I found no fellowship. I couldn’t see or hear a trace of them. A leather pot would be my only bedmate for the night. Kitty Gosse always had a good supply of greenish barley ale. “I find it beneficial,” she explained. Certainly, she slept on it and woke on it whenever I spent the night with her, and must have done the same when I wasn’t there. It dampened down the sorrows of her widowhood, she claimed, though if anything she was more dampened down by it when Fowler Gosse was still alive. She’s always had a loyal thirst, that woman. A single pot has usually been enough for me. I am reluctant to get drunk. I wasn’t born to it. But last night, after I failed to find my only neighbors, I chased off my own sorrows with enough ale, as we say, to drown a bag of puppies in. For whom should I stay sober, and for what?

The first two pots were cheering companions, though not as fortifying as I’d wanted. I think I expected to take extra courage from the ale, a courage greater than a plowman’s, anyway. I was hoping that my animal response would not be goat’s, or pig’s, or dog’s. I don’t need drink to make me lecherous, or obdurate, or even barking mad. No, I wanted to be as drunk as a bull and ready for a brawl, ready to be strong and reckless. Ready for today. I persevered, heroically, with widow Gosse’s ale. I do not think I much enjoyed the taste, or the leaden feeling in my arms and legs that it produced so rapidly, but I did enjoy the loosening of my anxieties. The next two pots of ale left me more spirited, as I’d hoped, but also more bemused and fanciful. I conjured up some company for myself. I invented visitors. They came up to the cottage door and knocked. I welcomed them, out loud, the fulsome host. But then, of late, I’ve done that often, when I haven’t had even a sniff of ale. A widower will first talk to himself, then — tired of that — he’ll have a noisy conversation with a candle flame or with the shifting shadows in his room, which he persuades himself are family.

Last night, the flames and shadows were those few men and women I most wanted to embrace. I imagined taking this reverie of friends down to the plow-scarred field at first light so that they could inspect my labors, and the evidence of my boldness and my disobedience. I lined them up, my seven sober witnesses. I stood them at the end of Kitty Gosse’s bed. Mr. Quill was soundless, shadowy. He was the bravest of us all. I’d prove to him that I could be daring too. The widow herself was there, of course. She always said she thought I was a cautious man. She counted me a civil owl, too quick to hoot, too scared to show my talons to the world. Well, she would see my talons soon and how I’d scratched a trench into the soil. Beside her, looking down at the back of his stubby, how- to hands, still avoiding my glance, was neighbor John. I’ll not forget him pulling back away from me the last time he came to my cottage door. I flush even to think of it. “Lord help you, Walt, if you’re deceiving us,” he’d said. “Lord help you, John, if you believe I would,” was my reply. Now he would see how defiant I could be on his behalf. Then came Master Kent, my milk cousin. Again he fixed me with the briefest show of eyes, as wide and white as eyes can be. They were asking, “Have you made the land ours again?” The Beldams nodded their encouragement. They trusted me. “You are the man who holds the sword,” the husband said. The woman pulled aside the velvet shawl and showed her wide-cheeked, thin-lipped face, her button nose, her belladonna eyes. Nothing ever frightened her. And finally my thrush was there, my Cecily, full-throated and alive again. I had forgotten what a plump and honeyed creature she could be and how light a voice she had. “Walter, Walter, make me proud of you,” she said.

I lifted my fifth pot and toasted all of them. We were the best of friends. I should have stopped the drinking there, while I had friends, while there was still some singing in the ale. Two further pots provided only tears — and anger too. The final pot was like a cudgel to the head. I would have dropped asleep at once if I hadn’t had to go outside to clear both my bladder and my gut. That sobered me a bit. The night air helped. I cannot say, though, that my head had cleared or that my feet were no longer tangled. But I was soon unruffled enough to listen once again, between the heaving spasms of my drunkenness, for any human sounds, other than the voices I’d just invented for myself and the usual mouthings of the stars. There were none, of course. Whatever courage I’d discovered briefly in drink had by now been almost entirely gagged and pissed into the once sweet-smelling garden, and I no longer could pretend to be the hero of the field. I was too wretched for a hero of the field. I could hardly stand, indeed, and either had to sleep among the ghosts of Fowler Gosse’s double-marigolds and thyme or take my spinning head back to its pillow in the room. Now my seven witnesses crowding at the far end of the bed were mocking me. Is that the only stand you’ll take against the Jordans and their sheep? they asked. Is that your fiercest riot and unrest, to put a pair of dumb beasts to the plow and mark your outrage on a field? Our enemies will quake at that, your knee-deep furrow and your knee-high ridge. Those armies will retreat at that. What next? Will you perhaps cut back some weeds or fix a fence to spread more fear into the hearts of those who do not wish our village to survive? Only a townsman could be so timid, Walter Thirsk, and still mistake it for rebellion.

Then I slept, though poundingly and fitfully. My dreams were punishing. I knocked on doors in them — but no matter what I did or said, no one would let me join them in their candlelight. Then my audience of friends and witnesses were standing at the bottom of the bed again, hard-faced. Mistress Beldam hurried forward, light-footed as a little deer, and pushed her velvet shawl into my mouth, to stop my cries of pain. She placed her tethering prong against my head above my ear. I could feel the metal in my dented skin. She hit it once. Then all the others took their turns in striking it home, double-handed, with the square and heavy stone that had killed Willowjack. Even Cecily. She was the cruelest of them all. She said, “It’s not enough. The ridge and furrow are not enough. You really haven’t done enough.”

What was soon clear, once I’d woken late this morning with a drumming head, not feeling brave at all, and gone outside to sober up on air again, was that the Beldams had spent the night in the best rooms of the manor. I was surprised by their audacity. I was not pleased, to tell the truth, though I suppose a couple as young and poor as them will have always wondered about the insides of a master’s house. If they’d ever hoped to sleep in airy space and any opulence, no matter how shabby, this might have been their only chance. I can imagine that they took Master Jordan’s bed, exactly as I had done the night before. I only chose the widow Gosse’s bed last night,rather than returning to the manor, because my evening there had seemed improper, afterward — though I am the manor-keeper for the moment. So if it was improper for me to wrap myself in Lucy Kent’s old riding cape and fall down in the cushioning of carpets, cloths and arrases, surely it was more so for these two passers-by. I’d thought that only bats would have it after me, at least until and if one of the masters came back in the spring. The Beldams are not bats.

I shamed myself by standing in the cottage lane as gray-faced and disapproving as a piece of slate and shaking my ale-sodden head at the mauvish scarf of smoke that was being woven from the lower chimney stack. They must have lit the oven in the scullery. I did not want to guess what they used for fuel, what furniture, what parchments, deeds or books. Or what it was they cooked for their first meals together since the dovecote fire. Or, come to that, what might have happened underneath her velvet shawl last night. I was resolved to hold my tongue. I’d keep away from them, and not only because I felt too ill for conversations of any kind. They were not my business anymore. If only I could find the courage and recover from my seven pots, then there were things to do for Cecily. I knew I hadn’t done enough for her.