“Where have we buried ourselves?” Master Kent once asked in that first year. “Will nobody talk with me about anything but the fattening of grain and hogs?”
“Beer and bacon’s all that matters here,” I said, sighing in agreement, because in those early days I feared that only those who had been cradled in this place could endure its agonies. But once I found my Cecily and put a hand to husbandry myself, I soon turned into one of them, a beer and bacon man who knew the proper value of an iris bulb. It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow, is inflexible and stern. It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait. There’s not a season set aside for pondering and reveries. It will not let us hesitate or rest; it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it. It has no time to listen to our song. It only asks us not to tire in our hard work. It wants to see us leathery, our necks and forearms burned as black as chimney oak; it wants to leave us thinned and sinewy from work. It taxes us from dawn to dusk, and torments us at night; that is the taxing that the thrush complains about. Our great task each and every year is to defend ourselves against hunger and defeat with implements and tools. The clamor deafens us. But that is how we have to live our lives.
So it is an affecting experience this morning — and, I’m happy to discover, more valuable than gleaning — to be reminded of my younger self by Mr. Quill’s good humor. “How should I name this place?” he asks, as we part the ivy vines again and climb to higher ground.
“No name,” I say. “A marsh. A marsh. What should we call a marsh? We’re dull. We have our names for animals but, no, not for the marsh.” I prefer not to have him spoil his charts with The Bottom, or Turd and Turf, or even the Charnel House.
“The Blossom Marsh, perhaps,” he says.
“Yes, scratch that down.”
We continue at our snail-like pace, beating the bounds of the village. I lead Mr. Quill along the same route we follow every spring as a community, when we take annual stock of what we have in hand and what we hope to have in bud or shoot. That’s when we bump our children’s heads against the boundary stones, so that they’ll not forget where they and all of us belong, and we challenge them to eat the grass they’re kneeling on and taste the fodder with the mouths of cattle. Normally this would be our day for reconciling grievances but in company and in the open air, where grievances cannot be aired except with moderation and a placid voice. I can predict already what will be grouched about next year, if next year ever comes. One of the Higgs women, let’s say, will want her family stints increased. Now that they have another mouth to feed at home, she’ll feel they should be granted rights to common graze a further pig or, failing that, some extra geese. Thomas Rogers’s mother will complain that the laystalls where we throw our cooking waste for composting are too close to her cottage; she has to suffer all our kitchen smells and endure everybody’s flies. “We have to put up with your piping son,” we’ll say. An older man as usual will repeat the enduring grumble — with not as easy a voice as he supposes — that the Derby twins for all their youth and energy are too often late to field and then too early to depart. But this coming spring there will not be the usual coo-coo-coo about the master’s thieving doves: “They take our grain; he takes their eggs; we see no benefit.”
Today this beating of the bounds is not a stock-taking and I will not be forcing Mr. Quill onto the ground to bump his head against our boundary stones or require him to chew on grass. He does not see the parish with the dutiful eyes of a laborer or cottager. He does not want to hear our grievances or have me list the details of our working lives. He does not note that someone needs to drag the tangleweed off our pond if we hope to tempt some mallard to our traps, or what grand oak is now so frail and honeycombed that over winter it has lost its crown and bared its once proud head in preparation for our axes, or which land we ought to set aside next year for turbary and which we ought to save, so that the peat and turf can fatten and recuperate, or where the best reeds are for our thatching, or where the best supply of wood for firing can be found, or what walls and fences need attending to and which of us might do that job the best.
He does want, though, to stand in his yellow trim of ribbons and mark the detail and the beauty of each view. He’s keen for me to name the plants. He makes a note of them and sometimes plucks a leaf or flower for pressing in his book, his personal “Natural History.” It seems that listing them is his way of knowing them. I can easily put a name to all the herbs we discover on our way: the herbs for medicines, the herbs intended only for our beasts, the killing herbs, the devil’s herbs, the herbs reserved for those already dead, the drunkard’s herbs, the herbs with magic properties. I even name some of the weeds for him, though sometimes I invent the words. There ought to be a plant called purgatory. And another one called fletch. I point out prickly eringes, whose roots, he ought to know, can be prepared into a love potion. I show him burdock leaves, for wrapping butter in. And almond leaves for keeping moths away from clothes. He thinks I am the wisest man.
I suspect he is unimpressed by our local place-names, however. He’d like me to put bright names to them, so that he can mark them down in ink, together with their measured angles and their shapes. But they’re only workaday. “East Field,” I tell him. “West Field, South Field. John Carr’s flax garth. The Higgses’ goose pen. Hazel Wood. The Turbary. The Warren.” We give directions in our titles, I explain, or we name a family, or we say what’s growing there. We are plain and do not try to complicate our lives.
“I have a pair of pigs called George and Gorge,” I say finally. “And Mr. Kent calls his horse Willowjack, even though she’s a mare, a Jill and not a Jack.” Those are the best names I can offer him. We do not even have a title for the village. It is just The Village. And it’s surrounded by The Land, I add. Even Master Kent’s freeholds and muniments do not provide a name. We’re written down only as The Jordan Estate or The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman. “He is deceased.”
“That is unusual,” Mr. Quill agrees, but does not mark it down. Instead, for once and with evident effort, he frowns away the smile from his face and, first checking that we are not observed, takes me by the arm. “I have a heavy confidence,” he says, “which Master Kent is keen that I should share with you but with no other. There is another gentleman … we are awaiting him … another Jordan, actually, who has his claims upon”—Mr. Quill makes a circle with his arm, beating our bounds with a single gesture—“all this.”
And here at last I start to understand my master’s evident distress. Old Edmund Jordan and his wife produced a daughter, Lucy, but not a son. So when her father died soon after Lucy married Master Kent, the manor and the property was her sole inheritance, which by legal document was to be divided equally on her death among her male heirs by blood, “her envisaged sons,” Mr. Quill explains.
“There are no sons,” I say. “She died in childbirth only this spring, but even that child was a girl … Master Kent is Mistress Lucy’s single heir.”
“Not so. He is not blood. A husband is not blood. There is a cousin, though. Also Edmund Jordan. Those changes Master Kent proposes and which he has employed me to mark down are not his own. You cannot think he wishes them. Those sheep, these charts which I prepare, indeed, are demanded by the cousin. And he arrives today to make good what he counts as his entitlement.”
We have regained the higher ground before the impact of this news sinks in. The gleaning field is already empty. Today it is difficult for me not to see heavy meaning in its emptiness. There is no hint of green; not even Lizzie Carr’s cloth crown remains. The acres seem to undulate and fall so endlessly and with such monotony of harvesting and tillage, such space and depth, that any bottom to them is lost not in the clouds or mist but in the duskiness of distance. What little pickings may be left are given over now to our cows and uninvited birds. Wild pigeons pause and jerk, full of fussy self-esteem and grain. I try to people it but I can hear only the weird and phantom bleats of sheep.