Harvest

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 ca

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 wi

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 us is accidental — he has only been with us for, 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 co

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 cra

“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 thi