Harvest A Novel (3 page)

But what are documents and deeds when there are harvests to be gathered in? Only toughened hands can do that job. And Master Kent, for all his parchmenting, would be the poorest man if all he had to work his property were his own two hands and no others. He’d be blistered by midday, and famished ever after. What landowner has ever made his palms rough on a scythe or plow? Ours are the deeds that make the difference. No, our ancient understanding is that, though we are only the oxen to his halter, it is allowed for us to be possessive of this ground and the common rights that are attached to it despite our lack of muniments. And it is reasonable, I think, to take offense at a ruling—made in a distant place—which gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it—and to see these vagrants off, beyond our cherished boundaries. It’s true, of course, that some of us arrived this way ourselves, and not so long ago. I count myself among those aliens. But times have changed. Our numbers have decreased in the years since I arrived as my master’s manservant. Stomachs have fallen short of acres. We’ve lost good friends but not had much success with breeding their inheritors or raising sturdy offspring. We’re growing old and faltering. Harvests have been niggardly, of late. There’re days in winter when our cattle dine and we do not. Why should we share with strangers?

Anyway, what can you tell about a newcomer from smoke, except that he or she is wanting? Or demanding? We’ve heard from the occasional peddler, tinker or walk-through carpenter—who’ve hoped, and failed, to make a living in our midst—how there are cattle thieves beyond the woods, how travelers are stopped and robbed, how vagabonds and vagrant families descend upon a settlement to plunder it,
like rooks and crows, and then move on. We have to ask ourselves, why have these people arrived just as the harvest is brought in. Is this another act of God? Bad luck, in other words, and not a soul to blame? A saint might think it so. A saint might want to welcome them and shake them by the hands. But we, more timorous than saints, might prefer to keep our handshakes to ourselves. Besides, to touch a stranger’s flesh is dangerous. Do not embrace a soul until you know its family name, we say. We have been fortunate this year. No deaths from plague and only one appalling death from sweating fits so far. But contagion is known to be a crafty passenger, a stowaway. I can imagine hidden sores and rashes on the backs and buttocks of our visitors. And I can see why blaming them for what the twins and Brooker Higgs have done might be a blessing in disguise. No, I was glad to be at home this morning and not among my neighbors, even though it meant I missed the first sighting of this creature who has so charred us with her fire.

I sat outside the cottage with my injured hand resting open on my knee, its palm turned up, and let the fresh air salve the wound. It was a rare event to have the row of dwellings to myself or, that’s to say, to share them only with our poultry and our pigs. The quiet was curative, but it was also chilling in a way to survey, from the oaken bench I built myself from timber that I felled myself, the makeshift byres that once were family cottages. There was the creeper-throttled derelict next door to the Carrs’ home, which when I first arrived was never free of voices; and then the unkept garden at widow Gosse’s place, where her husband used to stand and boast his colworts and his radishes, his double-marigolds and thyme; and, after that, set away with its own path, the rubble of the tenement where Cecily, my wife, was raised. No, we have tenancy to spare, and could easily provide some newcomers a place to live, if the village was only minded to be less suspicious of anyone who was not born with local soil under their fingernails.
Some extra working hands might be of value in the coming days, especially since my own left hand will be of little use and we are so hard-pressed for younger men and women. I rapped my good hand on the bench until my knuckles hurt. I did not deserve to feel relaxed.

These are the moments when I most miss greater places—the market towns, the liberties of youth, the choices that I had and left behind. My land-born neighbors now are ditched and fenced against the outside world. They are too rooted in their soil, too planched and thicketed, to be at ease with newcomers. They are not used to hospitality and do not want to be. There’s not a village, sea to sea, that receives fewer strangers. In all the years since my and Master Kent’s arrival not one other new soul has settled here for long, or hoped to. Who, after looking at this place and with no secret interest or association, would choose to make a home among these frowning residents? But I am now part of it and part of them. I have become a frowner, too, and I have learned to make do with the kindom of close relatives, where anyone who is not blood is married to someone else who is. One family’s daughter is another’s niece, another’s aunt, and yet another’s daughter-in-law. And if you’re not a Saxton or a Derby or a Higgs yourself, you have a score of relatives who are. We live in a rookery. A cousinry, let’s say. And just like rooks we have begun to sound and look the same. So many grumps, so many corn-haired blonds, so many wavy, oval beards, so many beryl eyes, so many thickset arms and legs, that no one needs to mention them, or even notice them, unless reminded by an out-of-pattern visitor like me. But even I have found myself with thickset arms and legs, though I arrived as thin and gawky as our Mr. Quill.

The latest dwelling on our lands is by all reports a poor affair. Our hurried newcomers have only dragged some fallen timber from the wood and woven out of it, uncut, a square of fences better suited to restrict a pair of pigs than to house a family. These walls are fit for
men who prefer to crawl rather than stand. They’re pargeted with earth and leaves, and roofed with the kind of sacking that can stop neither the light nor the rain. Is this den enough to confer squatting rights? No one is sure. Though if it is, foxes, badgers, even moles could lay claim to their common rights and help themselves to fowl and fruit and firewood from our land. But then it is not expected that these newcomers, these funguses that seek to feed on us, these dove-slaughterers, will choose to stay among us for a second night once they’ve discovered how thin—and dangerous—our welcome is. They’ll travel on. We’ll walk them to our boundaries and set them on the way, glad to be of help.

The open hearth that sent up such a green-black plume at dawn was dead by the time my neighbors and Master Kent arrived at the shadowed clearing near The Bottom, where our land is cliffed by woods. Even Mr. Quill had lurched along behind them, his parchment book in hand, as ever with such gentlemen, making notes and marking shapes and hoping not to be excluded from the dramas of the day. Though the smoke had run its course and some tidy housekeeper had already kicked away the remaining ashes and twigs, the confirmation that my neighbors were expecting—and Brooker and the twins were praying for—was on the ground for all to see. Bird bones, gnawed clean. Christopher Derby, the elder of the twins and usually the quieter, pointed at the remains with all the authority his index finger could muster and said, “Our dear guests’ meal. One of the master’s birds.” Last night the newcomers had evidently gnawed on dove, as if they were “great lords at banqueting,” though by the looks of it, according to my neighbor John Carr, who took the trouble to push his inspecting toe through the scraps and leftovers, this dove had dark feathers, short bones and a yellow beak. None of my other neighbors wished to be dissuaded, though. It was easier to believe that by a further cunning the arsonists had disguised their plunder as a blackbird.

There was no sign of any living bones about the den, and when its overnight inhabitants were summoned with a shout and beating implements to give an account of themselves, no one appeared. Brooker Higgs was the first to raise his stick and strike the dwelling on its roof, expecting, with a single blow, to bring it to the ground and earn himself some cheap applause. His stick produced an unexpected clonk as dull and firm as a bag of chaff, but the roof, after seeming to adjust itself, fell in. What thickset man cannot bring down a length of sacking? But the hurried timber walls were stouter than they looked.

Other men stepped forward with heavier tools and would have finished the task had not, before the second blow, a pair of strangers—a young mop-headed youth with a feathery, novice beard and a shorter, older man, the father, probably—stepped out of the trees with longbows raised and drawn to the ear. In common with every other man about these parts, they clearly knew how to loose an arrow if called upon. They seemed baffled rather than belligerent. They looked, in other words, more innocent than any of us would have liked. Their squinted eyes and furrowed foreheads said, “What kind of villainy is this that takes a cudgel to a poor man’s home?”

The twins and Brooker Higgs no longer wished to be numbered among the front rank of their more aggressive neighbors, and not only because the strangers’ arrows seemed to be pointing at Brooker’s chest. He was the only one who’d done any damage yet and so was the most deserving of some punishment. He heeled his way into the crowd until his chest was not the first in line, and then—no fool—he let himself drop shorter. The women called their children to their sides and also backed away. The widow Gosse, I’m told, fainted and fell into some nettles. The other, more stalwart men made narrow with themselves, turning their shoulders to the arrowheads and tucking their elbows into their waists, protecting their soft organs.

Master Kent dismounted from Willowjack and stood behind her.
He was not being cowardly but sensible. The men spread out, widening the strangers’ target and already calculating in their heads that the odds were on their side, that twenty sturdy men standing on their own God-given land with sticks and even one or two keen sickles were more than a match for two newcomers and a pair of arrows. As soon as those two arrows were released, no matter what damage they might do, the game was over and the beating could begin. As I’ve said, we’re not a hurtful people. We are, though, fearful, proud and dutiful. We do what must be done. But at this moment, so I’m told, the mood was murderous. Two poacher-arsonists were facing us with bows. We’d never known such disrespect and brazen sacrilege. The day had darkened suddenly.

Mr. Quill, for such a malformed man, showed the greatest bravery. Or was it simply courtesy? He clumsied forward wearing that ready, foolish smile which had kept us company in yesterday’s field. For a moment it was thought he meant to strike the den himself and earn the recompense of being augered through the heart by a hardened poplar arrow shaft. Indeed, one of the strangers turned his bow on Mr. Quill, secured his hold on the fletchings and string, and said in an accent no one there had heard before, “Step well away.” But the master’s chart-maker did not step well away. He had other plans. What those plans were, my neighbors never discovered. Four or five of them took advantage of what they would later describe to me as Mr. Quill’s shrewd diversion. While he distracted them with his determined smile, holding out his palms to show they had nothing to be fearful of, our bolder men edged closer to the newcomers. Two more steps and it would be done. If Mr. Quill was sacrificed in their attempt, then that might be a price they could afford. He was no cottager. They hadn’t grown used to him. No matter that his scratchings would be incomplete. I will not say they may have thought his death convenient.

This was the moment that the woman showed her face. No witnesses
are in any hurry to blot out the vision of her rising from the den. She had been hidden and confined below the sacking roof all along, I’m told excitedly by almost everyone who saw it. She is the burning topic for this evening. While her men—no one knows yet what kinship there might be between the three of them—were concealed among the trees, she was evidently sitting up inside her crude dwelling and peering out between the branches and the earthy daub at what I have to call a mob. She will have wondered at the anger they brought with them, their fearsome staves and sticks, the glinting silver of their sickle blades. She will have seen a stocky young man with the stone-green eyes of a cottage cat step forward and bring his clonking stick down on her roof—and on her skull. The face that showed itself was running wet with blood, and her black hair was further darkened with a wound.

The whole encounter was transformed by blood, I’m told. What was a routine stand-off between two sets of men, two sets of
armed
men, both ready to defend themselves incautiously, had in a trice become an occasion of shame. The woman’s wound was too red and fresh not to take notice of. Indeed, the blood was marking her cheeks, like tears. At once the village women began to call out for restraint. Their men did not attempt those two more steps. They let their weapons fall away into the undergrowth or hang loosely from their hands. Again it was Mr. Quill who didn’t do what he was told. Despite the closeness of the bow, he moved forward awkwardly, pulled aside the topmost branches of their den, put out his hand and helped the bloody woman step into the light.

What were they to make of her? She was not beautiful, not on first encounter anyhow. She had what we might call (behind her back) a weasel face, wide-cheeked, thin-lipped, a short receding chin, a button nose, and eyes and hair as shiny, dark and dangerous as belladonna berries. What caught our women’s eyes at once was the velvet shawl
she wore round her shoulders, an expensive lordly weave in heavy Turkish mauve and silver thread. Their instinct was to call out, Mind your cloth. Her blood was bulbing on her little chin and might soon drop to spoil the velvet. Their second thought declared, She’s dressed beyond her station. A woman of her kind could not possess a shawl such as that without first stealing it. Even Lucy Kent, the master’s wife, had never owned a shawl such as that. Indeed, a shawl such as that, so far as anybody could remember, had never crossed the village boundaries before. It’s not surprising, then, that so many of our wives and daughters widened their eyes in envy, hoped to feel the weight of it between their fingers, and wondered what their chances were of wearing it themselves.