Текст книги "Harvest"

Автор книги: Jim Crace

Соавторы: Jim Crace
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Master Kent is glad to have me at his side once we have left the barn. He needs “a calming hand.” Not only has he lost his mare, he’s had to fight to save her body from the profiteers. “My cousin tells me I am wasteful, not to have the ‘useless’ carcass baked for its grease,” he says. “I told him that the horse was far too loyal and loved for such rewards.” And Master Jordan’s reply was that he himself had valued his mastiff, Blunt, just as much. He evidently was a dog as fierce and unimpeachable as any constable. But he still yielded thirteen pounds of grease when he was too old for the job and had to be dispatched.

“I am improvident for not putting Willowjack to the same good use,” adds my master, leaning closer so that he is not overheard. “But I have insisted on my way, and won the argument … for once. If only I could always win the argument with cousin Edmund …” He puts a finger to his lips, nervous suddenly. “The two of us should hold our tongues. You understand?”

My master assumes that Mr. Quill has, by now, explained to me the cause and reason of his cousin’s country trip. He is asking that I keep secret from my neighbors not only what surely now seems obvious – his cousin’s lawful usurpment of the manor and the land – but also the details of our coming woolly plight. He hopes to win some further arguments, before any cloven hoofs make their first imprint on our land. He means first to negotiate some blunting of his cousin’s blades before he talks to us, his friends. It will have been his plan, I’m sure, as soon as he was warned, before the barley was cleared, that Master Jordan was descending by road to harvest his inheritance, to make a fight of it, to protect us with his arguments, to find some means of, say, saving at least some common ground where we – the shearers and the shepherds of next year – can let loose our beasts, to do his best, as well, to preserve some forestry. “So long as all my neighbors here are safe,” he’d say, “and they have work and food and dwellings that are assured until the thresholds of their graves, then I am equally assured your flock of sheep will meet with hospitality …”

But it has not been so. Somehow the village was already burdened by misfortune before its future rode in on a horse, before the Dream of Golden Hoofs came near. There were the fires. There were the doves. There were those raised, unfriendly bows. There was the woman and her disquieting face, breaking short the dance. There was the body at the pillory, or that much of the body left behind by pigs. It feels as if some impish force has come out of the forest in the past few days to see what pleasure it can take in causing turmoil in a tranquil place. And now, the worst – if it is right to count the death of a horse as worse than the death of a man – his Willowjack is dead. That is heartbreaking. She was Mistress Kent’s own horse. And it is frightening too, because whoever killed the mare was stabbing Master Kent as well. Of course, he cannot talk to me or open up his heart just yet. We are surrounded by the cousin’s men. And Master Jordan himself is never out of hearing. My master only offers me a shrug, a pulse of hands and chin and mouth but sadly eloquent. It says, These are the blackest days for us, old friend. I raise my eyebrows in reply. Indeed, we’ve never known a more alarming day.

We have gone beyond the hearing of the threshing barn. The flailing and winnowing continue steadily behind. Only Mr. Quill, the steward Baynham and the groom are unaccounted for, though I imagine the first two are working as an awkward pair on manuscripts and charts. I hope to be at Mr. Quill’s side this afternoon preparing paints and parchments as originally intended, but for the moment I am regarded as “cousin Charles’s fellow” and required to lead our party to the family homes, the heart of everything, identify the absent occupants by name and then stand by with Master Kent while Lucy Kent’s cousin-by-blood and his sidemen step indoors to pull away the coverings, lift the matting and the reeds, upturn all the storage chests, and shift the barrels and the benches in search of bloody rags. It’s rare for me to peer into so many private rooms, to glimpse how cramped some places are, how full the beds, how modest their possessions, how buckled is the furniture. I am surprised by neatness and by dirt, by evidence of last night’s food and evidence of none. It’s certain that you cannot tell from how a person works or how a person strolls behind her hens what kind of life they live in secrecy.

I am embarrassed when we reach the Carrs’ dwelling. John and I do not put up our feet at each other’s hearths. We are good friends but meet and talk only in the open air. We sit outside and understand that neighbors should not pry. Neighbors should be deaf and blind. “Take care,” I ask the men as they go in. But they are too impatient and detached to take much care. I sense my request has only made them more suspicious of the Carrs. I have to step away. I cannot bear to listen to the evident disruption. John will never understand why I did not go in to try to stop the breakages.

It is embarrassing as well to wait outside the widow’s house and hear the thudding of the overturning bed, still warm, as I suppose, from me and her. Still rocking, possibly. But thus far there has not been any sign of butchery, not even in Abel Saxton’s cottage. The only blood they find is on a kerchief in my place. I have to match my hand to it and have the master vouch for me, report my “courage” in the burning stable block. I evidently saved the best part of his hay. Only then can Master Jordan be persuaded I am not a suspect.

So we reach the last of the village’s twenty or so inhabited dwellings and we are allowed to rest while the sidemen go to check the sties and byres, the whitehouse and latrines, the brewing shed, the outbuildings and any nooks and crannies where a bloody shirt might readily be hid. It is Master Jordan himself who walks up the tangled path toward the tenement where Cecily was raised. And it is Master Jordan himself who almost at once reemerges into the light with a cry of satisfaction and holding a heavy, bloodstained wrap of cloth. At first the master and I think it is too dark to be the woman’s velvet shawl. But all too soon the truth is unignorable. First, the sunshine catches on its silver threads, and then the shawl is opened up and the color is confirmed, the rich and heavy Turkish mauve. Shake it one more time, I want to call out to the man, and see who topples out into that thistle bed.

Actually I hold my tongue, and so does Master Kent, even when his cousin throws the shawl across a fence and invites us to identify its owner.

“Give me her name,” the cousin says, addressing me, the villager, but one he seems to trust, though possibly only because I’m not as stolid or corn-haired as the rest.

“I truly do not have a name for her,” I say, and indeed it’s not entirely a lie. I can put a face to her. I can describe her roughly sheared scalp which must by now be softening and blackening with hair. I’d not mistake her dark and shiny belladonna eyes for any other woman’s in the village. But other than the byname Mistress Beldam conferred on her by Master Kent, she has no title of identity. “I’ve never seen one of my neighbors wearing that. By all my heart,” I say.

I leave it to my master to recognize the garment and the culprit, and do his heavy duty. He will have judged by now that the woman who spat at Willowjack also slaughtered her. She crept into the barn, where so recently she brought the dancing to an end, searched the tool chest for a spike and somehow lifted up that heavy churchyard stone to bring it down with spiteful and indignant force. From any other man but Master Kent I would expect a response of matching spite and indignation. He loved his Willowjack. But he does not even seem surprised to link the woman and the horse. He does not think her actions justified. Why visit anger on a horse? But clearly she was righteous in a way. Her kin – and still we do not know what kin he was, her father probably – was taken to the pillory on Master Kent’s command and was abandoned there to be consumed by pigs. What man with any heart could say the woman had no grounds? And so I am not surprised when Master Kent does not identify the owner of the shawl for cousin Edmund Jordan. He is prepared to blame himself for Willowjack. But neither does he hide behind a tricky truth, as I have done. Instead he says, “That shawl was my wife’s, your cousin Lucy Kent’s.” There’s not a cottager round here who’d have the means to gain a shawl like that, nor the opportunity. That much is clearly true.

Master Jordan nods. “Then who … then who lives in that derelict? It seems to me that someone’s sleeping there.”

“A vagrant, possibly. Some passing midnight pillager.” The master shakes his head, biding time by making show of his bewilderment. The tale that he eventually suggests is this: someone has come through overnight, a ruffian. He’s crept into the manor house and, finding it too occupied by lightly sleeping men, has taken leave with only Lucy’s velvet shawl as his bounty.

“It was hanging at the back of her old loom until last evening,” he explains. “Our mothy visitor means to sell it when he reaches any town, most probably – or he only meant to sleep in it, up there in that old tenement. But first he took the opportunity to steal the finest mount for his future travels.” Master Jordan is nodding yet again. “He will have chosen Willowjack, of course, rather than one of your serviceable horses, cousin Edmund,” Master Kent continues, warming to his narrative. “But Willowjack is loyal and skittish. I think we can presume the fellow took a kick from her. Or else she nipped him hard. A vulgar, violent person would have sought revenge for that.”

Master Jordan has pursed his lips. He is considering. It is not that he is such a stony-hearted moralist that he is looking forward to the gibbeting of a local man. But it will serve his purposes if through the death of this old mare he is able without cost to make his sudden mark on this inheritance. There’s nothing like a show of heavy justice – and a swinging corpse – to persuade a populace not used to formal discipline that their compliance in all matters – including those regarding wool and fences – is beyond debate. He’s made his threats and promises. He has already disturbed and violated everybody’s home. He will lose face and thereby some control if what Master Kent describes is true. The miscreant was not a local man; the miscreant has come and gone, it seems.

“So be it, then,” he says reluctantly and does not seem to mind that my master has taken up the velvet shawl, heavy with his horse’s blood, and says that he will have it washed and put back in its place, where it belongs, on Lucy’s loom.

But Master Jordan is still looking for ways to save his face and demonstrate his loyalty to justice. “That man who spends an idle week at your pillory, he was the one responsible for burning down your farm buildings and slaughtering your doves? Is that correct?” he asks eventually, smiling almost. My master only dips his chin. Not quite a yes. “And he, I think, has promised to revenge himself on you?”

“That’s true – but only in the heat of his dismay. Besides, he is securely fixed and cannot have visited any injury on Willowjack, except by sorcery,” the master says.

The cousin is not listening. “I do not mean to blame the horse on him, unless of course your proposal of sorcery can be proven. But we must question him,” he says. “At least I think I owe it to your dignity, dear cousin, to lay the charges of sedition and incitement at his feet. You are my witness. He has said that he has plans to murder you. Now I am unwittingly the master of this place and so discover myself to be its de facto magistrate. I think it’s time we took his case to court. I say so with a heavy heart.”

Here he turns full circle, sweeping the horizon, taking in the width and span of us. It’s clear the conversation’s at an end. He is maddened by our way of life. He is exasperated by the disarray he has discovered in our village. He sighs dramatically, to leave us in no doubt. We’ve brought these troubles on ourselves. And he will bring them to a sudden and impatient end if needs be. I catch his eye. “So, Walter Thirsk,” he says, just listing me. He’s wondering, I think, how useful I might be. I nod, admitting to my name, no more. But possibly he takes it as compliance on my part. He sees me as a man who not so long ago – twelve years – must have seen this village as he sees it now, a slow-paced commonwealth of habit, custom and routine, of wasting time and sauntering, of indolence.

Again he circles, but this time he is smiling. He lifts his arms and, palms up like a preacher, spreads his fingers, at all the land in sight. “Nothing but sheep,” he says, and laughs out loud. His joke, I think, is this: we are the sheep, already here, and munching at the grass. There’s none more pitiful than us, he thinks. There’s none more meek. There’s none to match our peevish fearfulness, our thoughtless lives, our vacant, puny faces, our dependency, our fretful scurrying, our plaints. I can tell he wishes he could see the back of all of us. He’ll put an end to all the sauntering. He will replace us with a nobler stock.

8

AM IN MR. QUILL’S GOOD COMPANY this afternoon and cannot help but dream about the sort of life I might spend with him should I escape the fleecy prospects of our fields by leaving here in his employ. At least, that is my maturing scheme. I could be gone within the week, if he takes to me and if my current master gives me leave. It is a fearful prospect, parting from Charles Kent, after what has been a lifetime of his company, his fellowship, but not as fearful as one in which his unremitting cousin is my master. So I do my best to be visibly meticulous for Mr. Quill, though – truth be told – I have embellished my expertise in readying the quality of vellum he requires for the final presentation copy of his enclosure charts. The best vellum, he says, rubbing his own inner arm by way of an example, takes weeks in preparation; even so, my brisker efforts might still be expected to produce a surface that is uniformly smooth “but textured still.” And it should be thin enough for the light of a candle to shine through it. I’ll do my best to reproduce his skin. It cannot be dissimilar to tanning leather for an apron or a shoe.

I have removed the calfskin from the sink of salted water, dung and lime where it has been soaking and bating for the past two days, since its removal from the rafter in the barn, and brought it, dripping brine and grease, past the site of Willowjack’s demise, along the farm lane and into the manor house, where the scullery corner has been set aside for chart-making. My hand is much restored, I am relieved to say. The wound has not defeated me, though it is still too tender at its center to be much use among the threshers and the winnowers and their heavy tools. But it is a relief to be working usefully after what have been almost three days of anxious idleness.

Mr. Quill requires me to prepare the skin while he makes paper audit of our fields and commons, finally transferring to the square in front of him what he has witnessed in the round. We keep our voices low so that neither Master Jordan nor his serving men catch any word of my account of this morning’s evasions and intrigues. The threats.

“I fear for us,” he says. His use of usis accidental – he has only been with usfor, what? not quite four days – but it is revealing. I can tell he has surprised himself with us. Evidently Mr. Quill is putting down a root just as I am pulling up my own.

“It is the woman who must fear the most,” I say.

We are agreed that Mistress Beldam – for whom we clearly both have put down roots, despite her misdeeds and offenses, though possibly because of them – should be found and warned. It can’t be long before our novice magistrate or one of his lieutenants connects the velvet shawl to its most recent owner – there’s not one of us who hasn’t seen her wearing it, either at the morning visit to the newcomers’ den on our rest day or at the feasting barn that night. Someone is bound to talk. All that Master Kent has done by claiming the cloth as his wife’s is to gain Mistress Beldam a little time, a stay of execution, possibly, and to earn himself the final contempt of his cousin.

We could and ought to put our tools aside at once and walk off to the tenement where the bloody cloth was found. Both of us fear that Mistress Beldam will have already returned to where she evidently made her refuge overnight. And that is perilous. No doubt that trio of sidemen who currently have nothing else to do except inflate themselves as constables will be poking noses into every nook and cranny as we speak, hoping to provide some extra bodies for the Jordan court. Neither of us wants those three gentlemen to catch even a glimpse of Mistress Beldam. We understand too well the impact of her face and hair. Especially her hair, which, now it’s shaved as short and shy as rabbit fur, only intensifies her native insolence and vulnerability. She’s too inviting to the eye. Such gentlemen with time to spare will not be kind to Mistress Beldam if they find her on her own and in a tumbledown beyond the hearing of the threshing barn. We only hope she has the sense, since her revenge on Willowjack, to scurry back into the forest from where she came and make herself another nest of logs and turf – but across the parish bounds, where none of us are free to stray.

“We’ll look for her,” says Mr. Quill. His voice has thickened, just from saying it. “But not until we are”—he points a finger at his ear—“not overheard.” Steward Baynham is close by, it seems. We hear him moving in an upper room and then we hear him on the stairs. He’s flitting like a bee about a plum, and bees – as I at least have learned in these past years – adore sweet mischief more than anything. Something ugly and unusual has happened to us all. In just a few days we have become even more suspicious of the world.

“She might be anywhere,” I say. “But there is one place she’s bound to visit.” Her surviving kinsman must be fed and given drink. She will not let him wither on the branch of our village cross. She’s bound to come at night when it is safer and she can be unseen except by owls and foxes, and the moon, to comfort him and take good care of him. That’s a duty none of my neighbors are expected to assume, but one which Mistress Beldam can be certain to fulfill. So it is agreed that once the Jordan party have retired for sleep tonight, Mr. Quill and I will become like owls ourselves, round-eyed and patient, waiting on the scuttle of some little feet. We’ll be dark-feathered in our drabbest coats, and in a hideaway of leaves. And when she comes? Well, we can think of nothing else. We’re happy to seem busy with our work. And we can think of nothing else but her.

I clear away the carpeting of straw to find bare tiles and stretch the calfskin on the scullery floor. Now I can see the puckering where that little hand-reared animal, which was so moist and succulent for us at our gleaning feast, was cut along the spine, peeled off the ribs and then spread out for butchering. Her twin flanks are still joined at the girth, along an uneven ridge of skin. They provide for Mr. Quill an amply proportioned square, almost a good reach in length along each side. I arm myself with a blunt-edged knife and kneel down, holding the saturated skin firmly under both knees while I scrape away from me with my good hand. The knife dislodges any waste, any nuds of lime or tags of veal, but I have to snap out hairs at their bulbs with my fingers. The skin is not yet leathery. I should say vellumy. It’s far too coarse still, and resistant. I should have soaked it for a week or more. I have to limber it. I will not say it’s easy work. I will not say I enjoy being this intimate with an animal I’ve known and liked (and eaten, actually). But I see the task as a test. It can stand as proof to Mr. Quill that should he ever need a manservant then none can do a better job than me. So I try my best not to complain. I concentrate on smooth and thin and uniform. I am determined I will pass the lighted candle test.

At such close quarters, the smell is nauseous. What flesh has not been loosened and washed away in the soaking has begun to putrefy. I have to sit back every little while to breathe less heavy air. Stand up too quickly and I’ll faint. But slowly I can feel the calfskin surrendering to my hand. It’s thinning and it’s softening. I do not think the vellum I produce will be the finest quality. It’s not sufficiently prepared. I’m rushing it. I have no practice or proficiency. I’ve made mistakes. I doubt that it was wise to dry the skin in the smoke of its own roasting flesh. I’m not even certain if I should have steeped the skin with lime and dung. Till now, there’s not been any call for vellum hereabouts. Mr. Quill, though, does not seem dissatisfied when he steps across the room to view my progress and test it with his thumb. Evidently my surface is very nearly fibrous enough to hold yet not absorb his inks and paints.

Mr. Quill is working on his preliminary sketches. He is experimenting, hoping to discover what colored patterns he can devise to make the story of our farmscape – and our sheepscape – easy to decipher. It sounds to me, from my position on the floor, as if he’s doing women’s work. His tools are cutlery and grinding blocks, and pestle dishes hardly larger than a shell. I half expect to smell the spice of cake. Nutmeg, at least. But all I get above the rot of veal are the cloying odors of his binding gum and lye. He is clearly content in my company, speaking freely now, not whispering. It doesn’t matter if he’s overheard by any of the Jordan men. He’s only talking processes, informing me, but also reminding himself, of each step in his recipes for color. He uses words I’ve rarely heard before – like lapis lazuliand smalt. They are somehow related to the emerging blues that are already in evidence on his fingertips – and across his cheeks and in his tapered beard. I am supposed to see the difference – although the light is low in here – between the florey and the litmus and the indigo, which he displays for me on little parchment tags. He is as snug and personal with his kitchen colors as I have learned to be with clouds, let’s say, or even with the sky’s own wash. I have my blues: this blue betokens harvest days (it will not rain), and that one promises a cracking frost; another – higher, darker and more ponderous – reveals itself only silently and briefly when the sun has already withdrawn into his bedchamber but the windows of his heavens are not yet quite closed; this is the blue that says we’re free to stretch and finish work and rest.

So our afternoon progresses cozily, drawn on by the prospect of our owlish rendezvous tonight. There is a touch of winter in the room, not in its chill but in its busyness – and that is comforting. What I will miss the most, now that Cecily is gone, now that I myself am tempted to depart, are those still and icy, cloud-weighted times in the dead season, when, if I were fool enough to step outside my cottage into the cold and moonless dark, all I could expect to see would be the ducking of my neighbors’ candle flames and all that I could expect to hear, other than the cracking of the frost beneath my feet, would be the industry of far-from-summer tools. This is for us the mending time and the fixing season: boys carve their spoons from yew or plug the leaks in mugs and jugs; their dads replace the handles on their scythes and sickles, or fashion willow tines to renew the teeth in forks and rakes; their wives and daughters make new clothes or darn the old. Every home is embering before its fires in concentrated silence, and getting ready for the coming year.

And in our house, my wife and I set to work on the reeds and withies I gathered in the autumn, making trays and baskets for anyone that asked and could provide us with a ham, let’s say, or a honey pot by way of exchange. Such evenings were our most tender and consoling, no matter that the spring was far away and all we had to eat was barley bannock bread and broth, every day a Friday with no meat. So here, in Mr. Quill’s attentive company, I hear those busy sounds again. So long as I do not look up across the scullery, I am lost in lost and happy times.

For a while, the encounters and discoveries of this morning are almost forgotten in the engrossments of our work. Our talk is soft and intimate. Mr. Quill has the grace to show an interest in my story. Here is my chance to say how, now that Cecily is dead, I am eager for a change. A change and an adventure. “And not one that involves a single day of shepherding,” I add. “Though making vellum is a pleasing craft.” He nods while I am speaking. He takes my meaning, I believe. His nodding gives me reason to suppose he will discuss the matter with his host. “And you, sir?” I ask Mr. Quill. “Are there adventures calling you?”

His story is a shorter one. He has never been in love. He has no wife to widow him, and both his parents are deceased. His eldest brother has their property: the family home, a warehouse and a riverboat for trade and carriage of anything from fish to cloth. But Mr. Quill is not a wealthy man, he says, “not in possessions, not in my body … as you see. This left side is wooden from the shoulder to the ribs. A sudden palsy. Something in the bones. When I was a child.”

“So not an accident?” I mean to ask him if he was struck by lightning or injured by a bucking horse, as I overheard him say to Master Jordan last afternoon.

“That was my schoolroom jest, my regular defense against …” he starts to say, but shakes his head. He evidently does not want to mention lightning again. “No matter, though. I have been raised to understand I am unfit to work out of doors and too great an encumbrance to be employed within. I cannot help my brother in his warehouse or his boat. What use am I? In such a clumsy state, I cannot even find myself a wife. I take my happiness from this …” He indicates the paints and sketches on his desk. “Step forward, Walter. See how my colors have ennobled all my marks.”

While I’ve been working vellum from the skin, Mr. Quill has turned his scratchy charts and drawings into something odd and beautiful. There is no lettering as yet. Just shapes and lines and coloring. I recognize their intrigue and their sorcery. I’ve seen equally compound patterns, no less ineffable than these, when I’ve peeled back bark on dying trees, or torn away the papering on birches. I’ve seen them sketched by lichens on a standing stone, or designed by mosses in a quag, or lurking on the underwing of butterflies. I’ve found these ordinary abstracts in the least expected places hereabouts: I have only to lift a stone, or turn some fallen timber in the wood, or reverse a leaf. The structures and the ornaments revealed are made purposeful simply by being found. But none of these compare for patterned vividness with Mr. Quill’s designs. His endeavors are tidier and more wildly colorful – they’re certainly more blue – than anything that nature can provide. They’re rewarding in themselves. They are more pleasing than a barleycorn. “This one,” he says, “is, here and now, my true account. It’s what you have before Edmund Jordan the Younger brings in his improvements—”

“King Edmund the Second!” I suggest.

“Yes, let the man be crowned as that.”

Can I identify the barley field, Mr. Quill wants to know. I look again, hoping for some clues, from the charcoal-dark lines, perhaps, or from where the paint has crusted heaviest, or where it’s thinned and tonsured on the bubbles of the paper. It is not until he turns his painting through two quarters that I think I recognize the twists and fall of the field, the low redundant parts where barley grows on hostile soil, the sweeping upper wings where cropping is the best, the darker shading of the baulks, the snaking signature of what must be our snaking stream.

“Exactly so,” says Mr. Quill, when I indicate my answer with a finger, lifting a smudge of paint as I do so. “And here I’ve plaited in your boundary line.”

Now I can see the boggy path and Turd and Turf, not yet identified as the Blossom Marsh. There’s our top end. And there’s our deep and tall and goodly wood. Our fortress walls of thorn and scrub. Our unbuilt church. Our commons and our cottages. Our onetime safe and kindly realm.

I look again but squintingly, and not at the particulars. I’ve never before had a true sense of how our estate is shaped, how stars might shine on us, or what those hawks and kestrels see. It has been too many years for memory since I last observed our land from any greater distance than our clover hill – that first day, in fact, twelve years ago, when I arrived with Master Kent and saw, far off, from the pale green of the higher downs, the true green bowl – no, valley’s not the word – of this isolated place nesting, hidden, in those blank spaces between far rivers, nameless and beyond. But otherwise I’ve put no shape to it. Now I know the village is a profile of a brawny-headed man – a bust, in fact. His neck and shoulders are our pasturelands. Our cattle and our goats are feeding there. The four great fields make up his face. His ear – our pond – is small enough to be a child’s. He almost has a nose, where I suppose that little clovered hillock is. The forests are his hair.

It is an odd experience, unnerving in its way, to look down on our woods, our commons and our fields at once, to see them side by side, or separated only by the thickness of my thumb, when I have never seen them on the ground with such adjacency. Here the sap-green-painted fallow is seemingly attached by the madly dark blue stitching of a ridgetop copse to the gray-cum-yellow stubble of our barley field. They look like neighbors, exchanging glances through the trees. I’ve walked that thickness-of-my-thumb a thousand times. It’s easy going till you reach the ridge. The fallow field has a subtle slope, so it drains well but keeps its soil. There’s seldom any mud. But there are pebble-stones to set your feet against. You have to take the cow track at the ridge and go downhill a little with the copse thickening on your right until you find another rise, and there an open gap which lets you pass along a lane of thorns into the field where now, this afternoon, you’ll find our cattle gleaning grain. This is the point, at the brimming of the trees, where neither field can be seen. You’re too closed in. Indeed,there’s nowhere on the walk – which takes a little while and some exertion – where both the fallow and the barley field can be looked upon at once. You’d have to climb a tree for that. Or be a bird.