Jim Crace - Harvest

I have forgotten how small she is, and how silent is her brightness. My memory has plumpened her and toughened her. But without the heavy wrapping of her shawl she’s even more birdlike than she appeared on that night in the barn. Now her shoulders seem especially narrow, particularly given the fullness of her hips. Could such shoulders really find the strength to drive a prong of metal through a horse’s skull? She has not seen us, evidently, because she walks between us and her husband’s back, not carelessly but not on tiptoe either. She’s confident. Perhaps she knows that everyone has gone to shake their fists — politely — at the manor house. Her hair, so far as I can tell from her gray silhouette, is no longer grinning with the exposed white of her scalp. It’s slightly darker now — a few days of defiant growth — and velvety. At least, I think it’s velvety. At least, I think of touching it and finding out. I think I’d like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she’s real and not a specter summoned up by loneliness.

She’s carrying a piece of sacking, heavy with food, in one hand, and a dark, stoppered bottle of cordial in the other. I recognize that stoppered bottle: William Kip has got a shelf of them — pippin juice or burdock or rosewater, mostly — his summer bottled for winter. I think he’ll find that one is missing now, unless she plans on taking back an empty. It seems that Mistress Beldam has been foraging but not, as I expected, in the woods. Again Mr. Quill puts a finger on my hand. He means we should stay patient and not be tempted to show ourselves to her with our warnings for her safety until her husband has been greeted, comforted and fed. Then we will reveal ourselves. We will reveal ourselves to be her friends.

It’s hard for me to watch her kissing him but it’s not an ache that lasts long. She’s hardly lifted the bottle to his mouth when the hubbub of my neighbors now returning from the manor house along the apple-strewn lane reaches us. We look in that direction, all four at once, like cattle in one herd, and when we turn our heads again, she’s gone. Mr. Quill darts forward, throws the stolen bottle which she’s abandoned at her husband’s feet into the sore-hocks, and hurries off with his strange gait, right shoulder first, in Mistress Beldam’s midnight steps.

HAVE PERSUADED NEIGHBOR CARR to talk today. He’d rather not. But I have him cornered at his door. He’s too embarrassed and too profoundly kind to rebuff me entirely. Still, he is not comfortable in my company and will not join me on the outside bench where it is cool and shaded. For once, against our custom, he prefers to duck into my stuffy, cluttered home and find a place out of the door light where he can’t be spotted from the lane. I touch his elbow as he squeezes by, but there is no response. I think he even pulls away. When he feels secure enough to speak, I can hardly hear his voice. He won’t be overheard by other cottagers. I suspect he also would prefer not to be heard by me. His story is “a spiky one,” he says. No one has yet laid eyes on either of the captive women or on Lizzie Carr, his niece. Indeed, the treatment of the crowd of supplicants at the manor house last night was “not considerate.” He’s being cautious with his words. He’s testing my allegiances. We know each other well enough to judge such things from how we sit and fidget, how we breathe.

“John Carr,” I say to him. “Let’s put an end to this.” I reach out for his knee and rather than grasping it as I might have done a day ago, I drop my closed fist on it, two gentle almost weightless beats, the softest of rebukes.

“I know,” he says. And that’s enough. He straightens up, takes steady breaths, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, so that his face is looking into mine. “Lord help you, Walt, if you’re deceiving us.”

“Lord help you, John, if you believe I would.” I’m glad he cannot see my flushing face in this half-light.

He settles back, deciding what to do. He’s caught between a nettle and a thorn. “And so …?” he says. He’s waiting for a prompt.

“And so, how was it ‘not considerate’?”

“Here’s how. Those serving fellows kept us waiting at the porch like dogs and horses,” he says, a mite less guarded than before. Master Kent was “not available,” it seems: “He’s always been available. I’ve never known him not available.” John Carr shakes his straw-gray head, warming — heating — to his tale. “And as for this new gentleman? He is a Jordan, so we’re told. And some devilry has given him our land.”

I cannot tell if I’m included in the our .

This latest Master Jordan was also “not available” last night, John tells me. The villagers could smile their smiles and doff their caps until the end of time, but still he would not meet them at the door. At last, his steward, Baynham, showed his face. “Matters are in hand,” he told the villagers, so gravely it was worrying. His only answer to their questions was a shrug. It was as if their worries were of no account. “I hear that there is witchery about,” the steward offered finally.

“What witchery? No one has ever thought there’s witchery,” I say to John. I overheard the mention of a “sorceress” just yesterday, but that’s less burdensome a word. We can be tempted by a sorceress, beguiled by her even — but witches? No, their crafts are uglier and heavier. I am concerned and genuinely surprised by John’s report. A formal accusation such as that brings turmoil every time. The very mention of it is bad luck. It is a charge we tell our children not to make, not even as a tease. Say “witch,” we warn them, and Master Havoc will come with Lady Pandemonium to keep their crone bad company. “There’s never any witchery,” I repeat.

“That’s what we told the man,” says John Carr. “But he replied that he knew better. They already had three of our she-devils in custody. He said we’d better go away and start collecting faggots for their fire. That’s when our tempers flew apart …” He stops. I hear his humiliated sigh. Now he’s the one that’s flushing and ashamed. Again, he’s forward, elbows on his knees. “Or should I say that’s when our tongues got loose. We did ourselves no favors, Walt. We didn’t do you any favors either. Sad to have to tell you that, but it is best you know. We had to take care of our own.”

It’s no surprise. I’m not included in “our own.”

As far as I can tell from John Carr’s brief, discomfited account of what then took place last evening at the manor house’s porch, Mr. Quill and I are said to be part of some conspiracy. For reasons of our own that are too dark for telling, we have teamed up with the three dove-burners who arrived so recently and so coincidentally at the same time as the Chart-Maker. My neighbors will not call him Mr. Quill again, it seems. That name does not sound devious enough or tie in with the excessive colors of their newly woven tale. If that fine shawl belonged to his departed wife, as Master Kent has claimed and they are now no longer determined to doubt, who was better placed to steal it from the manor house and wrap it round that woman’s shoulders than the master’s guest, the Chart-Maker? It was the Chart-Maker who offered his hand to the woman on the morning of the fire when her den was being leveled to the ground; it was the Chart-Maker who made her welcome at the dance; it was the Chart-Maker who was discovered only yesterday evening at the pillory with his arm round the younger vagabond’s shoulder. They evidently were old friends. Perhaps they were related in some way. Blood brothers, probably.