Harvest A Novel (27 page)

I know I have to drag myself away from this high window. I do not believe that Mistress Beldam intends to part from here leaving the manor intact. When she reaches the last house of the village and has satisfied herself that everything is beyond rescue, she is bound to scamper down the lane, together with whatever livestock has been panicked by the blaze, to where her husband is now resting from his exertions, with the pillory as dead as mutton at his feet. Then they will continue through the orchard’s apple strew to finish off the manor farm buildings left by Brooker Higgs, the Derby twins and their moonball. If there’s to be a fire started in the dry wood of the downstairs rooms, I could not be in a worse place—in the high turret of a timber house with a wooden ladder, a collapsed staircase and a wide stairway to hurry down before I even reach the flames. Indeed, I wonder if this has been her plan all along, to lure me, through some sorcery beyond my understanding, to this upper space and then to bake me here.

I do not know what makes me pause when I reach the attic rooms. I do know that going down into the lobby should be speedier and less dangerous than coming up. Descents are not as weighty as ascents. I can simply slip and slide and keep my fingers crossed. I’ll reach the safety of the courtyard very quickly. Then I’ll gather up my things and be on my way before the woman catches me. All neighborly and more-than-neighborly feelings I’ve ever had for her are gone. She frightens me. She only frightens me. That woman carries blade and fire. But pause I do. I’m anxious suddenly, alarmed, and not by the prospect of a manor fire. Something else has caught my eye so thinly
that, when I stop to check, I don’t at first know where to look. Then I spot it for a second time. The oblong of dark that first I took to be a wedge of shadow under the great, long travel chest is looking now more like a seeping spill of blood.

He’s lying facedown, covered only with the chest’s loose lining. But I do not need to turn his face to verify his name. I recognize his finer clothes. He’s wearing what he wore the last time I laid eyes on him, hurtling in pursuit of Mistress Beldam at the midnight pillory. Here are his gentlemanly boots, his decorated jerkin, his townsman’s breeches and his plain, unfeathered cap. His fingers and his knuckles are still blue and green with paint. I recognize his wealthy beard and see how waxed and shaped it is, a trowel-shaped wedge of hair. I even think I can see some proof of his enduring smile from the creases on the back of his neck. I can’t believe he would be parted from his smile, even in death. The body is crunched up, of course. Full stretched, it would be longer than the chest. But this is not a body I have ever seen full stretched. This is a body that appears as I’d expect it to, lopsided, stiff and out of line. He’s died exactly as he stands, off-kilter as if he has been struck by lightning. The heavens opened and a tongue of light gave him the body of an old gnarled tree. I have no doubt that this is him, the stumbler, the Chart-Maker, the man who was too oddly brave to turn his back on us.

So far as I can tell from my brief examination of the body before I close the lid on him and tumble downstairs to run along the gallery, more fearful for myself than I have ever been before, his wounds were inflicted by a sword, the same one, I presume, that cut the ropes away at the access to the stairwell. He has been run though with great force and commitment. The blade has entered at the front a dozen times and exited behind his back, piercing his main organs and his chest. The blood has blackened and stiffened in his clothes. I do not know enough about a corpse to tell how long it has been here, or when his
killing took place. It could have been last night, or equally it could have happened on the night of torture when the women named him. What’s probable, given the poor repair of the attic stairs, is that his killing took place in the upper rooms and close enough to the travel chest for the victim to be toppled in before he bled too much. Who should I hold responsible? Apart from the Beldams or the Jordan men? I have to say that for a moment I hold myself responsible. I feel that I have failed the man. I feel that I am failing him again, because I have to leave him here. By rights I ought to carry him to Turd and Turf to join the other corpses of the week, and mark his grave with a proper monument of piled stones and within sight of his beloved longpurples. He liked it there. He liked the blossoms and the light. He liked its solitude. He would have liked to listen to the juking of the birds until the end of time. But I cannot carry him, not on my own, not down those stairs, not with the fire maiden pressing down on us with her revenging flame.

The odd thing is, she does not come. Perhaps her husband has decided that she’s burned enough or he is impatient to depart before the evening and the darkness close in. He knows it’s wise to get away, to pass beyond our parish bounds before they’re stopped by someone coming back or asked for their account of where the oxen were acquired and why their cart is so loaded down with property beyond their station. Perhaps she’s tired of it herself. Her grief and anger have been spent. What is the point of taking down the manor house? What is the point of burning it with Mr. Quill inside to haunt its attics and its roofs? Maybe she has no idea that he is there, and she’s not the murderer. Whatever is the truth of it, it’s clear that I will never know. I step out of the courtyard with my bags, and there I glimpse the back of them and their great haul of plunder disappearing down the lane. The husband leads the oxen from the front, and she sits riding
on the cart, her skirts pulled up to her thighs, the short sword resting on her knees and her bare legs swinging over the back. Her shoulders are draped in velvet, naturally. She’s getting even smaller now as they retreat behind the hedges and the walls, as they retreat into another world.

I’ll follow those Beldams, of course, but now only in dreams and without the emboldening of fairy caps or ale. I see myself trailing them by fifty paces, say, a neighbor in their wake, and free to close the gap only when she calls out to me and says that I am welcome to travel at their sides, that it is safe to bridge the space between us, that she does not wish me any harm. We can be reconciled. But I don’t want to dream of them just yet. I want to watch the manor burn. What starts with fire will end with ash; it has to end with ash if I am to give Mr. Quill an honorable cremation rather than abandon him in the chest for woodworms, rats and attic birds to feed upon. Is this at last the courage that I sought this morning and last night and which I intended, at the very least (and at the very worst), to invest in redeeming mischief of some kind? Will this hotheaded deed make it too unsafe for me to stay on here as Master Jordan’s trusted winter man? Will this satisfy my seven witnesses? Will I be satisfied? Apart from wanting that one day behind the plow, I genuinely have not had a plan till now, but I have come to understand that I should finish what the Beldams have begun. I have a sudden, dutiful desire to set some further timbers cracking in the heat and to watch the ginger cats of flame, which have already put an end to all the other village homes, licking at the milky air of the manor house, licking through the many rooms and treading lightly up the several flights of stairs. I want to see the turret flaring like a beacon with flames higher than the pinnacle of any steeple.

It isn’t hard to coax some flame back into the ashes of the parlor
fire and light a candle that I can carry from the hearth to some deeper place. I need kindling but there’s plenty at hand. The parlor floor is strewn with the documents spilling from my master’s overturned coffer, his titles, muniments and deeds. They are as dry and brittle as barley husk. I’ll only have to touch them with this candle flame and they will leap with fire.

17

O I HAVE REACHED OUR VILLAGE BOUNDS
. On this main lane, our outer limits are marked on one side by a merestone, about waist high and vivid with its orange overcoat of lichen. It is dressed for traveling. I’ve not been this close to the edge for several years. It has always seemed too precarious a place; on our side of the stone there can be no trespassing, as Master Kent has told us many times: “If we stay within our bounds, there are no bounds to stay us.” One further step beyond, however, and everything you have is left behind. You are disowned.

I snap off a stalk of grass from our side of the limits, tasting our own fodder with an ox’s mouth. I grasp the merestone in both hands and bump my head against it, beating in the bounds just as we have beaten the bounds into every village child as soon as they were big enough to stray. I am that boy who needs reminding where he does and does not fit. I bump the stone three times, just hard enough to break the skin and lay the groundings of a bruise, just hard enough to make me admit to pain.

Now there’s nothing to detain me here or to encumber my escape.
I have my four mementos of these seven days, all marked in skin or made from skin. There is the forehead I’ve just bloodied on the stone; there is the shiny pink scorch mark in the middle of my palm, still slightly stiff; there is the kick wound on my brow and cheek, faintly sore but it will mend, and disappear; and, finally, tied in a scroll with hogging string, the piece of calfskin vellum I crafted myself in the manor’s scullery and which I almost used as kindling along with Mr. Quill’s two preparatory charts. I burned them both: the one that’s decorated with our commons and our fields and lanes, the fabric of our village lives marked down in colors and in lines; and the other, busy one, proposing future pastures. I burned them with the man that painted them. But I have kept the flap of calf. My vellum is an unmarked sheet. It could be anywhere.

I’m resting for a moment with my hip against the stone, and facing inward toward the village of my choice for what I know will be the final time. It’s silent there. I cannot hear the clacking of a single tool. Or any animals. It’s simply quiet and undisturbed, attending to itself, an Eden with no Adam and no Eve. My winter wheat is swelling, unobserved. It won’t be many days before that single furrow where the barley grew this year will imp with greenery. Earth and seeds are soundless laborers. Even the manor house has ceased its cracking, though its pall of smoke is still stretching out across our blackened roofs and browning canopies, with Mr. Quill among its residues. There is a story I can tell, if ever I am caught by any of the Jordans of this world and asked to give an account of why I failed to save the manor house. The orphaned witch caressed its timbers with her fiery breath. That Mistress Beldam—not content to have spent her venom on the doves and Willowjack, not yet satisfied by Philip Earle’s thin blood or the damage to the groom’s face that she encouraged with her sorcery, not sated by the fires in all our homes—was determined to destroy the Kent and Jordan property as well. That was the meanest
act of all. Watch out for her. She has a cart, I’ll say. She has the blackest eyes and hair. She’s bearing sin and mischief to the corners of the earth. I will not say she’s also bearing me away.

It’s time. I have to finish my farewells—though actually there’s not much of a view. From here, the prospects are hemmed in and limited: a lane, some stone-built walls, a well-attended hedge. Even the brambles and the traveler’s joy have been cut back by some attentive hand, some sickled villager who must by now be far away, and safe, and bewildered. Apart from the lichen cladding on the stone, the only color comes from scarlet haws, deep in the pruned-backed thorns.

If anything, the views ahead, beyond our bounds, are more rewarding to the eye. They are more savage, certainly. And more formless and more void. The hedges there have not been cut and trimmed for many years, if ever. They spread across the lane with their great arms as if to send all travelers back, or at best to make their passage forward troublesome. I can see where the Beldams’ cart has churned its muddy wheel ruts in the track and where its loaded sides have snapped back twigs on a pair of hazel trees, heavy with some timely nuts. The lane is telling me I should not fear the futures that it holds. I’ll not go hungry anyway. Once I tire of hazels, I can blacken my tongue with bramble berries and rouge my lips with elders and with sloes. I can fill my mouth with fruits and nuts at every step I take. The countryside will provide its seeded surplus of infinity for long enough for me to find another place where I can rest.

An unwary, solitary mouse, intent on foraging in daylight, against its custom, and too shortsighted either to spot or to be alarmed by me, pokes its tender head into the lane. I watch its fussy searching for a few moments before I let it know I’m close; I kick a loose curl of earth against its hedge. Take care. The mouse freezes for an instant, then scurries over rock and moss to disappear into its crevice home. If it is wise, it will stay there until tonight. I am left to gather up my bags
of modest assets and removables, my sturdy stick, my roll of unmarked vellum chart, my silver and my bulky burdens of remorse and memory. This is my heavy labor now. I have to leave behind these common fields. I have to take this first step out of bounds. I have to carry on alone until I reach wherever is awaiting me, until I gain wherever is awaiting us.