I must have been expecting to experience again what has been beyond forgetting all these years: the dancing lights and merriment that John Carr and I encountered when we first tasted fairy caps, the melting trails that haloed everything. We were like sun-drenched butterflies and then we were like moon-struck moths. It was a blissful afternoon and night. I’ve not regretted it. What I hoped for most was the enormous fearlessness I’d felt, beneath that long-lost moon that went from pale to blue to red. But what came first this morning, before any melting haloes or oblivion, was a stretch of paralyzing dread. I feared that what I’d eaten were not fairy caps at all, but something much more poisonous and wrathful. I was alarmed. And with good cause. I hadn’t even been born, let alone become a villager, when it happened, but I have heard the tale so many times: one of the Kips’ great grandmothers picked by mistake some red-top toadstools thinking they were edible. She baked them with a rabbit she had snared. She poisoned both her husband and a son. She would have died herself except, as was the habit in those days, the men dined first; the women had their suppers cold.

I could not help but think this morning of the dying Kips and how they would have felt at first, like me, heavy and unsteady, sick. And how quickly — certainly before their pie had gone quite cold enough for the woman to come to table — they would have begun to cry out with the pain. Already I had stomach cramps, as if I’d eaten palsied meat and it was sitting in my gut just biding time. Just killing time, perhaps, before it started killing me. My time was up. Certainly the fairy caps were keen to keep me on the ground. They would prefer it if I sank into the grass, if I became as rooted to the soil as them. Though stand I must. If I wanted to survive the day, I had to stand and rest my arms against the flat trunk of a beech so that my stomach could heave enough — yet again — to bring up these mushrooms. Yet, no matter what I tried to do, my body was both too slow and too fast to offer any balance when I attempted to get to my feet. The fairy caps would have their wish granted unless I could reclaim all the bones in my legs and arms, which were as spongy as the mushrooms themselves; I lay out flat again, spread myself across the ground, and waited to sleep or die or send down roots and put out leaves. But at last I succeeded in raising myself high enough off the ground to rest on my arms and knees, like the commonest and most wretched of beasts. I gagged and coughed but nothing came, except a skein of spittle and the overwhelming stink of barley ale. And then I flattened out again.

I was lucky, though. I must have been. I have survived to tell the tale, although there’s not much of a tale to tell. Most of the day is robbed from me. Anything could have happened. What might not have happened? I’m aching, though. Whatever it is I’ve done was strenuous. What I recall is hugging animals, and finding gorgeous horrors on the grinning bark of trees, and endless tumbling. Everything was newborn and familiar. My heart beats wildly at the memory. One picture haunts me. I was pinioned to the ground, just weighted to the ground, a seed, expecting only to be wheat and wanting only to be wheat and hoping only for the spring. The plow was heading for my back. Its blade was close. Its blade would bury me. I heard the rattle of the beam and the gritty churning of the furrow. That was the worst and best of it.

After that the fairy caps began to let me go. I had a twin, a standing twin, who came to rescue me. This other one who had my face, who looked like me and smelled like me and sounded like me, had got me by my shoulders and I was being pulled. I was being gleaned by him. My head came up and back. My bones solidified at last. My sudden twin put me on my feet and made me sensible again. Then, as far as I remember it, I walked the bounds once more toward midday, saying my farewells and making good, freeing any animal that was still tethered or penned, closing all the cottage doors, bolting every shed and barn, shutting gates. I stood and stared across each field, recalling in my reverie how tended and how tilled our years had been, how finely grained our lives. I know I passed the church ground where we never had a church and never will. I know I spent some moments standing on the turf where Cecily still rests, and Lucy Kent as well. My feet were heavy, not with soil, but with a leaden weariness. I think I felt like oxen might feel, if they weren’t so innocent. Yoked to the troubles of the world. But then again, in parallel perhaps, I had a sense that I was flying for a while. At least, I seemed to see our land as Mr. Quill has seen it with his brushes and his pens, his charcoal and his paints — just patterns and patchworks, as beautiful as embroidered cloth, not real in any way, but far below and not quite reachable. Time and distance seemed to play no part. Color was the master. And then I was most like a dove, its cote destroyed by fire, circling in plumes of smoke, without the prospect of a roof at night.

But now my quest, my heady pilgrimage, my madcap, stupored odyssey, is either coming to its end or resuming on a calmer note, and I am standing in the courtyard of the manor house alone. I cannot tell you how it came about. I don’t recall the final steps I must have taken to arrive, or how long I have been standing within a few paces of the porch, just staring, childlike, at the door, but I am here and it is me. I’ve never been this certain of a truth or more determined to proceed. Someone has packed two bags for me — that sudden twin, perhaps. I can’t remember doing it myself. But I see that I have been equipped with everything a man who travels on his own two feet through empty lands must have with him. There’s water in a leather pouch. There’s dried bacon, biscuit, cheese. There is my brimless working cap, my jerkin and my rain cape. I see the silver spoon, our wedding gift, tucked into one of Cecily’s handkerchiefs. Someone has pulled off my thin shoes and given me my walking boots. I have a sturdy stick. My arms are folded at my back like wings. I swear that they feel feathery.

16

HAT STRIKES ME IN THE MANOR HOUSE is how the smell has altered from when I slept here two nights ago. It hasn’t smelled like this for many months, not since Lady Lucy died. I will not say the odor is less manly, although of course this has been, all too recently, the lodging of at least six men apart from Master Kent. Master Jordan himself brought in the odors of a pomander and his casting bottle, so there was a hint, in his room at least, of what is womanly and superior. But the manor smells more homely this afternoon. There is the scent of family, of cooking for a family. Even from the hallway by the great front door I can smell fresh bread and a cooling grate, and other odors that belong to washing and to roasted meat, other odors that don’t belong to recent times. Mistress Beldam has evidently marked the liberation and return of her husband by setting up home in our finest premises and helping herself to the manor’s storeroom and its larder. She has been loving him.

The downstairs parlor door beyond which Master Kent used to sleep is closed. I hesitate. I am expecting to find them on the other side, despite the silence of the room, despite the stillness of the house. My instant image has the husband sitting on a bench, naked, wrapped up in her velvet shawl. The clothes he wore and muddied at the pillory and labored in yesterday at the back end of our plow are freshly washed and draped at his side; bitter with lye, they are drying at a dancing, open fire. The trestle table there — the oaken table where I last took breakfast, with both the masters on the morning of their departure — is provisioned for eating. Three places have been set. I am anticipated there. The bread, still warm, is cut in wedges. A steaming pot contains a meaty stew … and Mistress Beldam holds the wooden serving spoon. Well, what I’m seeing, what in fact I’m hoping for, is the domestic scene that everybody wants to discover when finally they’re home: the meal, the woman and the fire.