by Jim Crace
The woman and the man are husband and wife, Mr. Quill explains as we settle down with churchyard stones as our bench for our long wait for Mistress Beldam to appear. They are fugitives from sheep, exiles from their own commons, six or seven days away on foot. They’ve come to us because their ancient livelihoods have been hedged and fenced against their needs. And the man who died was Beldam senior, her father. This, I suspect, is information neither of us has hoped to hear. Our imaginations have been fed by having her as a sister and a widow, a woman, that’s to say, free of ties and so within our grasps. We are, the pair of us, one bachelor, one widower, unspoken for—but now we are required to feel less ravenous. A married woman’s out of bounds, in principle at least. But, though I cannot speak for Mr. Quill, my attraction for the woman, based on that glimpse of her in the lamplit dancing barn and on the recent sight of her blood-soaked shawl, has not abated but only quickened at the knowledge of her kinship to this man. The marriage of an older woman to a thin-bearded youth is something that appeals to me. I can imagine being younger, being him … well, I will stop. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and only ourselves, and they are better left unshared.
Except I cannot stop. I find myself too keen to catch the woman stepping through the night. I can see her stretching on her toes to kiss the cheek and ear where just a while ago Mr. Quill almost pressed his lips. I can see her kneading all her husband’s muscles and his joints, to drive away the stiffness and the pain of three nights hanging on the cross. I can see her taking from a wrap a supper she has foraged from the woods—there’s apples there aplenty now, and blackberries, and game. And I can hear them whispering: she’s saying that his sentence is almost half served and that he must endure; she’s saying how our village will be punished for its sins; she’s promising the fire they lit to stake their claim on common ground will be remade and lit again; she’s drawing bows and firing arrows at the night; she’s making love to him.
Mr. Quill is silent too. His hands are gripping tightly onto his knees. The moonlight catches us infrequently tonight but when it does I see the paint stains on his fingers and knuckles—some blues and greens, some luster work—and I can tell that apart from his plain cap he has dressed himself in finer and more gentlemanly clothes than those he wore for me this afternoon. He’s like a decorated strippling at a fair, come to spy himself a girl. We sit like this in brewing silence for a while, busy with conjectures of our own and only lifting our heads slightly whenever we’re disturbed by snapping twigs, a shifting animal, a bat, the hint of footsteps coming close, raised voices from the manor house, and all the usual, rowdy ardors of a fading summer night.
It is, I think, the husband who hears her coming first. The top beam of the pillory rattles, bone on wood, as he tries to turn his shoulder and his head. I do not know if he’s aware that Mr. Quill and I are sitting only twenty paces from his back. I do not know what Mr. Quill has said to him or what arrangements they have made, if any. I wouldn’t be surprised if Young Beldam (he has a name of sorts, at last) calls out to her. A warning. There are other men about, he’ll say. Best run. But he says nothing, only whistles lightly, no more than the whistle of a breeze. I think he wants to let her know, as she comes close, that he still has breath in his lungs. She will not find another corpse.
Mr. Quill touches the back of my hand with a single finger and lifts his chin to point toward our left, where beyond our tumble of stones the church ground falls away a little into a ditch backed by thorn scrub and sore-hocks and, then, the groping nighttime silhouette of trees. He cocks his head. I do the same, until I hear the rustling. It could be another roaming pig, come to feast on someone else’s shins, but it’s too delicate and purposeful.
I have forgotten how small she is, and how silent is her brightness. My memory has plumpened her and toughened her. But without the heavy wrapping of her shawl she’s even more birdlike than she appeared on that night in the barn. Now her shoulders seem especially narrow, particularly given the fullness of her hips. Could such shoulders really find the strength to drive a prong of metal through a horse’s skull? She has not seen us, evidently, because she walks between us and her husband’s back, not carelessly but not on tiptoe either. She’s confident. Perhaps she knows that everyone has gone to shake their fists—politely—at the manor house. Her hair, so far as I can tell from her gray silhouette, is no longer grinning with the exposed white of her scalp. It’s slightly darker now—a few days of defiant growth—and velvety. At least, I think it’s velvety. At least, I think of touching it and finding out. I think I’d like her to turn round. I want to see her face a second time. That first time she was hardly visible. She was little more than dark on dark, a body shape, as I remember it. If only she would spin round on her heels and the moonlight would oblige, I could persuade myself she’s real and not a specter summoned up by loneliness.
She’s carrying a piece of sacking, heavy with food, in one hand, and a dark, stoppered bottle of cordial in the other. I recognize that stoppered bottle: William Kip has got a shelf of them—pippin juice or burdock or rosewater, mostly—his summer bottled for winter. I think he’ll find that one is missing now, unless she plans on taking back an empty. It seems that Mistress Beldam has been foraging but not, as I expected, in the woods. Again Mr. Quill puts a finger on my hand. He means we should stay patient and not be tempted to show ourselves to her with our warnings for her safety until her husband has been greeted, comforted and fed. Then we will reveal ourselves. We will reveal ourselves to be her friends.
It’s hard for me to watch her kissing him but it’s not an ache that lasts long. She’s hardly lifted the bottle to his mouth when the hubbub of my neighbors now returning from the manor house along the apple-strewn lane reaches us. We look in that direction, all four at once, like cattle in one herd, and when we turn our heads again, she’s gone. Mr. Quill darts forward, throws the stolen bottle which she’s abandoned at her husband’s feet into the sore-hocks, and hurries off with his strange gait, right shoulder first, in Mistress Beldam’s midnight steps.
10
HAVE PERSUADED NEIGHBOR CARR to talk today. He’d rather not. But I have him cornered at his door. He’s too embarrassed and too profoundly kind to rebuff me entirely. Still, he is not comfortable in my company and will not join me on the outside bench where it is cool and shaded. For once, against our custom, he prefers to duck into my stuffy, cluttered home and find a place out of the door light where he can’t be spotted from the lane. I touch his elbow as he squeezes by, but there is no response. I think he even pulls away. When he feels secure enough to speak, I can hardly hear his voice. He won’t be overheard by other cottagers. I suspect he also would prefer not to be heard by me. His story is “a spiky one,” he says. No one has yet laid eyes on either of the captive women or on Lizzie Carr, his niece. Indeed, the treatment of the crowd of supplicants at the manor house last night was “not considerate.” He’s being cautious with his words. He’s testing my allegiances. We know each other well enough to judge such things from how we sit and fidget, how we breathe.
“John Carr,” I say to him. “Let’s put an end to this.” I reach out for his knee and rather than grasping it as I might have done a day ago, I drop my closed fist on it, two gentle almost weightless beats, the softest of rebukes.
“I know,” he says. And that’s enough. He straightens up, takes steady breaths, leans forward with his elbows on his knees, so that his face is looking into mine. “Lord help you, Walt, if you’re deceiving us.”
“Lord help you, John, if you believe I would.” I’m glad he cannot see my flushing face in this half-light.
He settles back, deciding what to do. He’s caught between a nettle and a thorn. “And so …?” he says. He’s waiting for a prompt.
“And so, how was it ‘not considerate’?”
“Here’s how. Those serving fellows kept us waiting at the porch like dogs and horses,” he says, a mite less guarded than before. Master Kent was “not available,”
it seems: “He’s always been available. I’ve never known him not available.” John Carr shakes his straw-gray head, warming—heating—to his tale. “And as for this new gentleman? He is a Jordan, so we’re told. And some devilry has given him our land.”
I cannot tell if I’m included in the our.
This latest Master Jordan was also “not available” last night, John tells me. The villagers could smile their smiles and doff their caps until the end of time, but still he would not meet them at the door. At last, his steward, Baynham, showed his face. “Matters are in hand,” he told the villagers, so gravely it was worrying. His only answer to their questions was a shrug. It was as if their worries were of no account. “I hear that there is witchery about,” the steward offered finally.
“What witchery? No one has ever thought there’s witchery,” I say to John. I overheard the mention of a “sorceress” just yesterday, but that’s less burdensome a word. We can be tempted by a sorceress, beguiled by her even—but witches? No, their crafts are uglier and heavier. I am concerned and genuinely surprised by John’s report. A formal accusation such as that brings turmoil every time. The very mention of it is bad luck. It is a charge we tell our children not to make, not even as a tease. Say “witch,” we warn them, and Master Havoc will come with Lady Pandemonium to keep their crone bad company. “There’s never any witchery,” I repeat.
“That’s what we told the man,” says John Carr. “But he replied that he knew better. They already had three of our she-devils in custody. He said we’d better go away and start collecting faggots for their fire. That’s when our tempers flew apart …” He stops. I hear his humiliated sigh. Now he’s the one that’s flushing and ashamed. Again, he’s forward, elbows on his knees. “Or should I say that’s when our tongues got loose. We did ourselves no favors, Walt. We didn’t do you any favors either. Sad to have to tell you that, but it is best you know. We had to take care of our own.”
It’s no surprise. I’m not included in “our own.”
As far as I can tell from John Carr’s brief, discomfited account of what then took place last evening at the manor house’s porch, Mr. Quill and I are said to be part of some conspiracy. For reasons of our own that are too dark for telling, we have teamed up with the three dove-burners who arrived so recently and so coincidentally at the same time as the Chart-Maker. My neighbors will not call him Mr. Quill again, it seems. That name does not sound devious enough or tie in with the excessive colors of their newly woven tale. If that fine shawl belonged to his departed wife, as Master Kent has claimed and they are now no longer determined to doubt, who was better placed to steal it from the manor house and wrap it round that woman’s shoulders than the master’s guest, the Chart-Maker? It was the Chart-Maker who offered his hand to the woman on the morning of the fire when her den was being leveled to the ground; it was the Chart-Maker who made her welcome at the dance; it was the Chart-Maker who was discovered only yesterday evening at the pillory with his arm round the younger vagabond’s shoulder. They evidently were old friends. Perhaps they were related in some way. Blood brothers, probably.
As for Walter Thirsk? Well, according to the blurtings of last night, I am not the same man they have known and trusted for so long. I now spend my hours only with the Chart-Maker. I no longer see the need to work at the shoulders of my neighbors, or to stand with them outside the manor, even when my own “sweeting” is inside. Master Kent, to whom I should be grateful till I die, is neglected by me, his onetime loyal man. I am, it seems, to be suspected. That is the benefit of accusing me. In the spreading shadow of my guilt, Anne Rogers, the widow Gosse and little Lizzie Carr must be considered innocent of … well, innocent of anything this younger Jordan could accuse them of, but which should be laid more properly at other doors, including mine.
“I’ll repeat you to the master, word for word,” Mr. Baynham promised them, according to John Carr, whose word, I must believe, is trustworthy. Equally innocent, by the way, my neighbors added for good measure—and to the increasing amusement of the steward, who by then was nodding with a knowing smile but with the door half closed—are the three good young men who thought it wise to keep away from these conspiracies and have already packed their few possessions in a cloth and gone but who knows where.
“I think you would be wise to do the same, Walt,” says neighbor Carr, already standing up to flee my cottage. “Follow Brooker and the Derby boys, and save yourself. Go back …” He stops. He will not say, Go back where you belong.
I am alarmed, to tell the truth. Our snug and tiresome village has burst apart these last few days. Master Havoc and Lady Pandemonium have already set to work. We are a moonball that’s been kicked, just for the devilry, by some vexatious foot. Our spores are scattering. And it seems I ought to scatter too. Perhaps at once. It’s always better to turn your back on the gale than press your face against it. Indeed, I am already looking at my possessions and wondering which few of them I ought to bag across my shoulders and by which path I might best secure my liberty.
ACTUALLY, I AM THE ONLY ONE who may safely stay. For the first time since the day I found my mottle-throated Cecily cold and lifeless on the bed, Master Kent has come into my cottage room. He is sitting in the place so recently warmed and dented by John Carr. He seems in shock. At least his hand is trembling, and his breath is evidently being ladled from a shallow pool. But he has news that is reassuring for me, though not for anybody else.
The captured women have endured a night of punishments, Master Kent reports in a sunken whisper. I have to turn my head to catch his words, although his words are almost beyond bearing. Last evening, before my neighbors even thought of marching mildly on the manor house, Kitty Gosse had already confessed to what Master Jordan has decided will best serve his purposes.
“I have the sense my cousin is taking pleasure from sowing these anxieties, in the same way we take pleasure in the sowing of our seed,” says Master Kent. “I fear his harvesting. I think he means to shear us all, then turn us into mutton.”
My master cannot claim to be a witness to the shearing, though. He was required to go back to his room and rest himself, until called. “They had that smaller fellow”—Master Jordan’s groom, I suppose—“lean against my door, in case I counted it my duty to step out, and try to be a hindrance,” he says. “What could I do, except stay toothless in my room?” But floorboards leak and timber carries sound; he heard the crashes and the cries from the gallery above all too clearly. The one word witchery has licensed the Jordan sidemen to do precisely what they want. Evidently, Kitty Gosse took less persuading than Anne Rogers, but then, once the inquisitors had discovered on her naked body her warts and lumps and judged them perfect teats on which the devil readily might suck, she was exposed to fiercer questioning. Besides, she is in her own way, as I well know, the more attractive of the two and, therefore, will have suffered more in their efficient custody. Their master must have promised a free hand in their tormenting if they produced the witchery he wanted, and the name. They will have asked, Was Anne Rogers also an enchantress? And was the little girl some kind of flowered sacrifice, some sort of offering, perhaps, or was she also being nurtured as a country hag?
My master is reluctant to say much more about what his ears have heard. He is ashamed, I think, to have proved so powerless—and under his own roof too. But I already understand enough about these sidemen to suppose how their evening might have advanced. They were not quick-witted, that’s for sure, but they would have been fired up by one another and by the stirring circumstance of being entirely in charge for once. They were far from their own wives and mothers. And they were far from a restraining word. And there were no witnesses that counted. No matter what they did last evening, they could claim they did it only at their master’s bidding. They were provoked by him. So Kitty Gosse will have done her best but very soon would have understood that there would be no respite until she told them what they said she must—although, of course, these men might very well pr
efer her not to offer a confession too soon because then they’d have to finish with their torments, they’d have to put an end to taking turns before they were entirely satisfied.
From what Master Kent is saying, I can presume that Kitty Gosse will have identified herself, as they required, to save herself. She might have done no more than nod almost imperceptibly when they mentioned Anne’s and Lizzie’s names again. Certainly, she had the spirit, the master says, to give her word that neither she, nor her friend, nor the child were ringleaders in any way, but only—“Only what?” a side-man said. Well, only foolish followers. “Who, then?” Kitty, joined by Anne Rogers by now, and too bruised and exhausted to do anything but cooperate, screamed out half a dozen names. My master, his head tipped toward the ceiling planks, heard every one of them. “I think she picked on women who were not her cousins and were not Rogerses either, or who had never been especial friends to her,” he says. And then a moment later, she began to list the men.
I am surprised to hear that neighbor Carr is included in the lengthy cast, though I am not. I surely would have been an easy pick—the outsider without the faintest trace of blond. Perhaps I fool myself, but it is tempting to imagine she’s protected me. If she’s ever free again, she will not want to go without an old friend in her bed. But Master Jordan’s sidemen were not satisfied by this. These village names were not of any interest. They hadn’t even called on Mr. Baynham to bring his ink and write them down. “So were these also ‘only foolish followers’?” they asked. Both women answered yes, at once, seeing there a chance to redeem a little reputation for their men and friends. Then who did they consider most responsible? By now they had run out of names. Who was there left to take the blame? “The gentleman,” said Anne Rogers.
