But what are documents and deeds when there are harvests to be gathered in? Only toughened hands can do that job. And Master Kent, for all his parchmenting, would be the poorest man if all he had to work his property were his own two hands and no others. He’d be blistered by midday, and famished ever after. What landowner has ever made his palms rough on a scythe or plow? Ours are the deeds that make the difference. No, our ancient understanding is that, though we are only the oxen to his halter, it is allowed for us to be possessive of this ground and the common rights that are attached to it despite our lack of muniments. And it is reasonable, I think, to take offense at a ruling — made in a distant place — which gives the right of settlement and cedes a portion of our share to any vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it — and to see these vagrants off, beyond our cherished boundaries. It’s true, of course, that some of us arrived this way ourselves, and not so long ago. I count myself among those aliens. But times have changed. Our numbers have decreased in the years since I arrived as my master’s manservant. Stomachs have fallen short of acres. We’ve lost good friends but not had much success with breeding their inheritors or raising sturdy offspring. We’re growing old and faltering. Harvests have been niggardly, of late. There’re days in winter when our cattle dine and we do not. Why should we share with strangers?

Anyway, what can you tell about a newcomer from smoke, except that he or she is wanting? Or demanding? We’ve heard from the occasional peddler, tinker or walk-through carpenter — who’ve hoped, and failed, to make a living in our midst — how there are cattle thieves beyond the woods, how travelers are stopped and robbed, how vagabonds and vagrant families descend upon a settlement to plunder it, like rooks and crows, and then move on. We have to ask ourselves, why have these people arrived just as the harvest is brought in. Is this another act of God? Bad luck, in other words, and not a soul to blame? A saint might think it so. A saint might want to welcome them and shake them by the hands. But we, more timorous than saints, might prefer to keep our handshakes to ourselves. Besides, to touch a stranger’s flesh is dangerous. Do not embrace a soul until you know its family name, we say. We have been fortunate this year. No deaths from plague and only one appalling death from sweating fits so far. But contagion is known to be a crafty passenger, a stowaway. I can imagine hidden sores and rashes on the backs and buttocks of our visitors. And I can see why blaming them for what the twins and Brooker Higgs have done might be a blessing in disguise. No, I was glad to be at home this morning and not among my neighbors, even though it meant I missed the first sighting of this creature who has so charred us with her fire.

I sat outside the cottage with my injured hand resting open on my knee, its palm turned up, and let the fresh air salve the wound. It was a rare event to have the row of dwellings to myself or, that’s to say, to share them only with our poultry and our pigs. The quiet was curative, but it was also chilling in a way to survey, from the oaken bench I built myself from timber that I felled myself, the makeshift byres that once were family cottages. There was the creeper-throttled derelict next door to the Carrs’ home, which when I first arrived was never free of voices; and then the unkept garden at widow Gosse’s place, where her husband used to stand and boast his colworts and his radishes, his double-marigolds and thyme; and, after that, set away with its own path, the rubble of the tenement where Cecily, my wife, was raised. No, we have tenancy to spare, and could easily provide some newcomers a place to live, if the village was only minded to be less suspicious of anyone who was not born with local soil under their fingernails. Some extra working hands might be of value in the coming days, especially since my own left hand will be of little use and we are so hard-pressed for younger men and women. I rapped my good hand on the bench until my knuckles hurt. I did not deserve to feel relaxed.

These are the moments when I most miss greater places — the market towns, the liberties of youth, the choices that I had and left behind. My land-born neighbors now are ditched and fenced against the outside world. They are too rooted in their soil, too planched and thicketed, to be at ease with newcomers. They are not used to hospitality and do not want to be. There’s not a village, sea to sea, that receives fewer strangers. In all the years since my and Master Kent’s arrival not one other new soul has settled here for long, or hoped to. Who, after looking at this place and with no secret interest or association, would choose to make a home among these frowning residents? But I am now part of it and part of them. I have become a frowner, too, and I have learned to make do with the kindom of close relatives, where anyone who is not blood is married to someone else who is. One family’s daughter is another’s niece, another’s aunt, and yet another’s daughter-in-law. And if you’re not a Saxton or a Derby or a Higgs yourself, you have a score of relatives who are. We live in a rookery. A cousinry, let’s say. And just like rooks we have begun to sound and look the same. So many grumps, so many corn-haired blonds, so many wavy, oval beards, so many beryl eyes, so many thickset arms and legs, that no one needs to mention them, or even notice them, unless reminded by an out-of-pattern visitor like me. But even I have found myself with thickset arms and legs, though I arrived as thin and gawky as our Mr. Quill.

The latest dwelling on our lands is by all reports a poor affair. Our hurried newcomers have only dragged some fallen timber from the wood and woven out of it, uncut, a square of fences better suited to restrict a pair of pigs than to house a family. These walls are fit for men who prefer to crawl rather than stand. They’re pargeted with earth and leaves, and roofed with the kind of sacking that can stop neither the light nor the rain. Is this den enough to confer squatting rights? No one is sure. Though if it is, foxes, badgers, even moles could lay claim to their common rights and help themselves to fowl and fruit and firewood from our land. But then it is not expected that these newcomers, these funguses that seek to feed on us, these dove-slaughterers, will choose to stay among us for a second night once they’ve discovered how thin — and dangerous — our welcome is. They’ll travel on. We’ll walk them to our boundaries and set them on the way, glad to be of help.

The open hearth that sent up such a green-black plume at dawn was dead by the time my neighbors and Master Kent arrived at the shadowed clearing near The Bottom, where our land is cliffed by woods. Even Mr. Quill had lurched along behind them, his parchment book in hand, as ever with such gentlemen, making notes and marking shapes and hoping not to be excluded from the dramas of the day. Though the smoke had run its course and some tidy housekeeper had already kicked away the remaining ashes and twigs, the confirmation that my neighbors were expecting — and Brooker and the twins were praying for — was on the ground for all to see. Bird bones, gnawed clean. Christopher Derby, the elder of the twins and usually the quieter, pointed at the remains with all the authority his index finger could muster and said, “Our dear guests’ meal. One of the master’s birds.” Last night the newcomers had evidently gnawed on dove, as if they were “great lords at banqueting,” though by the looks of it, according to my neighbor John Carr, who took the trouble to push his inspecting toe through the scraps and leftovers, this dove had dark feathers, short bones and a yellow beak. None of my other neighbors wished to be dissuaded, though. It was easier to believe that by a further cunning the arsonists had disguised their plunder as a blackbird.