Harvest A Novel (11 page)

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.

I could as well make out a case that lays the blame again at the feet, well, at the hands, of Brooker Higgs and the Derby twins, all three of whom are known for their great fists. Perhaps word has already leaked out—from outraged Mr. Quill, or possibly the cousin’s sidemen—that the village as we know it and our employments are to be surrendered to the yellow teeth of three thousand sheep. We’ll be outnumbered
fifty to one—and soon. Our trio of bachelors would once more have cause for anger and indignation, though no more cooing doves to vent their outrage on. And no bleaters yet. They might have listened to the lovemaking last night and grown restless, naturally, wanting trills and carols of their own. They might have eaten the remaining fairy caps from the visit to the woods on what seems a thousand evenings ago. And only then they would have found the wicked pluck to hammer Willowjack, a horse that everybody loved and so the creature most deserving of their blows. But I have seen how Brooker and the twins have slunk around like chastened dogs these past few days, fearful that their dove-baiting will catch them out. The roasting of the birds was bad enough, though it was warranted to some degree. But the newcomers were punished unjustly because of our men’s deceit and silence, and now the smaller one is dead, strangled at the pillory. No, there’s not a mushroom strong enough to make these young men kill the master’s horse. They’re frightened of the shadows now. In any other place but here, they would be frightened for their lives.

Another possibility: I blush even to name my neighbor, dear John Carr. He is a placid man, greatly loved by his fellows and close to animals. John Carr can stop a drove of running cattle in their tracks, even ones made frisky by the company of bulls or young. I’ve seen him root a maddened dog to the ground with just a fingertip: one firm touch on the nose to stop the barking, and another to set the tail wagging. It’s a gift, and one that he is called upon to use whenever we’ve an animal to butcher. It was John who dispatched the little calf we feasted on the other night at Master Kent’s expense. Its skin is still soaking in brine under the rafters of the barn, though today it is among my challenges to lift it out before it’s entirely fit and attempt to fashion some serviceable vellum for Mr. Quill’s shape-shifting chart. Yes, John Carr is the village slaughterman and more than anyone I know possesses all the skills and speed it took to execute Willowjack with the calm
efficiency Mistress Rogers describes. But neighbor Carr has small and stubby hands, a pair of how-to hands, worn short with work. And he is kind.

Anne Rogers will not be the only one to count our blacksmith, Abel Saxton, as a suspect, that’s for sure. One of his hands is big and strong enough to hold a hoof completely still while he’s shodding it with the other. But I discount that idea straight away, as Abel Saxton has been too intimately involved with Willowjack—her welfare and her tack, her clobber and her shoes—to wish her dead under any circumstance. The master rewards him well for his leatherwork and smithery. The man’s a fool, but not the kind of fool to spit in his own hat.

I’m mystified, to tell the truth. It does not take me long, once Mistress Rogers has run off to spread the gossip of where “old Walter Thirsk” has labored overnight “again,” to mutter a rosary of names between my lips—the twenty or so men in the neighborhood tall enough to level with a horse’s ear—but still not find a likely candidate.

“It will’ve been the short one did it,” offers Kitty Gosse as she prepares our porridge for the day. I have forgotten how hare-brained and vexing she can be.

“You mean the little man that died? Yes, that does seem likely, doesn’t it?”

“Who else? If you’ve been throttled in the pillory for burning doves, and half devoured by pigs, murdering a horse is just the sort of mischief you’d enjoy,” she says with certainty. “There’s motive, isn’t there?”