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.
13
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.
I hesitate. I ought to hurry across the yard and comfort them. I might even give them hope. I would not want them to travel out before first understanding that soon, thanks to Master Kent’s interventions, for which I am to some extent the ransom price, they will be freed, to walk afar, untethered, in another place. But I’m afraid, and I’m too shocked by them to move. It’s not that they are wounded like the groom, not visibly, at least. It’s just that they are not the women I have known. And Lizzie Carr is not the girl. She still wears her green sash, surprisingly. She has it tied round her throat. It’s dirty now, I see, and torn. It might be bloody, in fact. But I am reminded briefly of how she once appeared, that little nervous scrap, exhorted by my master to step out of the chair of hands provided by her father and her uncle John and find a single grain, “just one. Then we will cheer. And you will be our Queen for one whole year.” She’d been the sweetest and the yellowest that ancient day. I’ll not forget her blowing on the grains to winnow off the flake and how the barley pearls were weighty on her palm. But now she is like chaff herself. A sneeze could lift her up and take her off. She’s hollowed out and terrified. What can it mean to her that she is being fastened to the saddle of a horse? What can it mean to Kitty Gosse and her friend Anne, the piper’s mother, who cannot know her son has abandoned her and taken all the other Rogerses with him, that the only neighbor here today is Walter Thirsk, who’s skulking in the shadows with a bruise across his face?
I can’t deny it’s cowardly, but, now that the horses have been taken off my hands, I am free to edge along the slice of shadow, doing what I can not to catch anybody’s eye again, and find some refuge in the open lane. My master Kent has had the same idea. He does not want to take part in the packing for departure, the tying and the stirruping. I find him dressed for travel in his high hat and long topcoat, staring out across the fields, with his back pressed against a maiden elm, its warped feet bright with lichen and its craggy trunk already warm with light. I’ve seen him in this pla
ce a hundred times, a pipe in hand, belonging here. We all have somewhere private hereabouts where we can press our backs. Today—such is the light, and such the sap green of his coat—he looks as if he’s part of it, a man of wood and leaf.
“This land,” he says, gesturing, “has always been much older than ourselves.”
I do not take his meaning straight away. I nod respectfully, expecting him to say more, when he’s found the words.
“So much older than ourselves,” he repeats in a whisper, shaking his head. “Not anymore.”
I understand his meaning now: this ancient place would soon be new, he wants to say. We’re used to looking out and seeing what’s preceded us, and what will also outlive us. Now we have to contemplate a land bare of both. Those woods that linked us to eternity will be removed by spring, if Master Jordan’s saws and axes have their way. That grizzled oak which we believe is so old it must have come from Eden to our fields will be felled and rooted out. That drystone wall, put up before our grandpas’ time and now breeched in a hundred places, will be brought down entirely and replaced either with an upstart thorn or with some plain fence, beyond which flocks will chomp back on the past until there is no trace of it. We’ll look across these fields and say, “This land is so much younger than ourselves.”
My master takes his leave from me. We have embraced already this morning, in the orchard, beneath the apples and the hawks, and we are wise enough to let that parting serve. We could not better it. He does not even offer me his hand, but only puts a finger on my arm, and fixes me with the briefest show of eyes, as wide and white as they can be—he means me to remember this look; he means me to decipher it—before he turns toward his house, the house, his cousin’s house, and for the first time in a dozen years prepares to ride a horse other than Willowjack.
I find that I am running up the incline of the common fields toward the top end of our land, the one place where it is high enough to gain a pinched view of other parishes, that little clovered hillock which on Mr. Quill’s rough map marks the nose of the brawny-headed man which I now know to be our village from above. It’s just as well that I am on the move because I have an excuse to count my tear-filled eyes as proof of nothing more than my exertion. I am a man not used to moving fast. I can’t recall running for such a distance since I came to this village. There never was a need to hurry here. We value effort over haste. I half expect to hear my neighbors calling out, “What’s bitten your backside, Walt?” or “Where’s the fire?” or “Who the devil’s chasing you, for doing what?” They’d wonder at my weeping eyes.
I’m glad to sit and rest my lungs and legs on Clover Hill—now, there’s a name that Mr. Quill might like—until the travelers pass by. I’ve climbed up here because I know there is a stretch of lane where for, say, fifty paces, there are no hedges, trees or walls to curtain it from my view. I used to come here often years ago, before I settled in—yes, settled in; yes, fitted in; I can’t honestly say belonged—hoping I suppose to be the first to spot a visitor, some enterprising carter, say, a tinker with his colored and deceitful wares, a relative of Master Kent’s, perhaps (How could I know what that might mean for us?), some minstrel with a bag of songs and news of towns and palaces. But no one ever came to stay more than a day, of course. Not till this week, that is.
Now, I rest my arms across my knees, put my chin onto my wrists and allow the sun to dry me out. I am expecting cousin Jordan’s party soon. Until it comes, my master’s leaving, fixing stare is coaxing me. It shows wide and white again in my mind’s eye. I’ve not seen his face like that before, so mimed and meaningful. It was an accusation of a sort, I fear. A plea, as well. Yet it was fond, in its own way. My Cecily would sometimes bulb her eyes like that. Hers was a wifely nudge that meant there was a duty to be carried out, by me. Or else it was a warning that I had said too much, or gone too far, or not gone far enough. The eyes speak louder than the lips, it’s said—and they gather whispers better than the ears. My master’s final, whispered words—“Not anymore”—are coaxing too. His voice is quivered like a dove’s in this morning’s sun-stoked breeze, as if, far off, he’s cooing out to me. His voice is billowy, a sobbing parley in the wind, vabap-vabap. I catch only a gust or two. But I can tell it is a call to arms. It says that there are duties to be done. It says I haven’t yet gone far enough.
The cousins are riding at each other’s shoulders when they pass. I almost pick up their conversations. Even from this distance I can tell they are not ordinary men. I suppose their hats betray their standing. A workingman would never wear or even need to own a tall and heavy hat, or one with so deep a brim. Such hats belong to gentlemen who rarely need to bend their heads or swing a tool. A workingman could not afford to pass his day with so straight a back and so erect a head. It is as if these first two riders are suspended from their hats. All their wearers have to be is pendulous.
It’s disappointing to see how cousinly they are, my twin masters now. It would have made me happier, it would have helped my quandary, to see them riding far apart, not ear to ear. They are as close as two cloaks hanging from a pair of pegs. I cannot bear to think that they are friends or that there could be any liking between them. Blood is thicker than water, of course, and families are bound to observe truces which would not be kept outside the ties of kin. But the only blood these two have shared in common is Lucy Kent’s. The thread that links them is a flimsy one. Their seeming fellowship this afternoon is baffling.
I want to believe Master Kent has a stratagem. His accommodations are a plot, a subterfuge; that word I didn’t know before is proving its worth of late. But equally I fear the evidence of my own eyes—and my ears. There’s laughter, even, from the riders. Their high hats are not shaking but their shoulders are. In that meager distance between the courtyard of the manor house and this open stretch of lane, it could be that, flank on flank and simply with a shared click of the spurs, an allegiance has been forged between these two men, one that recognizes their joint interests, an acknowledgment of how their futures will be shaped, the benefits and moieties. I cannot truly blame my master Kent for that. He has to live. He has to have a roof. He’s lately done his best to intercede on behalf of our two women and our girl. He has secured, I must suppose, a living for me too. And now he’s thinking of himself. Perhaps that was all he meant by his briefest, widest show of eyes when he took leave of me at the maiden elm earlier today. Not a plea or an accusation after all. He was asking for my understanding, warning me of his defeat, showing me how wise it is to toe the line. I study him as he rides off. I’m almost tempted to call out. I want to say, “Not anymore.” But as it happens there’s no need. Perhaps he’s guessed I’m watching him. He knows my fondness for this clover tump. He might have even seen me sitting here. What’s certain is that as these two mounted gentlemen almost disappear behind a screen of elders and a raising wall, my master—the slightly shorter, less round-shouldered one—lifts his right arm as if he’s reaching up for fruit and twists his hand. It isn’t quite a wave. It’s not a farewell either. It’s more like a dancer’s curlicue, an unexpected gaiety, and not the gesture of a beaten man.
I’m standing up by the time the other horses and the other travelers come into view, at last. I do not waste my farewell waves on them. I don’t suppose they’re looking at the village hills. Their heads are down. They do not have the benefit of weighty hats to hang their bodies from. And they’re more laden than the masters. The wounded groom is the first to pass. He sets the pace for all the rest, and it is slow and torturous. He tries his best to sit upright, but every step is juddering. He lifts a bottle to his lips. I’m sure it will be Master Kent’s strongest cut-throat ale, or even better—quicker, that’s to say—some stupefying barley blaze. A few mouthfuls of that every now and then should dull the pain; too many and he’ll topple from his saddle. Two loaded horses follow, though I’m glad to see that little Lizzie Carr is sat on one of them, secured among the luggage like a market goose, a fancy goose in a green cloth
wrap. I hope she makes it to a cozy place before our apples bring these horses to their knees. The widow Gosse and Anne Rogers walk at her side, tethered to the panniers with rope. And then the sidemen follow on, again dressed like foot soldiers in matching breeches, jerkins and brimless caps. They are not happy to be walking, I am sure, not happy to have lost their usual mounts to their master’s cousin and the devil’s girl. One of them steps forward every few paces to switch the horses’ flanks. I do not see it now, during this short stretch, but I’m sure he’ll switch the women’s flanks as well. Another carries a long stave. He’s stolen it from us. I recognize its cut. It’s too heavy for a walking stick. I do not want to think what it’s intended for.
My master is too far ahead to know what’s going on behind his back among his charges. Am I to be the only one to witness and know it all, the only one to wonder what this mounted pageant represents? Is that why I’ve been left behind? To watch this spectacle? It’s like a costumed enactment at a fair, a mummers’ show. I used to love them as a boy. I’d want to be the first to name the parts and identify the players from their garb. Today, I’m seeing Privilege, in its high hat. Then comes Suffering: the Guilty and the Innocent, including beasts. Then Malice follows, wielding its great stick. And, afterward, invisibly, Despair is riding its lame horse.
The lane is empty once again. This hilltop is a friendless place, and capped in cloud. I’ve brought the end-of-summer sorrows on myself. They spread their great black wings and cast their peckish shadows over me. The sun’s still shining in the valley but its warmth’s no longer reaching me. It is the middle of the afternoon, late harvesttime. I should be as dry and ripe as barleycorn. Instead, I feel as chilly as a worm. I feel no prouder than a worm. I am almost tempted to run down the hill to that now empty way and join the pageant as it heads off for a town. I’m panicking, not only for myself, but also for the prisoners, and the departed villagers, every one, and for Mr. Quill as well. I have to fight the nightmares. I can’t imagine living here for the coming seasons without someone to love or like, or any neighbor to share my troubles with. I can imagine living there, where they will be, above those smelling, busy, crowd-warmed streets, with Kitty Gosse as my hands-on-belly second wife. I can imagine bringing Lizzie Carr into our rooms and taking care of her. I’d be as loving as her uncle John, until the day that uncle John himself arrives. I can imagine being Master Kent’s town man again, like in those lively days when he was still a bachelor. The prospect is not frightening. It wouldn’t take me long to catch up with that mummers’ show. I could tag on at the end and follow Despair and his dejected mount as … Shame, perhaps. As Servitude. I’d put up with their switches and their staves, so long as I could be with them and not beset by cloud.