Andy was a farmer, born far from this soil and worn by it all the same. His hands were hard, his face sagged like a wedding cake left out in the rain. Burly, broad, thickset, he had come south from Scotland with a bundle, a good back and very little money. Thirty years of Kent weather had taken the softness from his voice without quite taking Scotland out of it.
Bert had come from Yorkshire. They met as labourers on another man's land, digging a ditch in rain that neither thought worth mentioning. In time they rented smallholdings, then larger pieces, until each had a farm of sufficient size to keep him awake at night.
Their land lay in the hills between Charing and Faversham, where lanes sank between hedges and the woods hid one farmhouse from the next. A neighbour could be five miles away by road and still know what you had eaten for supper. People knew your business before you did, but seldom your dreams.
Andy and Bert lent each other horses, tools and men. When Bert's hay needed bringing in, Andy sent help; when Andy's ditch collapsed, Bert's labourers came with spades. They kept accounts in a grubby book, though neither was very exact about the other's debts. A few cottages stood along the lower lanes. Their chimneys made thin grey marks against the winter sky.
In February 1830, the ground rang beneath a boot. Frost held the furrows, and the low winter wheat had flattened under it. The barley ground waited bare. In the copse, men cut poles and gathered branches for the coming season. Sacks were mended, old coats fetched from lofts, faces made from whatever could be spared.
There was a quiet competition over scarecrows. Some looked like parish officers; others resembled men nobody liked. A hat tilted at the proper angle could make a whole field laugh.
The oldest labourers put them along the boundaries.
“Better there,” they said.
Andy had once asked why. The man he asked only shrugged and drove the stake deeper.
There were other notions. A fallen figure should be raised before dark. Clothes belonging to the dead were best left alone. At the inn, after enough beer, someone would remember a rhyme about crows remembering faces and the land remembering names.
Bert called it nonsense.
“Put a coat on a stick and they'll perch on it by Tuesday.”
Yet he set his own figures by the hedge, like everyone else.
Andy had made nine that winter. A tenth frame stood unfinished in the barn. He meant to ask Bert for a sack or an old jacket when he went over to arrange the men's work for the following week.
He walked there on the third of February, taking the footpaths across the hills. Rooks passed overhead, their calls tumbling down through the cold. A crow watched from a gatepost, turning its head as he went by.
Bert did not answer his knock.
The latch lifted easily. Inside, the house smelled of cold ash, wool and the faint sweetness of grain kept too long in a sack. A mug stood on the table with tea darkening its bottom. One chair had been drawn away from the hearth. Bert's everyday coat hung on its peg.
“Bert?”
Andy checked the kitchen, then the room above. The bed was empty and untidy. He looked through the yard, the sheds and the stable. Bert's horse stood eating hay.
He waited a while, stamping his feet, then left a message with Samuel Pike, who was bringing turnips down from the clamp.
“Tell him I called. I'll come tomorrow if he doesn't come to me.”
Pike said he would.
That evening Andy found himself listening whenever the yard gate rattled. Bert had a way of entering without ceremony, calling him a miser before he had even reached the door. By bedtime Andy was irritated with himself for expecting it.
Next morning he saddled his mare.
The track to Bert's farm climbed beside a field left in stubble. At its upper corner stood a scarecrow.
Andy drew rein.
It wore Bert's brown coat.
He knew the coat well. Bert had burned the left cuff lifting a kettle from the fire, then refused to replace it because the rest was sound. Even from the track Andy could see the dark crescent on the sleeve. Above it sat the old felt hat with its dented crown.
“Well, you've found a use for it at last,” Andy said.
The mare shifted beneath him. He stroked her neck and rode on.
Bert's house was still empty.
Pike was waiting in the yard with another man. Neither had seen Bert since the afternoon before Andy's first visit. They had thought him occupied in the house until Andy's message made them look.
They searched together. They opened every shed, lifted boards over the well, went down through the copse and along the ditches. Andy called until his throat hurt. Once he thought he heard a reply, but it was a rook somewhere above the trees.
He asked about the coat.
“Old clothes, aren't they?” Pike said. “That's what they're for.”
“Who put it up?”
Pike looked towards the rise.
“Couldn't tell you.”
On the way home Andy stopped beside the figure. Its sacks had been packed firmly, giving it something of Bert's square body. Two bundles of straw protruded from the sleeves. The ends were wet and dark, although no rain had fallen.
Andy reached towards the burned cuff, then withdrew his hand.
A crow landed on the hedge behind him. The mare began to back away.
He let her.
Snow came that night. By morning it had filled the cart ruts and softened the edges of the fields. Andy sent word to the inn and to the parish constable. A search was made while the lanes remained passable. Men knocked at cottages and asked travellers whether they had seen a Yorkshire farmer, stout and grey, who spoke as though every conversation were an argument he expected to win.
Nobody had.
Then the snow deepened. Wind drove it against gates and into the hollow lanes; a thaw glazed it, and another frost locked the glaze in place. One of the men fell carrying water and could no longer grip a shovel. A horse slipped at the lower bridge. Andy took to walking with a staff, testing the ground before each step.
There were animals to feed and water to break out of the troughs. Bert's stock needed tending too. Men who had worked both farms now passed between them when they could, carrying news that was never news of Bert.
Andy made two more attempts to reach the upper track. The first ended at a drift above his knees. On the second, his mare lost her footing before they had climbed halfway. He led her home with his own legs trembling.
At night he thought of the chair drawn away from Bert's hearth. He could almost hear his friend's voice from it.
He had spent thirty years learning how much work might safely be left until tomorrow. Now each necessary task felt like an excuse. Bert could be lying somewhere beyond the hedge while Andy counted feed and worried over a frozen pump.
Once, Pike came to collect a sack of oats and stood rubbing his hands in the barn doorway.
“Thought I saw you yesterday,” he said.
“Where?”
“Up by the boundary. Towards the old track.”
“I didn't go out yesterday.”
Pike glanced at Andy's coat, hanging behind him.
“Must have been someone else.”
Andy waited, but the man said no more.
After that he checked the coat each evening before bed. It was his best one, dark blue, worn shiny at the shoulders, with a horn button replacing the brass one he had lost. Beneath the right elbow was a repair of his own: small, clumsy stitches, pulled too tight.
He did not know why he needed to touch it. He did not tell anyone that he did.
The birds remained through the weather. Rooks quarrelled above the cottages; jays rasped in the copse. Their voices completed the stillness rather than breaking it. Andy had lived with that racket so long he noticed it only when it stopped.
One morning he opened his door and heard nothing.
Snow lay on the roofs. Smoke rose from the cottages. Somewhere a bucket struck stone, but there was no call from the trees, no wing beating over the yard.
He stood there until the cold entered his slippers.
By afternoon the rooks were back. He was ashamed of the relief he felt.
Towards the end of February, rain came steadily from the west. Ice loosened in the ditches. The hills emerged in dirty patches, and water ran beneath the remaining snow with a sound like someone moving unseen through long grass.
Andy decided to go before dawn. He set out his boots and left instructions for the men. This time he would reach Bert's house, then follow the far boundary and search the wood beyond it.
His blue coat was gone from its peg.
He searched the room, the chest upstairs, the kitchen. At last he put on his working coat. Someone must have borrowed the other. There were worse things to fret over.
Outside, the mare turned her head away from the bridle. He coaxed her, impatient with her reluctance and his own.
They climbed through the wet lanes as the sky began to pale.
At the upper track, Andy looked towards the corner of Bert's field.
The scarecrow was gone.
Its pole had left a dark hole in the softened ground. He dismounted and examined it. There were no footprints around it, though the rain might have erased them. Across the stubble, crows sat spaced along the hedge, watching him work.
He remounted and continued towards Bert's house.
At the next bend the mare stopped.
A figure stood beside the boundary of Andy's own land, where a narrow strip reached up to meet Bert's field.
It wore his blue coat.
The horn button was fastened. One sleeve hung a little forward, displaying the puckered repair beneath the elbow.
Andy sat without moving. He could hear the mare breathing and water trickling in the ditch. Behind the figure, the hedge was crowded with birds.
He tried to turn the horse. She stepped sideways, shaking her head. He got down, keeping hold of the reins until she pulled them from his hand. She retreated along the track, then stood some distance away, waiting.
“Bert?”
The name came out quietly.
The figure's hat was low over its sack face. It seemed taller than the one he had seen before, broader through the shoulders. A length of straw protruded from the cuff, bent like a finger.
Andy approached it.
He meant to open the coat. He meant to prove there was only a bundle beneath it, something the men had made, some cruel joke that had gone too far.
As he reached the ditch, the figure shifted backwards.
He stopped.
The coat settled. No wind moved the hedge.
Andy lifted his right hand.
The sleeve opposite him rose.
For a moment he saw the distance between them as though it were the narrow space between a man and his reflection. Beyond the coat lay the field he had ploughed for years, every uneven stretch familiar, every stone worked around or carried away.
His fingers had begun to ache. He tried to close them, but they stayed extended.
He thought of Bert's burned cuff. Of the wet straw. Of the horse waiting in the stable while its master stood out in the cold.
“No,” Andy said.
His mouth was dry. Something scratched inside his sleeve.
He turned towards the mare, but his boots would not lift. When he pulled harder, a pain travelled up through his legs, deep and fibrous. He looked down. The ditch water shone below him. He could no longer feel it soaking through the leather.
The figure before him leaned forward.
Andy tried to shout. A thin, rustling sound escaped him.
A crow dropped from the hedge and landed close to his foot. It tilted its head, looking up into his face. Behind it, the others began to call.
He remembered the unfinished frame in his barn. Ten figures. Nine made, one waiting.
The blue sleeve touched his wrist.
By the time the sun cleared the hill, the mare had returned alone to the yard.
Pike found the figure later that morning. He called once from the track, then came close enough to see the straw beneath its hat.
He recognised Andy's coat.
For a long while he stood with his hand on the gate. Then he went back down to the cottages to fetch the others.
At the boundary, tall and broad against the pale field, the scarecrow kept watch.
The crows settled around it. None was driven away.