Harvest A Novel by Jim Crace

Author:Jim Crace [Crace, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780330445665
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

ITTLE LIZZIE CARR AND HER GREEN SASH are in Master Jordan’s custody tonight, as is (or so the rumor has it for the moment—Mr. Quill and I have yet to see the living evidence) the widow Gosse, my Kitty Gosse, together with Anne Rogers, her best friend. We need to organize ourselves, of course. This is the moment when our wildest hotheads should raise their sickles and their sticks. But John Carr thinks the hottest heads have already packed their bags and gone. Certainly, Brooker Higgs has not been seen since dusk. And the Derby twins were spotted heading off toward our top end and the setting sun, bundles roped across their backs and walking faster than they’ve ever walked before; their mother looks as gray and blank as pewter, and only shakes her head when questioned. Three of our sons are vagabonds, untethered strays, who clearly feel it’s safer to be anywhere but here. That has never happened to our sons before.

Whose version of events should I believe? The loudest voices that I overhear are decided—as am I, reluctantly—that the shaven, black-haired woman is behind it all. A dozen different stories hold Mistress Beldam responsible for all the disarrangement of their cottages—and then for every odor that’s not pleasing, for every jug of curdled milk, for every darkening of cloud. And she will take the blame, I know, for driving sheep into our fields. Everything’s uncertain and unhinged because of her. She’s brought a curse onto our land, she’s blighted us. My neighbors say she’ll not be satisfied until we’re all dragged off to rot away with Willowjack. When the threshing barn was inspected at midday, they told the “new gentleman’s” serving men as much, and that the bloody velvet shawl claimed by Master Kent to be his wife’s was not his wife’s at all but the property of this fierce, alluring woman. But no one listens to them anymore, they now complain. No one’s been hunting for “the sorceress” despite their warnings. Those men are picking only on the innocent, on local women and a girl.

What’s certain, according to these flapping tongues, is that while I was on my knees this afternoon making pauper’s vellum from the calf, Lizzie Carr, still very much the Gleaning Queen in her green cloth and bored with sorting barley, slipped out of the threshing barn, hoping to renew the yellow blossoms she’d been wearing since her crowning. She was bound to be noticed by Edmund Jordan’s men. And they were bound to challenge her. This girl, bedecked beyond her station in a valuable cloth and mustardy with flowers, like a fairy child, was far too young and tame to fit the description of the savage woman they’d only recently been informed about by the less wary of my neighbors and whom the sidemen were now very keen to meet. But she was baffling. And her clothing was suspicious. The men supposed that all expensive cloth—Lizzie Carr’s green sash, that woman’s bloody velvet shawl—must provide some necessary clue in their pursuit of Willowjack’s killer.

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