Which gave me time to sniff and burp (I always start burping like mad when I’ve been crying), and wipe my eyes on the sheet, and mutter, “They still wouldn’t let you marry Edric.” Tamsin didn’t answer. I said, “What happened to Edric?”
I think she would have told me right then—no, I know she would have—if Julian hadn’t wandered in, rubbing his eyes and holding a couple of his French comic books. He said, “Jenny? Why are you doing that?”
I didn’t know whether he meant crying or burping, or just being awake—you can’t ever tell with that kid. Tamsin was gone before he was halfway through the door, and my room suddenly felt really dark again, and I almost started bawling again, but I didn’t. I told him, “I can’t get back to sleep, and I’m so tired,” which was true enough. And Julian said, “Me, too. I know what—I’ll make chocolate milk and I’ll read to you!” Julian would sell out the entire British Commonwealth for chocolate milk. I’m just mentioning it now, in case he ever gets into power.
So he went to the kitchen and stirred up chocolate milk for us both, and then he curled up on my bed and read me both of his Asterix books—doing all the different voices, naturally. Mister Cat was pissed at him, because Miss Sophia Brown had vanished with Tamsin the moment Julian showed. But he got into Asterix after a while, and I dozed and woke and dozed until dawn. Julian fell asleep at my feet somewhere along in there.
Eighteen
The rains don’t exactly stop in a Dorset winter—there’s a reason so many places are called Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Piddlehinton, Piddletrenthide, and like that—but they do ease up from time to time. Once he could get out to the fields, Evan started mounding up strips of earth straight across the muddy stubble and rotten leftover bits, everywhere there was going to be any planting. “To keep the soil warm,” he told Ellie John and Seth—right, Seth was there by then—and they stared at him, and then told everybody else about it, and they stared, but they went ahead and did what he told them. The fields looked weird when it was done—welted up like an attack of hives—and the Lovells damn near got hives themselves when Evan invited them to come down from Oxford and take a look. But Evan didn’t care. He was as cool as Mister Cat with the Lovells that time.
“It’s called no-till farming,” he told them. “I studied it fairly extensively when I was in the States. Very much the new thing. Very popular in the Midwest.”
The Lovells weren’t buying. They particularly weren’t buying Evan’s explanation that with this method you don’t do any plowing at all—just lay the seeds down on the ground and walk away. Not really walk away; you need to be using special improved seeds, and just the right amounts of the right kinds of fertilizer. Sometimes you don’t get as big a crop the first year or two, because the ground’s so used to disks and blades harrowing it up. And if it sounds for a minute as though I know what I’m talking about, forget it. I just live here.
Tony and I were on floor-mopping duty when Evan laid it on the line for the Lovells. “I know it’s hard to imagine, after so many millennia of people all over the world doing exactly the same thing with their land. Good soil or bad—you turn it over, you break it up, you hack furrows into it, you sow—you weed, you spray, you harvest, you market, you start over, world without end.” He shook his head solemnly. “All those centuries, basically unaltered. Amazing, when you think of it.”
Masses of Lovells glowered back at him. (Actually, they never came more than three or four at a time, but they always managed to look like an entire Board of Directors.) One Lovell said, “Nothing wrong with that. Civilization’s always built on people farming their land.”
“Civilizations change,” Evan said. “People change. And land changes—that’s what I’ve been trying to make you see. This soil, this earth we’re standing on has had the equivalent of a hurricane blowing through it every year for a thousand years. There’s nothing left. I want you to understand this. There is nothing left. The only reason Stourhead Farm and all the farms in West Dorset produce so much as a dandelion, a bloody burdock leaf, is that they’re absolutely saturated in chemical fertilizers. Zombie farms, the walking dead!” The Lovells’ mouths were hanging open like steamshovel jaws. Evan said, “If you’re serious about wanting to restore Stourhead to what it was when the land was young, then you’re going to have to change with the land. This is what’s needed, and this is how I’m going to be managing here from now on.”
A big bald Lovell was the first to stop spluttering. He said, “And I suppose there’s not a thing we can do about it.”
Evan smiled. “You’re my employers. You’ve always got a choice.”
The Lovells didn’t exactly call for a time out and a huddle, but close enough. There was a lot of silent shrugging, grunting, head shaking, mouth twitching, hand spreading, and general eyebrow athletics going on, while Evan leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs, just as though none of their antics meant a thing in the world to him. When he looked over and saw Tony and me leaning on our mops and watching, he gave us a long, slow wink. Cool as Mister Cat.
And he got away with it. The bald Lovell finally grumbled, “Might have said something . . well, in for a penny, in for a pound, hey?” and the rest of them went along. Evan could have two years to try out his no-till method, with an option for a third year if the second crop at least equaled this last harvest. It didn’t seem like much of a shot to me, but it was plainly all he was going to get out of the Lovells. He told them what kind of new equipment he’d need, and how much it would cost, and the Lovells pissed and moaned some more, but it came out consent. Evan got them to put everything in writing before they left, just in case.
“They could have fired you,” Tony said afterward. “They could have bloody bounced you, right on the spot. We’d have been back bunking in with Charlie.”
Evan shook his head. “They’d lose at least a year and a harvest finding another manager this late—they know it, and I know it, and they know I know. Now, on their way home, they’ll start looking around in a hurry, but it’ll keep them busy for a while. All I’ve done is buy us a bit of time, which was all I wanted. Who’s for chess? Julian, I’ll give you a rook, how about it?” Evan would have made a great chess hustler, like the ones in Central Park, if he weren’t a crazy farmer.
Later, with the rain coming down hard again, with the lights going on and off and the TV completely dead, and everyone piled together in the music room listening to Sally playing Rolling Stones songs the way Bach or Schubert or Mahler would have done them, I asked on an impulse, “Evan, does anybody know anything about Roger Willoughby’s family?”
Evan was leaning against the piano bench with his head resting lightly on Sally’s leg. By now I was almost used to seeing them like that, as though they’d been married forever; it only got to me once in a while, when I was offguard or in some kind of mood. He said, “It depends on what you want to know, Jenny. I could show you a copy of Roger’s will, which is quite detailed about who gets what, and I could describe the changes his oldest son, Giles, made when he took over the farm in 1699. But that’s not what you’re after, is it?”
“No,” I said. Tony was propped on an elbow, thumb-wrestling with Julian, but he was watching me really curiously, which is why he was losing. I said, “What about the other children? There were the two boys and two girls, only one of them died of the Black Plague.” That was a mistake—now everybody was looking at me. Well, in for a penny, like the Lovells. “I mean, that’s what I heard, anyway. I was just wondering about the other daughter, and about—I don’t know… if any of them could have gotten mixed up in Monmouth’s Rebellion or anything like that? Tony doesn’t think so, but I was wondering.”