Jim Crace - Harvest

“King Edmund the Second!” I suggest.

“Yes, let the man be crowned as that.”

Can I identify the barley field, Mr. Quill wants to know. I look again, hoping for some clues, from the charcoal-dark lines, perhaps, or from where the paint has crusted heaviest, or where it’s thinned and tonsured on the bubbles of the paper. It is not until he turns his painting through two quarters that I think I recognize the twists and fall of the field, the low redundant parts where barley grows on hostile soil, the sweeping upper wings where cropping is the best, the darker shading of the baulks, the snaking signature of what must be our snaking stream.

“Exactly so,” says Mr. Quill, when I indicate my answer with a finger, lifting a smudge of paint as I do so. “And here I’ve plaited in your boundary line.”

Now I can see the boggy path and Turd and Turf, not yet identified as the Blossom Marsh. There’s our top end. And there’s our deep and tall and goodly wood. Our fortress walls of thorn and scrub. Our unbuilt church. Our commons and our cottages. Our onetime safe and kindly realm.

I look again but squintingly, and not at the particulars. I’ve never before had a true sense of how our estate is shaped, how stars might shine on us, or what those hawks and kestrels see. It has been too many years for memory since I last observed our land from any greater distance than our clover hill — that first day, in fact, twelve years ago, when I arrived with Master Kent and saw, far off, from the pale green of the higher downs, the true green bowl — no, valley ’s not the word — of this isolated place nesting, hidden, in those blank spaces between far rivers, nameless and beyond. But otherwise I’ve put no shape to it. Now I know the village is a profile of a brawny-headed man — a bust, in fact. His neck and shoulders are our pasturelands. Our cattle and our goats are feeding there. The four great fields make up his face. His ear — our pond — is small enough to be a child’s. He almost has a nose, where I suppose that little clovered hillock is. The forests are his hair.

It is an odd experience, unnerving in its way, to look down on our woods, our commons and our fields at once, to see them side by side, or separated only by the thickness of my thumb, when I have never seen them on the ground with such adjacency. Here the sap-green-painted fallow is seemingly attached by the madly dark blue stitching of a ridgetop copse to the gray-cum-yellow stubble of our barley field. They look like neighbors, exchanging glances through the trees. I’ve walked that thickness-of-my-thumb a thousand times. It’s easy going till you reach the ridge. The fallow field has a subtle slope, so it drains well but keeps its soil. There’s seldom any mud. But there are pebble-stones to set your feet against. You have to take the cow track at the ridge and go downhill a little with the copse thickening on your right until you find another rise, and there an open gap which lets you pass along a lane of thorns into the field where now, this afternoon, you’ll find our cattle gleaning grain. This is the point, at the brimming of the trees, where neither field can be seen. You’re too closed in. Indeed,there’s nowhere on the walk — which takes a little while and some exertion — where both the fallow and the barley field can be looked upon at once. You’d have to climb a tree for that. Or be a bird.

So Mr. Quill’s true account of here and now is not as honest as he hopes. He’s colored and he’s flattened us. No shadows and no shade. We are too mauve and blue; he’s planted longpurples everywhere. There are no climbs or slopes. The land is effortless: a lie. He hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the seasons or the nights must last. No man has ever seen this view. But it is beautiful, nevertheless. And so, come to that, although it’s hard to acknowledge it, is Mr. Quill’s map of the sheep fields that are looming over us. This chart is even busier with color, and more patterned to the eye. Its patchwork is much tidier. The fields are smaller, broken up and edged. The dark of the wood, with its clustered symbols showing trees, has almost disappeared. I cannot find an eye or ear. The brawny-headed man has lost his face.

“What do you make of these?” asks Mr. Quill. I take his question as a test. I do not want to say his paintings aren’t as honest as he thinks. But it isn’t hard for me to praise them fulsomely for what they are as pretty things, a kind of vision of the world — our little world, in fact — that I have never seen before and which has left me moved and oddly breathless. With his help these colored papers, unmarked as yet with any names or guides, make sense to me at last. They complicate to simplify. I have translated them. I can tell you where we are on them. I could stub my finger on the spot where I am standing now. But still I’m left to wonder where we’ll be on them in days and years to come. And so my breathlessness. There’s something in these shapes and lines, in these casual, undirected blues and greens, that, for all their liveliness, seems desolate.

ITTLE LIZZIE CARR AND HER GREEN SASH are in Master Jordan’s custody tonight, as is (or so the rumor has it for the moment — Mr. Quill and I have yet to see the living evidence) the widow Gosse, my Kitty Gosse, together with Anne Rogers, her best friend. We need to organize ourselves, of course. This is the moment when our wildest hotheads should raise their sickles and their sticks. But John Carr thinks the hottest heads have already packed their bags and gone. Certainly, Brooker Higgs has not been seen since dusk. And the Derby twins were spotted heading off toward our top end and the setting sun, bundles roped across their backs and walking faster than they’ve ever walked before; their mother looks as gray and blank as pewter, and only shakes her head when questioned. Three of our sons are vagabonds, untethered strays, who clearly feel it’s safer to be anywhere but here. That has never happened to our sons before.

Whose version of events should I believe? The loudest voices that I overhear are decided — as am I, reluctantly — that the shaven, black-haired woman is behind it all. A dozen different stories hold Mistress Beldam responsible for all the disarrangement of their cottages — and then for every odor that’s not pleasing, for every jug of curdled milk, for every darkening of cloud. And she will take the blame, I know, for driving sheep into our fields. Everything’s uncertain and unhinged because of her. She’s brought a curse onto our land, she’s blighted us. My neighbors say she’ll not be satisfied until we’re all dragged off to rot away with Willowjack. When the threshing barn was inspected at midday, they told the “new gentleman’s” serving men as much, and that the bloody velvet shawl claimed by Master Kent to be his wife’s was not his wife’s at all but the property of this fierce, alluring woman. But no one listens to them anymore, they now complain. No one’s been hunting for “the sorceress” despite their warnings. Those men are picking only on the innocent, on local women and a girl.

What’s certain, according to these flapping tongues, is that while I was on my knees this afternoon making pauper’s vellum from the calf, Lizzie Carr, still very much the Gleaning Queen in her green cloth and bored with sorting barley, slipped out of the threshing barn, hoping to renew the yellow blossoms she’d been wearing since her crowning. She was bound to be noticed by Edmund Jordan’s men. And they were bound to challenge her. This girl, bedecked beyond her station in a valuable cloth and mustardy with flowers, like a fairy child, was far too young and tame to fit the description of the savage woman they’d only recently been informed about by the less wary of my neighbors and whom the sidemen were now very keen to meet. But she was baffling. And her clothing was suspicious. The men supposed that all expensive cloth — Lizzie Carr’s green sash, that woman’s bloody velvet shawl — must provide some necessary clue in their pursuit of Willowjack’s killer. The meaning of those shawls and sashes, not to mention Master Jordan’s too easygoing cousin’s lies, would reveal itself in time no doubt, and after thorough questioning, beginning with this mystifying child.