courtyard to greet them; his wife hung back.
“How are you, daughter?” her mother asked.
Francesca said nothing, but accepted her embrace. Bernat studied the two women: the mother anxiously hugged her daughter, expecting her to put her arms round her too. But Francesca simply stood there stiffly, without responding. Bernat looked anxiously at his father-in-law.
“Francesca,” was all Pere Esteve said, his eyes still looking beyond her shoulder. Her two brothers raised their hands in greeting.
Francesca went down to the pigsty to fetch the pig; the others stayed in the courtyard. No one said a word; the only sound to break the silence was a stifled sob from Francesca’s mother. Bernat felt an urge to console her, but when he saw that neither her husband nor her sons made any move, he thought better of it.
Francesca appeared with the animal, which was struggling as if it knew the fate awaiting it. She brought it up to her husband in her usual silent way. Bernat and the two brothers upended it and sat on its belly. The pig’s squeals could be heard throughout the Estanyol valley. Pere Esteve slit its throat with a sure hand, and the men sat while the women collected the spouting blood in their bowls, changing them as they filled. Nobody looked at one another.
No one even had a cup of wine while mother and daughter sliced up the meat of the slaughtered animal.
With their work done and the onset of night, the mother again tried to embrace her daughter. Bernat looked on anxiously, to see if this time there was some kind of reaction from Francesca. There was none. Her father and brothers said farewell without raising their eyes from the ground. Her mother came up to Bernat.
“When you think the time for the birth has come,” she said, taking him to one side, “send for me. I don’t think she will.”
The Esteve family set out on the road back to their farm. That night, as Francesca climbed the ladder to bed, Bernat could not help staring at her stomach.
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.
Llorenc 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 Llorenc 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.”
