The Harvest Rite

Chapter One: The Lanes to Barrow Fen

The bus left Elena at a lay-by where the hedges had grown into a soft tunnel of leaves. The driver gave a nod that was almost a warning and pulled away in a breath of diesel and dust. The lane ahead led downhill to Barrow Fen, the village she’d read about in brittle journals and parish notices. As she walked, the air changed; the sound of the road gave way to soft plucked notes of birds and the whisper of grain.

The village was the color of old stone and late summer. Low cottages leaned together, their roofs patched with lichen and thyme. At every gate, something hung: figures woven from straw and twine, crossed and knotted in ways she didn’t recognize. Some were broad like men. Some were thin as fingers. A few had faces made of stitched seed heads, sweet and uncanny as a tilting doll. She paused to photograph the first one with her battered camera. The corn dolly turned lazily in a light wind, its shadow stretched long on the pebble path.

She wanted to find her lodging before the light went, but she took her time, milling words and images in her head the way she always did. She had notes to write. To her left, fields tipped down toward slow water that glimmered through reeds. To her right, the village green held a duck pond and a sycamore that had seen so many summers it had grown outlandish, with a spine of iron bolts through its trunk.

Children played under the tree. They had their arms looped and heads tipped together. They moved in a circle, and their voices rose and fell on a rhyme. Elena slowed. It was a tune she did not know.

“Who cuts the stalk when the moon’s a shield?
Who turns the blade in the sleeping field?
Step soft, step sly, keep toe to heel,
Hide from the Reaper in the field.”

One child saw her and shushed the others. Their circle broke, and they ran off in bright scatter through the lanes. Elena was left with the last line in her head. She wanted to call after them and ask for their words again. She wanted to laugh and tell herself that every place had a way to be spooky at harvest, because that was when old things walked closest.

A bell sounded, clear and slow. Elena remembered she needed keys and a bed. The cottage called Mill View stood where the lane widened. A painted sign by the door promised let rooms and breakfast. Bushes of rosemary brushed her jeans as she climbed the step.

The woman who answered had flour dust on her hands. Her face had fine lines at the eyes and soft, pale hair tied back with red thread. “You must be Miss Ward,” she said. “I am Evelyn Pritchard. Come in out of this air. Do they not have proper sun where you come from?”

“Leeds,” Elena said, smiling. “We have sun. It just hides.”

“Then we will feed you enough light to last a year,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “Your room is at the back. It faces the fields. The festival is this week. You’ve timed yourself well.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Elena said, shouldering her bag past a low dresser with a row of Delft vases. “I’ve been researching rural rites for a series. They say your village still keeps one.”

Mrs. Pritchard wiped her hands and slid a heavy iron key across the table. “We keep many things,” she said, not unkindly.

“How long has it been held?” Elena asked.

“Longer than I have. Longer than anyone you’ll find here,” Mrs. Pritchard said. “But you’ll want real answers and a pot of tea to go with them. Eat first. You’ll have your talk after.”

In her room, Elena raised the sash and leaned into the air. Something sweet rode the breeze. Apple skins. Dry straw. Far off, a low drumming thread that could have been a tractor or a heart through wood. She took out her notebook and wrote a line: “Barrow Fen—effigies at every gate. Children’s rhyme mentions Reaper. Smell of apples and smoke. Drumming at dusk.”

She listened until she decided it was only her own blood in her ears.