AT THE END of May, on the first day of harvest, Bernat stood looking across his fields, sickle on shoulder. How was he going to harvest the grain all on his own? For a fortnight now, after she had twice fainted, he had forbidden Francesca to do any hard work. She had listened to him without replying, but obeyed. Why had he done that? Bernat surveyed the vast fields waiting for him. After all, he thought, what if the child were not his? Besides, women were accustomed to giving birth in the fields while they worked, but when he had seen her collapse like that not once, but twice, he could not help but feel concerned.
Bernat grasped the sickle and started to reap the grain with a firm hand. The ears of corn flew through the air. The sun was high in the midday sky, but he did not so much as stop to eat. The field seemed endless. He had always harvested it with his father, even when the old man had not been well. Harvesting seemed to revive him. His father would encourage him. “Get on with it, son! We don’t want a storm or hail to flatten it all.” So they reaped row after row. When one of them grew tired, the other took over. They ate in the shade and drank his father’s good wine. They chatted and laughed together. Now all Bernat could hear was the whistle of the blade through the air, the swishing noise as it chopped the stems of corn. Scything, scything, and as it sped through the air, it seemed to be asking: “Just who is the father of the child to be?”
Over the following days, Bernat harvested until sunset; sometimes he even carried on working by moonlight. When he returned to the farmhouse, his meal was on the table waiting for him. He washed in the basin and ate without any great appetite. Until one night, when the wooden cradle he had carved that winter, as soon as Francesca’s pregnancy became obvious, started to rock. Bernat glanced at it out of the corner of his eye, but went on drinking his soup. Francesca was asleep upstairs. He turned to look directly at the cradle. One spoonful, two, three. It moved again. Bernat stared at it, the soup spoon hanging in midair. He looked all round the room to see if he could see any trace of his mother-in-law, but there was none. Francesca had given birth on her own ... and then gone off to bed.
Bernat dropped the spoon and stood up. Halfway to the cradle, he turned around and sat down again. Doubts about whose child it was assailed him more strongly than ever. “Every member of the Estanyol family has a birthmark by the right eye,” he remembered his father telling him. He had one, and so did his father. “Your grandfather was the same,” the old man had assured him, “and so was your grandfather’s father ...”
Bernat was exhausted: he had worked from dawn to dusk for days on end now. He again looked over at the cradle.
He stood up a second time, and walked over to peer at the baby. It was sleeping peacefully, hands outstretched, covered in a sheet made of torn pieces of a white linen smock. Bernat turned the child over to see its face.
3
FRANCESCA NEVER EVEN looked at her baby. She would bring the boy (whom they had called Arnau) up to one of her breasts, then change to the other. But she did not look at him. Bernat had seen peasant women breast-feeding, and all of them, from the well-off to the poorest, either smiled, let their eyelids droop, or caressed their baby’s head as they fed it. But not Francesca. She cleaned the boy and gave him suck, but not once during his two months of life had Bernat heard her speak softly to him, play with him, take his tiny hands, nibble or kiss him, or even stroke him. “None of this is his fault, Francesca,” Bernat thought as he held his son in his arms, before taking him as far away as possible so that he could talk to him and caress him free from her icy glare.
The boy was his! “We Estanyols all have the birthmark,” he reassured himself whenever he kissed the purple stain close by Arnau’s right eyebrow. “We all have it, Father,” he said again, lifting his son high in the air.
But that birthmark soon became something much more than a reassurance to Bernat. Whenever Francesca went to the castle to bake their bread, the women there lifted the blanket covering Arnau so that they could check the mark. Afterward, they smiled at one another, not caring whether they were seen by the baker or the lord’s soldiers. And when Bernat went to work in his lord’s fields, the other peasants slapped him on the back and congratulated him, in full view of the steward overseeing their labors.
Llorenç de Bellera had produced many bastard children, but no one had ever been able to prove their parentage: his word always prevailed over that of some ignorant peasant woman, even if among friends he would often boast of his virility. Yet it was obvious that Arnau Estanyol was not his: the lord of Navarcles began to notice sly smiles on the faces of the women who came to the castle. From his apartments, he could see them whispering together, and even talking to the soldiers, whenever Estanyol’s wife came to the castle. The rumor spread beyond the circle of peasants, so that Llorenç de Bellera soon found himself the butt of his friends’ jokes.
“Come on, eat, Bellera,” a visiting baron said to him with a smile. “I’ve heard you need to build your strength up.”
Everyone at the table that day laughed out loud at the insinuation.
“In my lands,” another guest commented, “I do not allow any peasant to call my manhood into question.”
“Does that mean you ban birthmarks?” responded the first baron, the worse for wear from drink. Again, everyone burst out laughing, while Llorenç de Bellera gave a forced smile.
IT HAPPENED IN the first days of August. Arnau was sleeping in his cradle in the shade of a fig tree at the farmhouse entrance. His mother was going to and fro between the vegetable garden and the animal pens, while his father, keeping one eye all the time on the wooden cot, was busy leading the oxen time and again over the ears of corn to crush the precious grain that would feed them through the year.
They did not hear them arrive. Three horsemen galloped into the yard: Llorenç de Bellera’s steward and two others, all three armed and mounted on powerful warhorses. Bernat noticed that the horses were not wearing battle armor: they had probably not thought this necessary to intimidate a simple peasant. The steward stayed in the background, while the other two men slowed to a walk, spurring their horses on to where Bernat was standing. Trained for battle, the two horses came straight at him. Bernat backed off, then stumbled and fell to the ground, almost underneath their huge hooves. It was only then that the horsemen reined in their mounts.
“Your lord, Llorenç de Bellera,” shouted the steward, “is calling for your wife to come and breast-feed Don Jaume, the son of your lady, Doña Caterina.” Bernat tried to scramble to his feet, but one of the riders urged his horse on again. The steward addressed Francesca in the distance. “Get your son and come with us!” he ordered.
Francesca lifted Arnau from his cradle, and walked, head down, in the direction of the steward’s horse. Bernat shouted and again tried to rise to his feet, but before he could do so, he was knocked flat by one of the horses. Each time he attempted to stand up, the same thing happened: the two horsemen were taking turns to knock him down, laughing as they did so. In the end, Bernat lay on the ground beneath the horses’ hooves, panting and disheveled. The steward rode off, followed by Francesca and the child. When he was no more than a dot in the distance, the two soldiers wheeled away and galloped after him.
Once quiet had returned to the farmhouse, Bernat peered at the cloud of dust trailing off toward the horizon, and then looked over at the two oxen, stolidly chewing on the ears of corn they had been trampling.