Harvest

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Master Kent arrives in his cheerful hat and drives my troubled dreams away. In addition to the sashes around his brim, he has also knotted his ankles with golden ribbons and decorated Willowjack’s mane with yellow strings. Mr. Quill, who has accompanied them on foot, is trimmed at calf, cuff and throat in ribbons, a merry pillory of cloth. He is all smiles, of course. It’s hard to read a face that always wears a masking smile. The master does not dismount — I think he feels that ceremony should keep him in the saddle; he also looks a little frail today and unusually anxious — but he manages to make a pleasant speech, addressing us from aloft like a huntsman talking fondly to his hounds or beaters. This is “a noble day,” he says, as usual. Anything we glean is ours to keep, of course. We are free to take any remaining barley we find to our kitchen pots, for stew or beer or stover. We do not need to add it to the common wealth, or store it in the stackyard for any general benefit. After us will come the livestock, he says, in order of their station: our cattle will be loosed into the field to reduce the stubble, then the geese, for fattening, and finally our hogs will be allowed to root and nose the soil. Surprisingly, he does not mention as he usually does each year that the hogs will precede the plow. This barley field is set aside for next year’s winter-planted wheat (beer before bread, as ever) and so we need to go about its plowing soon, before the summer parts from us. Perhaps I’m surprised with no good cause, but his silence on this matter, his preference for “finally our hogs,” instead of “finally the oxen and the plows,” is startling. The organization to all of our advantages that he revealed last night might be more substantial than a dream, or an ambition that need not bother us just yet. It’s possible that Master Kent does not expect our plows to be in use again. Our final harvest might have come and gone.

There is happier business to distract us, though. Master Kent suggests that it would be a pleasing courtesy for Philip Earle — our Mr. Quill, our fiddler — to choose the Gleaning Queen: “He surely can be counted on to be an even-handed judge.” The girls and lasses are brought forward to pout and curtsey in a line for him. He does his smiling best to be judicial but we ca

Mr. Quill is thinking now, dramatically considering. He strokes his waxy, trowel-shaped beard to our amusement. Our laughter is lusty and excessive. We watch him looking out above our heads; perhaps he’s expecting guidance from the trees, or hoping to catch sight of Mistress Beldam in her velvet shawl. Possibly our lopsided fiddler, our evenhanded judge, means to raise his hand for her and have her step inside our ring to be the Gleaning Queen. The men turn round and stare toward the woods and to where some of them at least, to my certain knowledge, hunted for her under last night’s rain and where all of them, I’d guess, have wandered in their dreams. I half expect but dread to find a complicit smile on one of their faces, the smile of some quick-thinking lad who turned a profit from the rain by finding Mistress Beldam in distress and then providing somewhere snug for both of them to pass the night.

The judge opts sweetly for the one we least expect. He picks little Lizzie, John Carr’s niece, and one of our suspected spares. She is not five years old, a gawky girl and hardly pretty yet. But she has clearly done her best to decorate herself. She is by far the yellowest. Her happiness at being chosen is i

Lizzie Carr’s father and her uncle, John, make a chair for the Queen by joining hands across each other’s wrists and take her to the edges of the stub. She’s not entirely sure what she’s supposed to do. She only knows she is the center of attention, not all of it well-meaning. Her own sister has already pinched and hurt her leg. She’d like either to run away and hide or to give vent to tears. But Master Kent has dismounted and come forward to help her from her chair. “Take off your slippers, go barefoot, take the first step on the field,” he whispers to her. “All you need to do is find a single grain, just one. Then we will cheer. And you will be our Queen for one whole year.” He pushes her shoulder gently, and she does what he has said, blessing the stub with her bare toes. The stalks are too tough on her feet at first, but she takes a few wincing steps, finding balder ground. And there she drops down to her knees and leans forward to search for her grain. The sash falls from her head. It is the field’s only splash of green. But Lizzie Carr does not retrieve it yet. She has found more than a grain, she’s found a complete ear, perfectly intact, as long and broad as a man’s best finger, its awns as spiky as a teasel head. She’s old enough to know how to separate out the barleycorn by ru

Mr. Quill is at my shoulder. He’s grateful that I’m helping him, he says. He understands that I am handicapped today but all he has in mind for me is gentle work. He will be indebted if I can walk the village bounds with him, naming everything I see. He hopes as well that I can provide a shoulder for his bag of charting tools, and later use my single hand to help prepare his color pots of paint and prepare the calfskin still drying in the dancing barn for vellum. He needs it urgently for Master Kent’s land chart. Normally, I would not wish to miss my gleaning spoils. I could expect to come away with sufficient grain for some private ale and porridge flour, as well as winter feed for George and Gorge, the pair of long, flat-sided pigs I share with John Carr and his family. But Mr. Quill proposes something more pleasing, and an opportunity when everybody else is double-bent and studying the stub to settle what has happened overnight to Mistress Beldam.