by Jim Crace
Once or twice, I have affected not to hear her tapping on the door or, indeed, not to be in my bed at all, but on a nighttime mission somewhere else. Down at Turd and Turf, quite possibly, and achieving a release of quite a different kind. At such moments I am reluctant to call out “Kitty, Kitty, come inside,” because this is the bed where Cecily, my little thrush of a wife, has slept with me. The marriage bed. Though I’m not fool enough to think she’s still watching over me, there’s no denying that a woman leaves her mark, especially a woman who has shared your life for over eleven years and one for whom your feelings are not merely physical. Indeed, sometimes when I am in a melancholy mood, deep in the trenches of the night, perhaps, I slide my hand across the rough mattressing and find comfort in the hollows where my Cecily has slept (and died), where her shoulders and her hips have left their body ghosts.
My feelings for the widow Gosse are only physical, I have to say. I’m not even sure if she and I are friends. I think we hold each other in a low contempt. She finds me inexplicable—my self-absorption, my neglect of the small garden at the cottage back, my great abundance of uncommon words—and counts me as a town owl that’s all hoot and no talons. She blames me for my cautiousness. I’ve been too schooled, she says dismissively. I find her limited and, except in matters of the field, dull-witted. But in bed when we are making love she’s certainly no fool. Unlike my Cecily she has a lusty appetite. At night, her hand with her fingers spreading downward is always on my abdomen, rather than lying more tenderly across my chest, as was my wife’s. She has been a startling discovery. Possibly it is the intensity of our coupling that causes me so much shame to be her bedtime partner. We are, I think, like beasts, no better than a pair of forest beasts, unable to resist the physical and barbarous. It is not that she is beautiful or ever was. She must be very nearly fifty years of age. And since her husband died she has not taken much care of herself. Her clothes would benefit from mending—and from scrubbing, possibly. She has the usual warts and lumps of living hard and long. Her hair has grayed, despite the local patch of asphodels which other women use to keep their tresses stubbornly blond. And it’s difficult to tell, even when she’s naked at my side, if Kitty Gosse is fat or thin. She’s narrow-faced and narrow-hipped but large and softly comfortable about her waist and stomach. She calls it widow’s spread and is not the least concerned—the opposite—when, lying on her back with me on top, her creamy stomach sways and frowns like a shaken posset.
But then I have to ask myself, What does the widow see in me? As I imagine it, I am still a scrawny fellow, thin-armed and pale but with a bouncy head of hair, unfashionably brown for hereabouts. I’m handsome even, I would say. Indeed, I have been told that I look pleasing, especially in a hat or cap. Certainly, that is how I last appeared in a looking glass. But I have not had ready access to a looking glass for some years now. Once in a while, when Mistress Kent was still alive and I had reason to be in the manor house alone, I risked the two steps to her dressing room and stood in front of her tall glass to take stock of myself. I stared upon the one face in the village that I seldom saw but was available to everybody else. Her mirror darkened me and frayed my edges where the reflecting magic crystals in the glass had made a dry black mold, a kind of glittered lichen which seemed determined to encroach the clarity. But still, the body there was mine. I raised my hand and so did it. It replied to every smile. And when on more than one occasion I reached across to Mistress Kent’s day couch, where she threw her clothes, lifted free one of her heavy, decorated gowns and—wondering, just wondering; doing nothing worse than wondering—held it up against myself, that ashened, haunted woman in the looking glass was no one else but me.
For a year at least I have not even glimpsed my face. The duckweed in the ponds will not allow me to. The manor house has shuttered windows and no glass. The silver spoon the master gave us on our wedding day is tarnished and no longer repays any light. The worked copper on the brewing kettle picks up my shadow when I go close to it but the reflection is so tooled and beaten that my face is too pockmarked to be recognizable. In fact, I cannot think there is a looking glass in the parish, though no doubt there are some wives who have a secret sliver with which to horrify themselves and which they wisely do not seek to share. No, as far as I’m aware, our nearest likeness is two days’ distant. The master, as is the husband’s custom hereabouts among the gentlemen, sharded his wife’s long looking glass and buried the pieces with her, for fear of being haunted by her trace. So, unlike the town from where I came, where everyone who stepped out in the street would first have turned themselves this way and that in front of mirrors and could not have stepped twenty paces more before reflecting on themselves in window glass, we in this village walk around in blinded ignorance. We close an eye and see no more than a side of the nose, or possibly some facial hair, the outer regions of a beard. We know our hands and knees but not our eyes and teeth. So truly I can only guess what widow Gosse can see in me. And I suppose it is the same for her. Perhaps, without a husband to be her informant, she doesn’t even know how lined she is. That is the state of widowhood. We’ve no idea; we must hope for the best.
When I first started calling at her cottage, Kitty Gosse and I would hardly look each other in the eye. I was thinking of my Cecily—though Cecily was never this unbridled in my arms—and she, I must suppose, imagined herself unwidowed and back beneath the gouty, puffing Fowler Gosse, who died it’s said between these very legs. Hugged to death, with hair in his teeth, some wag has claimed. But over time I’ve ventured to study every part of her and have found great pleasure in her enthusiastic limbs. Tonight, though, I leave neither of us satisfied. I am too anxious and too hurried. My purpose in coming here, in tapping on her cottage door, is not so much to spend myself in her and have her disburse herself with me, so that we might deserve a full night’s sleep in company, but more to make myself forget or at least to banish from my mind for tonight the prospects I have overheard in Master Kent’s dark gallery.
I cannot say that Master Jordan has proved himself—not yet—to be a rough or thoughtless man, though he shows a stony disregard for proper burial. He is efficient, that is all. And unceremonial. He talks good sense, though sometimes sense is colder than an icicle. And sharper too. He listened patiently while Master Kent recounted the history of the newcomers: the doves, the fires, the bows, the pillory. And his replies displayed the mildest exasperation: “It is my judgment, cousin Charles, that you make problems for yourself by being kind.” The two men in the pillory had only got their just deserts, in his view. If one had died, that was still within the bounds of what the law allows. “A sturdy vagabond and fire setter” should expect to have his ears cut off and then be hoisted to the gibbet. That was not unusual. The younger man? Well, he should still serve out his week-long sentence: “What is the case for being lenient? He has given community offense and so should suffer justice in the full gaze of the community. Besides, cousin, you say he has already threatened you and holds you guilty of his kinsman’s death. Would you have him walking free, in such a vengeful frame of mind? No, we will take him with us, far from harm, when we depart. We’ll lash him to the saddle of a horse and set him free only when it is safe. Perhaps, we will equip him with a limp, as a reminder to be good, and wise. No doubt the woman you describe, the sister or the daughter or the wife, whoever she might be … well, no doubt she will follow her one surviving man away from here. In the meantime, let her be, let her peck about the forest like a goose. Do not concern yourself with her. A woman cannot do you any harm.”
What of the corpse? Again, Master Jordan could not see that this issue was problematic in the least. He snapped his fingers in dismissal. If Master Kent himself was too squeamish in such matters, he’d have his sidemen dispose of the corpse in the same place that any animal carcasses were abandoned. “He has not earned a place on hallowed ground, I think. So let the pigs complete what they’ve begun.” He clapped his hands. “You see, you see?” he asked, as delighte
d with himself as any boy. “Nothing is as complicated as you fear. Now, gentlemen …” His voice was lowered at this point. He did not want to waste more time on such frivolities. There were graver, grander things to talk about.
I listened to the squaring of the cousin’s feet as he began to outline his plans for Progress and Prosperity. “Do not blame me that I have an impulse to improve, a zeal for progress,” he told his audience this afternoon. “It is not by design or any subterfuge of mine that this estate and the duties that relate to it have fallen in my hands … But any final testament should be observed whatever the consequences. I think we will agree on that.”
Well, let him make excuses for himself. I will skirt round the details of his methods and procedures, the sums and calculations that he’s made, the reckoning. We’ve heard the drift of it before, from Master Kent’s own lips, when he addressed us between the veal and the dancing. The cousin’s version, though, was not so tender on the ear. There was no regret. He did not have a dream in which we “friends and neighbors” were made rich and leisurely, where we were sitting at our fires at home and weaving fortunes for ourselves from yarn. I think he judges us rich and leisurely enough already. No, Master Jordan only had a scheme, a “simple quest,” for a tidier pattern of living hereabouts which would assure a profit for those—he means himself—who have “the foresight.”
What matters most for now is that my master is allowed to stay. It is not the cousin’s wish to be “a country mouse,” he said. He would prefer to remain in his great merchant house in his great market town and simply check the figures once in a while: what rough wool from these old fields has arrived in his warehouse, what cloth his hired women have woven on their looms, what varying profits have been made from selling their worsted, twill or fustian, their pickthread and their petersham, and what profits have been lost to greedy shearmen and staplers, cheating chapmen, and lazy fullers, tuckers and dyers. “So many ravens to be fed and satisfied,” he said, letting his shoulders sag with the weight of his responsibilities. “We should not deceive ourselves that in a modern world a common system such as ours which only benefits the commoners (and only in prolific years) could earn the admiration of more rational observers for whom ‘agriculture without coin’ is absurd.
“Everyone among us plays his part, for the good of the whole,” Master Jordan concluded. “It is the duty of our part to make the others’ part more comfortable. This is society.” He pointed at his smiling village natural. “You, sir. Continue with your quills and charts, and let’s complete your mapmaking before the week is out. This gentleman is Mr. Baynham”—here I heard his steward civilly muttering his greetings—“and he, you will discover, is adept at preparing land for sheep. This is not the first community to benefit from Mr. Baynham’s stewardship. Of course, he needs to be acquainted with your land, my land. He will be guided by the charts. Before first snow he will have structured everywhere within these bounds with fences, dykes and walls, as he sees fit. He’ll be reclaiming forestry. How can it profit us that there are trees, an oak, let’s say, producing shade but not a single fruit to eat, except for beasts? We would be wise to hew it down and trade its timber rather than allow it to defeat the sun, for beauty’s sake, at my expense. Likewise, the commons will be cleared and privately enclosed. You’re pasture now. These lands are grass. We’ll never need another plow. You, cousin—”
“We have a little short of sixty souls to feed hereabouts …” Master Kent spoke up at last, his voice pinched and hesitant. And so it ought to be. But Master Jordan only spread his hands and shrugged, a shrug that counted our distresses as an inevitable proviso for his permanent advance. “That’s Mr. Baynham’s province now,” he said. “I’m sure that there will be a place for shearers and for sheep-boys. Or for some, at least. He will employ what hands he needs. But we will sadly need to make economies—”
“I do not think that you will make economies,” said Mr. Quill, who is, I have to say, the bravest soul for all his lumbering.
Master Jordan laced his fingers and looked down thoughtfully into the lattice they made. He offered Mr. Quill a fleering, patient smile of his own. “It is not my role to make economies but rather to provide expenditure,” he said finally. “Do not imagine that I come here empty-handed. There will be charity. Gratuities, indeed. I will fund at last the building of a church and I will employ a priest. I bring you sheep, and I supply a Holy Shepherd too. There’ll be a steeple, higher than the turret of this house, taller than any ancient oak that we might fell. This place will be visible from far. And I will have a bell cast for the very top of it to summon everyone to prayer. And hurry everyone to work. Those few that can remain, that is.” Again he stared into his hands, then added without looking up, as if talking only to himself, “It’s only Mr. Earle, I think, who is not obliged to make economies, and has no duties other than with maps, and besides is so hellishly unstable on his feet he must have …” He paused to find a witticism.
“Yes, I must have been kicked by a horse or struck by lightning. I’ve heard it all before. The heavens opened and a tongue of light gave me the body of an old gnarled tree. Oh, certainly, the devil himself concocted me in his cracked jar. And so I am deformed. Well, have it so, if that amuses you,” Mr. Quill replied, with only the merest edge of temper to his voice; a practiced speech, I think, which he has used to shield himself more than once before. And here my listening was hastened to an end by Master Jordan turning on his heels and striding down the gallery toward my lurking place. He was smiling—not unsweetly—to himself. I had to draw myself into the shadows until the man had passed.
Now I am sorely tempted to wrap myself round Kitty Gosse’s back and whisper to her everything I’ve overheard this afternoon. It is a burden that might be lightened in its sharing. I have been privy to the pattern of our futures. I’ve seen the green and white of grass and sheep. I’ve heard the tolling of the steeple bell. I am the only one among them yet that knows our master is displaced, though still in place. We’re all displaced, I must suppose. I have the sense to hold my tongue, of course—I must plan provision for myself, before my neighbors are informed—though feeling the warmth of the widow’s back against my chest again while thinking as I must of Mistress Beldam pecking in the forest makes me effusive in another way. So she and I make love again. And I am sure we’re not alone in that. The dark is stifling its cries in other cottages than hers. Their beds are creaking. There is whispering. Knees are pressing into straw. On nights like this, when there’s anxiety about, there is a glut of lovemaking. Then the moon is our dance master. He has us move in unison. He has us trill and carol in each other’s ears until the stars themselves have swollen and have ripened to our cries. As ever here, we find our consolations sowing seed.
7
E WAKE TO LEARN THAT Willowjack is dead. The news is brought to Kitty Gosse’s door at first light by Anne Rogers, our village piper’s mother. She is amused but evidently not surprised to find me in my spacious underclothes naked from the waist up and pulling on my breeches at her friend’s bed end. Someone “with clever hands,” she says, has taken a spike of metal, a tethering prong, from the winter tool chest in the standing barn and driven it with precision and with force into the horse’s head above her ear. The large square stone that the slaughterer took from the churchyard and used as a mallet was found in the straw, syrupy with blood, when the carcass was dragged aside. It’s sitting now on Master Kent’s mantelshelf. Plans are afoot to hunt the hand that wielded it.
“It must have been a large hand,” says Anne Rogers. “Someone big and strong. A man, of course. A man who might’ve done this sort of thing before. A man horses trust …” She hesitates because she does not want to say what she hopes each of us is thinking, that Willowjack will have known her murderer. How could a stranger get close enough to hold a prong against her head and drive it home, even if it took only a single blow? It was never easy to get close to Willowjack; even unplugging a blood tick from her ear was rewarded with
a nipping. Anne Rogers means us to suspect our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, a second cousin of my wife and a man she once set her heart upon—until he married. Then he was despised.
“It might be anyone who’s similar, of course,” she adds, seeing the look on my face and then nodding at my hands.
“I have my alibi,” I say, pointing at the bed and seeming for the women’s benefit to make light of what is already upsetting me and will be insufferable for Master Kent. The knots that tie us to this tranquil place are loosening. “Besides this one hand’s not entirely mended.” I show the healing wound. The scab has darkened and is flexible. If I’m not careful I’ll be put to work again. “It’s painful still,” I promise, not quite certain why both are laughing. “I couldn’t squash a fly with this.”
“Or even strip a bit of barleycorn,” she says.
So now there are two bodies to be taken down to Turd and Turf, the master’s cherished mare and the abandoned man from the pillory. I do not know whom we should hold responsible for the horse’s death. My first suspicion lays its eggs beneath the skin of Master Jordan’s groom. I was not impressed by him when, yesterday, I showed him where his horses could be tied. He looked at Willowjack with a narrow lip, I thought. “She’d benefit from brushing down,” he said, though by any rule she was twice as fine a horse as any of his mounts. Envy can be maddening. Perhaps she’s nipped him, and he’s taken his revenge.