Harvest

by Jim Crace

  So the numbers swell throughout the afternoon, until finally everybody I have known in this placid line of cottages accepts that it’s best to put some distance between themselves and Master Jordan’s men, especially that groom, especially his freshly carved gargoyle face. They shudder at the thought of him. Once the decision has been made, I can see—and I’m surprised and touched by it—a kind of determined, turbulent happiness taking hold. If there is grief and anger in the air, there is also jollity. Some of the younger ones are almost smiling with relief as they set off to cross our village limits for the first time in their lives, relieved to get away before they’re caught, of course, but also glad that what’s ahead of them is not predictable. They’ve found a reason to stride bravely off. Their hearts are leaping and their heads are clear. They’re free at last, and filling up with hope with every step. Perhaps they will encounter marvels on the way.

  Most of them take the widest lane, the one that Mr. Baynham followed on his horse, because it means they at least can lead a cow or goat with them, or carry their hens and geese in baskets on their barrows and their carts. The Kips even succeed in putting an ox between the shafts of a hay wagon and setting off with almost everything they own, including all their stoppered bottles of cordial and their gleaning sacks. Of course, their names are going with them too. All of the village names that count are moving out. Soon they will have gone beyond the hoof-trod paths and drift-ways on The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman, and will have reached the wonder of a graveled surface, the wagon ways of post-horn carriages, packhorse trains and carting loads. They will have joined the restless, paler people of the towns.

  Only the Carrs and Saxtons take the slower, deeper, forest route, despite their lifelong dread of going for too long without the certainty of either daylight or the moon. The trees at the forest’s heart might not have seen a human face before. There might not even be a path. That means these neighbors cannot draw their carts or take with them any of their more valuable animals. They’ll leave them to find forage of their own. “Let them eat wool,” I mutter at my neighbors’ backs, making light as best I can of all their troubles, present and forthcoming, their lamentable hereafters, as Mr. Quill has titled them. But going by the forest route does mean they’re safe at least from mounted pursuit. With any luck they’ll not be caught, they’ll not be hunted down like deer. Who knows, within a day or two they might have reached another line of bounds and someone else’s common ground, where they can put up their hut—four rough and ready walls, a bit of roof—and light a fire. They’ll build a place; they’ll lay a hearth; they know the custom and the law. Their smoke will give them liberty to stay.

  I AM IN KITTY GOSSE’S BED AGAIN. She isn’t stretched out at my side, of course. Tonight the only fingers fanned across my abdomen are my own. I’ve not laid eyes, or hands, on her since early yesterday. Her absence is an agony. I am surprised to feel so sick of heart because, of late, my wider carings have been narrowed by my wife’s too recent death. Kitty and I have not been honeyed lovers, after all, but falling short of that—something simpler, I suppose, something less affecting. But, still, the knowledge of her torments at the manor lies leaden in my stomach, a heavy, undigested stew which increases in its girth the more I ponder it. I’m brimming now with fret and bile, because of her.

  I hope to find escape in sleep. But before I even try to sleep, before I dare to fall asleep, I have to tidy up the mess left by the three sidemen during their ransacking, the same three men who pained my Kitty Gosse. I had my choice of many beds, of all the village beds, in fact. There’s not a neighbor’s home that’s closed to me. But the habits of half a lifetime will not be shed so suddenly. I don’t feel free to trespass in their forsaken rooms, let alone rest my head and body in someone else’s dents, without their first inviting me. I think I’m hoping to recover some of their trust even though they are too far away and too long gone to witness my timid, loyal observance of our country practices or even care what I might do. But Mistress Gosse’s home has on occasion let me in quite willingly, and so I am pressed into dents that do, to some extent, belong to me.

  I could not have slept comfortably in my own bed—at least, I did not want to take the risk. What I must regard as John Carr’s final, kind advice—that I was named as part of a conspiracy and should, therefore, pack up, move out and save myself, is unsettling still. My head is bustling with bitter, bruising possibilities. If Master Jordan’s men are looking now for Mr. Quill, no doubt they would be pleased to capture his assistant too, his vellum-maker, his companion on the bounds. It’s all too easy to imagine what might occur if I were sleeping in my bed at home, wrapped up in my own rough cloth inside my own rough room. I’d be woken by the breaking open of the door. They’d drag me by my ankles to the manor house. My cheekbone’s already cracked today, and hurting; it’s fractured, possibly. My jaw is stiff. Chewing on the apple and the stub of bread I had for supper was hard work. So I will be punished all the more if I am bounced among the windfalls in the lane. I see myself laid out on the long bench in the porch on stone already moist and cold from Mistress Beldam’s father’s corpse. I am the one who sleeps with Willowjack. My everlasting paradise is Turd and Turf. I take the blame for everything.

  I must remind myself that Master Kent has told me otherwise. He says I am not counted as a suspect. I’m ashamed to say, the opposite is true. I’m taken by his cousin for a man he can “rely upon,” that was the way he phrased it. Unlike neighbor Carr, Master Kent was privy to last night’s excesses, even though a floorboard blocked his view, and so his word has some authority. He promises I’ve not been named by widow Gosse. He could be wrong entirely or the circumstances might change, of course: each day the story of our lives is forced onto a different track. Nothing seems impossible. But my instinct almost persuades me he is right. There has been something in the way Master Jordan looks at me—he’s weighing me; I’m livestock in his eyes—to make me wonder if he hopes one day to find me useful, a beast of burden he can put to work. He must realize I’m truly not a villager. He knows I used to be the manor man. He sees I stand apart. I’m separate. Indeed, I haven’t felt as separate in years. Perhaps it’s just as well, this recent, saddening detachment from the drove. I almost welcome it. These loose roots might save me yet.

  So I find some calm in Kitty Gosse’s bed, though fleetingly. My naps are fly-by-night and fugitive. I cannot stay asleep. Because the demons come again. They’re taunting me with: You’re Master Jordan’s donkey now; You don’t deserve kind neighbors and good friends; you did deserve that hearty kicking when you toppled from your bench into the rain ditch this afternoon; There’s more and worse to come for you; watch out. I imagine for a second time that breaking open of my door, that dragging of my body by its ankles through the night. It is not the sidemen beating me but Saxtons, Rogerses, Gosses, Derbys, Kips and Carrs. Yes, someone that I must have thought of as a neighbor or a friend has struck me in the face today. The bruises have flowered on my cheek and the pain is ripening, I find myself so saddened and incensed that I can hardly hope for the salve of lasting sleep.

  Counting sheep is not the remedy. The night itself is also keeping me awake. Its wind is pelleting its buckshot stars across the sky. The trees cry out already for their departed friends. Abandoned animals are demanding care, despite the dark. It is as if they know I’m here and are impatient for my services. I ought to drag my aching face out of the widow’s bed and attend to them, attend to everything and anyone that needs me in the night. For there is no forgetting there are other human hearts out there, more damp and cold than mine. I’m haunted now by the thought of Mr. Quill, not only by the fear that he’s been caught, but also by Master Kent’s report that the missing man slept elsewhere. The last time I saw him was at the pillory. One moment he was putting his finger on my hand, the next he was almost out of sight, crashing through the sore-hocks in Mistress Beldam’s traces, and her scent.

  I am not being generous or sensible. What does it matt
er if he captured her? What loss is it to me? Indeed, it might be best if that were so, if he caught up with her elsewhere and hushed her cries to tell her of the danger she was in. But then surely he would have gone back to the manor house at once, his duty done, his conscience clear, and not slept elsewhere. And I am bothered by the thought, the tormenting drama, actually, of that cropped head on Mr. Quill’s bent chest. I almost put his lips on hers. I almost see his graceless body—bared, as white as moonlight—in her arms. I am so bothered that I placate the tension with my hands, alone in widow Gosse’s bed, where so many times of late the tensions have been stroked away by her. Of course, I’m left more bleak than I began. My loneliness is evidenced in wasted seed and empty cottages.

  Who are my neighbors now? I’m counting them on gluey fingers. My tally is the strangest one. There’s not a willing soul remains within our bounds who entirely belongs to these commons and these fields. Apart from Kitty Gosse, Anne Rogers and Lizzie Carr, if they’re alive, no one who’s stayed was born close by. No one who’s stayed has family. My reckoning provides me with just seven bodies freely sleeping under a roof: four Jordan men—the steward has already ridden off for help—the two masters of the manor and dissenting cousins, and myself (though not quite sleeping yet). There is the husband at the pillory, of course. I must remember him. He has no roof. And then the missing couple, unaccountable, the sorceress, the Chart-Maker. I have to say it: beauty and the beast.

  I force myself to concentrate. If I can only ponder on a single task—forget the woman, Mr. Quill, my bruises and the neighbors who provided them, all talk of sorcery, the horrors of the coming dawn … no, stop. If I can only find a single task to think about, to practice in my weariness, I will sleep. I know that I will sleep. Labor is the gateway to a night of rest. I take myself off to the barn. I close my eyes and fly there like a bat. And there I find discarded tools. And I commence—at least restart—the threshing of our barley crop. Quite soon I’ve made a rhythm with my flail. My neighbors should be proud of me. I work the thump, until it’s beating with my heart. I dream of plows and oxen, furrows, grain.

  12

  ASTER JORDAN SEEMS A CALM and happy man today. He says I’m just the hand he’s looking for. Indeed, when I walk across to the manor house as soon as it is light with nothing clear in mind except to show my damaged face and take the consequences, he meets me at the door himself and leads me from the porch into the room where he is eating breakfast. He has me sit. He offers me his bread and ale, though not the cold meats and the cheeses. He’s being civilized but thrifty. I cannot tell what’s happened overnight but clearly it is to his satisfaction. Even Master Kent, when he comes in and sits with me on my side of the table, seems less ashen and less shaky than he has for several days. This morning he’s breathing from a deeper pool. It is as if a truce has been brokered and both men claim the victory.

  But first—to earn my bread and ale, it seems—they ask for my account of what happened in the village yesterday. Has anyone remained, they want to know. Did anybody speak of their return? And when my answer to both questions is a no, Master Jordan claps his hands, his signature for being pleased, and laughs out loud.

  “What frightened mice your neighbors are,” he says. “And so the meek shall inherit the world!” He means his sheep, of course.

  Edmund Jordan might seem a very pleasant man when he is relaxed and smiling. I do not find him dangerous. And so I risk a question of my own, though I select it carefully. I will not ask about the girl and women in his keeping, even though they cannot be detained more than fifty paces from his table. I cannot seem to be concerned for them, if they are witches in his view. I dare not even mention Mr. Quill. I’m too associated with the Chart-Maker already. Instead, with a nod of apology to both men for my temerity, I say, “I worry that my dear master is deposed entirely.” I reach an arm out, stretch along the bench, until I can lay my hand on Charles Kent’s elbow. This is my show of loyalty. This is my reminder that we once drank at the same breast. I’m stepping back into his yard. That seems my only option now.

  “You should not squander any fluster on your master, Walter Thirsk,” he replies, then pauses, smiles, tips his head, says “Water! Thirst!,” laughs merrily and claps his hands. I’ve never seen a man so happy with himself so early in the day. He leans across the table to lay a hand on each of our forearms. “Your master is my cousin through marriage, as you know. He’s family. He’s country kin. I cherish him, of course. No, my benefit is that he benefits. We have a plan. We leave today. We leave with cousin Charles in our good company.”

  Now I am required to listen to a lecture on the principles of stewardship. The province of a hundred people out of every one hundred and one is to take and not provide direction, he says. He mentions Profit, Progress, Enterprise, as if they are his personal Muses. Ours has been a village of Enough, but he proposes it will be a settlement of More, when finally he’s fenced and quickthorned all the land and turned everything—our fields, the commons and “the wasted woods”—into “gallant sheep country.” “And, as misfortune has it,” he concludes, marking that Misfortune with a happy show of teeth, “the villagers who most would benefit from these advances have preferred instead—as one, it seems—to impose their villainy on my good groom and then seek another place where their idle subsistencies can flourish. So the land has come back to the Lord, I mean myself, who owns this property of soil. I have the chance to start from scratch. Or, as our Mr. Earle might say, I have the chance to start on a spotless sheet of parchment.”

  “Has Mr. Earle finished with his charts?” I ask. I cannot see the risk in that.

  “Ha, Mr. Earle will never finish it, I think.”

  “You mean because he is accused?”

  “Accused of what?”

  “Of unclean magic, can I say?”

  Master Jordan leans across the table again and presses his thumb into my forearm. “Your face is very cruelly bruised,” he says. His smile has thinned. “I hope the injury has no cause to spread. I would not want to see your other cheek as scarred. No. Again, you must not squander any fluster there. You will not. That is what I say. Magic, clean or otherwise, and sorcery … such things? We should not mention them again.” And on those words, as if ordained, the first sunlight of the day finds passage through the red-black canopy of sentry beeches and lays a glossy stripe across the tabletop. At last I understand the hope in Master Kent’s face, and his composure in these torrential times. His resignation too. There’ll be no trials. There’ll be no burning at the stake. There’ll just be progress of a sort.

  What the cousin proposes and my master Kent supports, with many nods and nudges of his knee on mine but without speaking a word, is that when the Jordan party leaves, as leave it must by noon today, with the three prisoners in tow, I am to stay behind to be the new master’s ears and eyes. His steward has already ridden off to organize the purchase of the sheep—so not to summon soldiers, then—and in the coming months I can expect the arrival of hired hands who will lodge in our empty cottages while trees are cut, and hedges struck, and drystone walls and winter folds built. I can expect, as autumn comes, a pair of shepherds to arrive, or even three perhaps, and they will carry with them coins for my wage. But for the coming weeks I can count only upon myself for company. “Yourself and Mr. Pillory,” he says. “It is my reckoning the man has three more days to serve. Today, tomorrow and the last. As you are honest, do not show him leniency, but set him free only when the hour veritably lets him free. I have your word?”

  Master Kent nods encouragement. He will explain when we’re alone, he seems to mean.

  “You have my word.” I hate myself for saying so.

  “Then start your day in my employ by preparing our five horses for the journey. My groom has not the heart or face for it. He’s keeping to his bed. I thank him for that. He is a fiercely ugly man today.” Master Jordan stands at the table, offers me his hand. I cannot help but reach across and shake it briefly. My finger joints clac
k against his rings. His palms are cool and vellum-soft and smooth.

  Master Kent comes with me to the orchard, where, carelessly, since the groom’s disablement, the horses have been left untethered overnight. We could be mistaken for ranking equals as we walk at each other’s shoulders down the lane, two graying men of more than middle years, no trace of finery, bulked up and burnished by our living on the land.

  “I thank you, Walt,” he says, taking my hand. We are old friends again. “I cannot say how glad I was to see your face today. Despite your bruises. I feared you would have fled like everybody else. I’d not have blamed you if you had. I’ve been tempted to take flight myself. I’ve even thought to take a light to it, my home, and finish off what was begun in my dovecote and my lofts. Rather than be witness to …” He does not want to list the changes that will come. “These are sad and hasty times. In what … five days, six days? … the village has been … lost to me. It has been lost to all of us.”