Jim Crace - Harvest

Master Kent nods encouragement. He will explain when we’re alone, he seems to mean.

“You have my word.” I hate myself for saying so.

“Then start your day in my employ by preparing our five horses for the journey. My groom has not the heart or face for it. He’s keeping to his bed. I thank him for that. He is a fiercely ugly man today.” Master Jordan stands at the table, offers me his hand. I cannot help but reach across and shake it briefly. My finger joints clack against his rings. His palms are cool and vellum-soft and smooth.

Master Kent comes with me to the orchard, where, carelessly, since the groom’s disablement, the horses have been left untethered overnight. We could be mistaken for ranking equals as we walk at each other’s shoulders down the lane, two graying men of more than middle years, no trace of finery, bulked up and burnished by our living on the land.

“I thank you, Walt,” he says, taking my hand. We are old friends again. “I cannot say how glad I was to see your face today. Despite your bruises. I feared you would have fled like everybody else. I’d not have blamed you if you had. I’ve been tempted to take flight myself. I’ve even thought to take a light to it, my home, and finish off what was begun in my dovecote and my lofts. Rather than be witness to …” He does not want to list the changes that will come. “These are sad and hasty times. In what … five days, six days? … the village has been … lost to me. It has been lost to all of us.”

Nevertheless Master Kent has managed, he reports, to salvage at least some advantage from the exodus. As soon as his cousin learned the village was cleared out, dispersed and chivvied by alarm, as Master Jordan always must have intended, his interest in the captives and in any talk of sorcery waned quite suddenly. A triumphant stillness flooded through the manor house. Any mention of Mr. Earle, my Mr. Quill, was rewarded only with a yawn. Mistress Beldam didn’t matter anymore. Alchemy and sorcery were trifling affairs compared to the Land of Progress he proposed.

“And so I risked an intercession on behalf of little Lizzie and the women,” says Master Kent. “If my cousin counted their undoubted sins — their foolishness, let’s say — a minor matter, surely he could end their punishments. It would be kind and wise of him, and honorable, of course — the man loves honor almost as much as he worships wool — to end their punishments.”

“You do not mean that I should end their suffering at once?” the cousin teased. “Is it your plea that I must let them meet their Maker straight away? Can I use faggots from your log pile for their fire?”

“I propose you let them meet their Maker in their own good time, and for the moment let them walk afar, untethered.”

“Walk afar as sorcerers and sinners?” Master Jordan was amused by his older cousin’s unproductive tenderness.

“No, only walk afar as country folk who have been sundered from their families, and will do nothing worse than follow them, and never trouble you again. Nor trouble me … my conscience, that’s to say.”

“We would not want your conscience to be bruised or even tested, cousin Charles.”

And that is what Edmund Jordan has consented to — although he clearly wants to number me among the many forfeits Master Kent has to pay. If I agree to stay behind and watch over his land until the sheep have taken charge and tainted our earth with their yellow splashes, then he’ll agree to “untether the witches.” “But they’ll not step free on the estate of Edmund Jordan the Younger,” he says. His lands are closed forever to Rogerses, Gosses and Carrs. “Their greatest sorcery has been to make the clock stand still. Their mischief is to shade my path. I’ll not pardon them for that.” So the girl and the two women will be escorted off in custody and released only the moment they reach the marketplace, three days away. Master Kent will keep them company to make sure his cousin honors his word. “It is my wish to witness it,” he says. “To see that widow, daughter, wife walk freely in the free streets of a town. But, for myself, I cannot think that I will ever come back to this place.”

Now he has me in his arms, and we are almost toppling onto the apple-strewn ground beneath the horses hoofs. Any hawk looking down on the orchard’s cloistered square, hoping for the titbit of a beetle or a mouse, would see a patterned canopy of trees, line on line, the orchard’s melancholy solitude, the jewelry of leaves. It would see the backs of horses, the russet, apple-dotted grass, the saltire of two crossing paths worn smooth by centuries of feet, and two gray heads, swirling in a lover’s dance, like blown seed husks caught up in an impish and exacting wind and with no telling when or where they’ll come to ground again.

T IS MIDDAY ALREADY AND I AM WAITING with the horses in the courtyard’s remaining rectangle of shade. The manor’s outline is straight-edged and motionless. Its sharpness has unsettled them. They resisted their saddles this morning, and are still peevish and resentful. Being in the sun under open skies and busy trees was preferable to this. Up till now, the last few days have been among the most unruffled of their lives. What space and liberty. They’ve not been fed before on hay as fresh as I’ve provided for them or, until yesterday, on such an uninterrupted abundance of apples. Had the groom been working and not nursing his cut face, he would have tethered them away from apples — especially the bitter codlings — and the fermenting colic they will cause, the fatal torsions and the windy flux. But I don’t care about the welfare of these strangers’ horses. I’ve watched them munch. I’ll let them suffer from our fruits. I will not wish Godspeed on them. By this time tomorrow they could well be too sick for traveling and my masters might be required to exercise their own legs for once. But for the moment the cobbles are clacking with hoofs and the air is murky with horses’ breath. They will not settle, no matter what I whisper in their ears. They know that soon they will be laden down with panniers and men.

I am relieved when the sidemen bring out the luggage and start to prepare for the journey. I am allowed to stand aside and be ignored. The sidemen do not want to meet my eye. I like to think they are ashamed, or even a little fearful of me. Perhaps they’ve heard I am their master’s latest chosen man, his eyes and ears, his watchman and custodian. They’ll be as glad to ride away from me as I will be to see their errant backs retreating from the manor house.

The final piece of luggage that they bring is the groom himself. He’s carried in a matting litter with not much care. I cannot see his face or any of his wounds until he’s helped to stand and lifted bodily onto the smallest and the least skittish of his mounts, a gelding with a mottled rump and flanks. The damage has been dressed, but his head and hair are caked in blood, and I can tell by how he holds himself, as shivered as a moth, that every movement inflicts pain on him. Three days of riding on rough ground, I think, and he will be either a mad man or a dead man. His little horse, if he survives my apples, will have requital then for every whip and switch the groom has ever laid on him. I would step forward for a closer view. I want to look the groom in the eye. I suppose I want him to see the bruises on my own face, of which he is to some extent the cause. But I have hardly taken one step forward when the door in the manor porch opens and the prisoners come out, in a line, and tied at wrist and waist. I think I’m seen at once by Kitty Gosse, although the sun is in her eyes and I am hidden in the wedge of shade. Her face contorts, although that might be pain and not the sight of me. Then Anne Rogers and the Gleaning Queen appear, their hands crossed on their aprons, their shoulders down like penitents.