The Ear in the Sheath

Friday, June 14, 1816

“She has not been out since November,” Gideon said. “She is fifteen and fat, and she has a mouth like a feather bed. Arabella rode her to church. I cannot offer you anything quieter unless it is the donkey that draws the lawn roller.”

“I asked for quiet.” His wife stood on the mounting block in the stable yard and looked the bay mare over. “I have ridden my father’s cob to sick calls since I was twelve, Duke. I shall not fall off. I only cannot promise to look well.”

“What is her name?” she added, gathering her skirt.

“Damson.”

“Then Damson and I will suit. We are neither of us in our first season.”

She settled into Arabella’s saddle with more ease than she had claimed, and found the stirrup for herself. She wore the grey cloak and a plain black hat tied on with a ribbon. He checked the girth, because he had never in his life let anyone ride out without doing it. That put his hand an inch from her boot. He took it away.

She had asked him yesterday, across the mutton. He had told Preece, in front of the children, that he meant to begin riding the farms. She had put down her fork and said, “May I come? I have read two books about this valley, your father’s rents and my father’s rain. I should like to see whether the fields agree with them.”

He had said yes before he had thought about it. He was not sure that he would have said anything else if he had thought.

His own horse was the black gelding that had carried him through most of Spain and half of one day in Belgium. Corporal had done nothing since August but eat. He blew out his ribs against the girth and looked insulted.

Preece was waiting at the arch on his cob, with his hat already in his hand.

“Which way, Your Grace?”

“Up the dale. The meadow farms first, and then the hill.”

They would not go by the bridge today. Preece knew it without being told, and turned his cob’s head north.

It had rained until noon and then stopped. The sky hung low over the Edge and the lane ran with water, but the air was still. Gideon rode in the middle. Preece had taken the right, as a steward should. The mare, who had her own ideas, fell in on the left and stayed there.

He had not sat a horse on his own land since the spring of 1815, when he had been home for a fortnight between one war and the next. There had been forty-five farms then, and there were forty-five now. He had known them as a boy knows his father’s property, by the coverts and the best places to jump. Since the wedding he had sat up late over the maps, night after night, and learned every field name. He was finding, as he had found in Portugal, that the country itself was another matter.

“Withy Farm,” Preece said, at the first gate. “Tom Bebb. A hundred and ten acres, the most of it meadow.”

The meadow lay along the Corve. It should have been standing grass, green and waist high. Instead it was striped. The grass had been mown, and it lay in long rows where the scythes had left it. The rows were black.

Gideon got down. He picked up a handful, and it came away from the ground in a slimy mat and smelled like a wet cellar.

A man was coming across from the yard at a heavy run. He was thirty or so and red in the face. He dragged his hat off when he saw who it was, and then he did not know where to look, so he looked at the hay.

“Your Grace. I never thought to see—Mr. Preece never said.”

“Mr. Preece did not know until yesterday. You are Bebb?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“When did you cut this?”

“Monday fortnight. It was the one dry day. I thought I’d steal a march, the grass being so backward. I thought a short crop got in was better than a long one lost.” The man swallowed. “It’s rained eleven days in the fourteen since. I’ve turned it four times. It’s no good turning it now.”

“No,” Gideon said. “No horse of mine would have touched this, and I have seen them eat thatch.” He let the stuff fall and wiped his palm on the wet grass. “How many beasts have you to winter?”

“Fourteen milkers, and the young stock.”

“On what?”

Bebb did not answer. He turned his hat round in his hands.

“I am not finding fault, Mr. Bebb. I should have cut on that Monday myself, and been thought a sharp fellow. I am asking what you have.”

“The top field’s not cut. If it comes dry in July I might get the half of what I want.”

“And if it does not?”

“Then I sell the young stock at Michaelmas, for what they’ll fetch. Every man in the dale will be selling too.”

Gideon looked at Preece. Preece had his pocket-book out already, and wrote.

“Leave the top field until Mr. Preece has been to you again,” Gideon said. “Do not sell a beast without sending to the castle first. That is an order, and you may say I gave it.”

They rode on. He was aware, without turning his head, that his wife had not said a word in that field. She had sat the mare and looked from the black rows to the river and back.

“Monday fortnight was the day we moved the glass,” she said, when the farm was behind them. “I was so thankful for that dry day. I never thought what else it was doing.”

“Nor I.”

They saw four more meadow farms before five o’clock. At two of them the grass was uncut and lying flat under its own wet weight. At the other two it was down and rotting. At every gate there was a tenant who came out slowly and stared, and remembered his hat late. Gideon made himself sit still for the staring. He asked each of them the questions he had asked Bebb. He discovered that he knew how to ask them. A farmer with fourteen cows and no hay was not so different from a quartermaster with six hundred horses and an empty depot. One wanted the numbers, and then one wanted to know what the man had not said.

Then the lane climbed, and the hedges gave way to stone walls, and there was plough land on either side.

“Upper Hope,” said Preece. He lowered his voice a little. “Isaac Gwilliam. Sixty-one, and his father had it before him, and his grandfather. A hundred and eighty acres, the best wheat ground on the estate. He’s a hard old man, Your Grace, and a just one. The others take their time from him.”

Gwilliam was in the lane already. He was leaning on the gate of a wheat field, with a dog at his heel, and he had watched them come up the hill. He was a long, spare man with a face like a walnut and white hair under a shapeless brown hat.

He did not take the hat off.

Preece drew in his breath. Gideon lifted one finger off the rein, and the steward let the breath out again.

“Mr. Gwilliam,” Gideon said.

“Your Grace.” The old man gave the title its full weight and no more. His eyes went to the patch and the scar and stayed there as long as he pleased. They were pale blue, and they had no fear in them at all. “So you’ve come.”

“I have come.”

“Lord Edmund came every month. First Tuesday, wet or dry. He’d sit in my kitchen and eat my wife’s bacon and ask what was wanted.” Gwilliam turned his head and spat neatly into the ditch. “That was five year he did that, while you was away, and three months after you was home. I’ve not had a soul from the castle in my yard since November but Mr. Preece for the rent.”

“No. You have not.”

“I carried your brother up from the water. Me and my two lads, and Bebb.”

“I know it. I was there.”

“Aye. You was in the river. I’ll give you that.” The old man looked at him a moment longer. “And since then you’ve been behind your wall.”

It was said to his face on the open road, before his steward and his wife. No man had spoken so to a Duke of Brackenhope in a hundred years, very likely. Gideon found that he was not angry. He had been waiting six months for somebody to say it.

“Everything you have said is true,” he said. “I will not make you a speech about it. You may look for me on the first Tuesday in July, and you may judge after that.”

Gwilliam grunted. It was neither yes nor no. The hat stayed where it was.

“Mr. Gwilliam.” The Duchess had brought the mare up to the gate. “You’ll not remember me under this hat. I am Linnea Corfield, that was.”

“I know who you are, ma’am. Your father buried my mother. He sat up two nights with her first.” The old man touched his hat brim to her with two fingers. Gideon noted that. “I wish you joy. You’ve taken on a deal.”

“I have. May I go into your wheat? I will keep to the furrow.”

“What for?”

“I want to see how far on it is. I have my father’s dates for twenty years, and I think you are a month behind them. I should like to be wrong.”

Gwilliam looked at her for some time. Then he unhooked the chain and swung the gate.

She got down without help before Gideon could reach her. She gave him the mare’s rein as if he were a groom, and walked into the field with her skirt in one hand.

He looped both reins over the gatepost and followed. He did not know what he was following her to see. The wheat stood knee high, blue-green, in good straight drills. To his eye it looked well. It looked a great deal better than the hay.

She had crouched down in the furrow. She chose a stem and bent it toward her without breaking it off.

“Come down here, Duke. You cannot see it from six feet up.”

He went down on one knee in the mud beside her. She ran her thumb up the stalk to the top, where the last leaf wrapped round it in a thick green roll. She set her thumbnail to the edge of the roll and slit it, and peeled the leaf back.

There was an ear of wheat inside. It was pale, almost white, and soft as a catkin, and no longer than the top joint of her thumb.

“That is the ear in the sheath,” she said. “It ought to have been out in the air a fortnight ago, and in flower by now. My father wrote the day down every year. In nineteen years out of twenty the wheat in this parish was in ear by the King’s birthday.”

“That was the fourth.”

“Yes. And this one is not ready to come out. Feel it.”

He took it between finger and thumb. It was cold and damp.

“It wants a week of warmth to get out of the sheath, and it has not had a warm day yet. Then it must flower and fill and ripen. Call it ten weeks from the ear to the sickle in a good summer. Mr. Gwilliam cuts in the second week of August, as a rule.”

“Third,” said Gwilliam, from behind them. He had come down the furrow as quietly as his dog. “Up here.”

“Then say the third. Add the month it has lost, and a week or two more, since nothing ripens fast in the cold. You will not put a sickle in this before October.” She looked up at the old man. “Am I wrong?”

“No, ma’am. I wish you was.” He took off his hat at last. He did it to scratch his head, and he put it straight back on. “My father cut on the tenth of October in the year ninety-nine. I was at it with him. We carried it wet and it grew in the sheaf. You’d open a stook and it’d be green inside, every grain with a shoot on it like a mouse’s tail. The bread was like glue. Folk ate it, for there was nought else.”

“Sprouted,” Gideon said.

“Sprouted. A sprouted grain will not make flour, and it will not make seed.” The Duchess let the stem go, and it sprang upright. She stayed crouched, with her wet glove on her knee, and looked at him. “This is the best wheat ground you have, and it faces south. Every field in England is behind it. I will tell you what I should do, though I have no right to tell you anything about corn. I should buy old wheat now. I mean last year’s, dry and sound, that is sitting in the merchants’ lofts. I should buy it this week, before the factors walk into a field and slit a stem.”

“The factors will have walked into a field.”

“Some will. But nobody wants to believe in a bad harvest in June. They say that July will mend it. Your father’s rent book says it in ninety-nine, in his own hand, in the margin. July will mend it. It did not.”

He stayed where he was, on one knee in Isaac Gwilliam’s furrow.

He did not know when a field should be mown. He had admitted as much to her at midnight on his wedding day. But he knew what it was to have an army in front of him and nothing in the waggons, and he had learned in the winter of 1812 what it cost to believe that next month would mend it. He had seen what men looked like when the bread stopped.

He stood up and gave her his hand. She took it and came up out of the furrow, and he let go.

“Thank you, Mr. Gwilliam. The first Tuesday.”

“I’ll tell the wife to slice the bacon thin,” the old man said. “In case.”

They were a hundred yards down the lane before Gideon spoke.

“Preece. How many souls are there on this estate who buy every loaf they eat? Leave out the farmers. I mean the labourers and the cottagers and the village.”

“With wives and children, Your Grace?” The steward reckoned on his fingers against the saddle bow. “Four hundred, or near it.”

“A man eats a quarter of wheat in a year. We reckoned it so in Spain, and the women and children even out with the ploughmen. That is four hundred quarters to carry them from this harvest to the next, if this harvest fails. What is old wheat at Ludlow?”

“It was seventy-six shillings on Monday. It was sixty at the New Year.”

“Seventy-six shillings is three pounds sixteen. Four hundred at three pounds is twelve hundred. Four hundred at sixteen shillings is three hundred and twenty.” He did it aloud, as he had done it a hundred times for a commissary. “Fifteen hundred and twenty pounds. Is the castle granary sound?”

“It’s dry, Your Grace. It’s been empty since your father’s time.”

“Have it swept and the rat holes stopped tomorrow. On Monday you will go to Ludlow market and buy four hundred quarters of old wheat at seventy-six. Buy it from three or four merchants, quietly, and have it brought in by our own teams. If they ask what the Duke wants with it, say he is a soldier and has a fancy for full stores.”

Preece’s pencil had stopped. “It’s a deal of money, Your Grace. If July does mend it, wheat will be back to sixty by Christmas, and you’ll have lost four hundred pound.”

“Then I shall have lost four hundred pounds and have a full granary. I can bear that. I do not care to think about the other case.” He glanced at the steward. “You have a doubt. Say it.”

“No, Your Grace. I was only thinking that Lord Edmund would have had it out with me for a week, and then written to three people.” Preece shut the pocket-book. He looked as if a weight had come off him. “Monday. Four hundred.”

The cob dropped back a length. The lane ran downhill between the walls, and the valley opened below, grey-green and soaked, with the castle red on its rise and the church tower beyond.

“Well,” said his wife.

He turned his head. She was looking straight ahead, between the mare’s ears, with her mouth held very sober.

“Well, Duchess?”

“I am only a little out of breath. Three weeks ago I was a spinster of this parish with opinions about peat. I have just watched a major of dragoons spend fifteen hundred pounds on my say-so, without so much as a council of war.”

“I held one. It was in a furrow. You and Gwilliam were of one mind, and the ear was the size of your thumb.”

“You might have asked a real farmer first.”

“I asked one. He took his hat off, in his way.” He paused. “I have served under worse generals.”

She laughed aloud, the short, breathless laugh he had heard once in the library. The mare flicked an ear back at it. He kept his eyes on the road and found that he had no wish to be anywhere else, which had not been true of any place for a long time.

“That is the second,” she said.

“The second what?”

“Never mind. I am keeping a tally of something. Crispin has given me the habit.”

She did not explain it, and he did not press her. They rode the last mile without talking. The quiet was easy, and it was a kind he had not known before with a woman.

He would have to write to Quince about the wheat. A corn-factor in Bristol had told the Lord Chancellor that the Duke of Brackenhope transacted no business of his estate, and it would do no harm for the Master to see fifteen hundred pounds’ worth of it. He thought of that with some satisfaction. Then he saw Bebb’s black meadow again, and the satisfaction went cold.

The stable clock was striking eight when they came under the arch. A boy ran out for the horses.

Gideon swung down and went round to the mare. His wife had her knee free of the pommel already. He put up his hands, and she set hers on his shoulders, quite simply, and came down between them. She weighed more than she looked. For a second her spectacles were on a level with his mouth, and he could smell wet wool and crushed wheat leaf.

He set her on the cobbles and stepped back.

“Thank you,” she said. “I shall be as stiff as a gate tomorrow. I would not have missed it.” She was looking up at him, pulling off a glove that was green to the wrist, and she was looking up from his left.

He stood still.

She had been on his left since the stable arch at three o’clock. For five hours the mare had kept that side, in the lanes and at every gate. He had turned to her to speak and to listen, time after time, and had brought the patch and the whole length of the scar round to her at a yard’s distance in broad daylight. He had knelt beside her in the wheat with it next to her face.

For a year he had not let anyone come up on that side. Today he had not once thought of it.

His wife had got her glove off. She was frowning at a broken thumbnail, and she noticed nothing at all.
***