It is an odd experience, unnerving in its way, to look down on our woods, our commons and our fields at once, to see them side by side, or separated only by the thickness of my thumb, when I have never seen them on the ground with such adjacency. Here the sap-green-painted fallow is seemingly attached by the madly dark blue stitching of a ridgetop copse to the gray-cum-yellow stubble of our barley field. They look like neighbors, exchanging glances through the trees. I’ve walked that thickness-of-my-thumb a thousand times. It’s easy going till you reach the ridge. The fallow field has a subtle slope, so it drains well but keeps its soil. There’s seldom any mud. But there are pebble-stones to set your feet against. You have to take the cow track at the ridge and go downhill a little with the copse thickening on your right until you find another rise, and there an open gap which lets you pass along a lane of thorns into the field where now, this afternoon, you’ll find our cattle gleaning grain. This is the point, at the brimming of the trees, where neither field can be seen. You’re too closed in. Indeed,there’s nowhere on the walk — which takes a little while and some exertion — where both the fallow and the barley field can be looked upon at once. You’d have to climb a tree for that. Or be a bird.
So Mr. Quill’s true account of here and now is not as honest as he hopes. He’s colored and he’s flattened us. No shadows and no shade. We are too mauve and blue; he’s planted longpurples everywhere. There are no climbs or slopes. The land is effortless: a lie. He hasn’t captured time: how long a walk might take; how long a piece of work might take; how long the seasons or the nights must last. No man has ever seen this view. But it is beautiful, nevertheless. And so, come to that, although it’s hard to acknowledge it, is Mr. Quill’s map of the sheep fields that are looming over us. This chart is even busier with color, and more patterned to the eye. Its patchwork is much tidier. The fields are smaller, broken up and edged. The dark of the wood, with its clustered symbols showing trees, has almost disappeared. I cannot find an eye or ear. The brawny-headed man has lost his face.
“What do you make of these?” asks Mr. Quill. I take his question as a test. I do not want to say his paintings aren’t as honest as he thinks. But it isn’t hard for me to praise them fulsomely for what they are as pretty things, a kind of vision of the world — our little world, in fact — that I have never seen before and which has left me moved and oddly breathless. With his help these colored papers, unmarked as yet with any names or guides, make sense to me at last. They complicate to simplify. I have translated them. I can tell you where we are on them. I could stub my finger on the spot where I am standing now. But still I’m left to wonder where we’ll be on them in days and years to come. And so my breathlessness. There’s something in these shapes and lines, in these casual, undirected blues and greens, that, for all their liveliness, seems desolate.
9
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. The meaning of those shawls and sashes, not to mention Master Jordan’s too easygoing cousin’s lies, would reveal itself in time no doubt, and after thorough questioning, beginning with this mystifying child.
As I imagine it, the men will have held Lizzie Carr by her irresistible plaits — like her uncles will have done a thousand times before, like I have done myself. They would have been more playful than spiteful, at first, and meant only to prevent her skipping off. Why was she in the lane at all, they’d want to know. Hadn’t she been instructed quite clearly by Master Jordan that nobody must stray today beyond the barn? And, more to the point, how was it that a common little girl like her was sporting such a fine and pretty dressing on her head? When she told the truth, that Master Kent had given it to her, and that she was the Queen for one whole year, they were bound to doubt her word, tighten their great hands round her willow arm, and march her off to answer more practiced and judicial questions in Master Jordan’s presence.
What is not yet clear — at least not clear to me because it seems that, for the moment, I am not included in the village circles — is how the two women became involved. Anne Rogers is the fiery sort, I know. It’s never wise to disagree with her, even if you’re family. And Kitty Gosse is mulish when she wants to be. If they were working at the entry of the barn, in plain sight of the lane, and witnessed Lizzie being taken off by those three coarse and stony men, who only this morning were party to the prophecy that we should expect to see a neighbor hanging from an oak by sundown—“God bless you all, and God help one of you,” he’d said — I can’t imagine them standing aside. I can imagine, though, a tug of war between the women and the men, with this year’s Gleaning Queen the scrap of flesh they were fighting for. The women wouldn’t have stood a chance. They’d have been outnumbered, for a start; outmuscled too. But it might have taken some kicking and some bruising before they admitted defeat and allowed themselves to be dragged away like sows to face the consequences of their meddling.