enough, downstairs, in what was, in the elder Edmund Jordan’s day, the steward’s room and where more lately Lucy Kent would sit and close the day with her needle; and Master Kent makes do in the parlor, his retreat, with its open fire. He has a wainscot bed, set against the wall but uncurtained and without evidence of any flock or linen. He sleeps on a mattress stuffed with chaff like everybody else and his summer coverlets are hap-harlots, the coarsest cloth. He has a coffer full of documents and manuscripts, an oaken trestle table where he sits to eat alone and rest his candle, a high-backed settle to protect him from the draughts and two reminders of his wife: her smallest loom, her hairbrush. He has more space, more possibilities, than us, but who can say he has more comfort? I would not swap accommodations with him, to tell the truth. Nor would I want to swap my life with his. Not now.

  It is the first time for many years—since I had quarters in the attic and in the turret room, in fact—that I’ve had reason to pause and study the grander, second story of the house. I have forgotten how melancholy these great rooms can be, especially when there are no dogs or children to misuse them. I am almost blinded by the dark as I draw close to the quartet of voices. It is still a bright afternoon outside. I have had to squint for much of the day. But even when my eyes grow used to it, the manor’s lack of light is burdensome. The building is too old for the great wide-latticed windows and oriels of newer dwellings. It does not have a square of window glass but only recessed openings and loopholes. What light it has is blanketed by the red-black canopy of beeches planted closely to the house, as was the custom, to protect against lightning strikes.
But at least the darkness affords me some disguise. I am able to ascend the stairs, skirting round what few narrow shafts of light there are, until I reach the landing at the upper gallery and what remains of the master’s better furniture and brass-braced storage chests. And I can stay in shadow behind the curtain at the door to watch and hear the conversations at the far end of the room.

  Only Master Jordan is standing. He is a tall, big-boned, round-shouldered man, dressed in a long doublet so hard-quilted that it stiffens him. He swings a casting bottle of rosewater in his hand, protection I suppose against the stench of this untended gallery. The once white-tempered mortar on the upper walls has dappled. The room is damp and smells of hair and moldy laths. The other three are sitting neatly on a bench like courtiers, hands on knees, their heads lifted, listening. Edmund Jordan says, “Of course, that’s natural for you, I see,” to some remark that Mr. Quill has made. It is clear he considers the Chart-Maker a fool, a grinning and beribboned fool, with barley straw still in his beard. Even the word “natural” is delivered with a sting. It is as if he’s labeled Mr. Quill the Village Natural—the local idiot who might be less annoying if he could stop airing his own opinions and only listen.

  I am not a local idiot. I listen for a good part of the afternoon.

  6

  SLEEP TONIGHT IN WIDOW GOSSE’S BED. Once in a while of late I creep up like a midnight cat to brush my face against her door and call her name through the ajar as quietly as I can, so as not to be heard by anyone. Excepting her. Sometimes I’m not even heard by her and, in the silence of her no reply, there is a chance for me to come back to my senses and creep away again, unsatisfied and angry with myself. At other times—though less commonly, because her cottage sits back from the lane and so is less overheard and, thereby, better suited than mine to, well, our cries—she turns up at my door on a similar errand. I am touched and reassured by that. It is a sign that we are equal parties in our sin. This is not a case of fox and hare. Her pretense, her subterfuge, to use a stylish word I’ve heard this afternoon, is that she’s come to borrow a length of candle or a little grease, but I’m not sure if she intends to make a pun.