So I am satisfied that this is the woman’s shawl. I have to confess I try to sleep with it and her. I try to summon her to me by whispering into her velvet pelt. I stroke myself with it and her. I press it close up to my nose and nuzzle her. Her recovering hair would feel like this, I think. And can I say I take some strength from her? For while these lengthy hours pass, while I am sunk into these lonely furrows of the night, I think I find or dream or have delivered to me by the spirits of the shawl a sense of what I ought to do before King Edmund, as Mr. Quill and I once christened him, vassals me entirely. I wake to a chilling clarity, as if my body has been swept with frost. Frost and furrows. That’s the prompt. I know my duty now. I have to put the earth to plow. The time has come to put the earth to plow, no matter what the Jordans say. The frost will finish what the plow begins. Winter will provide the spring.

I am too cold and clear to sleep a moment more. So I stand up naked from my bed, pull on my boots and the abandoned Jordan smock for warmth, wrap myself inside the Beldam shawl and make my way outside. I mean, I think, to lay a trap for her. Or at least to test if she is living still, if she is walking out at night to tend her man and see on whom else she might exact continuing revenge for her father’s death. I have to say the thought of that, the thought of her out in the night with a piece of stone gripped in one hand as her mallet and a spike of metal in the other, plus the image that I already have of Mistress Beldam luring Mr. Quill into the woods and the sudden sweeping of her length of wood, the bloody compost of the forest floor, makes me as nervous of the dark as any foolish townsman ever was.

THE SKY IS CLEAR BUT IT IS TOO EARLY for the moon to have fully crested the trees. I am determined to go down to the pillory. I’ll hang the shawl close to the husband, but beyond his reach. She’ll not miss it if she comes. Even in the flattest darkness its silver threads will glint and give away its place. But now that I am shivering outdoors and reminded by the deep-brewed quiet how neighborless I am, I lose my nerve. I am not ready yet to face the husband. I don’t want to chance the black and empty lanes tonight. So I only spread the velvet shawl out on the stone bench in the manor porch, exactly where her father has been spread, though I don’t believe Mistress Beldam knows that detail. I touch its nap. I say farewell. I do not think that she will come at once.

I suppose she must have come at once. Because I’ve hardly regained Master Jordan’s bed and laid my still-bruised head along the pillow of my arms, too tense and worried for sudden sleep, when I catch sounds that must be animal. The weather and the trees are random in their calls and songs. They are not rhythmic but unarranged and stray. These padding feet and footsteps are spaced and patterned. What I can hear is something on the outside of the house, something careful, something delicate and small. I do not dare to move inside my bed. I’ll give away my sleeping place. The manor boards are loose and squeakier than mice. But by the time I’ve reached cautiously across the bed to pick up a candle holder in case I need to defend myself, should I need to hold her off, should I need to capture her, the sounds or footsteps have retired. The manor house is mine alone again. And finally I dare to sleep, though I am nervous what I’ll dream or what I’ll find when I wake up.

At dawn, I find the velvet shawl has gone. I cannot tell what that means to me because I do not know myself. Of course, it shows the woman is alive, unless some fox or badger has a taste for velvet shawls. But equally it indicates the chilling, thrilling probability that while the world around her sleeps, Mistress Beldam has been roaming like a living ghost throughout our lanes and corridors. She never sleeps. She’s haunting us. She is patrolling every part of us. And now that all my neighbors have departed, and Mr. Quill, perhaps, is sleeping with the cadavers, I am the only one who’s left for her. Last evening she must have seen my coming home, my shoulders down. She will have seen where I decided to sleep. Last night, I must suppose, she will have watched the manor house and seen me standing, fearful as a child, at the porch door, dressed in Master Jordan’s embroidered smock, every bit the gentleman, and wrapped in the beyond-her-station shawl. She will have seen me spread out her shawl on the stone porch bench. And when I closed the door on her I cannot think it rested in its place for any longer than a breath. She has been cold these last few nights. She has her purple velvet back again.

This is not what I expected when I agreed at Master Kent’s prompting to serve as a Jordan man. I thought that though I would be troubled by my compromise, I would nevertheless find it comfortable to pass a little extra time in his employ among the places I have known and loved, indeed among the places where I have been known and loved myself. It would be a luxury, in fact. I’d have some privacy in which to grieve. Some autumn peace. But, standing here this morning in the deep shade of the manor porch, looking down onto the bench’s cold and naked stone, I feel nothing but alarm, the rising, clenching fear of death. I was a fool to stay behind. I’ve had my chances to escape. I should have run down yesterday from Clover Hill and joined the pageant on its way to town. Perhaps, I should have left the village with the Carrs the other afternoon or with any other neighbors who could tolerate my company. Here’s the truth of it: I should have got out of here as soon as Cecily died. I never could prove brave or blond enough to stay.

It’s tempting even now to pack up and leave at once. I’m not indentured to this place, after all. I have no witnesses who’ll care if I depart ahead of time. I’ve given Master Jordan my reluctant nod. But we hardly touched when we shook hands on it. My fingers only clacked against his rings. In the end it’s not the nod or the clacking that are bound to keep me here. It’s Master Kent’s wide-stretched eyes of yesterday, and what I came to understand last night that they mean to me, what it is I have to do, what I should start, before I go, the folds and trenches I must leave behind. And so I dress, and arm myself with the old short sword with which the first Edmund Jordan is reputed to have felled a cattle thief more than thirty years ago and which, from the brown-stained point, I suspect has been used again more recently. Then I search the manor house for the master’s chain of mostly unused keys. Mistress Beldam’s husband need not serve his sentence out, so long as he agrees to help me with the plow.

I can only guess what he’s thinking as I approach the pillory. I know that he will recognize at once how uneasy and shamefaced I am. There is no hiding it. My body feels as tense and knotted as a yew. I want to smile at him, to show I mean him well and that the blood-tipped sword I’m carrying need not be a cause for alarm, so long as he does not make it so himself. But the muscles in my face are not relaxed enough. My smile of greeting is fixed and artificial. I’m feeling sick to the stomach, actually. With apprehension, I suppose. But at least I’ve had a comfortable bed for the night and nearly enough sleep and I am thinking clearly. I know how I intend to spend the day. I cannot do it on my own.

If he is feeling any fear of me, my frozen face, the sword, my troubled bustle of intent, he does not have the strength to show it. I haven’t thought how weakened he will be from staying still and doing nothing for so many days. We thought his and his father-in-law’s punishment was mild when we sent them to the pillory for only seven days. That and the snapping of their bows, the clipping of their heads. “Count yourselves as fortunate,” they were told. In other places, less hospitable than here, they might have expected a beating and a hanging. But, now that I am looking at him in the light — our past encounters have been largely in the dark — I can see how summer has sapped out of him, how he has paled, how he’s hanging drily from the cross of wood. His arms were thick and oaky when they cuffed him there. I cannot say that they have become thin exactly, but they are certainly not muscular. They’re drained of blood and energy. His wrists and throat are still bruised purple from when he has attempted to pull himself free. His eyes are hollowed out, from lack of proper sleep,perhaps. His lips are crusted; orange funguses, dry cracks. And his neck is swollen with insect bites and red with sores where he’s tried to itch them on the wood.