Текст книги "Harvest"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

I could not help but think this morning of the dying Kips and how they would have felt at first, like me, heavy and unsteady, sick. And how quickly – certainly before their pie had gone quite cold enough for the woman to come to table – they would have begun to cry out with the pain. Already I had stomach cramps, as if I’d eaten palsied meat and it was sitting in my gut just biding time. Just killing time, perhaps, before it started killing me. My time was up. Certainly the fairy caps were keen to keep me on the ground. They would prefer it if I sank into the grass, if I became as rooted to the soil as them. Though stand I must. If I wanted to survive the day, I had to stand and rest my arms against the flat trunk of a beech so that my stomach could heave enough – yet again – to bring up these mushrooms. Yet, no matter what I tried to do, my body was both too slow and too fast to offer any balance when I attempted to get to my feet. The fairy caps would have their wish granted unless I could reclaim all the bones in my legs and arms, which were as spongy as the mushrooms themselves; I lay out flat again, spread myself across the ground, and waited to sleep or die or send down roots and put out leaves. But at last I succeeded in raising myself high enough off the ground to rest on my arms and knees, like the commonest and most wretched of beasts. I gagged and coughed but nothing came, except a skein of spittle and the overwhelming stink of barley ale. And then I flattened out again.

I was lucky, though. I must have been. I have survived to tell the tale, although there’s not much of a tale to tell. Most of the day is robbed from me. Anything could have happened. What might not have happened? I’m aching, though. Whatever it is I’ve done was strenuous. What I recall is hugging animals, and finding gorgeous horrors on the grinning bark of trees, and endless tumbling. Everything was newborn and familiar. My heart beats wildly at the memory. One picture haunts me. I was pinioned to the ground, just weighted to the ground, a seed, expecting only to be wheat and wanting only to be wheat and hoping only for the spring. The plow was heading for my back. Its blade was close. Its blade would bury me. I heard the rattle of the beam and the gritty churning of the furrow. That was the worst and best of it.

After that the fairy caps began to let me go. I had a twin, a standing twin, who came to rescue me. This other one who had my face, who looked like me and smelled like me and sounded like me, had got me by my shoulders and I was being pulled. I was being gleaned by him. My head came up and back. My bones solidified at last. My sudden twin put me on my feet and made me sensible again. Then, as far as I remember it, I walked the bounds once more toward midday, saying my farewells and making good, freeing any animal that was still tethered or penned, closing all the cottage doors, bolting every shed and barn, shutting gates. I stood and stared across each field, recalling in my reverie how tended and how tilled our years had been, how finely grained our lives. I know I passed the church ground where we never had a church and never will. I know I spent some moments standing on the turf where Cecily still rests, and Lucy Kent as well. My feet were heavy, not with soil, but with a leaden weariness. I think I felt like oxen might feel, if they weren’t so innocent. Yoked to the troubles of the world. But then again, in parallel perhaps, I had a sense that I was flying for a while. At least, I seemed to see our land as Mr. Quill has seen it with his brushes and his pens, his charcoal and his paints – just patterns and patchworks, as beautiful as embroidered cloth, not real in any way, but far below and not quite reachable. Time and distance seemed to play no part. Color was the master. And then I was most like a dove, its cote destroyed by fire, circling in plumes of smoke, without the prospect of a roof at night.

But now my quest, my heady pilgrimage, my madcap, stupored odyssey, is either coming to its end or resuming on a calmer note, and I am standing in the courtyard of the manor house alone. I cannot tell you how it came about. I don’t recall the final steps I must have taken to arrive, or how long I have been standing within a few paces of the porch, just staring, childlike, at the door, but I am here and it is me. I’ve never been this certain of a truth or more determined to proceed. Someone has packed two bags for me – that sudden twin, perhaps. I can’t remember doing it myself. But I see that I have been equipped with everything a man who travels on his own two feet through empty lands must have with him. There’s water in a leather pouch. There’s dried bacon, biscuit, cheese. There is my brimless working cap, my jerkin and my rain cape. I see the silver spoon, our wedding gift, tucked into one of Cecily’s handkerchiefs. Someone has pulled off my thin shoes and given me my walking boots. I have a sturdy stick. My arms are folded at my back like wings. I swear that they feel feathery.

16

HAT STRIKES ME IN THE MANOR HOUSE is how the smell has altered from when I slept here two nights ago. It hasn’t smelled like this for many months, not since Lady Lucy died. I will not say the odor is less manly, although of course this has been, all too recently, the lodging of at least six men apart from Master Kent. Master Jordan himself brought in the odors of a pomander and his casting bottle, so there was a hint, in his room at least, of what is womanly and superior. But the manor smells more homely this afternoon. There is the scent of family, of cooking for a family. Even from the hallway by the great front door I can smell fresh bread and a cooling grate, and other odors that belong to washing and to roasted meat, other odors that don’t belong to recent times. Mistress Beldam has evidently marked the liberation and return of her husband by setting up home in our finest premises and helping herself to the manor’s storeroom and its larder. She has been loving him.

The downstairs parlor door beyond which Master Kent used to sleep is closed. I hesitate. I am expecting to find them on the other side, despite the silence of the room, despite the stillness of the house. My instant image has the husband sitting on a bench, naked, wrapped up in her velvet shawl. The clothes he wore and muddied at the pillory and labored in yesterday at the back end of our plow are freshly washed and draped at his side; bitter with lye, they are drying at a dancing, open fire. The trestle table there – the oaken table where I last took breakfast, with both the masters on the morning of their departure – is provisioned for eating. Three places have been set. I am anticipated there. The bread, still warm, is cut in wedges. A steaming pot contains a meaty stew … and Mistress Beldam holds the wooden serving spoon. Well, what I’m seeing, what in fact I’m hoping for, is the domestic scene that everybody wants to discover when finally they’re home: the meal, the woman and the fire.

There is no proof, but I have determined it was the Beldams who made me ready for the journey, packing everything from water to the spoon. I am pleased to believe it was their way of thanking me. I try to count away the days. Is this the sixth or seventh day? I’m not quite sure, but I know the husband would without my clemency still be in the pillory this afternoon. It’s possible they found me in my stupor, walking on unsteady legs, my chin and chest damp and crusty from my vomiting, and gave me some tonic or some salve to rescue me from mushrooms and from ale. Then they packed these bags for me and placed me in the courtyard, to let the breeze clear out my head and lungs, while they went in and made a meal for us. I can’t be sure of anything. But I would like to think it so. I would like to think they carried me, my arms around their shoulders, the husband’s and the wife’s, and made me safe and ready for the roads. Now they will feed me, and I will leave this village in their company. So, I am feeling ravenous, and long to plunge my black and shiny beak into some food.

All they’ve left behind for me are smells. Whatever was cooked this morning has been eaten, drop and speck. The only hint of new-baked bread is a wooden board, a carving knife and crumbs. The only evidence of meat and stew is unwashed platters, licked clean of everything, it seems, except for a scrap of bacon rind and smears both of gravy and of sugared blackberries. The only sign of washing hanging on the bench to dry is a salty luster on the wood. The fire is open but it’s dying back. Whatever homely times took place in the manor’s parlor overnight and this morning ended long ago. In fact, it looks as if the room has been stripped of all its comforts and any remaining provisions. Two pairs of practiced hands have rummaged everything. The master’s coffer, where he stores his papers and his documents, has been tumbled over onto its lid. The mattress on his wainscot bed in the corner of the room has been dragged across the floor and slit open with a blade. Someone was hoping to find hidden silver, or some jewelry. Lucy Kent’s small loom, one of the two reminders of his wife that my master kept in this parlor, is missing. Her hairbrush too. He always kept it on the mantelshelf, still twined with her long hairs.

I cross to the far side of the parlor and step over the gutted mattress into the scullery. The doors of the crockery cupboard are hanging open, and most of the familiar jugs and dishes from Lucy Kent’s dowry are missing. The remains of one cracked cup, its handle snapped, is resting on its side and rocking slightly. The little larder too seems empty, though maybe it was emptied by the Jordan men while they were staying here. I know that there were winter hams inside, and salt and suet, and a row of different preserves. Someone has tipped over the master’s honey jar and left it dripping on the floor. My walking boots are sweet with honey.

I hurry to discover what mayhem has been inflicted on the rest of the manor, though hoping that the damage is restricted to the parlor rooms and service corridor. But what I find is damage everywhere. A fury has swept through the place, a fury that reserved its wrath for mostly worthless things. In the downstairs rooms, there’s not a table or chair that’s resting on its own four legs. There’s not a piece of cloth in place or any matting where it ought to be. Every floor is strewn with debris, including the shattered remains of Mr. Quill’s sweet-hearted fiddle. What isn’t broken isn’t breakable. What’s in one piece has proved too tough to tear or snap. The disorder in each room is worse than any I witnessed on the day the sidemen pulled apart our village homes. I suppose that is because my master has so much more to disarrange than any of us, but also because the sidemen’s searching was detached to some degree, impersonal, and so not quite as spiteful or as thorough. Master Jordan had required it done, and they were dutiful. But here the work has been completed by an enthusiast. And a pilferer. I am in too great a haste to carry out a leisurely inspection. This is no inventory, but I have become familiar enough over the many years to know where there should be tapestries and curtains in this house, where there once were table drawers and cupboards with valuables, where the pair of silver cups which Master Kent was given as a wedding gift by the cousin-in-law he was yet to meet had stood, where there was both costly furniture and the freely given hand-carved stool that Fowler Gosse’s father made. The Beldams will find a market trader in the town or some eager tinker who’ll happily exchange some food or money for these seized family goods. They’ll sell the richer spoils. The Beldams have suffered at our hands. That is not deniable. But they’ve been feeding off us too. I think I feel betrayed by her, her keenness to punish everyone and everything for her calamities. I cannot say that I am being logical, or calm. Especially when I discover on an otherwise stripped-bare mantelshelf the bloody piece of square stone that was used to murder Willowjack. This is the house where horrors are preserved. This is the house where Kitty Gosse was tortured and abused, and Lizzie Carr, our little Gleaning Queen, has left her stain of tears.

It is no different in the gallery upstairs. The walls have been stripped. The fittings have been thrown aside. Even the side room where Master Jordan made his den and where I and possibly the Beldams spent a night has been plundered of every piece of cloth, each coverlet, each cushion and arras. Lucy Kent’s old riding cape has gone. Again, the heavy mattressing has been slashed.

I can’t imagine that the man played much of a part in all of this. Such anger at the trimmings and the trappings of a house not worth the salvaging is woman’s work, I think. A man takes vengeance on the flesh; a woman lashes out at anything that cannot bleed – unless it is an animal, of course, a Willowjack, let’s say. Many times I’ve listened to the tantrums and the arguments of married neighbors in our cottages. The men were woundless come the dawn, though their best breeches or favorite jugs, or possibly their dinners, had been thrown out along the lane with terrifying force. But many of the wives appeared next day nursing their twisted wrists or showing bruises on their faces, or even on one occasion – the Kips again – a scorch mark where William had snubbed out a burning candle in the center of his wife’s forehead. He’d branded her, he boasted. While he was out, she snapped his smoking pipe in half and stamped on all the pieces.

I find myself for the first time in many months in the lobby room at the far end of the long gallery. The spiral staircase here leads up to the attic and the turret, the hideaway where I once made my nest in my first season, before I met my Cecily and moved into the village. Or at least it would lead to that lonely suite of sloping lofts if the supporting timbers had not collapsed into the well with age and rot, and from disuse. The middle section has no treads or flights at all these days. The lower steps are treacherous. There are very few dependable balusters. Only last year at Master Kent’s bidding I roped off the access, just in case any visitor was tempted to ascend – and then found himself descending rapidly, headfirst. Today I see that someone with a knife or sword has cut the rope away. The fibers have not been neatly severed but hacked aggressively. I imagine it will be the work of one of the sidemen, bored perhaps at being stuck in this dull house or, possibly, just trying out his blade after a tedious session with his whetting stone. I would not want to chance those stairs myself but it is clear that someone has, and recently. One of the treads is freshly splintered and I can see where hands have gripped the newel for support leaving traces, of what? Blood, or gravy, or even some of those preserves that have gone missing from the larder downstairs. I reach and touch. I cannot say that the traces are still damp, but they are sticky certainly. I hold my fingers to my nose. The smell is neither sweet nor savory.

I stand in silence, or at least in as much silence as these creaking floorboards will allow. It’s hard to isolate the sounds, to separate the ones coming from my own weight on the boards from those caused by the house itself. A timber house of several stories such as this is seldom absolutely quiet. The building shrugs and breathes. It’s like an old man shifting his hips to make his back more comfortable. A creak might denote not a footstep in the room above but the shifting of the roof frame or the settling of the wood. Still, it’s too late for such sensible opinions. I have already alarmed myself with several possibilities, the main one being that the Beldams have not left the manor yet as I thought but have heard me entering their door and – fearful that the masters have returned – taken refuge in the highest rooms. They’ve left the smudges of their hurriedly abandoned meal on the column of the unsafe stairs. I call out just as I imagined calling out last night when I was hunting for their company, “It’s only Walter, Walter Thirsk …” But of course they do not reply. They would have gone beyond the attic and up the wall ladder into the turret, too far away perhaps to hear my shouts. They will be huddled in the corner of that space and fearful for their very lives.

If I was feeling fitter and less damaged by the only food and drink I’ve had all night and day – the pots of ale, the fairy caps; I haven’t had a crumb besides – I might make a quicker and less noisy job of climbing up these stairs. At least, I could be less fearful. But as it is I feel nothing but foolhardy. If I fall or if the wood gives way, who’s to hear me tumbling and who’s to run down to my aid? And if my clumsy efforts are heard above, what’s to stop the Beldams mistaking me for someone other than myself and standing in the shadows at the top of the stairwell until my head comes into view clearly enough to invite the welcome of a well-aimed kick or a blow from a length of wood? Nevertheless I climb, using the treads and strings at the edges of the stairs as my supports, and always gripping the central newel with at least one hand. I keep on talking too, as I go up, repeating my name, promising that I mean nothing but to forge my peace with them, to thank them even – if they truly were responsible – for getting ready my possessions for the journey out.

The worst part of the stair is the blind stretch reached neither by the downstairs lobby window light nor by the sharper attic light. I have to test each footing with my toes, searching for the most solid timber and then chancing my full weight on it. Only once does my footing fail me. My ankle’s caught in splintered, wormy wood. I hear a piece of it clatter through the maze of stairs below. But after that either the going is easier or, having scared myself enough, I find the courage to proceed with more resolution. The pair of attic rooms is entirely empty except for some of Master Kent’s abandoned junk: a broken chair, broken not by the Beldams but by the weight of Master Kent himself, as I remember, and long ago; some leather riding tack; the great, long travel chest in which I once stored my clothes; the painted child’s cot which sadly was never put to use; a rusty brewing pan. Unlike in the downstairs rooms, however, these items have been left in peace. No one has upturned them, or thrown them about the place.

I turn at once toward the ladder mounted on the wall and climb the twenty rungs up to the trapdoor which will allow me entrance to the turret space. I half expect the trapdoor to be resistant to my push, weighted possibly on its upper side by Mistress Beldam and her husband standing on its boards, opposing me. But it swings open easily and showers me in dust. My eyes, once I have rubbed away the grit, are flooded with the full daylight of the unshuttered turret windows. I pull myself onto my feet, a little breathlessly. The floor is covered with the usual fallen scuff of under-roofs and with the undisturbed remains of bird nests and a waspery. It’s obvious that no one other than myself has been up here for years. The view is mostly chimney pots and roofs. I cannot see into the courtyard, as I intended, to check that my stick and the two travel bags with my glinting silver spoon are safe and where I left them. But I can see out to the orchard and the unbuilt church beyond, and I can see our village roofs and fields.

WHAT STARTS WITH FIRE WILL end with fire, I’ve heard it said. At first I do not spot the plume of smoke which, reluctant to rise on this almost windless day, has gathered on the tool-barn roof. I think at first it could be just a cloud of blackened dust – but dust does not behave as if it’s weightless, dust does not billow or form up in rounded shapes such as those that are now lifting from the roof. Another plume of smoke has started up a little further down the lane toward the cottages, this time from the whitehouse roof. I am as yet not able to make out the unsteady burst and blaze of actual flames or even, from this high vantage point, hear their crack. Now the first of our twenty or so inhabited – let’s say recently inhabited – cottages begins to offer up its smoke. It is the pretty home where Thomas Rogers played his pipe and Anne, his mother, raised her finchy voice. So far the smoke is so thin and undramatic that, if this was only chimney smoke, I might have taken it for nothing more than what was normal for teatime in our village lane, with cooking and a row of blazing hearths. But by the time the fourth and fifth cottages have been set afire, the tool barn and the whitehouse are leaping with orange light, and flames are running up their sides, blackening the wood. And by the time the fourth and fifth cottages are doing the same, the widow Gosse’s home is breathing black and mine is coughing smoke.

I do not need to guess who’s setting fire to us. Indeed, I see the evidence all too clearly. The Beldams have found themselves a cart and the pair of oxen that we used to plow our final mark into this summer’s barley field. The husband has evidently taken me at my word. “I’ll make the pair of you rich,” I’d promised, and, so far as I can tell, looking down at their great load where they have left it in the clearing by the pillory, they have pillaged us exceedingly and have assembled quite a cargo for themselves, both from the village homes and from the manor house. I recognize my master’s tapestries, his better chairs, his wife’s old loom. I can even make out the several parts of the plow we assembled together yesterday. Was that just yesterday? I only shrug. Their father’s death has paid for this, it must be said.

For the moment I can see and hear only the husband. He is sizing up the pillory, the great unwieldy cross of wood where he has spent the most part of a week. He proves himself to be as clever with an axe as he has been with a plow. His first strike is a little high. The oak of the upright is too hard for him, but lower down, where the timbers have been dampened and the surface worn away a bit by weather and by time, his axe bite takes a mouthful at first try. He cuts out the chip with a sideways blow, and then addresses his old resting place from the other side, until even I can see the hollow where the axe has landed. I hear his every strike. I do not think it takes him more than thirty, but I am no longer watching him. I have caught sight of the Mistress herself, my eyes drawn to her by the skittering of a narrow thread of smoke, the burning faggot she is holding as she hurries in and out of the final cottages, checking there is nothing left to steal and then setting fire to anything that is dry. Her head and shoulders are wrapped in velvet, to protect her from the smoke, I guess. She has my short-bladed sword in her free hand. I have forgotten how small she is. Her smoky trail is like a moth’s, erratic, willful, spirited.

I know I have to drag myself away from this high window. I do not believe that Mistress Beldam intends to part from here leaving the manor intact. When she reaches the last house of the village and has satisfied herself that everything is beyond rescue, she is bound to scamper down the lane, together with whatever livestock has been panicked by the blaze, to where her husband is now resting from his exertions, with the pillory as dead as mutton at his feet. Then they will continue through the orchard’s apple strew to finish off the manor farm buildings left by Brooker Higgs, the Derby twins and their moonball. If there’s to be a fire started in the dry wood of the downstairs rooms, I could not be in a worse place – in the high turret of a timber house with a wooden ladder, a collapsed staircase and a wide stairway to hurry down before I even reach the flames. Indeed, I wonder if this has been her plan all along, to lure me, through some sorcery beyond my understanding, to this upper space and then to bake me here.

I do not know what makes me pause when I reach the attic rooms. I do know that going down into the lobby should be speedier and less dangerous than coming up. Descents are not as weighty as ascents. I can simply slip and slide and keep my fingers crossed. I’ll reach the safety of the courtyard very quickly. Then I’ll gather up my things and be on my way before the woman catches me. All neighborly and more-than-neighborly feelings I’ve ever had for her are gone. She frightens me. She only frightens me. That woman carries blade and fire. But pause I do. I’m anxious suddenly, alarmed, and not by the prospect of a manor fire. Something else has caught my eye so thinly that, when I stop to check, I don’t at first know where to look. Then I spot it for a second time. The oblong of dark that first I took to be a wedge of shadow under the great, long travel chest is looking now more like a seeping spill of blood.

He’s lying facedown, covered only with the chest’s loose lining. But I do not need to turn his face to verify his name. I recognize his finer clothes. He’s wearing what he wore the last time I laid eyes on him, hurtling in pursuit of Mistress Beldam at the midnight pillory. Here are his gentlemanly boots, his decorated jerkin, his townsman’s breeches and his plain, unfeathered cap. His fingers and his knuckles are still blue and green with paint. I recognize his wealthy beard and see how waxed and shaped it is, a trowel-shaped wedge of hair. I even think I can see some proof of his enduring smile from the creases on the back of his neck. I can’t believe he would be parted from his smile, even in death. The body is crunched up, of course. Full stretched, it would be longer than the chest. But this is not a body I have ever seen full stretched. This is a body that appears as I’d expect it to, lopsided, stiff and out of line. He’s died exactly as he stands, off-kilter as if he has been struck by lightning. The heavens opened and a tongue of light gave him the body of an old gnarled tree. I have no doubt that this is him, the stumbler, the Chart-Maker, the man who was too oddly brave to turn his back on us.

So far as I can tell from my brief examination of the body before I close the lid on him and tumble downstairs to run along the gallery, more fearful for myself than I have ever been before, his wounds were inflicted by a sword, the same one, I presume, that cut the ropes away at the access to the stairwell. He has been run though with great force and commitment. The blade has entered at the front a dozen times and exited behind his back, piercing his main organs and his chest. The blood has blackened and stiffened in his clothes. I do not know enough about a corpse to tell how long it has been here, or when his killing took place. It could have been last night, or equally it could have happened on the night of torture when the women named him. What’s probable, given the poor repair of the attic stairs, is that his killing took place in the upper rooms and close enough to the travel chest for the victim to be toppled in before he bled too much. Who should I hold responsible? Apart from the Beldams or the Jordan men? I have to say that for a moment I hold myself responsible. I feel that I have failed the man. I feel that I am failing him again, because I have to leave him here. By rights I ought to carry him to Turd and Turf to join the other corpses of the week, and mark his grave with a proper monument of piled stones and within sight of his beloved longpurples. He liked it there. He liked the blossoms and the light. He liked its solitude. He would have liked to listen to the juking of the birds until the end of time. But I cannot carry him, not on my own, not down those stairs, not with the fire maiden pressing down on us with her revenging flame.

The odd thing is, she does not come. Perhaps her husband has decided that she’s burned enough or he is impatient to depart before the evening and the darkness close in. He knows it’s wise to get away, to pass beyond our parish bounds before they’re stopped by someone coming back or asked for their account of where the oxen were acquired and why their cart is so loaded down with property beyond their station. Perhaps she’s tired of it herself. Her grief and anger have been spent. What is the point of taking down the manor house? What is the point of burning it with Mr. Quill inside to haunt its attics and its roofs? Maybe she has no idea that he is there, and she’s not the murderer. Whatever is the truth of it, it’s clear that I will never know. I step out of the courtyard with my bags, and there I glimpse the back of them and their great haul of plunder disappearing down the lane. The husband leads the oxen from the front, and she sits riding on the cart, her skirts pulled up to her thighs, the short sword resting on her knees and her bare legs swinging over the back. Her shoulders are draped in velvet, naturally. She’s getting even smaller now as they retreat behind the hedges and the walls, as they retreat into another world.

I’ll follow those Beldams, of course, but now only in dreams and without the emboldening of fairy caps or ale. I see myself trailing them by fifty paces, say, a neighbor in their wake, and free to close the gap only when she calls out to me and says that I am welcome to travel at their sides, that it is safe to bridge the space between us, that she does not wish me any harm. We can be reconciled. But I don’t want to dream of them just yet. I want to watch the manor burn. What starts with fire will end with ash; it has to end with ash if I am to give Mr. Quill an honorable cremation rather than abandon him in the chest for woodworms, rats and attic birds to feed upon. Is this at last the courage that I sought this morning and last night and which I intended, at the very least (and at the very worst), to invest in redeeming mischief of some kind? Will this hotheaded deed make it too unsafe for me to stay on here as Master Jordan’s trusted winter man? Will this satisfy my seven witnesses? Will I be satisfied? Apart from wanting that one day behind the plow, I genuinely have not had a plan till now, but I have come to understand that I should finish what the Beldams have begun. I have a sudden, dutiful desire to set some further timbers cracking in the heat and to watch the ginger cats of flame, which have already put an end to all the other village homes, licking at the milky air of the manor house, licking through the many rooms and treading lightly up the several flights of stairs. I want to see the turret flaring like a beacon with flames higher than the pinnacle of any steeple.