Master Kent stands back with us, enjoying the noisy rush of gleaners, their concentrated, thorough scampering. Already many of my neighbors have gathered up a worthy gleaner’s sheaf; they hold it in their resting hands, a drooping horse’s tail of flaxen stalks, while their working hands peck and pick across the stub like hens. The master has tucked a barley ear under his hat’s remaining yellow sash, for good luck. He needs good luck. He knows my search for the woman failed. She did not seek shelter in his barn. He bashfully admits he waited for her there until “the hour was insensible,” meaning I suppose that when he finally retreated to his bed the casks of ale were empty. But he’s more troubled than can be accounted for by ale or even by the seeming disappearance of a woman who two days ago was unknown to him and only yesterday he ordered to be shorn. He was embarrassed and at first a little shamed this morning, as he rode past the pillory at a polite distance, he reports, to be yowled at so stridently and manically and with such uncivil language by the younger of the two fastened men. No, he will not repeat the words on such (again) a “noble day”: “It was as if I were the felon, in some way. The man’s a ruffian, no doubt of it. I am a callous killer, it seems, and worse. He says he’ll be revenged, and curses me. He shouted, ‘Murder, Murder!’ as I passed.” The father did not even lift his head, and that in some way was an even heavier rebuke, he says.
It’s just as well, I suppose, that I haven’t yet succeeded in alleviating the short one’s punishment by dragging up a log or stone for him to stand on. The men are proving insolent. But Master Kent can shrug off their insults. Any doubt he’s had that they were rogues deserving of the pillory has been rudely shouted away. No, something weightier is troubling him this morning, something weightier even than the recent and costly loss of his stable and his doves. He has not looked so sunken and reduced since the day his wife, Lucy, and their infant girl both died in childbirth. I raise my eyebrows and tip my head to let him know he’s set me wondering and that I am concerned for him.
“Come find me in my chambers, Walt, when Mr. Earle dismisses you this evening,” he says, using the familiar form of my name, unusually. “There are some matters to be shared.” He puts a single finger to his lips. He trusts me to stay silent.
Mr. Quill is not a man who can move quickly. He’s more the hedgehog than the fox. He’s careful and he’s leisurely. He doesn’t mean to miss a thing. But his slow company is satisfying. I am required to take my time and look at everything anew. The ridge and furrow of our daily lives become less commonplace in the shadow of his scrutiny.
“Where will you take me first?” he asks, and the question itself confers on me some pleasing status and authority. I am grateful for his thoughtfulness.
“We inspect The Bottom, then ascend,” I suggest, smiling to myself, for The Bottom is the dank depression which we know too as Turd and Turf. It’s marshland, lower even than the brook, and so we count it safe to use not only as a charnel place for carcasses and skeletons and any animal too sick in death to be eaten but also as our open privy. It drains into itself, its own wet turf. The wooden closed latrines that we have built closer to the dwellings are more convenient, especially in the middle of the night and during winter, but many of us — though mainly men — prefer to empty bowels where Nature will take care of it, remove the stench as soon as it’s produced. Our closed latrines hang on to smell, even when the gong farmer — we take our weekly turns at being him — pegs up his nose, wraps up his mouth, picks up his shovel and barrows it away. You cannot shovel up a smell. You’ll never see a barrow-load of smell.
As we arrive at Turd and Turf, I make our progress as noisy as I can and raise my voice, letting it carry on the echo. Anyone who has preceded us will be glad of some warning, especially as I have a recent stranger at my elbow who might not welcome the entertainment of chancing on a working arse. But I do not expect to discover anybody here, even though it is a place where on normal days there are many tasks to carry out other than squatting with a furrowed brow and hoping for some solitude. There’re rushes to collect for lights, ferns to pull for litter, clay to dig for bricks, peat and turves to cut for winter fuel and roofs. Today, though, I can account for all of us — well, all of us that I can name; not Mistress Beldam, though I live in hopes for her. They’re gleaning barley until noon, and then will be gathered on the threshing floors and barn as late as dusk today and every day into the hungry months until the job is done. No, Mr. Quill and I will have the margins and the commons to ourselves.
The path is overgrown here, and purposely neglected. It is portcullised by ivy vines, providing some seclusion for its visitors. I open up a gap for him until we’re standing at the edges of The Bottom, our feet in mud from last night’s rain but — I check — nothing less desirable. The marsh, where it’s not shaded by curtains of beech and oak, is steaming, its vapors thickened and shaped by sunbeams. The air is unusually stewed and balmy today. If it wasn’t for the flat blue sky, troubled only by the white pulses of a lifting mist, it could seem that thunderstorms are on their way. Otherwise, everything’s familiar: the dome of cattle bones, the usual ruminating pigs feasting on unhealthy pannage, the swollen carcass of another of their kind that’s died from cysts, the sinking, timbered path we use to barrow out our turves, the glint of oily water where the quagmire is deepest and the squelch is loudest, the coppiced hedge of goat-willows from which we take our sallow poles and behind which any man in need of privacy might clutch his knees and murmur to himself without an audience. There is no sign of Mistress Beldam here.
Mr. Quill is too delighted by our tour to notice anything that does not bring him pleasure. The smell is worse than usual but, if he is aware of it, it does not bother him. He mistakes it for the unaffected countryside. He does not remark on the bones even, with their regiments of flies. He only says it is a peaceful and secluded place and “humbling” in its beauty. He is blind to all the knot and thorn of living here. He takes hold of my arm in his excitement. He’s pointing at the far side of the clearing and a swathe of longpurples, tall and at their strident best, as are the birds today, despite the nets that we have set for them. “Listen to them juking,” he says. He holds a finger up and cocks his head. A finch commands him Pay Your Rent. A thrush complains of Tax Tax Tax.
I am a little shamed by Mr. Quill, in truth. I don’t wish to beat a drum, but there is something of myself in him, something that is being lost. I remember well my first encounter with The Bottom soon after my arrival here as Master Kent’s man. It was, I have to say, a privy trip. And it was spring. The longpurples had hardly come to blade. But there were tall-necked cowslips nodding on the banks and king-cups, fenny celandines and irises in the mire. The trees were imping with infant leaves that seemed as attentive and pert as mice ears. So I was struck and “humbled” by the beauty too, and only later by the carnal stench. I was an innocent. In that first season I tumbled into love with everything I saw. Each dawn was like a genesis; the light ascends and with the light comes life. I wanted to immerse myself in it, to implicate myself in land, to contribute to fields. What greater purpose could there be? How could I better spend my days? Nothing I had seen before had made me happier. I felt more like an angel than a beast.
My new neighbors were amused by me, of course, my callow eagerness. For them an iris bulb was pig fodder; celandines were not a thing of beauty but a gargle for an irritated throat; and cowslips were better gathered, boiled and drunk against the palsy than stared at in the open privy.