“I thank you, Walt,” he says, taking my hand. We are old friends again. “I cannot say how glad I was to see your face today. Despite your bruises. I feared you would have fled like everybody else. I’d not have blamed you if you had. I’ve been tempted to take flight myself. I’ve even thought to take a light to it, my home, and finish off what was begun in my dovecote and my lofts. Rather than be witness to …” He does not want to list the changes that will come. “These are sad and hasty times. In what … five days, six days? … the village has been … lost to me. It has been lost to all of us.”
Nevertheless Master Kent has managed, he reports, to salvage at least some advantage from the exodus. As soon as his cousin learned the village was cleared out, dispersed and chivvied by alarm, as Master Jordan always must have intended, his interest in the captives and in any talk of sorcery waned quite suddenly. A triumphant stillness flooded through the manor house. Any mention of Mr. Earle, my Mr. Quill, was rewarded only with a yawn. Mistress Beldam didn’t matter anymore. Alchemy and sorcery were trifling affairs compared to the Land of Progress he proposed.
“And so I risked an intercession on behalf of little Lizzie and the women,” says Master Kent. “If my cousin counted their undoubted sins — their foolishness, let’s say — a minor matter, surely he could end their punishments. It would be kind and wise of him, and honorable, of course — the man loves honor almost as much as he worships wool — to end their punishments.”
“You do not mean that I should end their suffering at once?” the cousin teased. “Is it your plea that I must let them meet their Maker straight away? Can I use faggots from your log pile for their fire?”
“I propose you let them meet their Maker in their own good time, and for the moment let them walk afar, untethered.”
“Walk afar as sorcerers and sinners?” Master Jordan was amused by his older cousin’s unproductive tenderness.
“No, only walk afar as country folk who have been sundered from their families, and will do nothing worse than follow them, and never trouble you again. Nor trouble me … my conscience, that’s to say.”
“We would not want your conscience to be bruised or even tested, cousin Charles.”
And that is what Edmund Jordan has consented to — although he clearly wants to number me among the many forfeits Master Kent has to pay. If I agree to stay behind and watch over his land until the sheep have taken charge and tainted our earth with their yellow splashes, then he’ll agree to “untether the witches.” “But they’ll not step free on the estate of Edmund Jordan the Younger,” he says. His lands are closed forever to Rogerses, Gosses and Carrs. “Their greatest sorcery has been to make the clock stand still. Their mischief is to shade my path. I’ll not pardon them for that.” So the girl and the two women will be escorted off in custody and released only the moment they reach the marketplace, three days away. Master Kent will keep them company to make sure his cousin honors his word. “It is my wish to witness it,” he says. “To see that widow, daughter, wife walk freely in the free streets of a town. But, for myself, I cannot think that I will ever come back to this place.”
Now he has me in his arms, and we are almost toppling onto the apple-strewn ground beneath the horses hoofs. Any hawk looking down on the orchard’s cloistered square, hoping for the titbit of a beetle or a mouse, would see a patterned canopy of trees, line on line, the orchard’s melancholy solitude, the jewelry of leaves. It would see the backs of horses, the russet, apple-dotted grass, the saltire of two crossing paths worn smooth by centuries of feet, and two gray heads, swirling in a lover’s dance, like blown seed husks caught up in an impish and exacting wind and with no telling when or where they’ll come to ground again.
13
I am relieved when the sidemen bring out the luggage and start to prepare for the journey. I am allowed to stand aside and be ignored. The sidemen do not want to meet my eye. I like to think they are ashamed, or even a little fearful of me. Perhaps they’ve heard I am their master’s latest chosen man, his eyes and ears, his watchman and custodian. They’ll be as glad to ride away from me as I will be to see their errant backs retreating from the manor house.
The final piece of luggage that they bring is the groom himself. He’s carried in a matting litter with not much care. I cannot see his face or any of his wounds until he’s helped to stand and lifted bodily onto the smallest and the least skittish of his mounts, a gelding with a mottled rump and flanks. The damage has been dressed, but his head and hair are caked in blood, and I can tell by how he holds himself, as shivered as a moth, that every movement inflicts pain on him. Three days of riding on rough ground, I think, and he will be either a mad man or a dead man. His little horse, if he survives my apples, will have requital then for every whip and switch the groom has ever laid on him. I would step forward for a closer view. I want to look the groom in the eye. I suppose I want him to see the bruises on my own face, of which he is to some extent the cause. But I have hardly taken one step forward when the door in the manor porch opens and the prisoners come out, in a line, and tied at wrist and waist. I think I’m seen at once by Kitty Gosse, although the sun is in her eyes and I am hidden in the wedge of shade. Her face contorts, although that might be pain and not the sight of me. Then Anne Rogers and the Gleaning Queen appear, their hands crossed on their aprons, their shoulders down like penitents.
I hesitate. I ought to hurry across the yard and comfort them. I might even give them hope. I would not want them to travel out before first understanding that soon, thanks to Master Kent’s interventions, for which I am to some extent the ransom price, they will be freed, to walk afar, untethered, in another place. But I’m afraid, and I’m too shocked by them to move. It’s not that they are wounded like the groom, not visibly, at least. It’s just that they are not the women I have known. And Lizzie Carr is not the girl. She still wears her green sash, surprisingly. She has it tied round her throat. It’s dirty now, I see, and torn. It might be bloody, in fact. But I am reminded briefly of how she once appeared, that little nervous scrap, exhorted by my master to step out of the chair of hands provided by her father and her uncle John and find a single grain, “just one. Then we will cheer. And you will be our Queen for one whole year.” She’d been the sweetest and the yellowest that ancient day. I’ll not forget her blowing on the grains to winnow off the flake and how the barley pearls were weighty on her palm. But now she is like chaff herself. A sneeze could lift her up and take her off. She’s hollowed out and terrified. What can it mean to her that she is being fastened to the saddle of a horse? What can it mean to Kitty Gosse and her friend Anne, the piper’s mother, who cannot know her son has abandoned her and taken all the other Rogerses with him, that the only neighbor here today is Walter Thirsk, who’s skulking in the shadows with a bruise across his face?