Jim Crace - Harvest

Master Jordan himself has left his traces in his room, mostly the smell of rosewater from his casting bottle and the soiled embroidered linen smock that he was wearing when he came to shake his fist at everybody in the threshing barn and in which, I must suppose, he’s slept. I take his bed. He’s made it comfortable, or at least ordered it to be made comfortable by one of his serving men. He’s evidently turned down anything from Master Kent’s supply of chaff mattresses and rough, hap-harlot coverlets, and made instead a cushioning of carpets, cloth and arrases that he has covered with one of Lucy Kent’s old riding capes. It is not quite up to the flock that he is used to. This is hardship for the man. He’s had no spaniels sleeping at his feet or any supper tray of dainties on the side. But I am finding his bed unusually comfortable.

At first I do not recognize what Master Jordan has folded up and lately used as a pillow for his head. The room is dark. But when I put my own head down, I suspect the pillow by its texture. I can’t have ever pressed my cheek into a velvet shawl before, although I’ve dreamed of it recently. At first I think I’ve put my face on mole. I’ve caught moles, hares and rabbits in my time. I’ve felt the thick pile of them, brushed my lips and skin with them. There’s nothing living that’s more silky than a mole. But mole will never smell as good as this. Behind the slightly breaded flavor of Master Jordan and his splash of rosewater, I pick up — despite its recent washing out of blood, horse blood, perhaps, its stain of Willowjack — the warm and musty scent of her. I lift it and I turn it in the half-dark hoping to confirm it is the Beldam shawl. It seems too dull and colorless. I try to make the cloth show mauve. It will not oblige. But there are moonlit, silver threads for sure, glistening almost wetly like snail tracks. The first time I saw this in its full finery was at the ending of our feast and dance. She had it round her shoulders then, at the entrance to the barn, and she was looking Turkish underneath its weighty, lordly weave. The last time I saw the velvet cloth it was heavy with blood and thrown across a fence in the cottage lane below the Saxton derelict. “Give me her name,” my latest master demanded of me. “By all my heart, I truly do not know her name,” I’d said.

So I am satisfied that this is the woman’s shawl. I have to confess I try to sleep with it and her. I try to summon her to me by whispering into her velvet pelt. I stroke myself with it and her. I press it close up to my nose and nuzzle her. Her recovering hair would feel like this, I think. And can I say I take some strength from her? For while these lengthy hours pass, while I am sunk into these lonely furrows of the night, I think I find or dream or have delivered to me by the spirits of the shawl a sense of what I ought to do before King Edmund, as Mr. Quill and I once christened him, vassals me entirely. I wake to a chilling clarity, as if my body has been swept with frost. Frost and furrows. That’s the prompt. I know my duty now. I have to put the earth to plow. The time has come to put the earth to plow, no matter what the Jordans say. The frost will finish what the plow begins. Winter will provide the spring.

I am too cold and clear to sleep a moment more. So I stand up naked from my bed, pull on my boots and the abandoned Jordan smock for warmth, wrap myself inside the Beldam shawl and make my way outside. I mean, I think, to lay a trap for her. Or at least to test if she is living still, if she is walking out at night to tend her man and see on whom else she might exact continuing revenge for her father’s death. I have to say the thought of that, the thought of her out in the night with a piece of stone gripped in one hand as her mallet and a spike of metal in the other, plus the image that I already have of Mistress Beldam luring Mr. Quill into the woods and the sudden sweeping of her length of wood, the bloody compost of the forest floor, makes me as nervous of the dark as any foolish townsman ever was.

THE SKY IS CLEAR BUT IT IS TOO EARLY for the moon to have fully crested the trees. I am determined to go down to the pillory. I’ll hang the shawl close to the husband, but beyond his reach. She’ll not miss it if she comes. Even in the flattest darkness its silver threads will glint and give away its place. But now that I am shivering outdoors and reminded by the deep-brewed quiet how neighborless I am, I lose my nerve. I am not ready yet to face the husband. I don’t want to chance the black and empty lanes tonight. So I only spread the velvet shawl out on the stone bench in the manor porch, exactly where her father has been spread, though I don’t believe Mistress Beldam knows that detail. I touch its nap. I say farewell. I do not think that she will come at once.

I suppose she must have come at once. Because I’ve hardly regained Master Jordan’s bed and laid my still-bruised head along the pillow of my arms, too tense and worried for sudden sleep, when I catch sounds that must be animal. The weather and the trees are random in their calls and songs. They are not rhythmic but unarranged and stray. These padding feet and footsteps are spaced and patterned. What I can hear is something on the outside of the house, something careful, something delicate and small. I do not dare to move inside my bed. I’ll give away my sleeping place. The manor boards are loose and squeakier than mice. But by the time I’ve reached cautiously across the bed to pick up a candle holder in case I need to defend myself, should I need to hold her off, should I need to capture her, the sounds or footsteps have retired. The manor house is mine alone again. And finally I dare to sleep, though I am nervous what I’ll dream or what I’ll find when I wake up.

At dawn, I find the velvet shawl has gone. I cannot tell what that means to me because I do not know myself. Of course, it shows the woman is alive, unless some fox or badger has a taste for velvet shawls. But equally it indicates the chilling, thrilling probability that while the world around her sleeps, Mistress Beldam has been roaming like a living ghost throughout our lanes and corridors. She never sleeps. She’s haunting us. She is patrolling every part of us. And now that all my neighbors have departed, and Mr. Quill, perhaps, is sleeping with the cadavers, I am the only one who’s left for her. Last evening she must have seen my coming home, my shoulders down. She will have seen where I decided to sleep. Last night, I must suppose, she will have watched the manor house and seen me standing, fearful as a child, at the porch door, dressed in Master Jordan’s embroidered smock, every bit the gentleman, and wrapped in the beyond-her-station shawl. She will have seen me spread out her shawl on the stone porch bench. And when I closed the door on her I cannot think it rested in its place for any longer than a breath. She has been cold these last few nights. She has her purple velvet back again.

This is not what I expected when I agreed at Master Kent’s prompting to serve as a Jordan man. I thought that though I would be troubled by my compromise, I would nevertheless find it comfortable to pass a little extra time in his employ among the places I have known and loved, indeed among the places where I have been known and loved myself. It would be a luxury, in fact. I’d have some privacy in which to grieve. Some autumn peace. But, standing here this morning in the deep shade of the manor porch, looking down onto the bench’s cold and naked stone, I feel nothing but alarm, the rising, clenching fear of death. I was a fool to stay behind. I’ve had my chances to escape. I should have run down yesterday from Clover Hill and joined the pageant on its way to town. Perhaps, I should have left the village with the Carrs the other afternoon or with any other neighbors who could tolerate my company. Here’s the truth of it: I should have got out of here as soon as Cecily died. I never could prove brave or blond enough to stay.