Harvest: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

The manor house’s smell has changed since Walter spent the night here. Someone has been cooking and it smells homely, as it did when Lucy Kent was alive. Mistress Beldam has been using the manor’s stores to care for her liberated husband.

The parlor door is closed, and Walter imagines them sitting inside. In his mind, the young man is naked and wrapped in the shawl while his clothes dry against the fire. Mistress Beldam has made a stew and set the table for three, waiting for Walter to arrive and join them. He believes it’s the Beldams who packed everything for him and interprets it as a gesture of thanks for freeing the husband early. Now he can share a meal with them and perhaps leave the village together.

However, Walter finds that whatever food was cooked has already been eaten. There are no clothes drying and the fire is dead. In fact, the young man and Mistress Beldam have ransacked the parlor and stolen everything of value. Walter walks into the scullery, which is in a similar state of disarray.

Throughout the house, Walter finds damage. All the furniture is toppled, and objects have been slashed or broken. Walter knows they have stolen many things, probably to sell in a nearby town, and the damage they’ve inflicted on furniture left behind shows enthusiastic spite. On one hand, this is justified since the young man and Mistress Beldam suffered much in the village; however, Walter feels betrayed by Mistress Beldam’s “keenness to punish everyone and everything,” when he’s tried to be kind to her. On the mantel, he even discovers the bloody stone she used to murder Willowjack. Now, the manor house seems like a monument to disaster.

Upstairs, the walls have been stripped and all the mattresses slashed. Walter imagines that the destruction of “trimmings and trappings” must be a woman’s work, since men are more likely to take out anger on people. Normally, the village men struck their wives in anger, while the women destroyed their husbands’ possessions.

Walter finds himself at the bottom of the staircase that leads into the attic, where he lived when he first arrived in the village. Now, the timbers are rotting and almost collapsed. It looks like someone has climbed them recently, leaving smudges on the bannister. He wonders if the young man and Mistress Beldam are hiding from him and calls out, but they don’t respond. Carefully, Walter climbs up the stairs; at one point he almost falls, but quickly recovers himself.

The attic is filled with junk and broken furniture, including the trunk where Walter once stored his clothes. He climbs the ladder into the turret and looks out the window to see a plume of smoke from the tool-barn and the cottages; soon the whole row, even his own house, is engulfed. He knows Mistress Beldam has set the fire and sees the couple loading a cart with possessions from the manor and animals from the village. The young man marches to the pillory, and with some effort, chops it down with an axe while his wife torches the last cottages.

Walter knows he needs to leave the manor before Mistress Beldam sets it on fire as well. If he’s caught in the wooden turret, he won’t be able to get out; he wonders if she somehow planned to lure him here and kill him. In the attic room, he pauses and notices that blood is seeping from his old trunk. Investigating, he finds Mr. Quill’s corpse lying face-down. He’s still wearing the outfit in which Walter last saw him.

Walter examines Mr. Quill’s body briefly, seeing that he was killed by a sword, run through several times and piercing his main organs. However, he can’t tell when he was killed; it could have been a night ago, or earlier, when the imprisoned women named him. He wonders if Jordan’s men or the young man and Mistress Beldam are responsible. He feels that he’s failed Mr. Quill, both because he’s allowed him to die and because he doesn’t even have time to carry his body outside and build a monument. He has to flee before Mistress Beldam arrives.

However, Mistress Beldam doesn’t arrive with her torch. Perhaps she’s in a hurry to leave before someone returns to the village and apprehends them, or perhaps she’s exhausted her supply of anger. After all, there’s no real point in burning the manor house. When Walter reaches the courtyard, he sees her and the young man hurrying away. Now, Walter will accompany the young man and Mistress Beldam “only in dreams.” He imagines himself following them and waiting until Mistress Beldam invites him to join them.

Walter wants to give Mr. Quill “an honorable cremation,” and to prove the courage that he’s found himself lacking recently. The fire has put an end to the village, so he wants to see it destroy the manor house as well. With scattered documents from the parlor floor, Walter kindles a fire and leaves the house as it burns.