Eppie knew the place. It was no more than a ramshackle hut. Most of the thatch was off, the saturated walls thick with grey, furry mould.
‘The difficulty is finding a muck-man to take on the job,’ du Quesne said. ‘Few are willing; it’s a lonely, dirty task. I will give the matter some consideration.’ He glanced skyward. ‘The clouds are thickening. Have some stack-men sent back to reap. I don’t want to lose a single ear. If necessary we’ll store some sheaves in the threshing barn. Isn’t that Hix’s lad? What’s he up to?’
Eppie peered over the hedge. Wilbert was dashing madly about with a faggot tucked under his arm, imitating the gamekeeper who was shooting scuttling rabbits as their cover of corn progressively vanished.
‘You boy!’ du Quesne shouted. ‘Resume your work this instant.’
Snatching at the reins, he was about to return to his study to secrete himself away from the intense heat, when he spotted a tired-eyed, ogling face. ‘Strawhead, I do not pay your mother good money for you to go skulking behind hedges.’ He indicated to a pile of stubble tied with straw rope. ‘Gather those and carry them to the ditchers.’
The idea crossed her mind that she would rather gather the scarlet pimpernel that sprawled, mat-like around her feet.
‘Look lively, you idiot child!’ he barked. Riding away, he ordered Maygott, ‘See to it that some of the other children do the same. Get the older boys to help their fathers.’
Faces grim, children massed around Eppie. Quiet and withdrawn, she was an easy target for their frustration, a scapegoat.
Sukey prodded her with a bundle of stubble. ‘This is your fault, Dunham. Hey, someone else is looking for trouble.’
‘Lottie, go back!’ Eppie cried, afraid that the child might also become a victim of Sukey’s bullying.
Maygott was chiding reapers for their leisurely work. Hearing Eppie’s shout, he glared around and saw the children dawdling. ‘Get a move on, you lot, or I’ll deny you a respite.’
Crossing the field, Eppie slowed to Lottie’s snail pace. She delayed further at the ditches when the child stopped to fill a wooden beaker with muddied water.
Sure her tactic had worked, that the others would have already reached the cornfield, she was sorely disappointed when, sauntering back, they came upon the gang, concealed behind a blackthorn hedge, waiting in ambush.
Taking Lottie’s bedabbled hand in hers, Eppie encouraged her to a quicker pace.
Sukey skipped on their heels. ‘That fooled ya. Figured we’d went, hey? Reckon when yer brother burnt yer head last Christmas he fancied roast pig’s ear friz supper?’ She dropped an earwig on Eppie’s bonnet. ‘That battle-twig’s gonna make a nest in yer deaf head.’
Eppie tramped on, eager to widen the distance between her and the gang.
Boys dashed in front, thwacking stubble with sticks.
A stone smacked into Lottie’s back. She squealed in pain.
Eppie came to an abrupt halt and protectively pressed Lottie’s sun-bonneted head against her stomach. The child wrapped her arms around Eppie, sobbing.
‘Leave us be!’ Eppie cried.
‘Where’s the fun in that, hey?’ Sukey retorted, delighted that Eppie was responding to her taunting. Scrabbling in the dirt, encouraging others, she grabbed a handful of stones. Though some children hung back, Sukey’s gang was like a pack of wolves going after its prey, whooping victorious as stones hit their mark.
‘Oy!’ Wakelin was returning with a gang of stackers. He crashed through the bullies. ‘Leave off, Hix, else I’ll slice yer guts with me sickle.’
‘Ooo, I’m that scared, big boy,’ Sukey cried brazenly. ‘You ain’t even got one.’
Tom strode towards Sukey, his sickle glinting in the sunlight. ‘Want me to do it for ya, Wake?’ Watching Sukey shoot off, pursued by her gang, his laughter rang through the stifling air.
Eppie and Lottie returned in the wagon with the men. Eppie felt immensely grateful to Tom for scaring their aggressors. ‘I’m sorry about what happened,’ she said, somewhat shyly. ‘About the badgers, I mean.’
‘’s all right.’ He grinned hugely. ‘It was the tar what caused me the most trouble. I couldn’t get the wretched stuff outta me beard.’
He cocked his head, delighted to see the rare ghost of a smile creep across her lips. ‘I used to see you and that lad about with the badger. What happened to it, dead?’
‘She ran off.’
He tied twine below the knees of his trousers in preparation for harvesting. ‘Wild, see. You can’t train badgers like dogs.’
Not far away, Bill, labouring alongside Percy and Edmund, was instructing Wilbert on how to handle a reaping hook, using a deliberate chopping action.
Some children were playing hood-man-blind. Blindfolded, Sukey span around, attempting to tig the others.
Jumping from the wagon, Eppie led Lottie over to Pip. Anxious about being sent on a mission working alongside Sukey, she raced over to where Martha and some other women toiled. ‘May I do some, Mam?’
‘I’m glad to see you making yourself useful for a change,’ Maygott shouted, seeing Eppie raking corn and pitch-forking it onto a horse-drawn cart, ready to be carried away. Rising in the saddle, he bawled up the field, ‘Sukey Hix, stop messing about. Follow Eppie Dunham’s good example.’
Eppie kept her eyes lowered, guessing Maygott’s demand would have riled Sukey.
Not long after, the cheapjack’s cart drew up at the field entrance. Du Quesne and Maygott safely out of sight, the women’s backs straightened in an instant. Eagerly trailed by their children, they scurried away.
Martha threw down her fork and peeled off the leather gloves that protected her hands. ‘Let’s take a breather. Besides, we’re short of this an’ that.’
Harvey was elated to see the mass of exhausted women rambling towards him. Within seconds, revelling in his chirpy banter, the spirits of the women lifted. So absorbed was Eppie in rummaging through the tailgate of the brimming cart and so loud was the chatter and laughter around her that she failed to hear a wagon rattling towards them.
‘Poor Betsy,’ Martha said. ‘If only there’d been something we could’ve done to stop it.’
Instantly, several heads turned.
Never one to mince his words, du Quesne had declared Betsy and other elderly people in the village, unsupported by family, to be beggars, and ordered that they be hauled off to the poorhouse where, he declared, ‘You may rot, for all I care.’
Betsy’s words to Eppie the previous evening flooded back to her. ‘I won’t be seeing you again, m’dear. I’ll miss our card games.’
Though the cart had travelled on some distance, Eppie tore after it, crying her friend’s name. To her consternation she saw not the face of the Betsy she knew and loved, the jovial lady who always made light of life’s difficulties. Rather, it was a face of impassive resignation. Drawing her shawl close around her face, Betsy turned away.
Riding back, du Quesne was so angry that he seemed to foam at the mouth like his horse. ‘What the deuce do you women think you’re doing?’
Harvey was off in a trice.
‘Strawhead, how dare you sneak away the moment Mr Maygott is not here to supervise you?’
Beholding the dreadful transformation in Betsy, Eppie felt weak with the onset of nausea. Ranger became several spinning horses, his grey spots whirling before her eyes. Involuntarily, she reeled towards the beast, her stomach hard and pained.
Seeing vomit splatter upon the hem of her smock, a look of disgust fell upon his lordship’s face and he rode away, rapidly.
Taking Eppie by the hand, Martha led her back to the field and uncorked an earthenware jug. ‘Try and drink some of this. It’ll take the nasty taste away.’
Eppie gratefully sipped the lukewarm small-beer, though it did nothing to relieve the stabbing pain in her aching temples.
Martha stroked Eppie’s dry, bronze-hued cheeks. ‘It upset you, didn’t it, seeing Betsy? What a dreadful thing it is to be poor. L
ook out, more trouble.’
‘You there, Mrs Dunham, on your feet or I’ll cut your pay,’ Maygott yelled.
A look of frustration flashed dangerously into Martha’s eyes.
The peal of church bells clanged through the fierce air.
‘Lowsing time!’ Tom hollered. ‘Come an’ grab yer belly-timber.’
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
FIELD OF BOULDERS
As part payment for the workers’ labours, du Quesne daily supplied crates overflowing with lettuces, onions and radishes. These salads made an agreeable addition to the bread and bacon that were the reapers’ staple mid-day meal. The crop cost his lordship next to nothing and indicated an element of goodwill between him and the reapers. Even beer formed part of the deal, each man being apportioned seventeen pints of liquor daily.
Women chatted and sopped bread into tin cans of weak tea, taken with a little brown sugar. An itinerant worker was bemoaning to some of the villagers about how his son had run off to join the naval battle against the French. One reaper fetched out his tin whistle and played a merry tune.
‘Why can’t Maygott leave folk be?’ Martha remonstrated, swatting insects that gyrated around her head.
Wakelin bit into a raw onion. ‘Ignore the maggot. He’s nubbut a crumbling mass o’ flesh.’
Lottie joined Sissy and other children who were bashing apples out of the tree for use in jelly-making, though, by this method, most would be so bruised as to be useless.
Stretched on the grass, Tom laughed as single women wove flowers into his black spade-beard.
Lottie poked Wakelin in the stomach with her stick. ‘Froggy-back, Wakey.’
‘Nay, I’m done in.’ Eyeing her miserable face, he changed his mind.
He was on all fours, Lottie giggling and slapping him on the shoulder, when a cart drew into the field. Kizzie had arrived with a cheese from the dairy and a milking-pail brimming with cider.
Edmund swirled her to the ground. ‘You gonna give me a kiss when we Drown the Harvest?’
Eppie imagined the fun and frolic of the Drowning. When reaping was at an end, a man would plait a tuft of corn. Fast as he could ride, he would make off to the brewhouse, where the stillroom maid waited at the threshold with a bucket of water. If the man could hotfoot it past her, without getting a drenching, and reach the kitchen table with the tuft dry, he claimed the right to kiss her.
Wakelin grabbed the quart pint mug tied to the handle of the pail and drank heartily. ‘Stop romping about Ed. Come and have some o’ this. It’ll put back yer sweat.’
Maygott rode up. ‘Back to your work!’
Wakelin pushed through the knot of disgruntled workers who rose, reluctantly. ‘We ain’t half way through.’
Maygott ignored the flash of anger in Wakelin’s eyes. ‘There’s no time to waste. You men finish with the scythe. We’ll lose some grain this way, but it’ll be faster mowing.’
Like an irate army general, du Quesne patrolled on horseback. Growing increasingly impatient, he could be heard complaining almost incessantly.
Late for work, itinerant reapers, who had ridden to The Fat Duck for something colder and stronger to drink, strolled up the field, adding to his wrath.
Heaviness filled the air. Thunder grew close, threatening.
Eppie was half-choked with the corn dust that drifted in the furnace hot air. She lugged yet another sheaf to Wakelin. He was building sheaves into hooded stooks to protect the corn ears from rain.
Tumbling into stubble, Flip screamed as Wilbert, play-acting the killing of the last sheaf cutter, made to stab him through the heart with a branch.
The last sheaf is the corn spirit. He who cuts it kills her. In times past, the last sheaf-cutter was killed on the field to restore life to the spirit.
‘That’s what it was like for me, the summer before you was born,’ Wakelin told Eppie. ‘Ownee rougher. I’d been gathering stones. Towards the end o’ reaping these lads an’ me stood in a half-circle, chucking sticks at the corn.’
Using his knees, protected with scraps of sheep’s skin, he pressed the corn into position. ‘We pretended we were the men, who use sickles to cut the last corn.’ He rubbed his neck, which was burnt nut-brown by the fiercely glaring sun. ‘Even though it were only a game to us lads, Thurstan yelled that he’d seen my stick slice the last sheaf. He and his friends beat me up summat rotten.’
Tom took the rubstone strickle from his hugger, the leather pouch at his belt, and sharpened the shaft of his scythe. Seeing his friend idle, he shouted in jest, ‘Wake, come and do some work for a change.’ Despondent, in need of male company, Wakelin made towards him and Edmund.
Eppie’s lonely figure was quickly singled out by Maygott, who set her to beating lumps of earth, ready for the seeding of next year’s crop.
All around, tempers frayed with the heat and rapid pace of work.
A roll of thunder grumbled, as yet unaccompanied by rain. Tips of trees swayed.
Weary almost beyond endurance, Eppie sighed; thankful that cooling rain and blissful rest were not far off. To her dismay, she spied du Quesne, who had wound himself into an irritable, hot-tempered mood, riding fast towards her.
‘Never before, Strawhead, have I known anyone as dilatory as you.’
Intent on punishing her, he set her to collecting stones from amongst the stubble, to be carted away to mend drinking places for cattle.
Massaging her aching back, Martha looked up to see Eppie trudging before du Quesne, her besmirched smock sagging around her filthy knees with the weight of the load. She saw not the peasant and the lord, but the daughter and the father.
Fortunately for Eppie, a distraction in the cornfield averted du Quesne’s attention.
Taking yet another trip to the brewery wagon, Bill Hix had used a short-cut through uncut corn when a mouse scampered up the leg of his trousers. ‘Na! Na!’ he yelled in surprise and revulsion. Scampering around like a dizzy dragonfly, he attempted to unbuckle his belt. ‘Geroff me!’
Glad of a diversion from their labours, harvesters stood around laughing about Bill’s misfortune.
Seeing the mouse scuttle across the corn stubble, Sukey grabbed her father’s scythe. Bashing the ground as the creature ran past, she unwittingly slashed the blade into a hornets’ nest. The looped hazel twig attached to the bottom of the shaft, which laid the cut corn evenly, snapped.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Bill bellowed. ‘You’ve broke me bow.’
Sukey raced around, arms whirling, trying to escape the torment of the wasps. ‘I never touched yer stupid scythe!’
Reapers guffawed at her blatant lie.
Scowling at Eppie, Sukey cried, ‘Snigger at me would ya, hey?’
‘I’m not,’ Eppie answered, startled.
In the girl’s eyes, as she hurtled towards her, Eppie saw burning hatred. She backed off and made to run. Sukey was too quick for her.
Knocked to the ground, she tried to fend Sukey off as she tugged at the ribbons under her chin. Her bonnet torn off, her burnt ear and singed locks were exposed for all to see. Some reapers chuckled at her odd appearance. Others turned away, saddened and embarrassed for her.
Fast and furious, Wakelin raced up, cursing Sukey.
Du Quesne sniffed disdainfully. ‘By the deuce, Dunham, I will be glad when you are muck-man. Then I will no longer have to suffer your rank comportment.’
‘Muck-man?’ He span around to face du Quesne. ‘No way. Not me.’
‘It is the ideal job for you. No respectable man is prepared to take on the task.’
‘I ain’t respectable?’
‘I am glad to see you recognise the fact,’ du Quesne said derisively.
‘We’ve cut the last sheaf!’ Edmund shouted. ‘Let’s go a-drowning!’
Wakelin joined the eager crowd of field-farers and ditchers hurrying towards the harvest-wain. Drawn by garlanded horses, it had pulled in at the field entrance.
Maddened by Wakelin’s bullishness, du Quesne hitc
hed Ranger’s bridle into his left hand and, with his free hand, drew an ivory-handled pistol from his waistcoat.
Eppie recognised it as the pistol he had used to kill Gillow.
‘Not another step, Dunham,’ du Quesne demanded. ‘For your mulish attitude you shall labour on until darkness, at the ditches.’
Distressed for Wakelin, Eppie and Martha watched him traverse the field, his head lolling between his broad sloping shoulders as though he were looking for something lost in the stubble.
Although du Quesne and Maygott rode swiftly past him on their way to the manor house, they paid them no heed.
Filled with sadness for Wakelin, Eppie turned her attention to the harvest-wain. Boughs of oak and ash, festooned with flowers, projected over its sides. The wagoners had returned dressed, as tradition would have it, in women’s garb. Tiredness forgotten, the villagers and itinerant workers cracked jokes. Hastily, the rake-maker’s wife fashioned a corn doll, the female spirit, from the last sheaf.
Seeing Gabriel riding up to the wain, Eppie nearly fainted away with shock. Compared to his sallow complexion when he had left home, he looked the epitome of health, his skin tanned, hair lightened.
She instinctively shrank back, hoping he would not spot her, that she would be lost in the crowd. Though she had not been aware of it, forced to spend such a long time away from him, a reserve had grown in her heart. In childhood they had innocently played together. Now, being older, it seemed extraordinary that the lord’s son would even consider continuing a friendship with her. Surely he must see that separation, merited by differences in their social standing, was more important to maintain than their companionship?
Leaping from his horse, Gabriel handed the reins to Paxton Winwood and, speaking to him, pointed in the direction of the manor stables.
Young men leapt onto nags, singing heartily: ‘We’ve ploughed, we’ve sown, we’ve reaped, we’ve mown. Harvest home, harvest home! We want water and we can’t get none!’
Eppie Page 33