Harvest A Novel (13 page)

Master Jordan nods. “Then who … then who lives in that derelict? It seems to me that someone’s sleeping there.”

“A vagrant, possibly. Some passing midnight pillager.” The master shakes his head, biding time by making show of his bewilderment. The tale that he eventually suggests is this: someone has come through overnight, a ruffian. He’s crept into the manor house and, finding it too occupied by lightly sleeping men, has taken leave with only Lucy’s velvet shawl as his bounty.

“It was hanging at the back of her old loom until last evening,” he explains. “Our mothy visitor means to sell it when he reaches any town, most probably—or he only meant to sleep in it, up there in that old tenement. But first he took the opportunity to steal the finest mount for his future travels.” Master Jordan is nodding yet again. “He will have chosen Willowjack, of course, rather than one of your serviceable horses, cousin Edmund,” Master Kent continues, warming to his narrative. “But Willowjack is loyal and skittish. I think we can presume the fellow took a kick from her. Or else she nipped him hard. A vulgar, violent person would have sought revenge for that.”

Master Jordan has pursed his lips. He is considering. It is not that he is such a stony-hearted moralist that he is looking forward to the gibbeting of a local man. But it will serve his purposes if through the death of this old mare he is able without cost to make his sudden mark on this inheritance. There’s nothing like a show of heavy justice—and a swinging corpse—to persuade a populace not used to formal discipline that their compliance in all matters—including those regarding wool and fences—is beyond debate. He’s made his threats and promises. He has already disturbed and violated everybody’s home. He will lose face and thereby some control if what Master Kent describes is true. The miscreant was not a local man; the miscreant has come and gone, it seems.

“So be it, then,” he says reluctantly and does not seem to mind that my master has taken up the velvet shawl, heavy with his horse’s blood, and says that he will have it washed and put back in its place, where it belongs, on Lucy’s loom.

But Master Jordan is still looking for ways to save his face and demonstrate his loyalty to justice. “That man who spends an idle week at your pillory, he was the one responsible for burning down your farm buildings and slaughtering your doves? Is that correct?” he asks eventually, smiling almost. My master only dips his chin. Not quite a yes. “And he, I think, has promised to revenge himself on you?”

“That’s true—but only in the heat of his dismay. Besides, he is securely fixed and cannot have visited any injury on Willowjack, except by sorcery,” the master says.

The cousin is not listening. “I do not mean to blame the horse on him, unless of course your proposal of sorcery can be proven. But we must question him,” he says. “At least I think I owe it to your dignity, dear cousin, to lay the charges of sedition and incitement at his feet. You are my witness. He has said that he has plans to murder you. Now
I am unwittingly the master of this place and so discover myself to be its de facto magistrate. I think it’s time we took his case to court. I say so with a heavy heart.”

Here he turns full circle, sweeping the horizon, taking in the width and span of us. It’s clear the conversation’s at an end. He is maddened by our way of life. He is exasperated by the disarray he has discovered in our village. He sighs dramatically, to leave us in no doubt. We’ve brought these troubles on ourselves. And he will bring them to a sudden and impatient end if needs be. I catch his eye. “So, Walter Thirsk,” he says, just listing me. He’s wondering, I think, how useful I might be. I nod, admitting to my name, no more. But possibly he takes it as compliance on my part. He sees me as a man who not so long ago—twelve years—must have seen this village as he sees it now, a slow-paced commonwealth of habit, custom and routine, of wasting time and sauntering, of indolence.

Again he circles, but this time he is smiling. He lifts his arms and, palms up like a preacher, spreads his fingers, at all the land in sight. “Nothing but sheep,” he says, and laughs out loud. His joke, I think, is this: we are the sheep, already here, and munching at the grass. There’s none more pitiful than us, he thinks. There’s none more meek. There’s none to match our peevish fearfulness, our thoughtless lives, our vacant, puny faces, our dependency, our fretful scurrying, our plaints. I can tell he wishes he could see the back of all of us. He’ll put an end to all the sauntering. He will replace us with a nobler stock.

8

AM IN MR. QUILL’S GOOD COMPANY
this afternoon and cannot help but dream about the sort of life I might spend with him should I escape the fleecy prospects of our fields by leaving here in his employ. At least, that is my maturing scheme. I could be gone within the week, if he takes to me and if my current master gives me leave. It is a fearful prospect, parting from Charles Kent, after what has been a lifetime of his company, his fellowship, but not as fearful as one in which his unremitting cousin is my master. So I do my best to be visibly meticulous for Mr. Quill, though—truth be told—I have embellished my expertise in readying the quality of vellum he requires for the final presentation copy of his enclosure charts. The best vellum, he says, rubbing his own inner arm by way of an example, takes weeks in preparation; even so, my brisker efforts might still be expected to produce a surface that is uniformly smooth “but textured still.” And it should be thin enough for the light of a candle to shine through it. I’ll do my best to reproduce his skin. It cannot be dissimilar to tanning leather for an apron or a shoe.

I have removed the calfskin from the sink of salted water, dung
and lime where it has been soaking and bating for the past two days, since its removal from the rafter in the barn, and brought it, dripping brine and grease, past the site of Willowjack’s demise, along the farm lane and into the manor house, where the scullery corner has been set aside for chart-making. My hand is much restored, I am relieved to say. The wound has not defeated me, though it is still too tender at its center to be much use among the threshers and the winnowers and their heavy tools. But it is a relief to be working usefully after what have been almost three days of anxious idleness.

Mr. Quill requires me to prepare the skin while he makes paper audit of our fields and commons, finally transferring to the square in front of him what he has witnessed in the round. We keep our voices low so that neither Master Jordan nor his serving men catch any word of my account of this morning’s evasions and intrigues. The threats.

“I fear for us,” he says. His use of
us
is accidental—he has only been with
us
for, what? not quite four days—but it is revealing. I can tell he has surprised himself with us. Evidently Mr. Quill is putting down a root just as I am pulling up my own.

“It is the woman who must fear the most,” I say.

We are agreed that Mistress Beldam—for whom we clearly both have put down roots, despite her misdeeds and offenses, though possibly because of them—should be found and warned. It can’t be long before our novice magistrate or one of his lieutenants connects the velvet shawl to its most recent owner—there’s not one of us who hasn’t seen her wearing it, either at the morning visit to the newcomers’ den on our rest day or at the feasting barn that night. Someone is bound to talk. All that Master Kent has done by claiming the cloth as his wife’s is to gain Mistress Beldam a little time, a stay of execution, possibly, and to earn himself the final contempt of his cousin.

We could and ought to put our tools aside at once and walk off to the tenement where the bloody cloth was found. Both of us fear that
Mistress Beldam will have already returned to where she evidently made her refuge overnight. And that is perilous. No doubt that trio of sidemen who currently have nothing else to do except inflate themselves as constables will be poking noses into every nook and cranny as we speak, hoping to provide some extra bodies for the Jordan court. Neither of us wants those three gentlemen to catch even a glimpse of Mistress Beldam. We understand too well the impact of her face and hair. Especially her hair, which, now it’s shaved as short and shy as rabbit fur, only intensifies her native insolence and vulnerability. She’s too inviting to the eye. Such gentlemen with time to spare will not be kind to Mistress Beldam if they find her on her own and in a tumbledown beyond the hearing of the threshing barn. We only hope she has the sense, since her revenge on Willowjack, to scurry back into the forest from where she came and make herself another nest of logs and turf—but across the parish bounds, where none of us are free to stray.

“We’ll look for her,” says Mr. Quill. His voice has thickened, just from saying it. “But not until we are”—he points a finger at his ear—“not overheard.” Steward Baynham is close by, it seems. We hear him moving in an upper room and then we hear him on the stairs. He’s flitting like a bee about a plum, and bees—as I at least have learned in these past years—adore sweet mischief more than anything. Something ugly and unusual has happened to us all. In just a few days we have become even more suspicious of the world.

“She might be anywhere,” I say. “But there is one place she’s bound to visit.” Her surviving kinsman must be fed and given drink. She will not let him wither on the branch of our village cross. She’s bound to come at night when it is safer and she can be unseen except by owls and foxes, and the moon, to comfort him and take good care of him. That’s a duty none of my neighbors are expected to assume, but one which Mistress Beldam can be certain to fulfill. So it is agreed that once the Jordan party have retired for sleep tonight, Mr. Quill and I
will become like owls ourselves, round-eyed and patient, waiting on the scuttle of some little feet. We’ll be dark-feathered in our drabbest coats, and in a hideaway of leaves. And when she comes? Well, we can think of nothing else. We’re happy to seem busy with our work. And we can think of nothing else but her.

I clear away the carpeting of straw to find bare tiles and stretch the calfskin on the scullery floor. Now I can see the puckering where that little hand-reared animal, which was so moist and succulent for us at our gleaning feast, was cut along the spine, peeled off the ribs and then spread out for butchering. Her twin flanks are still joined at the girth, along an uneven ridge of skin. They provide for Mr. Quill an amply proportioned square, almost a good reach in length along each side. I arm myself with a blunt-edged knife and kneel down, holding the saturated skin firmly under both knees while I scrape away from me with my good hand. The knife dislodges any waste, any nuds of lime or tags of veal, but I have to snap out hairs at their bulbs with my fingers. The skin is not yet leathery. I should say vellumy. It’s far too coarse still, and resistant. I should have soaked it for a week or more. I have to limber it. I will not say it’s easy work. I will not say I enjoy being this intimate with an animal I’ve known and liked (and eaten, actually). But I see the task as a test. It can stand as proof to Mr. Quill that should he ever need a manservant then none can do a better job than me. So I try my best not to complain. I concentrate on smooth and thin and uniform. I am determined I will pass the lighted candle test.

At such close quarters, the smell is nauseous. What flesh has not been loosened and washed away in the soaking has begun to putrefy. I have to sit back every little while to breathe less heavy air. Stand up too quickly and I’ll faint. But slowly I can feel the calfskin surrendering to my hand. It’s thinning and it’s softening. I do not think the vellum I produce will be the finest quality. It’s not sufficiently prepared.
I’m rushing it. I have no practice or proficiency. I’ve made mistakes. I doubt that it was wise to dry the skin in the smoke of its own roasting flesh. I’m not even certain if I should have steeped the skin with lime and dung. Till now, there’s not been any call for vellum hereabouts. Mr. Quill, though, does not seem dissatisfied when he steps across the room to view my progress and test it with his thumb. Evidently my surface is very nearly fibrous enough to hold yet not absorb his inks and paints.

Mr. Quill is working on his preliminary sketches. He is experimenting, hoping to discover what colored patterns he can devise to make the story of our farmscape—and our sheepscape—easy to decipher. It sounds to me, from my position on the floor, as if he’s doing women’s work. His tools are cutlery and grinding blocks, and pestle dishes hardly larger than a shell. I half expect to smell the spice of cake. Nutmeg, at least. But all I get above the rot of veal are the cloying odors of his binding gum and lye. He is clearly content in my company, speaking freely now, not whispering. It doesn’t matter if he’s overheard by any of the Jordan men. He’s only talking processes, informing me, but also reminding himself, of each step in his recipes for color. He uses words I’ve rarely heard before—like
lapis lazuli
and
smalt
. They are somehow related to the emerging blues that are already in evidence on his fingertips—and across his cheeks and in his tapered beard. I am supposed to see the difference—although the light is low in here—between the florey and the litmus and the indigo, which he displays for me on little parchment tags. He is as snug and personal with his kitchen colors as I have learned to be with clouds, let’s say, or even with the sky’s own wash. I have my blues: this blue betokens harvest days (it will not rain), and that one promises a cracking frost; another—higher, darker and more ponderous—reveals itself only silently and briefly when the sun has already withdrawn into his bedchamber but the windows of his heavens are not yet quite
closed; this is the blue that says we’re free to stretch and finish work and rest.