The Knot
The Knot
Jane Borodale
An extraordinarily evocative story of obsession, love and secrets, THE KNOT holds at its heart the struggle of one man: Henry Lyte. Spanning twelve years, 1565-1578, Henry struggles with his life’s work, the translation of a Herbal which lists, for the first time, every herb, against the backdrop of his heart’s desire, the creation of a perfect, beautiful garden at the heart of which lies the Knot.After the tragic death of his much-loved first wife Anys, Henry falls in love again and brings Frances home to Lytes Cary. She struggles to come to terms with life in the remote rural setting of the Levels in Somerset, and feels the threat of the watery landscape despite Henry’s efforts to show her how the landscape he loves can bring her happiness. Henry’s father is not happy about his second marriage however, and the tensions within the family grow.Just as Henry finds a precarious equilibrium, in his intellectual and emotional lives, this sense of balance is shattered by his father’s unexpected death and the unleashed malevolence of Henry’s step-mother, Joan Young, begins.
JANE BORODALE
The Knot
Dedication
For my grandmothers, who both had green fingers
Epigraph
The good and vertuous Physition, whose purpose is rather the health of many, than the wealthe of himselfe, will not (I hope) mislike this my enterprise, which to this purpose specially tendeth, that even the meanest of my Countrymen, (whose skill is not so profound, that they can fetch this knowledge out of strange tongues, nor their abilitie so wealthy, as to entertaine a learned Physition) may yet in time of their necessitie have some helps in their owne, or their neighbors fields and
gardens at home.
henry lyte, A Niewe Herball
Contents
Title Page (#u818392f5-2843-56e4-9f4a-16f48811f5d8)
Dedication
Epigraph
THE FIRST PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
THE SECOND PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
THE THIRD PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
THE FOURTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
THE FIFTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
THE SIXTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
THE SEVENTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
THE EIGHTH PART
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Also by Jane Borodale
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FIRST PART
The Place
1565
Chapter I.
Of BORAGE. Which endureth the winter like to the common Buglosse. The stalke is rough and rude, of the height of a foote and halfe, parting it selfe at the top into divers small branches, bearing faire and pleasant flowers in fashion like starres of colour blewe or Azure and sometimes white.
TWO HOURS OF DIGGING, and Henry Lyte still feels that unrecognizable discomfort.
Like a slight tipping, washing inside him, a darkish fluid lapping at his inner edges as though in a dusk, yet when he turns to it; nothing, nothing. Perhaps he is about to be unwell. Perhaps the Rhenish wine last night at supper was old or tainted, or he had too much of it.
A man of nearly thirty-six with all his health should not be troubled by sudden, unspecifiable maladies. Being at work on the garden out in the fresh air should be enough of a wholesome antidote to sitting hunched and bookish in his study, over his new, impossible manuscript that is going so slowly. There is satisfaction to be had from being outside instead, slicing and turning the light brown, clayish soil, breaking it into the kind of finer ground he needs for planting. The day has been good for October, bursts of rain giving way to bright sunshine, yet still it is not enough to distract Henry Lyte from being so ill at ease. He decides that as he can’t place the sensation, nor what provoked it, he will try to ignore whatever it is. Probably nerves, he thinks. It is not every day that a man is due to ride up to London to collect his new wife. His second wife, and they have been married for three months already, but she has not been to Lytes Cary yet. Within the week her postponed marital life and duties with Henry are to begin. He leans on his spade and considers the hulk of the manor house, the sky to the north dark behind, and wonders what she will make of it.
Lytes Cary Manor is made of limestone, a modest huddle of yellow gables and chimneys embedded comfortably on a mild slope of arable land where the Polden hills begin to rise up out of the damp flatness of the floodplain that is the Somerset Levels. The estate itself spreads down onto the damp moor in several places, but most of it sits on higher ground over a knoll in the crook of a bend in the river Cary, as far as Broadmead and Sowey’s Fields, then out onto the lower, uncertain ground of Carey Moor. Lytes Cary stands on the very brink of the Levels, and in winter these marshy acres to the south-west are inundated with shallow salty water from the sea and can be traversed only by boat. The Mendip hills are high and blue in the distance to the north, to the far south-west are the Quantocks, and to the near west, at about seven leagues off lies Bridgwater Bay, with its bustling port and the wide murky sea that stretches to Wales.
About the house sit diverse barns, the malthouse and dovehouse, and tenants’ cottages, many put up in his father’s time. Henry can still remember improvements being made to the house when he was a boy. The adjacent manor of Tuck’s Cary is almost uninhabited, just a handful of tenants, since Henry’s brother Bartholomew died of a pleurisy four years ago. There is also a hop yard, two windmills and several withy beds.
The new garden project here, however, is of his own devising.
To his knowledge, this part of the grounds has not been cultivated for at least two generations, though it lies alongside the kitchen garden that feeds the household, and the little plot in which his first wife Anys grew a few of the most vital herbs. Sheep have been folded here right up by the house on this grass during summers for years, so the soil has been kept fertile with dung, and it is level, south-facing, and as well-drained as any of this clay country is likely to be. Now the earth needs to be prepared and opened up, so that the frosts can penetrate the clods and break it down over the winter months.
He likes digging. He likes the pull of the spade against the earth, the tilting strain on his back, the mud drying on his palms. More accustomed to directing men than taking up the tools himself, he is always surprised at how much you can be changed by working physically till you ache. The world seems more vivid, more manageable. He does not feel it is at all beneath him as a man of status to be at work like this, instead he imagines his guardian spirit glancing down approvingly from time to time, saying, look, see how he takes charge of his affairs, because that is how it feels to be digging into the good soil with the iron spade and mattock.
And then of course he remembers that guardian angels are no longer the stock in trade of any churchman worth his salt, nor any true believer, and are resorted to only by those such as his cook, Old Hannah, still cutting her surreptitious cross into the raw soft dough of every loaf on baking day. At thirty-six, Henry Lyte does not practise his faith in the way he was instructed as a boy, nor as a youth, because the world is not now as it was, not at all. It has changed, and changed again.
While he digs he is free to let his mind wander, and he dreams his kingdom of pear trees in the orchards across to his left, growing skywards, gnarling, putting forth fat green soft fruits with ease each year. The trees that already grow in the orchards he loves almost as women in his life; the Catherine pear, the Chesil or pear Nouglas, the great Kentish pear, the Ruddick, the Red Garnet, the Norwich, the Windsor, the little green pear ripe at Kingsdon Feast; all thriving where they were planted in his father’s ground at Lytes Cary before the management of the estate became his own responsibility as the eldest son. So much has happened these six years since his father handed over and left for his house in Sherborne: there have been births and deaths – Anys herself was taken from him only last year. But the pear trees live on, reliably flowering and yielding variable quantities as an annual crop that defines the estate, and he has plans to add more.
He wonders – as he does at some point without fail each day that passes – whether it would have been better if his father had, despite everything, attended his wedding to Frances. Three months have passed now since the ceremony, and the fact of his father’s deliberate, calculated absence on that day is a smouldering hole in their relationship, there is no doubt. Henry had stood with his bride-to-be at the church door perspiring with anxiety and the heat of July, in the hope that his father would appear as invited, despite Henry’s letters having met with a deafening silence. After almost an hour the chaplain could wait no longer, as he had others to marry at two o’clock, so he garbled through the litany and vows, and the thing was done without his father being there. Henry would have liked his approbation, but there was nothing to be done about it, for his father, when he gets an idea into his head, is a stubborn man.
That in itself was an inauspicious start, and then suddenly Frances was burdened with pressing, unexpected matters to attend to in London because by great misfortune her own, beloved father had died on their wedding night. Her mother had needed assistance with probate, which proved a terrible family tangle that Henry was unable to involve himself with. After several weeks he had returned to Lytes Cary alone to deal with his own estate that could not, after all, run itself, and sent up diffident, occasional letters to his new wife as though to a stranger. Now her brother has come to the aid of their mother so that Frances’s presence is no longer essential, and tomorrow at last he goes up to London to fetch her.
Henry digs on to the end of the row, straightens up and looks south, and finds now that evening is already creeping up the hill from the west, that the large, yellowing sun is close to the horizon. A green woodpecker flies to a branch of the tallest willow at the end of the bank and squats back belligerently on its tail, the slope of its red cap bright in the grey of the tree. Henry always calls that bird the Sorcerer, it has a menacing, ethereal presence he would rather do without. From there the bird has a commanding view of its surroundings, it knows more than he does about their mutual territory.
The sweet savour of dug earth is all about, and yet for a moment Henry Lyte thinks he can smell the sea – a weedy, salt smell of unwanted water. Then it is gone – perhaps it was a draught of air drawn over the half-completed brick wall from the heap of rotting compost in the kitchen garden, some stalks of greens maybe, or kale. But Henry Lyte pauses, and for a moment has a strong thought of the sea itself wash round his head – the great blank sea that lies in sheets of water against the low shoulder of the land at Berrow, the wide strip of coast where the mouth of the river Parrett coils its way out across the mud flats at low tide below the dunes thirty miles from here.
It must be explained that the sea there is held back by only the thinnest strip of land at high tide, and with the highest tides in winter the sea wall is often breached. But these winter floods are to be expected; they are planned for, understood by farmers, eel fishermen, migrating birds. Unseasonal deluge has never happened in his lifetime; that would be more of a threat to human life than he would care to think of. Nevertheless, it is said that a true native from these parts, with marsh-blood going back centuries, is always born with webbed feet, because nothing can be taken for granted in this precarious world. Unusual weather stems from unusual circumstances. It certainly felt that way just after the death of Anys, the winter that followed – last winter – was the coldest and deepest he could ever remember. And there are plenty who believe that bad weather is a punishment from God.
Downwind of the chimney, Henry can smell what might be supper and the unaccustomed exercise has made him hungry. He props his tools in the outhouse and bolts it tight, goes into the house by the back door. His blisters sting satisfyingly as he washes his hands in the ewery. The dog in the porch beats her tail without raising her head, a young mastiff bitch called Blackie who has developed a reciprocal loyalty to this half of the house rather than to her master. He puts his head in the door to his left. The kitchen at Lytes Cary is high and cavernous, the rack over the broad fireplace hung with hams and sides of salted beef and bacon, gigots of dried mutton, stockfish, ropes of onions and long bundles of herbs. On the east wall is the great oven, and ranging off to the west are the pantries and buttery and dairyroom, and all of this is Old Hannah’s dominium, filled tonight with meaty steam and the fatty goodness of something fried. Three blackened cauldrons sit at the hearth, beside a stack of gleaming earthenware and a basket of scraps for the poor as it is Tuesday tomorrow. One vast wet ladle lies across the mouth of a brown pot, and a row of pewter plates laid out indicates that serving is imminent. He won’t disturb her; if she gets talking things might go cold. Old Hannah has a rolling walk, it is always alarming to watch her crossing the kitchen carrying a large pudding basin filled brimful, or a cleaver for chopping the heads off plucked fowls. Tom Coin who works in the kitchen with her is a gangly sprout of a boy with a long, earnest face and hair of the soft brown sort that grows very slowly. Through the door in the cross passage Henry can see that Tom has set the trenchers in the hall, cut up the maslin bread, lugged in the pitchers of the small beer that is suitable for hindservants, and is just about to call supper for the household.
Tonight though Henry thinks he will eat with the children separately in the oriel. A speech that a father must have with his girls before the arrival of their new mother – God knows but he never thought he’d ever have to say such words to them – must be done in private. As he walks through the hall the armorial glass in the windows above to his right glows with the setting sun outside, casting a ruby-coloured light of the ancestors over the swept floor and the plain trestles. There is no escaping the ancestors, and they observe – as God does, but with perhaps more vested interest – his every movement through this place.
Chapter II.
Of BISTORTE. They grow wel in moist and watery places, as in medowes, and darke shadowy woods. The decoction of the leaves is very good against all sores, and it fastneth loose teeth, if it be often used or holden in the mouth.
IT IS LATE, BUT HENRY LYTE can never sleep easily on the eve of a long journey. He sits with the trimmed candle burning low and ploughs on with his translation. He is an orderly man who likes to work in a state of neatness, which should stand him in good stead for the task ahead of him. There is, after all, a place for brilliance of mind and there is a place for method, and he feels he may have enough of the latter to complete all six hundred pages. He has ink of different colours ranged in pots on his desk; red, black, purple, green and brown, for different types of fact or notes, and he likes a sharp nib. Surrounded by other men’s herbals for ease of cross-reference, he is working directly from the French version as L’Histoire des plantes, which is itself translated out of the Flemish by Charles l’Écluse, or Carolus Clusius, as the great man prefers to be known. He hasn’t decided what his own is going to be called. A title is crucial and difficult to decide upon, he’s finding. The original work, startlingly detailed and scholarly, was published in 1554 as the Cruÿdeboeck by the learned Rembert Dodeons, a master of plants and medicine, whom Henry himself had met when he was in Europe as a young man all those years ago. Sometimes Henry blushes with embarrassment to think that he has been so audacious as to consider himself man enough for this enormous undertaking. Why him? Not a physician, not an expert in anything. It is almost ridiculous, but the project is well underway now, too late to turn back.
He has finished butterbur and begun bistort today, which is a familiar kind of herb to him. Some plants are easier to render quickly because it is very clear from their descriptions or the Latin what their equivalents might be in English. Others are not, and he will have to return to those later, get specialist opinion, exercise extreme caution and assiduousness in applying names to them. The excellent plates by Leonhard Fuchs are also of considerable help in identification, but grappling with the French is his own charge entirely. He hovers over a disputable word. What is ridée in English? He thinks. He notes down rinkeled, folden, playted or drawn together. He considers his sentence, and then writes the great bistort hath long leaves like Patience, but wrinkled or drawen into rimples, of a swart green colour.
He can hear from the creak of boards upstairs when Lisbet leaves the children’s room and goes off to where she sleeps in the chamber over the dairy in the north range. With her departure all four children settle down in their beds and a quietness conducive to writing subsides throughout the house. For two full hours Henry works hard enough to forget most of what weighs on his conscience, though it is a temporary displacement. When the second candle is burnt about halfway down its length, he retires to bed to dream of nothing.
Chapter III.
Of PAULES BETONY. The male is a small herb, and créepeth by the ground. The leafe is something long, and somwhat gréene, a little hairy, and dented or snipt round the edges like a sawe.
HIS NEW WIFE FRANCES, daughter of the late John Tiptoft, London, distant cousin to the Earls of Worcester, is standing for the first time at Lytes Cary in the hall. It is a wet blustery autumn day. The highways from London these past six days have been very bad for mud and their passage was slow, beset with driving rain and herds of animals on their way to market; broken branches and at least one diversion to avoid hazardous bridges. Henry loathes driving in a carriage as it is painfully cumbersome, and makes a man’s limbs sore and stiff, doing nothing on a lumpy, jolting road for such a distance, but Frances had refused to ride on horseback so far in weather like this. They might have been better hiring a horse litter for Frances, with Henry riding alongside, as even with allowances made for the sluggish nature of progress by carriage, the journey had taken a day longer than it should as a wheel was lost and they had to put up overnight at the inn in Stockbridge whilst the axle was repaired at the wright’s. But now here they are. This feels momentous, her arrival here; perhaps more so than the marriage itself. There is baggage due to follow when her mother comes next month.
Four o’clock in the afternoon, and the fire has been lit with all speed to honour her entrance and take the chill off the hall. Someone has swept out the leaves and dirt that sift into the porch on windy days and has left the besom propped in the passage. All of the household is gathered here to glimpse the new mistress; John Parsons his bailiff; Old Hannah, Lisbet and other servants; the dairymaid; Richard Oxendon the horseman; various farmhands, and several tenants’ children clustered at the door. Frances removes her chaperon and cloak, goes straight to the hearth and stands shivering against the yellow fire. Her black hair is in rats’ tails from being blown about. She says nothing at all. Old Hannah mutters something to someone Henry cannot see. Henry tries to be jolly, stands beside her feeling stiff and damp and out of sorts and makes an awkward joke about the countryside, whilst all the time trying to recall how she’d looked when he saw her last. She seems very different here. Her skin is unnaturally white and smooth. He has a strong impulse to touch her cheek to see if there is any warmth to be had from it. She is like a doll, a figurine. He had wanted, expected her to look about and take in her new surroundings eagerly. She had been so pleased to see him, so chatty for much of the journey, pointing out distant spires of churches and asking questions. She must be feeling the very great difference of what she is now, he thinks, and is occupied with that. She is anxious, perhaps, or very tired. Yes of course, she needs hot food to eat and then her bed should be warmed. It must be that she is white with exhaustion, quite blanched through with it, indeed he can see now that she is almost swaying on her feet. Henry Lyte feels guilty that he hadn’t thought of that more promptly. She looks ready to faint.
‘Lisbet!’ he claps the servant over to take his wife to her chamber. A boy is dispatched to the carriage to bring in her first of many bags and cases.
‘Send up a caudle,’ he tells the cook. ‘Or a dish of eggs. Something hot and quick. My wife is tired.’ He is annoyed with himself for not having sent word on ahead to have a spread of food prepared ready for her arrival. Clearly he is out of the habit of being married to someone younger. The crowded hall filters away to usual duties, until it is very quiet in here, just the spit and crackle of the freshly lit fire.
His girls, all stood beside it in a row, are watching him like little owls. Edith, at twelve years old the eldest, opens her mouth to speak but then closes it again. He looks at her, and then at Jane, who is nine, with baby Florence on her hip. At Mary, six, then back to Jane again – and is baffled.
‘What?’ he says.
His new wife is asleep in the very middle of their bed by the time he goes up to see how she is, a plate of half-eaten tart and an empty mug on the floorboards at the end of the bed. He parts the curtains and holds up the candle but she does not stir in the pool of light. Her face is fine-boned and angular. Her breathing is deep and even, she lies with the cover pulled up over her chemise and one narrow wrist flung out. It seems bad-mannered to climb in and push her across, so he takes a blanket from the wicker coffer and retires for the night to the dressing room, where he does not sleep because the owls are so loud on the roof above him.
In the morning he goes to his study to give his wife time to get ready in their chamber before coming down. He is not going to be a stranger in his own house ordinarily, but this is, after all, the first day: the first day of his new life. He stands at the window that gives onto the garden and watches a fine rain coming down and the green Sorcerer out on the grass, up-loping toward the ants. He sees Tom Coin coming back from the fishponds with a large carp flapping so much he can hardly keep it in the basket. Henry opens the window and leans out, and the noise of chopping up in the coppice tells him that the woodman is not idle, despite the weather. There is nothing seemingly wrong at all, and he should be glad for it. Why then does he feel so angry? It makes no sense. The Sorcerer puts his thick head up and seems to laugh at him as it flies away towards the wood.
‘I had no choice but to marry, I have four surviving daughters to consider. Four, dammit! They cannot run free in the mud like dottrill or little urchins. They need a woman’s hand to oversee their maturation, to bring them up in a civilized way until they are of age and can enter the world as wives and then mothers. They need to know French, totting-up, how to stitch, how to make sweet malt, bind a man’s wound, how to be in charge of the kitchen. Not everything can be taught by a nurserymaid.’ He indicates out of the window at the rainy scene. The grass is sodden and deserted, though to the far left a cow is being driven into the yard from Inner Close for milking.
‘Look at it out there,’ he demands, to the empty room, ‘what civilizing influences will be had by them if I do not seek it?’
He regrets that there has been no time for grieving – practical matters to attend to when a family member dies seemed on this occasion to take all his vigour for months afterwards, he has felt blank and sucked dry of any melancholy or other emotion. He does not mean he didn’t suffer pain but that he felt it like a physical blow to the body, so that he sat by the hearth alone at night aching as though he’d been in a fight. Yes, it was just that he’d been in a fist-fight with death on behalf of his wife and had lost. It is all perfectly normal. Doesn’t everyone suffer deaths within their close family circle?
In the year that his own mother Edith died, coffins went up the road to the church almost every week. There had been fair warning that death was to be afoot that year – in March around Lady Day there had come a great comet, reddish like Mars, half the size of the moon in diameter, with a flaming, agitated tail that stretched itself across the night sky and scorched a rightful terror into the hearts of those who looked upon it. There were many who said it was a clear token from God that the end of Catholic rule was near, and that Queen Mary’s tumour may have begun with its manifestation. A comet is a sure sign of change, or death. He hopes never to see another body like it in the sky. His mother had died in exceptional pain, drenched in sweat and gasping for air in what had been the hottest summer for eleven years, as she clung to his hand for those last dreadful days. Sometimes across his knuckles he feels the grip of her bones still, has to flex all his fingers to free himself of it. And sometimes when his eye catches at the horizon just after sunset, the first bright sight of Venus makes his blood pound momentarily, mistakenly. It is surely unthinkable that another comet of that stature could appear twice in a man’s lifetime.
His father, remarried himself after Edith’s passing within two years, has no right to listen to any bad claims against his character. It’s just the usual way of things, to marry again.
‘Everybody does it,’ Henry goes on aloud to no-one. ‘Hadn’t I waited a decent length of time since Anys was taken from us by the will of God? By God’s will alone. It had been nearly a year.’ With this last thought, a draught blows under the door, and for a second he almost thinks he can catch the scent of her brushing against him like a substance.
Anys smelt of leather polish and warm skin and oats. She smelt of hard work and prayerbooks and children and bread. He is sure he has remembered that right. He is sure she knew how well she was esteemed by him. He swallows. The whole business is unavoidable. He leaves the study hastily, goes to the last of his new wife’s boxes stacked in the hall, and carries them up.
He had lost two servants soon after the funeral, but they’d each had good reasons, as they explained, for their change of situation. Lisbet is the new maidservant, she replaced Sarah who was a diligent worker. He had let her go with regret, Anys had thought so well of her. Lisbet is tolerably good, but he did wish he couldn’t hear her feet slopping down the corridor all the time when he is trying to concentrate. Why does she never pick them up when she walks? It occurs briefly to Henry Lyte that her shoes might not fit properly. She has a pleasant enough face. There is even something quite appealing about the crooked tooth that juts out a little over her lip, though it is the kind of countenance that will not age well, and of course he knew her mother. He prefers to hire local girls like her, they stay for longer, ask fewer questions, and he doesn’t think she can have heard anything of what happened. The misunderstanding will all simmer down and be forgotten. He hopes that Frances herself will never hear what people have said of him. It is just a matter of time. People forget so easily; memories are flimsy, friable things that get buried and mulch down into the past like vegetation. A few will stick, of course, inevitably. His memory of what happened is already concentrated to a few sparse images that he cannot shake off. One can be forgiven for forgetting a detail here or there – even though details, the little unimportant daily things amassed together over time, are what makes up most of living. What does his own life add up to, he suddenly wonders. In forty years, a hundred years, three hundred, what will be left of him?
He recalls a distinct, disturbing sensation he had once in his early days as a student a long time ago, in one of Oxford’s many bathing houses. It was not the sort of place that he was to frequent very often, but he was a young man missing home, missing his mother, and had gone for comfort, a little bit of human warmth that could be bought straightforwardly with sixpence.
A pretty doxy by the name of Martha was rubbing at his back with oil, plying her knuckles to his spine, to the very bones inside his muscles, and smoothing backwards and forwards across his shoulders in a shape like a figure of eight, her breathing ragged with exertion. There was a good savour of flowers or resin all around. Afterwards she was friendly to him, and didn’t seem to mind that he had fallen asleep.
‘How was that?’ she’d asked, prodding him gently and pouring a drink from the jug. He’d thought carefully, yawned and sat up. He examined the back of his hands, turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.
‘It was like … being rubbed out,’ he’d said eventually. It was the only way to put it.
‘Out?’ she’d queried, her brow wrinkling up as if she hadn’t heard this one before, and pouring herself a measure too, just to take the edge off. She had a busy night lined up.
‘Like being erased,’ he’d said, ‘quite worn away into nothing. No trace of me left at all, not a bump or ridge to show I’d existed.’ As if it were his history that was being smoothly abolished with her accumulating, efficient strokes, in just half an hour. He had an image of himself face down in the earth, being slowly flattened and absorbed into its clayish mass, and it had felt inevitable, nothing out of the ordinary, as though this was what happened to everyone. Which it does in the end, of course, for who gets remembered? Almost all of us go back to the earth to be worn away into nothing again.
She hadn’t laughed, he recalls, but pursed her lips as though it was not at all the answer that she’d wanted. She stood pinning up her curls and ducking in front of the polished plate that served as a glass to catch her reflection. ‘You should go to church more if you want that kind of talk.’
‘I don’t mean my soul,’ he protested, confused that she was so offended. ‘I mean my presence on this earth as we know it.’ But she had a customer waiting, he could hear his shoes scraping outside on the boards, and she’d gone to the door and held it ajar for him to depart.
Chapter IV.
Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.
IT HAD BEEN SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF ANYS that he’d begun planning his Knot garden in earnest. On paper at first, endless sketches and discarded ideas that he would pore over by candlelight in the evening when it was too dark to see anything outside. He made occasional visits to costly gardens in London, and drew on recollections of aromatic, unattainable gardens in Europe that he’d seen as a youth. The ground itself here needed preparation. There was a lot of dross to get rid of on the site, including a defunct fallen-down building where his father had reared pigs before the new sties were built. This was removed, piece by crumbling, splintery piece. It is always surprising how small the footprint of a demolished building appears. How could so little space have enclosed so much?
‘Much faster to take down a building than to put one up,’ one of the labourers had informed him, as though Henry had no sense of practical matters. It took little more than an afternoon to do. There was a lot of other debris to clear away, an old trough, piles of inexplicable rotting logs and branches, crawling beneath with worms and woodlice.
‘Look at that. A garden is teeming, isn’t it,’ Henry had said, brimming with cheerful purpose in the fresh air, as he squatted to examine a yellow centipede, rippling in kinks against the damp earth. ‘The very stuff of life itself.’
‘If you’re lucky,’ his gardener Tobias Mote remarked, straining to lift something into the barrow to take to the bonfire. Henry looked at him to check he was joking. ‘Seeing as the job of nature is to feed on death.’
Sometimes Henry wishes that Mote’s voice wasn’t so dry, so opposite to what he hopes for.
The pegging-out of the borders and the Knot, however, had been one of the most exciting moments so far in this process. The simplicity of unwinding each ball of twine in the hand and walking backwards, squinting, squaring up and measuring sideways with the feet, pushing in the stake like a New World explorer with his claim. Mote worked alongside him, scratching his head, making unhelpful, tardy suggestions where none was wanted, because everything was decided now in terms of form and symmetry. The garden was like a grid for days from the upper windows before they took the twine away, making last-minute adjustments to the guidelines they’d whitewashed. It was a sheer delight to see it stretched out down there. What had existed previously only on a small piece of paper as the final meticulous inked plan for the structure has now been unravelled from inside his head, squared up and made manifest.
Now he has the shape out there, but what he will plant is still to be decided upon. Roses, definitely roses. He also has a master plan for content, and marks in his choice of plants and herbs as they occur to him. This plan by contrast is chaotic, filled with crossing-out and scribbled re-inking. He paces about outside making mental lists to write up later, checking up on the bricklayers putting up the new walls course by course which will shelter his tender specimens from the winter harshnesses that they will have to suffer, looking over the work of the men he has hired in for the week because there is more digging than he and Mote can manage if they are to get it over with in time for planting. Today the four of them work steadily across the earmarked areas; Thom Pearson from over at Tuck’s Cary Manor just a stone’s throw from the stables here, William the oldest son of Hunt of Podimore who leases the windmill, Ralph Let, and some other man from Devon who was passing through and had asked for work.
‘Lucky to get Ralph,’ Tobias Mote says with a wink. ‘He’s good at that, being parish gravedigger he’s had a lot of practice, brings his own spade, just never mind what that spade iron’s gone through; very full that graveyard is, a lot of folk dead these days, begging your pardon. Just don’t turn your back on him – he’d nimble you in.’ Mote laughs with his face like a weasel’s, his eyes closed to slits.
The diggers have broken the persistent turf all down what will be the raised border. It’s coming along. To anyone else the scene looks like chaos, but Henry Lyte is beginning to have it all mapped out in his mind’s eye, the raised square beds, the enclosing walls, the espaliers, the roses, the medicinal herber. And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect Knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses.
Henry is not in favour of the kind of closed Knot currently fashionable that he has seen so many times in London, laid out to weedless, barren segments of coloured sand in red and yellow and other garish hues, intersected by rigid, close-clipped hedges, the whole intended to be amusing from inside the house, or along the gallery or walk, like a dead kind of outdoor carpet. He has no wish to go about decorating his land like that, but hopes to coax from it an exquisite, flourishing entity; something wholly alive and changeable, a place where man and nature can meet and within which he and others will be able to study the riddles of botany. He knows his ambitions for it are high, that it will be hard work.
He goes on considering. Espaliers there against the warmth of the bricks, he decides, and perhaps a further row of espaliered trees at right-angles to the wall itself – offering glimpses through the layers of branches, as into green and fruited chambers.
But what kinds of fruit? He would like very much to be bold enough to try to grow apricots. He has eaten them abroad straight from the tree, the warm, furred skin of them bursting under his bite, the juice running in his mouth. He has eaten them in this country at other men’s tables, both the tender yellow kind and the tougher sort, flavourless, the green of raw turnip. He has enjoyed dried apricots too, shrunken to a brown leather of sticky molasses sweetness. His mother used to call them St John peaches, ripe only in June. Of course she would remember when monks once sold them from the Abbey, when their walled enclosures were secure. He can just remember the day that the Abbot of Glastonbury was hanged on the Tor. He remembers particularly because his father owed the Abbot money, and there was uncertainty afterwards with what to do about the bonds. Don’t worry, the Crown will be hounding me for it soon enough, Henry recalls him soothing his mother. The King’s agents had moved in and taken the Abbey and all the contents. Henry had ridden past Glastonbury a few days later with his brother Bartholomew on an errand, and seen the distant sight of the Abbot’s misshapen figure up there, swinging by his broken neck. At the time it had felt like the world was ending. It was hard to know which God to turn to, He seemed to differ according to who one spoke to about Him. Henry had dreamt constantly of brimstone, smouldering deadly, choking fumes, all the terrible punishments his grandmother had warned him about if he strayed from the good path laid down by God. He must have been about eight years old, sat between his parents at the hearth, his mother’s anxious face rosy on one side from the heat of the fire. His mother loved all fruit, of course.
And what else should he grow here? Perhaps there could be an entirely separate plum orchard. Imagine the tiny stellar blossoms appearing in early spring, before the apples and pears. One fruit that can be simultaneously green and sweet is the greengage; perfect greeny globules of juice, almost gelatinous with being ripe, melting to fibres that lodge between the teeth. He too loves all fruit, but thinks perhaps the greengage is his favourite prunus. A plum orchard should be near the house, because the blossoms, coming early in the spring would be so cheering. For the other orchards, there are sixty new apple trees of sundry sorts on order, mostly whips and maidens because they will take to the soil better than if their roots were already more developed.
For the far end of the walled gardens, he thinks a vine. Sweet grapes gladden a man’s heart. And a peach tree. Voluptuous, fat-bottomed velvet fruit of heaven. A fig, fibrous juicy threads, cool seeds cracking delicately between the teeth, at their very best when they are oozing resinous juice. He would like to eat every one of them, a fig pig, he thinks, but they will be laid in the sun to darken and dry. Walnuts, for pickled walnuts of course. There are walnuts in the woods nearby but the squirrels always strip them bare. Nut trees are lucky, perhaps he will have two or three.
But what he knows best and what will do best on this difficult clay ground of theirs are pears. The orchard is already filled with almost forty varieties of pear but there are many more to choose from that he has not tried. Perhaps having one here against the lea of the sunny-sided wall might bring even an early variety forward in the fruiting season. Imagine that – the first ripe pear in the borough.
He ducks through the space where an oak door will sit on the hinges to be made at the blacksmith’s just as soon as he can get into Ilminster, and checks the wall from this side. For a moment he is dazzled by the low sun.
‘Master Lyte?’ a voice rasps.
Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He blinks and sees that it is Widow Hodges, sat almost under his feet outside her dilapidated tiny cottage on a low stool, silently working withy into baskets as she does on most days when the weather permits it, though rarely in winter, when weeks can go by without her emerging as if she were dormant, or dead. To be frank he usually takes care to avoid chancing upon her, as most people do. He can never tell if she is merely old, or ancient, but she has struck an unreasonable fear in him since he was a child. Perhaps he should know more about his tenants, but there are exceptions to every rule he makes for himself.
‘I saw you knocked down those pigsties, Master Lyte,’ she grates out. Her voice is cracked and tired, like something left at the back of a cupboard and never used properly. ‘You’re not going to be doing away with my cottage?’
Henry assures her that he plans no such thing. Childishly, he tries to avert his gaze. Her wrinkled face is twisted into puckered lines and dots where her eyelids meet her cheeks. She is blind, and the eyelids themselves are flat, grotesque.
‘We are going round you with the new garden wall, dame, no cause for worry,’ he shouts cheerfully, backing away as if very busy with something. ‘The wall runs to the back of your dwelling.’
‘I heard all the noise,’ she goes on saying. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it these weeks since. It’s just I’ve been here a long time, Master Lyte. A very long time.’
It is almost All Souls’, he thinks, as he goes back to his study to note down the last of his financial outgoings before the end of the month. October has flown by. There is little of note for the rest of the afternoon, bar a brief flurry of noise from the other side of the house when in the kitchen one of the servants scalds her hand on a kettle, and then the boy comes with the packhorse for his father’s grain. Henry Lyte has to pay his father two bushels each of wheat and dredge malt every week to supply their household brewing and bread over at Sherborne. Sometimes he wishes that they would take a fortnight’s worth at once, or more, and leave him in peace. His stepmother Joan Young (he will not call her Lyte, nor mother; she is no blood of his) declares that there is no provision for storage at their house, but Henry knows it is an excuse to keep a weekly eye on proceedings at Lytes Cary. She is becoming far too interested in it.
After this he is able to be utterly absorbed in his accounts. Henry puts aside what he needs to pay the tithingman of Kingsdon for the queensilver, which is sixteen shillings the quarter, and works out what he is owed himself on the field rents since Lammas. These accounts done, he is free to return to his work on the herbal.
As a grey evening draws in again, earlier and earlier now it is so close to Hallowtide, there is an interruptive, particular tap on his door that has become familiar to him this last fortnight, and Frances comes into the room.
‘You have not lit the candle yet, Henry,’ she says.
‘I can see well enough.’
‘They have been calling supper.’ She sounds annoyed, but goes to her husband’s side and touches him lightly on the shoulder. He puts down his pen and a sentence hangs unfinished; Medewort doubtlesse drieth much, and is astringent, wherefore it restraineth and bindeth … the word manifestly floats newly inked, untethered to any other on the page. It can’t be helped. Her fingers are indeed very pale and smooth. What she lacks in warmth of speech, he has decided, she makes up for in other ways. Her presence glitters softly out of the corner of his eye as she picks up a pebble on his desk and turns in the gloom towards the light to examine it idly, puts it down again. She smells of subtle things, something like damask rose perhaps or musk ambrette, a dusky, milky scent that he presumes she must buy from a London perfumier in a bottle, though he likes to think it is her skin itself that secretes such promise, such difference from what he is.
He has a sudden thought of her fingers as they would be if closing round his own, against his limbs. He finds that he understands her with more clarity once the matters of the day are over. He likes the silences produced at night – the dwindling need for words and explanations. A silence lit by daylight has to be used fully, taken advantage of, but at night a silence could be simply encountered, dwelt in, quite for its own sake. He wishes that on balance it might not be unreasonable to dispense with supper altogether and suggest the bedchamber. Of course it would be very unreasonable, but he admits her presence excites his senses, distracts him.
When he lies with her at night, she does not envelop him as Anys used to, with gentle arms and her eyes appreciatively closed. Frances keeps her eyes open and fixes him with a gaze that he cannot read or enter into. He thinks it is curiosity that makes her do this, but he can’t be sure. Her body is very different from Anys’s, too, more taut, rawboned. She does not seem to object to him paying her proper attention in bed; indeed, more than once he has had the distinct sense this gives her a gleam in her eye, but again it is hard to be sure. His father always told him that whores are the only women who enjoy their carnal duties to the husband, and he would not like to think badly of her. For himself of course he prefers to think of it as natural procreation rather than venery.
‘But what will you do with all this effort, this … learning, Henry?’ she asks unexpectedly, as if puzzled. She has never asked a thing about his work before.
‘Do you mean my book?’ He lets her wrist go and begins to gather up the pages that are dry into a bundle.
‘I mean the book, the time in the study, those letters that come, the exertion generally.’ He can’t see her expression.
‘I don’t have a publisher yet for my translation, but I have high hopes. My dear,’ he adds briskly, as she stifles a yawn. ‘Is it late? Is it white herring for supper again? No doubt it can’t be helped, on a Friday. When a thing is plentiful there is always so much of it.’ He wonders why his habit is to speak so loudly when he talks to her.
‘Could we go up to London before Christmas?’ she asks.
‘London? Certainly not. There is too much to do. The roads are a nightmare.’
Neither speaks for a moment. Outside by the gate a dog is barking. A dog barking at dusk always sounds louder, he thinks, than during the day. A log slips on the fire irons, and a shower of sparks flies up the chimney.
‘Why do you suppose that old woman never does her work indoors?’ Frances asks.
‘What woman?’
‘Whom you spoke to this morning, the old basketmaker.’
Henry frowns. ‘What makes you mention that?’
‘I’ve been watching from the bedchamber window, she sits out there all day.’
‘Perhaps her rafters are too low – those rods of willow reach very tall at the beginning of a basket. And you will have seen how they take up room to the sides as she weaves, her cottage must be too cramped for such activity.’
‘Or perhaps she needs the brighter daylight to properly see what she is doing.’
‘She is blind. Her eyelids have been sewn shut for nearly thirty years.’
‘Oh!’ Frances flinches at the thought.
There is a silence. Really he’d prefer to start a new page of his translation, but he cannot do it with Frances standing by him. He cuts a nib for later. He might get up to fleabane by tomorrow. Hote and dry in the third degree. It is going to take him ten years or more at this rate.
‘How did she become blind?’ Frances asks.
‘Mmm?’
‘The old woman.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ There is something vaguely tugging at his memory as he says that, something odd and unpleasant from way back when he was a boy, but then it is gone. He does remember the talk around the time that they sewed her lids shut to cover up the mutilation.
‘I was away at school but they said her screeching was heard right down on the Fosse Way. After that when I was disobedient I thought that the redness I saw when I shut my eyes was God showing me the colour of blood, a warning not to cast my gaze unheedingly upon wicked things. I always thought she must have seen some wicked thing to get like that.’ He shrugs, looking at his manuscript. ‘The savage, unfair minds of children.’
‘I can’t imagine a noise like that coming from her.’ Frances is still at the window.
‘She’s got a stone’s silence about her most days. Squatting there in the middle of her webs, though like most old women she can also pounce on a man with unsolicited speeches, if he should forget to go by the other path. How she knows who it is that’s passing is any man’s guess, but she always does.’
Once a month Henry sees Widow Hodges at the market in Somerton, selling her baskets. He’s seen her struggling up onto the cart pulled by a decrepit skewbald that another old woman, with whom she shares profits, drives over from Kingsdon. Years ago, he used to see her plying her wares further afield, such as the St Paul’s Day Fair at Bristol, but she is too old now for such distances.
‘Maybe she does need the light to work by. I’ve heard some can see the brightness of the sun. There are degrees of blindness, Henry. Many different kinds.’
‘There are many different kinds of spider.’
He thinks of her as sat at the heart of a web. He can’t help it. Even though she is blind, when he goes by her cottage he has a suspicion that she has an inward eye on him, some kind of sentient finger or whisker stretched out to feel the twitch of his passing. There is something about the way she cocks her head as he approaches that makes him shiver, without a pause in the rhythm of her fingers catching the withies, knotting them down, netting his details.
Chapter V.
Of MOUSE EARE. A man may finde amongst the writers of the Egyptians, that if a bodie be rubbed in the morning early, before he hath spoken, at the first entrance of the moneth of August with this hearbe, that all the next yéere he shall not be grieved with bleared or sore eyes.
HENRY LYTE HAS GONE OVER TO WELLS to buy various items. He wants to go himself rather than send a servant, for he has heard that his old friend Peter Turner is in town staying with his father – the radical Dean of Wells Cathedral, and botanist of note, Dr William Turner. The ride over is back-endish, yellowing stalks collapsing over the paths, the sweet smell of fruit and rot everywhere, too many insects. He is glad that he still has the Turners to discuss matters of botany with. Another good friend Thomas Penny – in whom he had a fellow fieldworker, together scouring the West Country and elsewhere thoroughly for plant specimens – has just gone to Zurich because Archbishop Parker believes him to be too outspoken against the church. Dr Turner is outspoken too, but somehow retains his position here as Dean of the cathedral since his return from exile in Germany during the dark time of Mary. ‘So far, so good,’ he’d grinned the last time he’d seen him, as though it was all a conspiracy, or luck.
As Henry winds through the busy, dirty marketplace, the booths, the standings, flesh shambles and fish shambles, towards the cathedral, the clock strikes ten and he realizes he’s going to be too early. He scratches his beard, which feels itchy and unkempt, and decides to go to the barber for a trim. He dismounts and turns his horse around. The sky to the west is dark with impending rain, though the sun is out, so that the stone of Penniless Porch shines yellow by contrast. A beggar is lying inside the arch, his face blotched with sores and clutching his stomach as if he had some griping torment there. Henry hopes it is not dysentery. A woman passing by grimaces at her companion.
‘Look at that, poor man, he is in pain,’ she says.
‘But they are used to being like that. Quite accustomed. I need to get a pigeon before we go back. Or two. Do you think we need two?’ She checks in her basket then looks down at the beggar. ‘It is different for them. They don’t know any better, just as well. They are like animals in that respect.’
‘It is a shame.’
‘One must pray for them,’ she says brightly. ‘There is nothing else anyone can do about it.’
‘Nothing,’ the other woman concurs, and they glide on towards the market and the pigeon stall. Henry feels the blood rushing in his ears. He has an urge to run after them and try to make them see how they are wrong, but instead goes swiftly to the beggar and on the same, furious impulse gives him the first coin that he fishes from his pouch, which is a half-sovereign, a great amount of money to give to any man in the street or otherwise, more than a skilled mason earns in a week. The beggar’s eyes widen, and even as he puts it into the outstretched bandaged, filthy hands Henry has a spasm of doubt, but it is too late.
‘Bless you, Master, it is a sign!’ The beggar mutters, rubbing the coin against his cracked lips. He jerks a finger at the sky, and to the west now a rainbow is stretched inkily over the whole of the town, so vivid with colour it almost fizzes in the sky. He must be right. Surely this must be a good omen.
Fat drops of rain begin to spot the dry compacted earth of the thoroughfare as the sunshine fades. People jostle to take shelter under the porch, and when he turns about, the beggar has vanished.
Half a sovereign.
He had better not mention that to anyone, not Frances, not Dr Turner, he decides. But by the time he has arrived at the house, it is already weighing so heavily upon him that he must say something. The boy removes his horse to the livery and another poor man follows him up to the gate and pulls at his sleeve most insistently until he finds a coin to make him go away. He is more careful this time, makes sure it is a penny.
Turner’s naughty little dog comes to greet him, yapping at his heels. Turner has trained it to jump up and remove the corner-caps of bishops at table. Turner hates ecclesiastical trappings; the pomp and ceremony of the high church. He also hates his bishop, which is making life difficult in Wells, but Turner has always prided himself on his ability to thrive on controversy.
He rises from his desk to kiss Henry.
‘You’ve missed Peter,’ he says. ‘Oxford drew him back a day early, as he leaves very shortly for Heidelberg and has things to wrap up before his departure.’
Henry Lyte is disappointed, everyone is going somewhere, it would seem, and he is sorry not to have the chance to say adieu to Peter. But it is always engaging to spend time in William Turner’s house. There is always something very obstructing to debate, some nuisance ignorant with a bad opinion holding his own torch wrongly.
‘People are so easily offended,’ William Turner complains, waving a letter. ‘Do they have no resistance of their own that my view can rake up theirs like ponds so hastily?’ Henry Lyte smiles. He has many a time had his own self raked over by Dr Turner, but he has learnt to live with it; there is too much to gain from being with him.
Dr Turner peppers his speech rapidly with Latin and Greek, so that Henry, who is much more comfortable with French, has to concentrate hard to keep abreast of him. Often in Turner’s company he wishes he had paid closer attention to his studies whilst at Oxford. University is wasted on the young, he has decided, without strict guidance. He was too occupied with pacing between the taverns of the town in a long coat drinking malmsey until the small hours of the night and sleeping with doxies, though he did read every volume of Dioscorides, Matthiolus, Galen, Pliny that he could. A normal existence, anyway by all accounts. 1546, when he left and married Anys, daughter of John Kelloway of Cullumpton, was the year in which all that ground to a halt and his responsibilities seemed to begin, sharply.
‘Have you begun that work you crow so often about? Your opus de singulis?’ Dr Turner is a demanding man, who will not let a thing pass once mentioned.
‘You mean the translation of Rembert’s herbal? I have started it. It is quite slow to get going.’
‘I am waiting for the competition!’ His laughter is hoarse but not unkind. He considers Henry when the mirth has left him. ‘You will need to be very contained to write that book, young man. There will be times when you must shut your ears and eyes to anything outside the vessel of your undertaking. And once you are done, the dissatisfaction with it will pour in from all sides. Easier to find fault with a wheel already rolling than it is to build one up from raw timbers.’
Dr Turner’s eye has a little more white about it than one might expect in a calmer man. He is old now, but they say he was once very handsome, like an ox in his prime.
‘I think it will take me a long time. It mentions eight hundred varieties of plant. Not only does it have to be translated accurately from the French, I shall need to seek out every single name in English, which part I believe shall be the hardest.’
‘There will be much scholarship in its making. You may achieve it.’
‘I don’t know, Doctor, I—’
‘You will need to be tenacious. But there is something of the limpet in you. Not a fast mover on your rock, but you cling on tight.’ Henry bridles, quick to sense criticism where perhaps none is intended.
‘Should I speed up, Doctor, how should I do that?’
‘Drink more hare’s piss.’ Dr Turner’s back is to him as he searches for a book he needs shortly for a service, then starts away down the corridor.
‘What kind of advice is that?’ Henry calls, aggrieved. His diminishing back looks square and spiky in its black church garb that doesn’t fit about the shoulders. He has no patience for a tailor fiddling about him, and it is clear his wife has but hasty measurements to pass on for an impossible task. Dr Turner is not a man who glides his way to anything. His sermons are punctuated with enraged jabs as though even the air itself between him and his congregation needed prodding into discipline. He is not a man with whom you’d dare to share a lukewarm half-thought unprepared, unless you felt like being torn into tiny pieces for the evening’s sport.
‘Come,’ he says, and beckons Henry Lyte to follow him downstairs. ‘There is something I must show you.’
The doctor is showing signs of his age, and stumbles on the path out into the garden. This labour of his latter years has paid off in the shape of a most glorious plot to the south of his house, with a small orchard of the choicest variety of fruits, and a horseshoe of beds laid out to herbs and flowers in the final states of blooming, though most are tatty and seeded into heads or fruiting now. In a few days there will be frosts and all will be blackened, but for now these latter-end herbs still cling to their season.
Dr Turner stops by a low wall and points into a browning, damp tangle of small climbing herbs that have colonized the stones over the summer and are dying back.
‘What do you see there, Henry? Does a thing strike you?’
Henry Lyte gets down on his knees and obligingly blinks and peers. ‘Well, Doctor, I …’
‘No doubt you see remnants of pennyroyal, Pulegium, and mosses of various sorts and a little bit of old unwanted yellowing Aegopodium podagraria that I must speak to my garden man about, and something else, Henry.’ His voice drops. ‘What is it?’
Henry Lyte is aware that the knees of his hose are very wet now from pressing at the lawn. A small fat spider, her belly full of eggs, is climbing up a crown of murrey-coloured stalks. ‘I see herb Robert,’ he says eventually. ‘Flowering late, in your sheltered haven.’ Dr Turner cackles then and rubs his crabby hands together.
‘You do! Geranium robertianum is a humble little herb that, as Dioscorides has told us, is to staunch the blood of green wounds and is used against corrupt sores and ulcers of the paps and privy members. And here, nestled as to its custom against the wall, and its purple-pinkish five-fold petals … Ah! And you have seen it for yourself at last.’ Dr Turner’s face is shining at the sight of Henry Lyte’s astonishment. He squeezes his hands together now as if in fervent prayer, and cocks his grizzled head on one side to hear the answer. ‘What is its difference?’
‘This flower is white, where it should be purple. Every single flowerhead upon its stalks is white as snow. I cannot believe such a deviation is possible without intervention, a natural anomaly.’ Henry Lyte cannot take his eyes away from it. ‘What does this mean, for scientific study, for our understanding of the way that nature takes its forms?’
‘It means that the Holy Spirit takes many guises, and does not eschew a humble weed to show that the power to change things takes many forms, and can begin in simple ways, in obscure corners. Not for nothing do the country people call this plant poor Robert. I say it is God’s way of showing how nothing is fixed – that this earth is in fluxus: a constant state of being made, of being in change. This is a glorious thing, yet found in a moist and shady corner which our eyes are trained to overlook. The same ignorants might say this is the work of malevolent, unchristian spirits such as Robin Goodfellow, appearing in disguise to mock God’s choices. You and I, Henry, are here to prove that this is never the case. We do not deal in falsehoods, you and I. We are true scientists, physicus, studying the work of God. Only what we see before us can be verified, with the exception of the will of God itself. Nothing is to be taken for granted. Only God’s will is absolute.
Henry feels a flicker of doubt.
‘But, if—’
‘It means, take nothing for granted, Master Lyte. Apply all your powers of observation in your work. If you do it thoroughly, your work will be of use to someone.’ Dr Turner’s outsize, drooping sleeves hide knobbled, twisted hands with fingers like root vegetables, and when he prods one’s chest to instil a point, it is almost painful. Henry Lyte tries not to flinch or rub the spot.
‘I am worried, Doctor. I saw a beggar in the porch as I came here this morning and—’
‘What use is that, Henry?’ he barks. ‘Whether or not you worry about some man in the street you saw in passing makes no difference. It is what you do next that counts. Otherwise it is a form of vanity and odious self-reflection.’
‘I did worse than that, I gave the man a large quantity of money, and then he disappeared. I can’t explain, but I do feel very bad about it,’ he says. He know that sounds weak-willed. He is irresponsible, a bad citizen, worse than those women for at least they, in their ugly, easy complacency, did not actually go out of their way to court trouble for the man. He pictures the beggar made vulnerable with that gold in his hand, killed for it by other beggars, vagabonds or lawless rufflers. He pictures him in the tavern drinking it off in a night, and dying of drink. And who would know?
Dr Turner leans forward on his stick so that Henry can see up close the very substance of his face. It is like a natural exclamation of rage. Hair sprouts from his nostrils, his eyes are red-rimmed. ‘It is not about salving your conscience, Henry. It is about changing things. You have been blessed with certain privileges, and in the eyes of God you must employ them in ways that create a change. I was brought up where the stink of the tannery permeated every crack of life, every breath, each mouthful of food. I was inured to its poison, and yet I never wish to forget what poison is or what it does to men. There are many different kinds of poverty, Henry,’ Dr Turner says. ‘Who are you or I to say that one man’s suffering is worse than another man’s. It is not our task to judge between sufferings, only to help where relief can be given. Your man may well have made those sores himself by laying irritants like spearwort or crowsfoot upon his members, a known practice in these parts amongst their kind. But what else is he to do, being whipped from parish to parish? With no home to speak of. Poverty is the visible, residual poison of a bad society, it eats away at the lives of those who have little or cannot help themselves.’ He pushes his cap about on his head.
‘These changes in the Church are not moving fast enough to reinstate an antidote. All this mealy-mouthed absolution and confession that we’ve lived with for too long has made us lazy.’ He snorts. ‘That’s not a way to improve the world, is it? People don’t like to hear that. How much easier it was to go to a priest, smell the frankincense, bleat unworthiness and be absolved like infants. Cut into a Catholic’s flesh and be warned, you may see whey running from the wound instead of blood.’
Henry looks shocked.
Turner flaps his hand dismissively. ‘There is still too much Romish pox about.’
‘If a man has to make amends how can he properly go about it, if he is not to just hand out bits of gold?’
‘By making an effort.’ Never had such a simple word sounded so menacing and unachievable.
‘God gave you hands, didn’t he?’ Turner holds open his own palms skywards as if to be inspected.
‘Use them!’
Henry’s ears are ringing all the way home.
Chapter VI.
Of TUTSAN or PARKE LEAVES. At the top of the stalks groweth small knops or round buttons which bring forth floures like St Johns grasse, when they are fallen or perished there appeareth litle small pelets very red, like to the colour of clotted or congealed dry blood, in which berries is contained the seede. The roote is hard and of wooddy substance, yeerely sending forth new springs.
THE GREAT FROSTS HAVE COME. The fields and hedges are white and the early morning air in the ribbon of valley beneath the slope is quick with birds. The redwings are here, getting down to the business of stripping the last of the haws, and filling the hedges with a gregarious, weighty presence that sets the squirrels chattering angrily. Crisp, seeded heads of wild angelica are spiky with crystals.
Henry walks down to Broadmead to cast an eye over the cattle. They should be brought in for the winter now; they stand cold and miserable in the hoary grass, breath in clouds about them. He must talk to his stockman. He walks on and stops by the Cary, the little course that runs down off the Mendip, through Somerton and winds out across the Levels. There is vapour rising from the river. One moorhen nervily shrugs itself through the water at the edge near the overhanging reedy bank, black plumage against the blackish water, a faint wake the only clue to its movement.
He calls in at the barton to see it is ready for cows, and then goes back up the hill to eat with his family. He takes a shortcut across the back of Horse Close, and then without thinking turns past Widow Hodges’s place. Rounding the corner of the new wall he comes across her suddenly, weaving a wide-mouthed, greenish basket in the cold without looking at her hands, as if they had a way of their own and could work on without her.
‘Good day to you, Master Lyte,’ she says. Her nose is running. Her hands are very pale in the November light, almost flashing as they move, twisting withy against withy. The flickering lids of her eyes are very dark and seem to latch on to his movement as he passes, as a hawk’s gaze might, fixing to the warmblooded gait of rabbits. He is unwilling to put his back to her, and turns once to raise his hand absurdly as he bids her good morning.
It is warm in the hall by comparison. He stamps the frost from his boots. Hannah has boiled black puddings and somehow the cold makes them all seem even more delicious.
‘That woman gives me the shivers, Frances,’ he complains.
‘Your Widow Hodges? All men find old women disconcerting, Henry.’ Frances is amused. ‘Once past childbearing age, a woman’s use is ill-defined even if working, particularly if she has no husband to tend. Men are unsettled by their ugliness. They are afraid of withered things.’
‘Gardeners are afraid of withered things,’ Henry concedes, going off to his unformed Knot.
It is good to stand up straight after two hours’ digging and to quench his thirst with a long draught from the flagon Mote’s boy brings him, instead of waiting, tetchy, inside at his desk, for the slop-slop of the maidservant’s stepping up the corridor. The lawns are steaming where the sun hits the frost. He wipes his mouth. He needs to decide what shrubs to plant for the low, trimmed hedges that will form the body of the Knot.
He has considered the cost of bringing down from London some of the newly introduced box-tree. They say Buxus is best planted at this time of year, and he is tempted, because the hedges of box he saw in France and Holland were firm and densely foliated, and agreeably disposed to being clipped into shapes. But they also say it has little use in medicine, and with its reeking, astringent smell like cat’s piss it could prove a mistake for his garden. Hyssop, though apt to grow straggly, has a mildly aromatic charm of its own, and many virtues.
Henry sits down on the upturned new waterbutt, just delivered from the coopers, and examines the progress so far. The bricklayers finished their final course last week, and the garden wall stands ruddy and crisp. Tobias Mote’s children are clearing up the hardened bits of lime mortar all along its base. The joiners over at Kingsdon are measuring up now for the pair of doors.
Henry calls over to Mote. ‘Has the smith sent in his bill for the ironwork?’
‘Not yet. I can fetch the hinges in the afternoon if you’re in a hurry for them.’
‘I’d like to get them as soon as possible because the trees will be in soon and those doors will keep out nibblers.’
Mote crosses the sea of opened earth.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says. He takes off his soft cap and scratches his head. ‘It’s only that there are a few things we should mind.’ He pauses.
‘Like?’
‘Like we’re getting a bit forward of ourselves.’
‘Are we?’
‘That plot needs a lot of husbanding before it’s fit. If you want the handsomest plants you’ll need, well, diligence.’
‘What are you saying, Mote?’ Henry sighs inwardly. ‘I sense a dampening of enthusiasms coming on.’
‘It would not be seemly to start planting this year.’
Henry raises his eyebrows.
‘It wouldn’t harm to put in some trees, perhaps, come a month or two, but we ought to be getting the soil in better fettle and, as it is, that ground is overbound with clay. There’s still thorough clearing to be done, look at that ashweed, and setting our minds firmly to the shape of it all. We can’t do that if we’re fiddling around with plants already put in, and bits of earth already committed over to being sown or set with slips. It’d be an evil mess in my estimation.’
Henry is thinking that he couldn’t remember asking Mote for his thoughts on the matter.
‘It’s a big job, Master. It’s not just a few dainty pot-herbs in a frame.’
Henry doesn’t need reminding of the scale of his task. He sighs again, louder this time. It’s just that the idea of a desolate unplanted mudbath outside the house for a twelve-month is not appealing. He pictures the rainwater puddling on the walkways and the creep of the most voracious sort of weeds colonizing the blank spaces; thistles, docks, running grasses. And then after almost a year’s worth of decrepitude and neglect, once everything was waterlogged and become prone to yellow mosses and vermin, the frost would descend, unmitigated by any sheltering stalks or the overreach of wintered shrubs; needling down with violent, icy precision to split the lias paving slabs asunder, the earthenware pots he hasn’t bought yet, this very waterbutt.
‘It’ll fly by,’ Mote says, rubbing his hands together, as if it were all settled. ‘Time won’t lie long on us, as for the while we can hoe what comes up, and we’ll get the gang back to turn in the dung after St Martin’s feast in a two-week’s time. We’ll still need a fair portion of the dung over in the kitchen garden as well, remember, Master. It’s what’s needed most for a fair, well-dressed earth.’
‘Are you saying there may not be enough?’
Tobias Mote shrugs cheerfully. ‘And that all depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether you carry on with all those roses you’ve got a mind for is the truth, Master. They’re hungry buggers for the dung.’
Henry winces. ‘I see. Well we can buy in more from somewhere, can we?’
‘Probably.’ He chuckles. ‘Though that’ll get them talking.’
He can see that it would. He imagines the gossip at the market; have you heard? They’re buying in shit up at Lytes Cary. He imagines the sucked-in breath and shaken heads. Whatever next? It’ll be all over anyway, come the frosts, for those fancy plants. It makes him annoyed, the way he cares about what other people think.
‘But it’s not just the roses, Master, is it. It’s that we’ve got a ground here that is cold and stiff, which we can make more lively by the digging in of hot dung.’
‘Not near the rosemary,’ Henry adds.
‘Nor the carrots,’ Mote says, thinking of all his duties, ‘the carrots most particular. But the nature of this closed-up soil will be warmed and loosened if we keep on with it. If we can find more dung to see us through this year at least.’
‘I may send word over to the Lockyer’s. They have so many horses at livery they are bound to have a surplus to requirements.’
‘Horse dung is only any use if it has stood a year.’
‘I know that.’
‘Or it burns.’
‘Yes,’ Henry says. What is this goddammed habit Mote has, of trying to teach him all the time.
Over where the plum orchard is to be the Sorcerer shrieks manically, and it still sounds horribly like laughter.
‘We’ll turn in that dung, like you say, and we’ll be half-there already.’ Henry says, and then feels suddenly nettled into resolution.
‘You know what? By spring we’ll be planting in it.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Let’s get cracking.’
Tobias Mote looks startled. He chews a corner of his grimy thumb and then nods secretly, imperceptibly to himself as if it was all to be expected.
‘I’ve a lot on my hands, then. I’ll need at least another boy to help me, if that kitchen garden up there is to feed more than a nest of starvelings,’ he says. ‘And if it gets too much, well.’ He spreads his hands out wide to show the true reach of his feelings, and pretends to yawn, his grey teeth showing. ‘There’s sundry other gardens in the parish could do with tending.’
This is certainly true.
‘Blackmail,’ Henry says. It’s not as though he hasn’t already considered the situation he could find himself in without a competent gardener. He can’t do this thing on his own. But Henry is definitely bothered by Tobias Mote. He does not match up to expectations. He does not pause between spadefuls of earth and consider the weather evenly and at length. He laughs too much. He has opinions.
Yet he has been here for very many years and knows the soil like one of his family. His father had been stockman here for most of his working life until his death, and Tobias had grown up running in the meadows with the kine. He knows what the very grass on this clay soil tastes like from field to field. He knows about the particular way of the wind here, and the likely pattern of rain and the sheltered places. He’d first learnt his gardening from his mother, whose patch was the most burgeoning in the village, and a husbanding man called Colleyns, who he had gone to as a boy about sixteen when he knew he preferred pears to driving cattle down to the other side of Pricklemarch Bridge, say. Tobias Mote has been gardening this soil at Lytes Cary for nigh-on thirty years. Henry knows that he would be foolish to deliberately lose a man’s skills just like that.
‘Would another four shillings a year make all the difference to your sense of optimism about this project?’
‘It would,’ Mote says to the sky in general, without a trace of irony, without turning round.
Some little brown thing is flicking up leaf mould – a wren, a mouse – they look the same sometimes from the corner of one’s eye. That reminds him, he needs to set traps tonight. As soon as the cold weather comes, mice are all over the house, getting into the pantry, the stores, behind the panelling.
‘Master?’ Tobias Mote scratches his neck, then stops.
‘What?’ Surely to God he won’t ask for more.
‘It’s just that there’s a bit of talk going about. Not much, only a word or two. I just was wondering …’
‘What?’ Henry says coldly.
‘If you knew of it, and if there is a way it might be stopped.’
Henry is in no mood to discuss family matters with his gardener. ‘I have heard nothing about anything,’ he says, ‘and do not care for it.’
‘You don’t care to know what they are saying?’
‘I do not listen to the wigwag of idle tongues.’
‘Alright.’ Mote shrugs in a way that suggests he will try again later, and carries on with his spade. ‘It’s just that—’
‘No!’ Henry rounds on him. ‘There is too much to do today for all this. Far too much.’
‘I’m going for my dinner soon,’ Mote warns him, unnecessarily. ‘It’s already late.’
And so it is. The day passes very quickly, and it seems no time at all before a fat, white moon has shot up into the sky with startling rapidity, shrinking as it does so, and its gaze seems harder, more judgmental, up there above the alder, than it had all vastly soft and gaping down on the horizon. Tobias Mote goes off down the path towards Tuck’s, he is small and spry and lithe. He is not at all what Henry imagines a gardener to be. This vexes him more than he can put into words, but he tries anyway, complaining to his wife over meals and in bed.
‘A gardener should be big-handed, slow, move steadily like a root moves in the soil, not flitting quick and tense between the beds, perspiring freely, energy bounding out of him with every springing step. Damn it, Frances, that man almost crackles about the garden. Will that be bad for the plants?’
He wants Frances to laugh then, and get up from her chair and go to him to soothe his troubled feelings and gather him into her fine encircling arms, and suggest an early retirement to bed for the night, but she does not; she is playing at being the dutiful wife. Instead he watches her bite a length of her thread from the reel and hold the needle close to her face to see its narrow impossible eye in the candlelight. He feels desire kindling in him as she puts the end of the thread in her mouth and makes it firm and damp between her lips, and then the thread is through. Henry looks despondently at the interminable hem she is stitching along, and knows there will be no consolation to be had from her tonight. It is not that she is shy, or reticent about her new role as a wife, and she even listens to him as she works, something it must be admitted that Anys did not always do. But he is finding that her poise and coolness disconcert him on a daily basis.
She has very good teeth, he thinks, looking into the fire, at least he has that to be grateful for.
1566
Chapter VII.
Of SHEPHEARDS PURSE. It hath sound, tough and pliable branches, of a fote long, with long leaves, deeply cut or jagged. The floures are white, in place whereof when they are gone, there riseth small flat cods, or triangled pouches, wherein the seede is contained.
CHRISTMAS AND TWELFTH NIGHT have been and gone, but scraps of ivy and mistletoe are still up in the hall. They drive Henry mad, everywhere he treads, little, limp leaves beneath his feet, but it’s been a pleasure to have a reason to open up a vat of Gascon wine, and make spiced hot hippocras by the fireside, share it out on those cold, stark nights. They all survived the tenants’ feast and there were no disagreements. The girls enjoyed the juggler that came on Boxing Day and Old Hannah surpassed herself with tarts, roast meats and suckets, though Frances didn’t seem to enjoy the Christmastide victuals as much as he did. He hopes she is not sickening for something, as wintertime is not ideal for having doctor’s visits in the night, the roads can be treacherous.
No word though from his father during this time, which is a source of great sadness to him. He had sent a fat goose over to Sherborne, but received no word in return. He always misses his mother at Christmas, and he observes the girls and knows how much they must miss theirs, too, though they never complain. Anys loved games at Christmas. Of course after she died Mary in particular was inconsolable, crying for hours on end, clinging onto her poppet. Florence was just a newborn. Jane did not speak. Edith, the eldest, bustled about the younger ones, in fact he hardly saw her, but even she has a look in her eye still that he finds hard to describe, except that it is like a dullness, as though some essence in her had died away.
The memory of his own mother Edith is now so eclipsed by the disagreeable nature of his relationship with his father’s second wife Joan Young that Edith Lyte appears only occasionally as a kind of improbable saint in his imagination. Sometimes he dreams of her as a white, cloudy horse leaping over his head, and the leaps are like steam pouring through air. In these dreams his horse-mother never lands, is always vaulting the hedges, legs stretched mid-jump, so that he sees the underbelly, the pale unshod hoofs. In the dreams he does not know if she can see him standing there below her, his small boy’s face tilted up to the dark sky, studded with stars. Sometimes he knows her view of him would be obscured by trees even if she should look down, he netted in shadow, rooted in shadow, his leather boots sunk an inch into mud on the track so that he cannot move from the lea of the withy hedge, its overhang.
His father is becoming a stranger to him. In the last few months they have exchanged cursory messages about land matters, church dues, administration, crops and tenancies, but not a word between them about family life, no ordinary pleasantries. He has never asked after Henry’s new wife’s health, and never refers to her by name, in fact Henry is not sure he has ever mentioned her at all. He has many feelings about all of this, most of which he pushes to one side and declines to think on. But when he receives word to expect his father on Tuesday next he has no choice but to recognize the state of things between his father and himself.
It has to be said, he is not sure of his motives for coming. John Lyte’s health is not good and the ride over from Sherborne may not be comfortable for him, but according to the short letter he has sent, he insists on coming to discuss the proposed sale of various cows while prices are strong. Henry knows that he wants to check on the estate, make sure that Lytes Cary is not suffering in his son’s hands. In turn, Henry is looking forward to imparting good news about the ditches, which have been cleared already, and have him savour last season’s cider, which is exceptional. Henry always strives to please his father: this time it seems vital, and as a small chink of light falls onto that ignored, closed corner of his life which his father occupies, he begins to wonder. He wishes … oh, it is no matter what he wishes. No doubt it will all die down or be smoothed over and forgotten before long. The childish dependent part of him hopes the visit is a reconciliatory one, in which his father plans to apologize for not attending the wedding.
At the same time he resents the way this makes him feel. He wants it all to go away and leave him to get on with the real project in his mind; his garden, his pride. He wants to talk of it with his father but something prevents him, and he thinks they will not walk around to that side of the house to show off the new walls and ironwork and open beds. Though every other ounce of him cries out to try to impress his father, he would prefer to wait until the garden has found its balance, until its own presence has become distinct. He does not want his father’s disapproval spoiling his enthusiasm, and most of all he does not want Joan Young prying into the cost and workings of it all, criticizing his choice of rose, his taste, his usefulness, his ambitions.
Indeed he is hoping that Joan will stay behind, because her presence in the house makes the servants behave erratically in front of his father, which makes it seem as if he cannot properly restrain his household. At least that is what occurred on the last occasion that she came, over a year ago. It had been unfortunate, for example, that a large, black fly the size and furriness of a bumble bee had drowned itself in her glass and bobbed unnoticed all the way from the kitchen to her place at table.
In his reply to his father’s letter he had not extended a courteous wish to see his stepmother. For several nights he lies in bed at night agonizing over whether he might be making a mistake by not inviting her, and then again, is he making one if he does?
All this browbeating proves to be a waste of time, because even as he spies the newfangled, painted carriage that she insisted that his father purchase lurching up the drive, he can see from the dark, malevolent shape wrapped beside him that they will not be left alone together, that she has come. It is St Vincent’s day; the patron saint of drunkards, he thinks wryly, and as they approach he steels himself for the abomination of her company, summons the cheerful greeting he has rehearsed.
‘Father!’ he calls up, but he can see the discomfort all over his face already. His hand raises stiffly in the air, more like a warding-off than a greeting.
When he descends they embrace briefly, but then his gaze looks everywhere but at Henry. Blackie runs round the horses, barking, providing distraction.
‘Madam,’ he bows to his stepmother.
Their distaste for each other is entirely mutual. When she smiles her ghastly wooden teeth at him, it is more as if she was grinding them together. A very fast, small woman, she clambers unaided from the carriage and beetles straight across the porch threshold and disappears into the passage towards the kitchens, her sleeves trailing. No one has worn sleeves like that for twenty years. Dressed in cloth of that inky purple hue, and with her nose turned blue at the tip from the breeze on the ride, she has always looked to him like death on legs; cadaverously alive. He had detested her manner from the moment she entered their lives when he was younger; she would coil herself around his father like she owned him, in an offensive way his mother would never have wished or dared to do. In his blackest, most resentful moments, he has thought of her like rootless Devil’s Thread, wrapping its strands about the crop plants in the fields, strangling all hospitable life from them. Now though he knows to call her parasite would be disrespectful to his father. She is kin.
‘Henry?’ He can hear her shrieking for him. ‘Henry! Is this beef we are having today?’
‘I hardly know, madam, I—’ Henry stands awkwardly at the kitchen doorway, trying to avoid the glower of Old Hannah, standing by the fire with her basting spoon in hand. ‘It is not my business to poke about in there.’
‘It won’t be done on time, you know we’re hungry after the ride. Look at that fire.’
‘You are very early. Perhaps—’
‘Where’s that wife of yours?’
‘She is … upstairs, madam, and will be with us shortly.’ Henry knows that Frances will be in her chamber, staving off that minute when she must glide down the staircase like the lady of the house she is, and greet her mother-in-law with gracious if entirely feigned obeisance.
He goes to the foot of the stairs and looks up but does not call. He is not sure but thinks he hears a door being slammed at the end of the corridor. He hopes there might be a kind of unspoken solidarity between them both now that Joan Young is in the house – perhaps the only feeling that they share, but some men would have less to boast of. He takes a deep breath and goes back to the hall, to seat his father according to the rules of honour. He feels stifled with anxiety, his throat so tight he can hardly get simple niceties and phrases out. His girls appear one by one and curtsey properly before they take their places, which is a relief, and even though the guests have arrived so appallingly early Old Hannah manages almost immediately to produce a first course of roast fowls and salad, but after this it is unfortunate that the beef takes a long time to appear, and so does Frances.
‘Where is that wife? Does she exist? Of course she does, I can smell there’s a woman about the house,’ Joan says, pushing her plate about impatiently.
‘I do dislike a hiatus in a meal,’ she hisses to Edith, sitting next to her at table. ‘A gap can feel so dissatisfactory. It is fortunate that nobody important dines with us today.’ She casts her eye glassily round the hall, though as Henry Lyte knows she is short of sight, she will not have focussed much on anyone.
After all that fuss, she doesn’t eat much, helping herself to meat but draining the juice away with the edge of her spoon against the bowl as though the dish is too watery, turning the loaf suspiciously to check the underside for mould, rifling through a salad of winter cresses to find the choicest pieces of bottled artichoke, only to fling them back with a bitter little sigh and eat nothing. Though she does like bones, sucking the last little fibres of meat from them, snapping them to get at any traces of marrow concealed inside.
When Henry enquires after the journey, she runs through a tedious itinerary of the way they had taken, and how poor the roads in this part of the country, how hopeless the route chosen and how slow the horse.
His father, who until this point has not uttered a word, puts his knife down.
‘That carriage was a mistake,’ he mutters.
‘No John,’ she snaps, in front of everyone. ‘It was that the horse was inadequate.’
Nobody else seems to blanch at the way she speaks to her husband before company. For a second he catches Jane’s eye, and then when he looks at his father he sees a small red patch, the size of a coin, flare up on his left cheekbone. Even when the conversation veers towards the matters of local taxation that usually rouse his father to table-thumping vehemence, he toys with his table knife in silence. Either he is feeling unwell or he, too, has something heavy weighing on his conscience or his family affairs. Henry looks across at his own offspring and tries to imagine their roles in reverse. He is a very different kind of father, isn’t he? But after all, children rarely consider the innermost feelings of parents, indeed they do not seem to have them, which is the natural order of things.
The girls are very quiet during this visit. Jane in particular says not a word, she sits still through the meal; bowing her head as they say grace, eating neatly what is put on her plate, dabbling her fingers clean in the waterbowl. She is occupied in watching, taking in whatever strangeness it is happening just under the surface in all of them, her eyes flicking between the adult faces as they speak. Henry wonders how she can be aware that something is wrong. On the surface this is a perfectly ordinary family day. After all, nobody else could possibly know that there was such a storm swilling inside him. Why should they? Any guilt or resentment is entirely his own, entirely invisible.
Joan Young. Even her name is a contradiction, she is the furthest from young a body could ever be, representing for him all that is shrivelled, bitter, hardened. There is a shallow stream he knows up on the Mendip which, if one drops a stick or small object in its flow, with alarming rapidity will grow a crust of greyish lime about it, as hard and coarse as any stone. He imagines that someone caught habitually in her presence could suffer a similar fate, because stoniness exudes from her very soul, like a contagion. He can see it slowly afflicting his father, a callous skin edging across his being. Looking at his father is like looking at himself as he would appear in twenty years if he had a crust of stone grown over him.
Frances is the last to join them at the table, in fact she is distinctly late by the time she glides into her seat. Henry is not sure if she has done this on purpose, even though she is very pale. He hopes she doesn’t have the green sickness, from which his sister used to suffer.
‘Ah!’ his father says, rising briefly as she takes her chair beside Henry.
‘I’ve always been a good riser,’ Joan Young remarks.
‘Even when expecting, madam?’ Frances smiles sweetly at the nearest child and takes some bread from the basket, and then the long-awaited beef course arrives and there is much chatter and diversion.
Henry looks at her astounded.
No-one else seems to have heard what she said. What is the matter with everyone, are they deaf? And though he keeps on staring at her through the rest of the meal she does not speak again after that, and the conversation veers towards his father’s lawyer who is unwell. When they have finished eating Henry follows her down the corridor into the kitchen and closes the door.
‘Madam, did you mean to—’
‘Shhh.’ She puts her finger up to her lips and smiles, her eyes dancing.
‘That’s all you can say? You can’t leave a man unsure over something like that! I beg you!’
She touches his arm. ‘We’ll see. I am rarely so late with my courses, and I have begun to feel sick these last few days. But it may be nothing.’ She will say no more.
Henry’s heart is racing inside his chest with familiar apprehension and hope. ‘A child!’ he whispers to Blackie, who thumps the stub of her tail once on the flagstones. This time it will surely be different. His new wife’s first baby.
Henry pays slightly less attention to the rest of the day than he should. Ignoring his father’s reticence, he goes with him anyway to examine his windmill up in Cowleaze field though the tenant is out, then they skirt across to Inmead. Though they stand and look out at the view to the wet moorfields, they do not speak, and as his father does not ask about the trees he does not tour the orchards with him as Henry had planned. Indeed they do not do anything he planned; he feels rather superfluous, as though he were following his father about in the same, slavish manner as Blackie, trotting at his heels. His mind is elsewhere now, though, and he is almost grateful when the horses are got ready early and his father and stepmother leave despite the special supper being prepared.
The very house itself seems to let out a sigh of relief to see Joan Young gone, as the carriage containing her pulls mercifully out of the yard and onto the track towards the road, trundling back off to Sherborne again where she belongs. His father had not mentioned, Henry realizes, any sale of cows.
He goes straight to the parlour to find Frances, to examine her closely for clues.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘That was not a complete disaster, was it.’
‘Is there no stone which that woman will leave unturned?’ she exclaims, quite amazed at Joan Young’s rudeness even though she had been warned.
‘Probably not. But she is your mother-in-law, and there is nothing to be done about it,’ Henry says.
‘Why is she like that?’
‘Because she had seen herself here, upon marriage to my father. Here at Lytes Cary. She believed that she would be first lady of this manor, did not anticipate that he would stand aside and allow me to manage the land, while he retired with his new wife to an unimposing though pleasant enough house in Sherborne. By virtue of my being the sole heir to my father’s estate as eldest son, I have ruined her plans – and she is always reminded of this on coming here.’
Chapter VIII.
Of CINQUEFOYLE, or Five finger grasse. The great yellow cinquefoil hath round tender stalks, running abroad. The roote boyled in vineger, doth mollifie and appease fretting and consuming sores.
IT IS THE TWELFTH OF MARCH, and the second week of Lent. Outside in the last of a spring frost the plants are made of glass, the sun full upon them, a few melted drops catching light and winking colours. Henry walks the edge of the estate, steam rising from the river like a pan seething. The wood is a theatre, cutout black twigs shot through with vapour and diffuse beams of light against which birds flit, softly translucent. The willow’s tawniness is flaring to orange with the year’s growth, a supple bristle of shoots. Coming back through the garden Henry watches honey bees among the snowdrops, their legs fat with yellow catkin pollen. He remembers to avoid the upper garden door, so that he does not have to speak to Widow Hodges.
Today Henry takes delivery of seeds.
Looking through them when the man has gone, he has to admit that he’s probably bought too much. There are others on order, too, but the seedsman doesn’t pass through very often and Henry was keen not to overlook a chance to buy many sorts. The man had parsley and radish which he said had come from nearby, and endive, cucumber, anise, lettuce, purslane and pompion from further afield, mostly London. Henry also took pear kernels brought from Worcestershire, and he was tempted into buying fourteen liquorice plants, even though he suspects they will not do well on this kind of soil.
It is like a banquet, a seed banquet at his desk as he sits there opening the little packets one by one and relishing their differences: pale seeds of angelica like discarded shells of dull, brown beetles – flat and ribbed as if each one had been squashed in the overcrowded seedhead. He puts one into his mouth for that explosion of resinous savour, harsh at first then with a distinctive soapy undertow. Astonishing, he thinks, going on chewing, his tongue tingling and numb, how such insignificant, woody flecks can unleash such potency. He has seeds of ammi, too. Horribly dry and bitter. Smallage lives up to its name; the seeds are minute, scarcely bigger than grains of sand or mites. Alexander seed is black and large, like fat rat’s droppings. Gromwell is of a cold dense grey like that of tin-glaze china, quite startlingly like the eyes of cooked fish – with a high shine on each, and a faint patch of yellow blush. Not perfectly round, these seeds are mobile, free-flowing on his hand.
He also has dill, vervain, motherwort, thlaspi of Candy, sanicle, dittany, thyme, aristolochia, pennyroyal, calamint, centuary, alecost, herb of Grace, and wafer-thin moons of lunary; some call it Honesty but what is truth or honesty or lies to a plant? Such riches at his fingertips!
Of course for years he has bought in seeds for the vegetable yard, but this year his enthusiasm bubbles over even for them, as well as the seeds for the Knot, as though he is seeing them anew. He already has plenty of onion seed bought locally in March – maybe three pounds in weight. He digs his hand in and lets the seeds run through them in his delight as he opens each little sack and examines the contents, sniffs them, cracks a few open with his teeth. There are various peas, and borlotti beans in their stiffly undulating parchment pods.
He pours a mixture of some of the peas and beans into a pot to gloat over at his desk. They are soft red and brown and green, silkily dry, wrinkled. They are the colour of dried blood, tallow, bone, fresh larder mould, lichen. They are as hard as shingle, as light as buttons. And they are all – he feels quite overwhelmed with the sheer mass of them – waiting. He puts his forefinger to them and stirs them about. He rattles a handful from palm to palm. They are extraordinary – how has he never heeded it so well? And the promise they contain. These things seem dead, and yet … A few drops of water, the enclosing dark earth with its minerals, the warmth of sunlight; and each of these desiccated, mummified little bits of toughness will hydrate, fatten and burst into vivid miraculous sweet shoots, climbing, sinewing towards the light.
Tobias Mote looks at them doubtfully, when Henry takes a fair selection out to show him.
‘That’s a fearful lot to be grown from seed,’ he says, scratching through his rat-coloured, curly hair. ‘We’d be better off buying in little plants already set from Mistress Shaw in Wells. Only so much time on a man’s hands. Can’t produce a nursery out of thin air in a year’s stretch.’ He points with a blunt, grimy forefinger at the dug turf around them. ‘Not with all this going on.’
Henry’s good mood is unshakeable. ‘But they’ll last, even if we can’t get round to sowing everything this season.’
‘If they don’t get mildewed, or eaten by mice, or stolen; or so long as they don’t sprout untowardly.’ Tobias Mote chuckles with more glee than Henry wants to hear. ‘There’s a lot can go wrong with seeds stored badly.’
Henry stops listening to him.
For a second he thinks he hears something else behind the garden wall, strains his ears, his heart beating, but it is the low noise of ravens up in the woods that sounds like men talking.
‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking, we’ll be needing a bank,’ Mote is saying. ‘We can cast up one here where it should catch the sun alright.’
‘And grow a soft kind of cover over it – then I must add grass seed to the list.’ Henry is making notes on a board propped on an overturned cask.
‘And grass it.’ Mote repeats. Henry finds this is an annoying habit he has, of saying again what has already been said; not as if he is committing it to memory, more as if he is weighing up the readiness of what has been decided upon, as one might judge a fruit in the palm of the hand during the course of a tour of the orchard. It is not that Tobias Mote is rude or disrespectful, just that he seems disconcertingly his own man, that won’t be bidden.
‘So that it can be used as a seat for contemplation amongst the calm of the plants, facing the Knot itself.’ Henry goes on regardless, still pleased with the idea. ‘I imagine in June it will be popular.’
‘Folk can sit and kick their heels, when they’ve little to do.’
Henry Lyte looks sharply at Mote, but he can’t see any evidence of sarcasm. Mote’s countenance is fixed always either to the far distance of the horizon, detecting the weather, or straight down to the soil to the matters in hand. He digs very fast and straight, as though he were racing. Only for trees, it seems, does he make an exception and look out to the middle ground. Once Henry saw him watching a fox crossing Easter Field with a hen from the yard in its jaws, a ruddy streak trotting diagonally, its brush out straight and triumphant.
‘See that devil go,’ he’d muttered grudgingly to no-one in particular.
But on the whole, Tobias Mote seems to know what is going on around him without looking, without ceasing his thin, see-sawing whistle, without raising his eyes from the ground as he digs or rakes. His ears are small and pricked, perhaps their bristle of hairs makes his hearing more acute than other men’s. Mary calls him the troll, because she is afraid of him. If she is naughty, he only has to mention his name to make her squeal and comply with parental requests.
‘Does he do magic?’ she’d whispered once in awe, when they were discussing the crop of skirrets laid like dead man’s fingers buttered on the plate at supper, but her stepmother dislikes that kind of talk and made her get down from the table. Frances applies herself with scant duty to prayer and worship at the appropriate moments of the day but has a horror of talk of spirits and the afterlife, that makes Henry suspect that her beliefs run wilder than some. Of course he can’t be sure of this as they have never discussed it, not being something a civilized family should concern itself with. His first wife Anys, he can’t help remembering, was devoted to prayer.
‘And on the shady slope behind the bank, for who ever thinks about what is behind them, we can set primroses, or violets as a surprise, and other little shy flowers that do not mind a lack of sunshine – all in due course,’ Henry adds hastily. He is determined to remain enthusiastic about remembering details, even in the face of cynicism. He paces up and down the length of land, which Mote is now raking finely, slighting the soil in preparation for the sowing as soon as the weather seems suitable.
Henry has hired a weeding woman who lives at Tuck’s, called Susan Gander. She has been pulling out neat, tender bits of dandelion, jack-by-the-hedge and long, easy roots of withywind, so that the beds are smooth and clear, and everything is ready for committing the seeds to the earth. Some areas are sown, and some left bare for pricklings to be set out later. Susan Gander is an odd woman, Henry decides. He has caught her staring at him when his back is turned, and when he speaks to her to give instruction, she doesn’t say much in return, just nods, staring all the time even as she tosses weeds into the basket, so that she sometimes misses. He knows she’s not a half-wit, she is the wife of John Gander who is the most reliable carter round here. He thinks perhaps she may be put out because at first he found it hard to remember her name, but now he has it, and still she goes on, which is making him feel almost paranoid. It happened when he saw her at church on Sunday, he swears he saw her surreptitiously turning round and watching him out of the corner of her eye, nudging her neighbour. Her behaviour proves to him something unpleasant he has been suspecting for a few weeks now.
There can be no longer any doubt that something has begun to quietly, insidiously, circulate the district about the nature of his first wife’s death. No-one has mentioned it to him, not a single mortal soul, but he hears the whispering and sees the glances, and slowly the whole ghastly mess is rearing its head again in an unformed, pliable version of itself like a bad dream.
He goes inside, and watches the sowing of seeds from the study for a while, with more than a touch of jealousy. Mote somehow knows he’s watching, brazenly raises his hand once to him. See? Henry mutters to himself, even his own gardener prefers him not to dig in the garden. He seems to regard it mostly as his own domain. But he does trust Mote sufficiently to carry out what they have agreed. The progress is invisible from here.
Henry prays, then goes to his manuscript, though it is hard to put his mind to it. Every day as the season draws on he finds it more of an effort to apply himself to its difficulty, tinkers with what little there is of it so far. He feels mired and tense.
The next day is grey, and the lesser celandines have kept their petals half-shut. A small brown hawk with pointed wings, not from round here, has been flying between the pear trees and making the blackbirds jittery. By midday the pale sky has lowered and dissolved into a mizzling fine drift of rain that is perfect for moistening, nurturing those seeds laid already in the earth. Tobias Mote says that a successful life for any seed is determined in the first day – the first hours, even – of being planted.
Watching the hawk whirr up to the edge of the copse, Henry is reminded of a reddish-brown moth and thinks it softly beautiful, until he sees its decisive landing in the ash tree, cruel feet outstretched and latching onto the bough so swiftly that he flinches. It is a meat-eater, through and through.
Chapter IX.
Of PLANTAINE, or Waybrede. The third kind of plantaine is smaller than the second, the leaves bee long and narrow, with ribs of a darke greene with smal poynts or purples. The roote is short and verie full of threddie strings.
FRANCES QUICKENED TODAY. Henry can’t feel it of course, though he puts his hand dutifully on her belly, but he praised God for it; another healthy child kicking in the womb. He can never picture a miniature human in there, like those shown in the diagrams in medical books. His mind’s eye suggests rather that it is a pinkish kind of grub or caterpillar, that will later transform into something more recognizable, when it is pressing tiny feet and hands against the inner side of her belly skin. He is after all an experienced father. There were the births of Edith, Mary, Jane and Florence, and there was the other birth too, but this is too painful for him to remember. This last memory is the one that is slippery, evasive, so deeply interred that he can’t even acknowledge it. He is adept at forgetting; extremely adept.
‘Come and see the garden today, Frances!’ he says, on impulse.
‘Then you must wait while I find my old shoes,’ she says.
‘No, now! Come at once! It is the end of April and you have not seen what has been happening out there,’ Henry makes himself laugh, tugs at her hand. And as they go out together to see the progress of the Knot and its surrounding borders, Henry begins a descriptive verbal tour for his wife, so that she can imagine how it is to grow. What will be here and here. What will be high, what will be climbing. He ignores Mote, who is grinning to himself as he listens to Henry’s enthusiastic, expansive rendition of how it is to be.
‘Picture its frankness,’ he entreats, ‘fat and green. Here will be the gillyflowers, and these little slips of lavender will have grown into plants by then, and see all these frondy bits of dill coming up, and these are the apothecary’s rose, and these the damask. What do you think?’
‘I do love roses.’ Her tone suggests that there is doubt involved in all of this.
‘The beehives are at the far end by the garden. If you sit up here by the house they will never bother you, and here is a good corner where the sun warms the wall. Even the little rock lizards bask in this spot.’
‘It really is quite hard to picture, Henry.’ He knows she is only allowing herself to see the mud, the parts that are not finished.
‘Think of a lily. Think of breathing in the plant’s waxy freshness like a draught of vital spirit.’
Frances does smile politely.
‘Think of a rose, then, think of bringing a fresh pink rose up to your face and drinking in its scent. It will have opened that morning and you will have your basket with you in order to gather many more, perhaps to make an aromatic water in your stillroom that very day while the blossoms are wholly fresh. If you like there could be a seat here for you to sit on, by the roses.’ He fetches a cask for her. ‘Try it!’
‘And my face won’t catch the sun?’
‘Your fair white skin would be shaded by the briars overhead.’
She looks suddenly keen. ‘And could we have that by the week in July when my mother comes to visit for my lying-in?’
‘Well, no, it may take a couple of years to reach overhead.’
She looks back at the house. ‘Everything takes so long. Can’t you just buy bigger roses, more full-grown, and get the men to twine them up as if they’d been there months and months?’
‘Roses do not like being moved – better to wait and coax them up the wires at their natural pace if you want them to last their proper lifetime’s span.’
Frances is becoming concerned for the state of her shoes and the mud that she will be treading into the house.
‘Every time I come out here, Henry,’ she points out. She knows perfectly well that one cannot rip up roses by the roots at whim. She is being wilful in her lack of interest. Henry cannot understand why she does not enjoy the garden more. To be sure there are many bare patches and places where herbs are not added yet, but he has described to her the wholeness of it, its beauty that by next June will surely dazzle her.
‘And is it all very costly, darling?’ she adds lightly. He looks at her. In the sunlight her straight black hair shines as though it is polished. She is not at all like a flower, he thinks. She is mineral, crystalline, waxy, brittle. The cost of his garden is not something that he wishes to discuss, he realizes.
‘How you can spend so much time inside the house without fresh air is quite beyond me,’ he retorts instead, as she walks away. He is very annoyed that she is blind to the garden’s soft growth, its promise. Mote smirks at the masterwort in the bed behind him, saying nothing.
He opens the garden door and leaves the neat, planned, incipient beauty of his Knot and strides off to inspect the orchards and the wilder, rampant plants in the wayside. He will clear his head, stretch his legs, shake off that disappointed feeling that comes from not being able to rouse enthusiasm in another being for something that one loves.
As he walks about, gradually and in truth for the first time in his life he begins to see the plants around him in terms of both their particularities and their potential. He begins to examine them all with a mounting respect and excitement for their distinctions, going from plant to plant, getting lost in their worlds, making mental notes, determined to write down what he’s observed when he returns to his study. Next time he will bring a notebook outside, and something to write with. He looks closely at the yellow loosestrife with its expanding, hairy, silky, fat stem, a plain-looking plant. He admires a specimen of elecampane; muscular in its softness, stiff with preparing to grow. He sees wild feverfew, with its almost sticky leaf; comfrey, a foot tall now, relaxing out of its growth into a soft almost reptile skin; and there is lady’s smock; pinkish, wavering in the air as though alert or tense. In the orchards the Dunster plum tree has rounded leaves peeping from the smooth twigs. On the greengage, tight waxy points are bright yellow-green, thin and strong. The apple leaves are opening raggedly on the branch like a conjuror’s flourish, and the quince is decked with little piles of hairy leaves, long pile like the hair on a young woman’s jawline. On the medlar are mild, elegant fingers of leaf and pinkish buds. Those leaves are fine in texture, rippled. He applies most observation to his favourites in the pear orchard. Their white blossoms are open like hats, and the leaves silver-soft, with a white-green tip that is crisp to the touch, and shedded brown husks at the base where it has sprouted. He watches a metallic green beetle clinging and clambering inside a blossom, and sees the boughs are dripping with mosses and crusted with three kinds of lichen; bearded, creeping, yellow. He wishes he knew more.
He wishes he could have some word from his father, who has kept up a resolute silence although Henry has written to share the good news about Frances’s condition. It is often surprising when a man gets what he hopes for, but so rarely does it come in a guise that one could have predicted. For a moment he has the most peculiar, overwhelming sensation that something vast is creeping up on him, drawing nearer. He turns around in alarm but it is only Blackie, trotting over the wet grass towards him, blunt tail in the air.
Chapter X.
Of BLOOD-STRANGE, or Mousetails. It floureth in Aprill, and the torches and seede is ripe in May, and shortly after the whole herb perisheth, so that in June yee shall not finde the dry or withered plant.
HE NEEDS TO GO AND COLLECT A HUNDRED ready-set slips of gillyflower, on order from Mistress Shaw, an old woman of some sixty years that lives in Wells. At its best her garden is a fat, colourful kerchief of blossom, and the children always vie to come with him in the cart when he goes to her for plants and seed. Rumour has it that as a young girl she was a Benedictine novice in a London convent, but that she left the calling and walked south-west long before the upheavals in the Church began. They say that she was never wed, yet everything else she plants springs eagerly to life.
Once they arrive at her garth, which is a square of land that sits beyond the town on the flat beyond the Bishop’s palace, Mary and Jane run off to hide and reappear later with the stains of strawberries about their mouths, oozing fistfuls of redcurrants, though they swear they were not thieving. She never chastises them, which he suspects is not only because their household provides good custom for her business. On occasion he has caught that raw, hungry glance that the barren can sometimes have on seeing children, but she seems to take some pleasure in cultivating their sound running full tilt in her garden.
She has narrow shoulders, but these days a protruding abdomen makes her very wide about the middle under her gown, and walking makes her lean a little as if one side of her were puckered up. Henry Lyte sees that she must suffer from some kind of growth inside her, but knows he cannot mention it unless she does. But on this visit, which is about his fourth or fifth already that season, as he is ducking out of the gate in her garden wall, he turns back to her. Checking that the garden boys are out of earshot, he asks very quietly, ‘You have been seen by a physician, madam?’
She looks down at her hands. The knuckles are shiny with the swelling of old age, and the nails green and split and grubby with work. When she speaks he smells her breath has the unmistakable unsavoury sweet smell of rot, and he is sorry for it.
‘There is no need, Master Lyte, no need at all.’
‘A doctor would give you physic to ease your suffering, and he can prepare you for what you might have to expect.’
‘I go to church to know what there is ahead of me. And beyond that I do not want to know. I pray. I try to sleep at night.’
‘Do you sleep easily?’
‘I do not.’
Henry tries to think what he can usefully do to help her. ‘I shall have a boy ride over with a bottle of aqua vitae for you, for the pain,’ he says.
Mistress Shaw’s eyes widen. ‘No! I can manage, thank you, Master Lyte.’
‘Or I can leave half a crown and you could order some yourself.’
‘No, really, but I thank you anyway.’
He smiles, will not be put off by her firm demurral. ‘I do insist,’ he says. And when he gets home he dispatches it immediately, a corked brown bottle wrapped in cloth.
But something very strange happens, which is that Mistress Shaw sends it back unopened with the boy that very evening, and with it is a little note. I thank you again Master Lyte, but I will not take strong drink. I hasten to assure you how this has naught to do with what they say of you, which wickedness I shall not believe.
What they say? Precisely what is it that they say? He must find out. He calls his bailiff but he is still out at market. He begins to asks Lisbet but before he reaches the crux she finds a pretence to vanish away to the kitchen. There is someone else he could ask, but something makes him hesitate. In the gloomy distance, he can see Mote’s form on the edge of the garden, digging, digging. He considers sending the boy to call him in. He delays lighting the candle, so that he can keep an eye on his progress. But in any event he does not need to make further enquiries, because by tomorrow forenoon a letter from his father comes.
Chapter XI.
Of HORSETAILE. It is good against the cough, the difficultie and paine of fetching breath, and against inward burstings, as Dioscorides and Plinie writeth.
HE IS NOT SURE WHICH IS WORSE, the fact that he has disappointed him, or believing that his father would allow himself to be manipulated into this position by that woman.
He stands, transfixed, in the hall. Across the passage he can hear Frances giggling in the kitchen over the clatter of pots. Her condition is softening her, she has begun to waddle very slightly as she moves from room to room, and listening now to her voice like that makes him feel protective. It suits her, this temporary relaxing of the rules she has set herself. He hears footsteps approaching from the kitchen, towards him standing there. The smile dies on her face.
Frances sees he has a letter in his hand. ‘What is it, Henry?’
‘From Sherborne.’ He is smarting.
Frances snatches the paper from him. ‘What does he say? I cannot make head nor tail of your father’s hand – it’s like cobwebs.’
‘Here.’ Henry directs her to the passage.
Her mouth opens a crack in disbelief as she takes it in.
‘How can he even suggest such a thing? And then seamlessly he goes on to talk of picking up the barley malt on Friday. It’s scarcely credible.’ Disparagingly she turns the paper to see if there is anything of worth to be found on the reverse. ‘This cannot warrant a reply,’ she says. ‘Do not even give him the pleasure of watching you put your attention to it.’
‘But does it sound like his usual way of speech?’
‘I scarcely know him, Henry.’
‘It is that viper woman, hissing in his ear. I know it.’ Henry bites at his thumbnail. ‘Coiled in the sand over my father’s money like a clutch of someone else’s eggs.’
‘It’s just the words of a bad-tempered old man. Pay no heed. Parents can be cruellest to their children, but they may not always mean it.’ Frances pretends that it is of no consequence but her cheeks have flushed scarlet with offence. She stands for a moment, rubbing the mound of her belly and looking at nothing.
‘But to say that God will punish me,’ Henry says. ‘And that my conscience will be nothing if not tainted. This is like a curse upon us!’
‘What has provoked it?’ she asks.
Henry does not know where to begin to answer. ‘The imminent arrival of a child can bring on … change, bring unsaid, underlying matters to a head. There is nothing like new life to unleash the past,’ he says.
‘But what underlying matter could that be?’ she says, bewildered.
Above them there is a crash on the floorboards, one of the children starts to cry and she has to rush upstairs.
So certain things begin to make sense. Here is the vile rumour laid out in black and white upon the page, in his father’s hand. He is the very source of it, the wellspring, and it is unthinkable. A more bitter blow could not be had, he thinks, than being struck down maliciously by your own father. In great anguish of mind Henry sits down and attempts a reply to his imputation. My good father, he begins. Then comes a torrent of opening lines each crossed out in favour of the next.
With deep regret I received your—
I beseech you to reconsider the harshness of your—
I cannot know by what false informant you have arrived at this—
I am sickened by your—
It is an injustice, sir, that I shall not swallow—
Henry crumples up the sheet of paper and finds a fresh one. There is black ink all over his fingers, his face. He must keep to the point, he thinks, pacing about, phrasing and recasting over and over in his head until all is garbled and makes no sense even to him. What were the circumstances of his second marriage? It is hard to remember. He takes more wasted paper to the grate and burns the pieces into flakes of ash. He will try again later.
He goes out to find solace in digging at the garden. He fetches the iron spade from the shed and chooses a difficult, untamed corner to confront, where even the most persistent robin leaves him alone. By noon, he is drenched in sweat and goes to the ewery to wash thoroughly before coming to dinner.
Frances has a great liking for eggs at the moment, so they eat whitepot alongside the meat today. Usually it amuses him to see her eat such quantities, her fine frame dominated by the firm round belly so that she puts away great slices of custard pie and boiled beef in large, eager mouthfuls with uncharacteristic speed. The baby has also meant that she cannot abide the smell of green vegetables, so has to excuse herself if salad or greens are to be served. But today he does not notice what Old Hannah brings out for her, and they avoid all mention of the letter’s content before the servants, indeed they hardly speak at all.
In the afternoon he still ignores the unwritten thoughts running through his head, and goes to work out the quarter-wages for the household staff. He notes that where last year there had twice been a change of dairymaid, Bridget had been with them now since before last Michaelmas, with a marked improvement in the keeping qualities of the butter.
His hand is uneven as he sets out these figures in his ledger, he makes several mistakes, but it is evening before he permits himself to return directly to the matter. Joan Young is very clever, he thinks, to have turned his father so hard against his own flesh and blood. He shaves a new quill to a satisfactory sharpness and sits down again to set it out clearly.
Father,
You hold that I have married another man’s wife and you intend to disinherit any issue we should have. You may cut off whom you choose, but remember that Frances carries this child as my lawful spouse without dispute. Should it be found, if it please God, to be a boy, he shall bear our family name, and through me prove ultimately to be your rightful heir as a Lyte of Lytes Cary – our shared descendance. Once this child is born of my wife’s body and cries within these four walls, in law and life Frances is bound to me in property and God’s eyes. I beg you not to go against the way of natural succession without good cause. I entreat you for your blessing, pray for your good health, and remain your obedient son.
Father, never did I wed another man’s wife.
He makes adjustments, shakes the castor and slides the document across the desk to dry. Outside in the dark a nightingale pours out its ceaseless, bubbling song. He has an incongruous recollection of an evening spent once in a garden in London. The garden itself was plain and empty, the company laughing and playing a game of lawn bowls, with wild nature just visible on the surrounding hills.
Chapter XII.
Of SOPHIA or Flixweede. Groweth alongst bywaies in untilled places, and specially whereas there hath bene in times past any buildings. The séede drunken with wine or water of the Smiths forge, stoppeth the laske.
HENRY LYTE WAKES IN A SWEAT, and lies there on the bed with his heart racing. Joan Young was in his dream again like a long red tendril coiling up and up towards his neck. He looks toward the thin strip of light from the window.
The moon always makes him dream badly. Weeds in the Knot garden make him dream badly; running grasses, bittercress, nettles, sinister little towers of horsetail. It is the time of year for such things. Early summer with its abundant froth of blossom and greening fields looks idyllic to the untrained city eye, delighting in the sight of cows dotted in the meadow and nice asparagus to eat at lunch – but to be inside the working countryside is a different matter. He rubs his neck to be rid of the tight sensation he still feels there. Arcadia it is not, and no-one feels this more strongly than his wife. Frances knows that a walk in the fresh air is good for her but refuses to go out on more occasions than not. There are several types of weather that she does not tolerate – fine rain because it presents a dilemma about whether to go out, heavy rain because obviously one will get soaked, thunder because one may be struck by lightening, icy because one may slip and break a bone, damp and warm because one may catch an ague, windy because one may catch a chill, too late in the afternoon because one may get lost and not have enough time to discuss supper with Old Hannah. It is beginning to be clear that Frances is not wholly suited to the countryside. Which is why she asks again this morning if they can go to London this month.
‘London?’ Henry looks up from the book in which he jots down market matters. He thinks of the annual tasks for the land and almost laughs.
‘Impossible.’
He makes a note about the price of raw wool in his meticulous hand, and flips the pages to examine the same for the previous year. He calculates what kind of profit might be expected from his flock, how many hoggets should be sold off, how many kept. His shepherd William Warfyld has a plan to use the unclaimed field known as No Man’s Plot, which means he could afford to raise the numbers unless someone places an objection. He wonders though whether that field is just too wet. When he looks up, she is still in front of him, waiting for an answer.
‘Besides, what would you do there?’
Now it is Frances’s turn to be amused. ‘Do? Master Lyte, what do you suppose I spend my time at here that I should miss? I must run the household but it can manage without me if we are not here. After all – if we are not here, there is much less to do. We can stay with my cousin, now that mother has remarried and gone to Devon.’
‘Surely there is plenty to do wherever we are; it should make no difference?’
‘I do not mind hard work, but in London there would be less weather and more people,’ she replies. ‘And we can bring Lisbet.’ Frances, when she chooses, can set quite a stubborn line to her jaw. ‘I lack for just one thing, Henry. Fun.’
‘You’ll have plenty on your hands soon enough,’ he says, indicating her belly.
‘There are months left to go,’ she protests.
This really is very tiresome. He has several sorts of account to pay today; tailors’, mercers’, smiths’ and chopmen’s bills. He waves his hand vaguely at the door. ‘Go for a walk. Learn an instrument.’
‘An instrument?’
‘Yes, a lute. No! Perhaps the virginals.’ Reverend Tope says that a lady should only ever learn an instrument that does not cause her to spread her legs. He agrees with very little that Reverend Tope opines on, but today he is in a hurry, and other people’s thoughts can provide an occasional shortcut to thinking for oneself, can’t they? And in her condition … He is sure that one could sit at the virginals with one’s anklebones neatly together, though at this very moment he does not much care.
‘I don’t know, Frances, you are a grown woman with an entire household to run, and in the unlikely event that you have an ounce of spare time you can occupy it for yourself. Learn ballads. Anything! But London this month is out of the question.’
This afternoon Henry receives another letter from his father. There have been many sent between them now, their dealings with each other becoming at best unkind, at worst hostile, a volley of fire. But this letter, it becomes clear as he breaks the seal, is the most poisonous of them all, one that at all costs Frances must never see. This letter summons every evil that his father has been alluding to over this horrible month, but never yet dared to mention outrightly. And here it is, set down as if it were a truth, a twisted fact. If it were so, why does he not make his accusations in public? Why does he hide his venom in a letter, yet leaking breath and whispers of his intent all through the borough so that it comes to his ears slowly from all directions. His claim is that Henry himself was to blame for the sickness and death of his first wife Anys. Death. The man claims he is a murderer. Murderer. Odious, odious lies.
‘I am a good man, am I not?’ he says to himself, his carefully nurtured world falling apart inside him. ‘How can I clear my name, when there has been no fair trial?’
Chapter XIII.
Of MULLEYN. It hath great, broad soft and woolly leaves. It sheweth like to a Waxe-candle, or Taper, cunningly wrought.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS satyrion, a kind of orchis? He has never seen one for himself, nor even had it verified, and he will not write about a kind he does not understand. He puts that section of the translation aside and waits until the simpler calls by again. In the meantime he finds he cannot respond to his father’s letter. He will. He will write soon, but not until his head has cleared. It is like a fog in there; remembering anything is more like groping about and stumbling by chance upon fragments.
When the simpler comes, he calls her in.
‘Does my lady yet need hart’s tongue or camomile for her limbick as she used to before?’ she bleats. ‘She were always such good custom off me. She’ll want a good few handful.’ She starts pulling bundles out of her pack and spreading them across the table. ‘I have a quantity and can get more. Plantain, as you call it here? Sorrel? Betony?’ The simpler is a thickset, wall-eyed woman with black fingernails. Her one good eye roves the carpet as if looking for herbs.
Henry Lyte clears his throat. ‘What do you know of standegrasses, orchis?’ he asks her.
The woman looks blank.
‘I’ll know the plants I know of, and that’s flat.’ She is not inclined to be helpful, in fact she is distinctly disgruntled. Since the death of Anys, her sales of flowers and other necessaries up at Lytes Cary have been minimal. Anys used to order roseheads by the bushel to supplement those grown at the edge of her little plot, which was eightpence a time.
‘They have two roots in the soil like a man’s cods,’ he explains. ‘One fat, one shrivelled. Spotted, fleshy leaves, thick upright stems with—’
The woman’s face clears. ‘You means butcher flowers, long purples. Too late for them now.’
‘But there are others like them—’
‘Ah! Like maybe fools ballocks, or sweetheart’s, you mean?’
‘Possibly, it’s just that—’
She looks sly. ‘I may have been approached by several gentlemen in London and once a lady for the same before. I may know of a place where they grow. In confidence, you’ll want them, like they did.’
‘In confidence? Why?’
Her eye fixes abruptly on a spot upon the floor and does not waver.
‘It’ll cost.’
Henry sighs. ‘How much?’
The woman’s good eye briefly meets his own then slides away. She shrugs. ‘If you want ’em I can get but it’ll be sixpence. Each,’ she says flatly. ‘There’s not so many of them and with my sight I’ll be scrabbling all over the hillside up off for too long before I’m spotting any. Got to make it worth my while.’
‘I shall need a variety of specimens. Whatever you can find.’
‘What did you call it? Stander grass? Never heard that. Don’t know that I call it anything much, any old name’ll do half the time, and the other half I calls ’em nothing.’ She perks up suddenly, having got her price.
‘And just the fat cod out of the two roots it has, Master? You’ll not want the slack one with nothing in it? That’s no good to Venus, Master, is it.’ Her lopsided wink is a peculiar sight and Henry Lyte looks at her uncomprehending. Surely the wretched woman doesn’t think he wants them for a provocative to venery. He has seen a recipe called a diasatyrion that mixes orchis cods with grains of Paradise and nuts and Malaga wine and candied eryngo root among other things, a sweet electuary. But he needs to observe them, and then if still fresh enough he may set them in the garden when he is done with that. He is irritated to find that his face is flushing.
‘No, no, I’ll need the whole plant, my good woman. Bring me the various sorts you can find. And try to remember where each specimen comes from. It is for my research. They have … they have no practical application whatsoever.’
The woman smirks. ‘Whatever you say. No doubt there are no other uses a man could find for them.’
She goes off into the corridor just as Lisbet passes by with a besom.
‘Several sorts of dog’s testicles for you then, Master,’ the simpler hisses out noisily, winking. ‘No bother at all.’
Lisbet drops her brush on the flags with a clatter. As she bends to retrieve it Henry Lyte sees the disgust on her face, and he is sure that by the evening the entire household will be discussing his business, as if he was practising witchcraft in addition to everything else, damn it! He slams the door behind the simpler’s squat retreating figure, behind everybody, and stands with his back to it.
‘God’s wounds! I do not have to explain myself,’ he says angrily, to the empty room.
But of course he must. First he puts his mind to other things for several days more, thinks instead of the confusion caused by too many diverse names. This is always the difficulty with employing simplers, they all have their own aberrant, singular names for a herb or plant. It is, he believes, one of the obstacles for a sharing of knowledge, or any collective progression, it is also a source of mistaken identities and the reason for many a wrong or dubious leaf finding its way onto an apothecary’s shelf by another name. Ask a local where a particular plant may be found and he will look at you blankly unless you can name it as he was taught it as a child, toddling at his mother’s knee in the grasses. But if a proportion of those who can read would learn from or recognize what they know in print, set out clearly, consistently in black and white, and in English, then a hoard of particulars would be transformed into knowledge. Misbeliefs, wrongnesses and ill-used wisdoms could be set right, and many lives saved. This thought breeds hope and frustration mixed up in him.
Increasing age is supposed to make a man grow more contented with his lot, with what God has bestowed upon him, but some days Henry Lyte can still feel something like the rage of youth inside him at the slowness of progress, at the satisfaction with the state of stupidity the world is so often content to live in, himself included.
We are so ignorant, so coarse in thoughts and knowledge! he rages at the pear trees that afternoon, stretching his back between batches of summer pruning. Our aspirations should be high, higher than they are.
But then when he goes to his pages spread out, he finds that he takes a very long time to write a sentence, to think through anything. This is the real trouble, the gap between what is needed, wanted, and what is possible for the ordinary man.
It is high summer now, brutally hot when a man has been working. When he goes back to the garden, the hot green smell of it is like a smack in the face. The annuals they grew from seed are now clambering up the walls, the stakes, thick in the beds, covered in bees.
Indoors, Frances is vast and panting, drinking quantities of buttermilk, writing lists, preparing herself for any outcome as her confinement draws near.
‘I must write to my father,’ he mentions out loud when he goes in to see her.
She sits up on her elbow. ‘Do not write, Henry. Let him stew in his own juice for a while yet. Leave it a month or so. You are his son. Make him suffer for the hurt he causes you. Besides, you may just make it worse.’
Henry does not think he has her steely reserve. But then again, she does not know the full extent of it, that last letter which she did not see was by far the worst. Every night he prays she will not hear what his father says of him. But although he can feel himself yielding, as a son, and it is natural enough to want to be on good terms with one’s father, it is easier to go along with her suggestion. Women can be very wise, he thinks. His mother was.
‘Leave it awhile. Be strong, Henry! Let it lie, just a little while longer,’ she says.
‘I shall do it soon,’ he concedes. But a day passes, and then another, and still the letter is not sent.
The orchis arrives just over a week before Lammas. He unwraps it fully and pays the simpler. A dug-up plant is always disconcerting. It is limp on his desk, an unhappy, naked tangle, dried mud everywhere as he examines it closely in order to be able to properly describe it to others, making notes. It is only later that he remembers one other characteristic ascribed to the orchis. Too late now, he thinks, with Frances approaching the time of her lying-in. It would have been worth a try. Anything would. If men do eat of the fullest and greatest rootes … they shall beget sonnes. Of course he has been blessed with many daughters. But is it not the truth, he thinks defensively, that in this world a man needs a son?
Chapter XIV.
Of ARCHANGEL, or dead-Nettle. Is of temperament like to the other nettles.
IT IS NEVER GOING TO BE GOOD NEWS when an urgent letter arrives on horseback in the late evening. Henry has not yet retired for bed and is already halfway across the hall when he hears the knock, a familiar dread already tight in his stomach when one of the kitchen boys opens the great door. As soon as he has it he recognizes the hand – it is from Nicholas Dyer, his father’s friend.
He thanks the messenger, who is sweating and thirsty and covered with dust from the late summer roads in riding from Marlborough at speed, and orders his horse be watered in the yard. Henry waves him into the kitchen for a drink and bite to eat, and still does not read the letter for some moments because he has a sudden urge to urinate, and goes hastily up to his room to use the close stool. Frances is sitting in bed sewing in the hot July dusk.
‘What was that rapping?’ she asks, pulling her thread through its length, and tucking the needle in again. The sound of the thrush’s song from the ash outside drifts in through the open window.
‘A letter from London. I haven’t read it yet, but I know what’s in it.’ He does up his breeches and sits down on the end of the bed with a creak of rope. The evening has taken on a horrible significance. He knows he will remember forever the particular sight of the loose weave of the bedcover, the smell of the half-used washing ball on the form by the bed, the ordinary aftertaste of the wine from supper in his mouth.
He breaks the seal and the stiff paper unfolds unwillingly for him, and then he reads the scant, crabbed lines three or four times over, as if there was not enough there on the page to tell him what he already knows.
He puts the paper aside and lies flat on the bed with his shoes still on.
‘What? What is it?’ Frances says.
‘He is dead. My father is dead.’
Silence. Frances puts her sewing in her lap. Outside even the thrush is quiet. Henry can hear no noise from any quarter. Not a whistle, not a breath, not a creak of anything. Then he hears his heart, going on beating.
‘What is the date?’ he asks.
‘July the thirtieth. The eve of St Neot.’
‘As I thought. I cannot even pay my due respects because today they buried him at the church of St Botolph without Aldersgate. But I must ride to Sherborne to help tie up his affairs. There will be the inventory to sort out, and many papers …’ There is no air in here.
‘If Joan lets you set foot over her threshold.’
Henry sits up abruptly and swings round to face his wife. ‘That woman may think she has a life interest but my father’s business is my own. It should all be made clear to her at the reading of the will.’
THE SECOND PART
The Time
Chapter I.
Of THOROW-WAX. It floureth in July and August.
THE ANCESTORS ARE WAITING in the hall with him, all about like silver smoke or fog. A dissolved airborne, sense-borne host of tiny flecks or particles of the continuity of living. They have his face, his hands, his eyes, they all speak at once as if from a great, hollow distance away and they have his voice, and his father’s voice, and his father’s before him. There must be hundreds of them waiting here, a faint, infinite crowd lightly shifting and jostling in the atmosphere as a shoal does.
He paces the length of the hall, waiting for the noise of hooves outside the porch. He has had no choice but to send for Goodwife Dutton and let her into the house, despite everything that had happened with Anys.
She greets him sternly, untying the panniers and bringing them in.
‘Mistress Dutton, I—’ he begins, waving at the boy to take her stocky little mare off into the stables.
‘We’ll bury our differences shall we, Master?’ She begins to unpack right there in the passage. ‘There is not much time for messing about with life, I find. Your wife is within due season? And how long has she already been travailling? Two hours, four? And the fluid humours have left the matrix? Then I must not tarry.’ She bustles past him, laden with rolls of cloth and a brazen pot from which she produces a bewildering variety of dried and fresh herbs. Without appearing to do so, Henry edges closer and tries to identify what she is about to give his wife. He thinks he can see a packet labelled Elleborus, which would make sense, and maidenhair, aristolochia, motherwort, fenugreek, but what is—
‘Hands off for gentlemen,’ she remarks, slapping his hands away with astounding rudeness and gathers them up to go into the birth chamber. She believes that nothing good ever came from books.
‘If you can bring the birthing stool,’ she orders.
She points into the kitchen.
‘Water boiling?’
‘Yes, Lisbet is—’
‘And her mother is here?’ she says over her shoulder as they go up the stone stairs.
‘Yes, Mistress Marwood is with her, and other kinswomen come up from Devon.’ They reach the closed door of the great chamber and can hear them murmuring inside. ‘What virtue does the oil of white lilies have?’ He can’t help asking.
Goodwife Dutton looks extremely disapproving. She lowers her voice.
‘Lily does make the privy parts wont to slipperiness, Master. Better than duck’s grease or the white of an egg together with the yolk, which I use on ladies of the poorer sort to loose the straits. Now, if you don’t mind? Gentlemen engender babies and then they are to leave the rest to those who know what they’re at. That’s the rules, the way of the world. You need something to do? See the maidservant has the kettles always at the ready, bolsters, hot white wine and more clean cloths. Send up caudle for the ladies. Your wife may need refreshment of good meat, but never anything with oatmeal for it will clot viscosities.’ She twitches a smile at him. ‘Then I should retire for the night, Master, if I was you, after your prayers. We can wake you if need should arise, which it will not. I’ll pass on your wishes to her for a speedful deliverance, Master.’ And with that she shuts the door in his face.
Henry Lyte closes his mouth and can do nothing but wait. He remembers now why she makes him grit his teeth, cocking her power deliberately beneath his nose because she can at times like these. Everybody knows what happened when she did not come to Anys. If she had come … well, there is no use dwelling in that, is there.
Through the muffling of the door he can hear her speaking firmly to Frances. ‘Up and kneel on the bed Madam! Kneel! In the country way! You can pray later. Your matrons will pray for you. There, you see. Good girl, good girl.’
Frances has prepared for death.
Henry fully intends to sit up all night on his chair in the corridor listening to Goodwife Dutton barking demands. For what seem like hours he strains to hear Frances’s responses but cannot hear his wife at all, no cries, nothing. All he thinks he can hear is the brush and hiss and breath of the ancestors, amassed in the draughty air just beyond the reach of the guttering pool of light cast by the candle at his feet. The dark tonight is all uncertainty, but he feels time rushing in to fill that newly opening potential. The first confinement is so often long and arduous and filled with peril, and though Henry Lyte has had other children born to him, this is the first by his new wife Frances and her strengths and weaknesses in that respect are an unknown quantity. But somehow he jerks awake and it is the grey of morning and Goodwife Dutton is before him in the empty corridor, a bundle of bloodied cloths in her arms. The ancestors have gone, their interest sated, for of course now they already know what he does not.
His heart contracts. Her face is unreadable as she tells him the news that he can hardly hear for the beating in his ears.
‘Today your wife is delivered of a strong child, Master, born at full time. Of sound limb and lungs.’
‘And is she—’
‘She laboured sore for twelve hours and is tired from her travail.’ She walks on. ‘But sitting up and doubtless will be glad to see you when she’s cleaned up well enough and has had a bite to eat.’
‘Thank God, Mistress, thank God.’ He tries to keep his voice from shaking. Henry can hear a thin, vibrating cry now from behind the door. His child! He cannot bear to wish. He must not, for it will be God’s judgement upon him if it is otherwise to what he hopes for. He goes to the chamber next door and opens a window, looks out without seeing and breathes the late summer air in deeply, his hands still trembling and sticky with sweat. What is the date? The nineteenth of September; cradled just between Ember days following the Day of the Holy Cross. A sacred day indeed!
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Jane Borodale
An extraordinarily evocative story of obsession, love and secrets, THE KNOT holds at its heart the struggle of one man: Henry Lyte. Spanning twelve years, 1565-1578, Henry struggles with his life’s work, the translation of a Herbal which lists, for the first time, every herb, against the backdrop of his heart’s desire, the creation of a perfect, beautiful garden at the heart of which lies the Knot.After the tragic death of his much-loved first wife Anys, Henry falls in love again and brings Frances home to Lytes Cary. She struggles to come to terms with life in the remote rural setting of the Levels in Somerset, and feels the threat of the watery landscape despite Henry’s efforts to show her how the landscape he loves can bring her happiness. Henry’s father is not happy about his second marriage however, and the tensions within the family grow.Just as Henry finds a precarious equilibrium, in his intellectual and emotional lives, this sense of balance is shattered by his father’s unexpected death and the unleashed malevolence of Henry’s step-mother, Joan Young, begins.
JANE BORODALE
The Knot
Dedication
For my grandmothers, who both had green fingers
Epigraph
The good and vertuous Physition, whose purpose is rather the health of many, than the wealthe of himselfe, will not (I hope) mislike this my enterprise, which to this purpose specially tendeth, that even the meanest of my Countrymen, (whose skill is not so profound, that they can fetch this knowledge out of strange tongues, nor their abilitie so wealthy, as to entertaine a learned Physition) may yet in time of their necessitie have some helps in their owne, or their neighbors fields and
gardens at home.
henry lyte, A Niewe Herball
Contents
Title Page (#u818392f5-2843-56e4-9f4a-16f48811f5d8)
Dedication
Epigraph
THE FIRST PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
THE SECOND PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
Chapter XVIII.
THE THIRD PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
Chapter XVI.
Chapter XVII.
THE FOURTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
THE FIFTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
Chapter XIV.
Chapter XV.
THE SIXTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
Chapter VIII.
Chapter IX.
Chapter X.
Chapter XI.
Chapter XII.
Chapter XIII.
THE SEVENTH PART
Chapter I.
Chapter II.
Chapter III.
Chapter IV.
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Chapter VII.
THE EIGHTH PART
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Also by Jane Borodale
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FIRST PART
The Place
1565
Chapter I.
Of BORAGE. Which endureth the winter like to the common Buglosse. The stalke is rough and rude, of the height of a foote and halfe, parting it selfe at the top into divers small branches, bearing faire and pleasant flowers in fashion like starres of colour blewe or Azure and sometimes white.
TWO HOURS OF DIGGING, and Henry Lyte still feels that unrecognizable discomfort.
Like a slight tipping, washing inside him, a darkish fluid lapping at his inner edges as though in a dusk, yet when he turns to it; nothing, nothing. Perhaps he is about to be unwell. Perhaps the Rhenish wine last night at supper was old or tainted, or he had too much of it.
A man of nearly thirty-six with all his health should not be troubled by sudden, unspecifiable maladies. Being at work on the garden out in the fresh air should be enough of a wholesome antidote to sitting hunched and bookish in his study, over his new, impossible manuscript that is going so slowly. There is satisfaction to be had from being outside instead, slicing and turning the light brown, clayish soil, breaking it into the kind of finer ground he needs for planting. The day has been good for October, bursts of rain giving way to bright sunshine, yet still it is not enough to distract Henry Lyte from being so ill at ease. He decides that as he can’t place the sensation, nor what provoked it, he will try to ignore whatever it is. Probably nerves, he thinks. It is not every day that a man is due to ride up to London to collect his new wife. His second wife, and they have been married for three months already, but she has not been to Lytes Cary yet. Within the week her postponed marital life and duties with Henry are to begin. He leans on his spade and considers the hulk of the manor house, the sky to the north dark behind, and wonders what she will make of it.
Lytes Cary Manor is made of limestone, a modest huddle of yellow gables and chimneys embedded comfortably on a mild slope of arable land where the Polden hills begin to rise up out of the damp flatness of the floodplain that is the Somerset Levels. The estate itself spreads down onto the damp moor in several places, but most of it sits on higher ground over a knoll in the crook of a bend in the river Cary, as far as Broadmead and Sowey’s Fields, then out onto the lower, uncertain ground of Carey Moor. Lytes Cary stands on the very brink of the Levels, and in winter these marshy acres to the south-west are inundated with shallow salty water from the sea and can be traversed only by boat. The Mendip hills are high and blue in the distance to the north, to the far south-west are the Quantocks, and to the near west, at about seven leagues off lies Bridgwater Bay, with its bustling port and the wide murky sea that stretches to Wales.
About the house sit diverse barns, the malthouse and dovehouse, and tenants’ cottages, many put up in his father’s time. Henry can still remember improvements being made to the house when he was a boy. The adjacent manor of Tuck’s Cary is almost uninhabited, just a handful of tenants, since Henry’s brother Bartholomew died of a pleurisy four years ago. There is also a hop yard, two windmills and several withy beds.
The new garden project here, however, is of his own devising.
To his knowledge, this part of the grounds has not been cultivated for at least two generations, though it lies alongside the kitchen garden that feeds the household, and the little plot in which his first wife Anys grew a few of the most vital herbs. Sheep have been folded here right up by the house on this grass during summers for years, so the soil has been kept fertile with dung, and it is level, south-facing, and as well-drained as any of this clay country is likely to be. Now the earth needs to be prepared and opened up, so that the frosts can penetrate the clods and break it down over the winter months.
He likes digging. He likes the pull of the spade against the earth, the tilting strain on his back, the mud drying on his palms. More accustomed to directing men than taking up the tools himself, he is always surprised at how much you can be changed by working physically till you ache. The world seems more vivid, more manageable. He does not feel it is at all beneath him as a man of status to be at work like this, instead he imagines his guardian spirit glancing down approvingly from time to time, saying, look, see how he takes charge of his affairs, because that is how it feels to be digging into the good soil with the iron spade and mattock.
And then of course he remembers that guardian angels are no longer the stock in trade of any churchman worth his salt, nor any true believer, and are resorted to only by those such as his cook, Old Hannah, still cutting her surreptitious cross into the raw soft dough of every loaf on baking day. At thirty-six, Henry Lyte does not practise his faith in the way he was instructed as a boy, nor as a youth, because the world is not now as it was, not at all. It has changed, and changed again.
While he digs he is free to let his mind wander, and he dreams his kingdom of pear trees in the orchards across to his left, growing skywards, gnarling, putting forth fat green soft fruits with ease each year. The trees that already grow in the orchards he loves almost as women in his life; the Catherine pear, the Chesil or pear Nouglas, the great Kentish pear, the Ruddick, the Red Garnet, the Norwich, the Windsor, the little green pear ripe at Kingsdon Feast; all thriving where they were planted in his father’s ground at Lytes Cary before the management of the estate became his own responsibility as the eldest son. So much has happened these six years since his father handed over and left for his house in Sherborne: there have been births and deaths – Anys herself was taken from him only last year. But the pear trees live on, reliably flowering and yielding variable quantities as an annual crop that defines the estate, and he has plans to add more.
He wonders – as he does at some point without fail each day that passes – whether it would have been better if his father had, despite everything, attended his wedding to Frances. Three months have passed now since the ceremony, and the fact of his father’s deliberate, calculated absence on that day is a smouldering hole in their relationship, there is no doubt. Henry had stood with his bride-to-be at the church door perspiring with anxiety and the heat of July, in the hope that his father would appear as invited, despite Henry’s letters having met with a deafening silence. After almost an hour the chaplain could wait no longer, as he had others to marry at two o’clock, so he garbled through the litany and vows, and the thing was done without his father being there. Henry would have liked his approbation, but there was nothing to be done about it, for his father, when he gets an idea into his head, is a stubborn man.
That in itself was an inauspicious start, and then suddenly Frances was burdened with pressing, unexpected matters to attend to in London because by great misfortune her own, beloved father had died on their wedding night. Her mother had needed assistance with probate, which proved a terrible family tangle that Henry was unable to involve himself with. After several weeks he had returned to Lytes Cary alone to deal with his own estate that could not, after all, run itself, and sent up diffident, occasional letters to his new wife as though to a stranger. Now her brother has come to the aid of their mother so that Frances’s presence is no longer essential, and tomorrow at last he goes up to London to fetch her.
Henry digs on to the end of the row, straightens up and looks south, and finds now that evening is already creeping up the hill from the west, that the large, yellowing sun is close to the horizon. A green woodpecker flies to a branch of the tallest willow at the end of the bank and squats back belligerently on its tail, the slope of its red cap bright in the grey of the tree. Henry always calls that bird the Sorcerer, it has a menacing, ethereal presence he would rather do without. From there the bird has a commanding view of its surroundings, it knows more than he does about their mutual territory.
The sweet savour of dug earth is all about, and yet for a moment Henry Lyte thinks he can smell the sea – a weedy, salt smell of unwanted water. Then it is gone – perhaps it was a draught of air drawn over the half-completed brick wall from the heap of rotting compost in the kitchen garden, some stalks of greens maybe, or kale. But Henry Lyte pauses, and for a moment has a strong thought of the sea itself wash round his head – the great blank sea that lies in sheets of water against the low shoulder of the land at Berrow, the wide strip of coast where the mouth of the river Parrett coils its way out across the mud flats at low tide below the dunes thirty miles from here.
It must be explained that the sea there is held back by only the thinnest strip of land at high tide, and with the highest tides in winter the sea wall is often breached. But these winter floods are to be expected; they are planned for, understood by farmers, eel fishermen, migrating birds. Unseasonal deluge has never happened in his lifetime; that would be more of a threat to human life than he would care to think of. Nevertheless, it is said that a true native from these parts, with marsh-blood going back centuries, is always born with webbed feet, because nothing can be taken for granted in this precarious world. Unusual weather stems from unusual circumstances. It certainly felt that way just after the death of Anys, the winter that followed – last winter – was the coldest and deepest he could ever remember. And there are plenty who believe that bad weather is a punishment from God.
Downwind of the chimney, Henry can smell what might be supper and the unaccustomed exercise has made him hungry. He props his tools in the outhouse and bolts it tight, goes into the house by the back door. His blisters sting satisfyingly as he washes his hands in the ewery. The dog in the porch beats her tail without raising her head, a young mastiff bitch called Blackie who has developed a reciprocal loyalty to this half of the house rather than to her master. He puts his head in the door to his left. The kitchen at Lytes Cary is high and cavernous, the rack over the broad fireplace hung with hams and sides of salted beef and bacon, gigots of dried mutton, stockfish, ropes of onions and long bundles of herbs. On the east wall is the great oven, and ranging off to the west are the pantries and buttery and dairyroom, and all of this is Old Hannah’s dominium, filled tonight with meaty steam and the fatty goodness of something fried. Three blackened cauldrons sit at the hearth, beside a stack of gleaming earthenware and a basket of scraps for the poor as it is Tuesday tomorrow. One vast wet ladle lies across the mouth of a brown pot, and a row of pewter plates laid out indicates that serving is imminent. He won’t disturb her; if she gets talking things might go cold. Old Hannah has a rolling walk, it is always alarming to watch her crossing the kitchen carrying a large pudding basin filled brimful, or a cleaver for chopping the heads off plucked fowls. Tom Coin who works in the kitchen with her is a gangly sprout of a boy with a long, earnest face and hair of the soft brown sort that grows very slowly. Through the door in the cross passage Henry can see that Tom has set the trenchers in the hall, cut up the maslin bread, lugged in the pitchers of the small beer that is suitable for hindservants, and is just about to call supper for the household.
Tonight though Henry thinks he will eat with the children separately in the oriel. A speech that a father must have with his girls before the arrival of their new mother – God knows but he never thought he’d ever have to say such words to them – must be done in private. As he walks through the hall the armorial glass in the windows above to his right glows with the setting sun outside, casting a ruby-coloured light of the ancestors over the swept floor and the plain trestles. There is no escaping the ancestors, and they observe – as God does, but with perhaps more vested interest – his every movement through this place.
Chapter II.
Of BISTORTE. They grow wel in moist and watery places, as in medowes, and darke shadowy woods. The decoction of the leaves is very good against all sores, and it fastneth loose teeth, if it be often used or holden in the mouth.
IT IS LATE, BUT HENRY LYTE can never sleep easily on the eve of a long journey. He sits with the trimmed candle burning low and ploughs on with his translation. He is an orderly man who likes to work in a state of neatness, which should stand him in good stead for the task ahead of him. There is, after all, a place for brilliance of mind and there is a place for method, and he feels he may have enough of the latter to complete all six hundred pages. He has ink of different colours ranged in pots on his desk; red, black, purple, green and brown, for different types of fact or notes, and he likes a sharp nib. Surrounded by other men’s herbals for ease of cross-reference, he is working directly from the French version as L’Histoire des plantes, which is itself translated out of the Flemish by Charles l’Écluse, or Carolus Clusius, as the great man prefers to be known. He hasn’t decided what his own is going to be called. A title is crucial and difficult to decide upon, he’s finding. The original work, startlingly detailed and scholarly, was published in 1554 as the Cruÿdeboeck by the learned Rembert Dodeons, a master of plants and medicine, whom Henry himself had met when he was in Europe as a young man all those years ago. Sometimes Henry blushes with embarrassment to think that he has been so audacious as to consider himself man enough for this enormous undertaking. Why him? Not a physician, not an expert in anything. It is almost ridiculous, but the project is well underway now, too late to turn back.
He has finished butterbur and begun bistort today, which is a familiar kind of herb to him. Some plants are easier to render quickly because it is very clear from their descriptions or the Latin what their equivalents might be in English. Others are not, and he will have to return to those later, get specialist opinion, exercise extreme caution and assiduousness in applying names to them. The excellent plates by Leonhard Fuchs are also of considerable help in identification, but grappling with the French is his own charge entirely. He hovers over a disputable word. What is ridée in English? He thinks. He notes down rinkeled, folden, playted or drawn together. He considers his sentence, and then writes the great bistort hath long leaves like Patience, but wrinkled or drawen into rimples, of a swart green colour.
He can hear from the creak of boards upstairs when Lisbet leaves the children’s room and goes off to where she sleeps in the chamber over the dairy in the north range. With her departure all four children settle down in their beds and a quietness conducive to writing subsides throughout the house. For two full hours Henry works hard enough to forget most of what weighs on his conscience, though it is a temporary displacement. When the second candle is burnt about halfway down its length, he retires to bed to dream of nothing.
Chapter III.
Of PAULES BETONY. The male is a small herb, and créepeth by the ground. The leafe is something long, and somwhat gréene, a little hairy, and dented or snipt round the edges like a sawe.
HIS NEW WIFE FRANCES, daughter of the late John Tiptoft, London, distant cousin to the Earls of Worcester, is standing for the first time at Lytes Cary in the hall. It is a wet blustery autumn day. The highways from London these past six days have been very bad for mud and their passage was slow, beset with driving rain and herds of animals on their way to market; broken branches and at least one diversion to avoid hazardous bridges. Henry loathes driving in a carriage as it is painfully cumbersome, and makes a man’s limbs sore and stiff, doing nothing on a lumpy, jolting road for such a distance, but Frances had refused to ride on horseback so far in weather like this. They might have been better hiring a horse litter for Frances, with Henry riding alongside, as even with allowances made for the sluggish nature of progress by carriage, the journey had taken a day longer than it should as a wheel was lost and they had to put up overnight at the inn in Stockbridge whilst the axle was repaired at the wright’s. But now here they are. This feels momentous, her arrival here; perhaps more so than the marriage itself. There is baggage due to follow when her mother comes next month.
Four o’clock in the afternoon, and the fire has been lit with all speed to honour her entrance and take the chill off the hall. Someone has swept out the leaves and dirt that sift into the porch on windy days and has left the besom propped in the passage. All of the household is gathered here to glimpse the new mistress; John Parsons his bailiff; Old Hannah, Lisbet and other servants; the dairymaid; Richard Oxendon the horseman; various farmhands, and several tenants’ children clustered at the door. Frances removes her chaperon and cloak, goes straight to the hearth and stands shivering against the yellow fire. Her black hair is in rats’ tails from being blown about. She says nothing at all. Old Hannah mutters something to someone Henry cannot see. Henry tries to be jolly, stands beside her feeling stiff and damp and out of sorts and makes an awkward joke about the countryside, whilst all the time trying to recall how she’d looked when he saw her last. She seems very different here. Her skin is unnaturally white and smooth. He has a strong impulse to touch her cheek to see if there is any warmth to be had from it. She is like a doll, a figurine. He had wanted, expected her to look about and take in her new surroundings eagerly. She had been so pleased to see him, so chatty for much of the journey, pointing out distant spires of churches and asking questions. She must be feeling the very great difference of what she is now, he thinks, and is occupied with that. She is anxious, perhaps, or very tired. Yes of course, she needs hot food to eat and then her bed should be warmed. It must be that she is white with exhaustion, quite blanched through with it, indeed he can see now that she is almost swaying on her feet. Henry Lyte feels guilty that he hadn’t thought of that more promptly. She looks ready to faint.
‘Lisbet!’ he claps the servant over to take his wife to her chamber. A boy is dispatched to the carriage to bring in her first of many bags and cases.
‘Send up a caudle,’ he tells the cook. ‘Or a dish of eggs. Something hot and quick. My wife is tired.’ He is annoyed with himself for not having sent word on ahead to have a spread of food prepared ready for her arrival. Clearly he is out of the habit of being married to someone younger. The crowded hall filters away to usual duties, until it is very quiet in here, just the spit and crackle of the freshly lit fire.
His girls, all stood beside it in a row, are watching him like little owls. Edith, at twelve years old the eldest, opens her mouth to speak but then closes it again. He looks at her, and then at Jane, who is nine, with baby Florence on her hip. At Mary, six, then back to Jane again – and is baffled.
‘What?’ he says.
His new wife is asleep in the very middle of their bed by the time he goes up to see how she is, a plate of half-eaten tart and an empty mug on the floorboards at the end of the bed. He parts the curtains and holds up the candle but she does not stir in the pool of light. Her face is fine-boned and angular. Her breathing is deep and even, she lies with the cover pulled up over her chemise and one narrow wrist flung out. It seems bad-mannered to climb in and push her across, so he takes a blanket from the wicker coffer and retires for the night to the dressing room, where he does not sleep because the owls are so loud on the roof above him.
In the morning he goes to his study to give his wife time to get ready in their chamber before coming down. He is not going to be a stranger in his own house ordinarily, but this is, after all, the first day: the first day of his new life. He stands at the window that gives onto the garden and watches a fine rain coming down and the green Sorcerer out on the grass, up-loping toward the ants. He sees Tom Coin coming back from the fishponds with a large carp flapping so much he can hardly keep it in the basket. Henry opens the window and leans out, and the noise of chopping up in the coppice tells him that the woodman is not idle, despite the weather. There is nothing seemingly wrong at all, and he should be glad for it. Why then does he feel so angry? It makes no sense. The Sorcerer puts his thick head up and seems to laugh at him as it flies away towards the wood.
‘I had no choice but to marry, I have four surviving daughters to consider. Four, dammit! They cannot run free in the mud like dottrill or little urchins. They need a woman’s hand to oversee their maturation, to bring them up in a civilized way until they are of age and can enter the world as wives and then mothers. They need to know French, totting-up, how to stitch, how to make sweet malt, bind a man’s wound, how to be in charge of the kitchen. Not everything can be taught by a nurserymaid.’ He indicates out of the window at the rainy scene. The grass is sodden and deserted, though to the far left a cow is being driven into the yard from Inner Close for milking.
‘Look at it out there,’ he demands, to the empty room, ‘what civilizing influences will be had by them if I do not seek it?’
He regrets that there has been no time for grieving – practical matters to attend to when a family member dies seemed on this occasion to take all his vigour for months afterwards, he has felt blank and sucked dry of any melancholy or other emotion. He does not mean he didn’t suffer pain but that he felt it like a physical blow to the body, so that he sat by the hearth alone at night aching as though he’d been in a fight. Yes, it was just that he’d been in a fist-fight with death on behalf of his wife and had lost. It is all perfectly normal. Doesn’t everyone suffer deaths within their close family circle?
In the year that his own mother Edith died, coffins went up the road to the church almost every week. There had been fair warning that death was to be afoot that year – in March around Lady Day there had come a great comet, reddish like Mars, half the size of the moon in diameter, with a flaming, agitated tail that stretched itself across the night sky and scorched a rightful terror into the hearts of those who looked upon it. There were many who said it was a clear token from God that the end of Catholic rule was near, and that Queen Mary’s tumour may have begun with its manifestation. A comet is a sure sign of change, or death. He hopes never to see another body like it in the sky. His mother had died in exceptional pain, drenched in sweat and gasping for air in what had been the hottest summer for eleven years, as she clung to his hand for those last dreadful days. Sometimes across his knuckles he feels the grip of her bones still, has to flex all his fingers to free himself of it. And sometimes when his eye catches at the horizon just after sunset, the first bright sight of Venus makes his blood pound momentarily, mistakenly. It is surely unthinkable that another comet of that stature could appear twice in a man’s lifetime.
His father, remarried himself after Edith’s passing within two years, has no right to listen to any bad claims against his character. It’s just the usual way of things, to marry again.
‘Everybody does it,’ Henry goes on aloud to no-one. ‘Hadn’t I waited a decent length of time since Anys was taken from us by the will of God? By God’s will alone. It had been nearly a year.’ With this last thought, a draught blows under the door, and for a second he almost thinks he can catch the scent of her brushing against him like a substance.
Anys smelt of leather polish and warm skin and oats. She smelt of hard work and prayerbooks and children and bread. He is sure he has remembered that right. He is sure she knew how well she was esteemed by him. He swallows. The whole business is unavoidable. He leaves the study hastily, goes to the last of his new wife’s boxes stacked in the hall, and carries them up.
He had lost two servants soon after the funeral, but they’d each had good reasons, as they explained, for their change of situation. Lisbet is the new maidservant, she replaced Sarah who was a diligent worker. He had let her go with regret, Anys had thought so well of her. Lisbet is tolerably good, but he did wish he couldn’t hear her feet slopping down the corridor all the time when he is trying to concentrate. Why does she never pick them up when she walks? It occurs briefly to Henry Lyte that her shoes might not fit properly. She has a pleasant enough face. There is even something quite appealing about the crooked tooth that juts out a little over her lip, though it is the kind of countenance that will not age well, and of course he knew her mother. He prefers to hire local girls like her, they stay for longer, ask fewer questions, and he doesn’t think she can have heard anything of what happened. The misunderstanding will all simmer down and be forgotten. He hopes that Frances herself will never hear what people have said of him. It is just a matter of time. People forget so easily; memories are flimsy, friable things that get buried and mulch down into the past like vegetation. A few will stick, of course, inevitably. His memory of what happened is already concentrated to a few sparse images that he cannot shake off. One can be forgiven for forgetting a detail here or there – even though details, the little unimportant daily things amassed together over time, are what makes up most of living. What does his own life add up to, he suddenly wonders. In forty years, a hundred years, three hundred, what will be left of him?
He recalls a distinct, disturbing sensation he had once in his early days as a student a long time ago, in one of Oxford’s many bathing houses. It was not the sort of place that he was to frequent very often, but he was a young man missing home, missing his mother, and had gone for comfort, a little bit of human warmth that could be bought straightforwardly with sixpence.
A pretty doxy by the name of Martha was rubbing at his back with oil, plying her knuckles to his spine, to the very bones inside his muscles, and smoothing backwards and forwards across his shoulders in a shape like a figure of eight, her breathing ragged with exertion. There was a good savour of flowers or resin all around. Afterwards she was friendly to him, and didn’t seem to mind that he had fallen asleep.
‘How was that?’ she’d asked, prodding him gently and pouring a drink from the jug. He’d thought carefully, yawned and sat up. He examined the back of his hands, turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.
‘It was like … being rubbed out,’ he’d said eventually. It was the only way to put it.
‘Out?’ she’d queried, her brow wrinkling up as if she hadn’t heard this one before, and pouring herself a measure too, just to take the edge off. She had a busy night lined up.
‘Like being erased,’ he’d said, ‘quite worn away into nothing. No trace of me left at all, not a bump or ridge to show I’d existed.’ As if it were his history that was being smoothly abolished with her accumulating, efficient strokes, in just half an hour. He had an image of himself face down in the earth, being slowly flattened and absorbed into its clayish mass, and it had felt inevitable, nothing out of the ordinary, as though this was what happened to everyone. Which it does in the end, of course, for who gets remembered? Almost all of us go back to the earth to be worn away into nothing again.
She hadn’t laughed, he recalls, but pursed her lips as though it was not at all the answer that she’d wanted. She stood pinning up her curls and ducking in front of the polished plate that served as a glass to catch her reflection. ‘You should go to church more if you want that kind of talk.’
‘I don’t mean my soul,’ he protested, confused that she was so offended. ‘I mean my presence on this earth as we know it.’ But she had a customer waiting, he could hear his shoes scraping outside on the boards, and she’d gone to the door and held it ajar for him to depart.
Chapter IV.
Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.
IT HAD BEEN SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF ANYS that he’d begun planning his Knot garden in earnest. On paper at first, endless sketches and discarded ideas that he would pore over by candlelight in the evening when it was too dark to see anything outside. He made occasional visits to costly gardens in London, and drew on recollections of aromatic, unattainable gardens in Europe that he’d seen as a youth. The ground itself here needed preparation. There was a lot of dross to get rid of on the site, including a defunct fallen-down building where his father had reared pigs before the new sties were built. This was removed, piece by crumbling, splintery piece. It is always surprising how small the footprint of a demolished building appears. How could so little space have enclosed so much?
‘Much faster to take down a building than to put one up,’ one of the labourers had informed him, as though Henry had no sense of practical matters. It took little more than an afternoon to do. There was a lot of other debris to clear away, an old trough, piles of inexplicable rotting logs and branches, crawling beneath with worms and woodlice.
‘Look at that. A garden is teeming, isn’t it,’ Henry had said, brimming with cheerful purpose in the fresh air, as he squatted to examine a yellow centipede, rippling in kinks against the damp earth. ‘The very stuff of life itself.’
‘If you’re lucky,’ his gardener Tobias Mote remarked, straining to lift something into the barrow to take to the bonfire. Henry looked at him to check he was joking. ‘Seeing as the job of nature is to feed on death.’
Sometimes Henry wishes that Mote’s voice wasn’t so dry, so opposite to what he hopes for.
The pegging-out of the borders and the Knot, however, had been one of the most exciting moments so far in this process. The simplicity of unwinding each ball of twine in the hand and walking backwards, squinting, squaring up and measuring sideways with the feet, pushing in the stake like a New World explorer with his claim. Mote worked alongside him, scratching his head, making unhelpful, tardy suggestions where none was wanted, because everything was decided now in terms of form and symmetry. The garden was like a grid for days from the upper windows before they took the twine away, making last-minute adjustments to the guidelines they’d whitewashed. It was a sheer delight to see it stretched out down there. What had existed previously only on a small piece of paper as the final meticulous inked plan for the structure has now been unravelled from inside his head, squared up and made manifest.
Now he has the shape out there, but what he will plant is still to be decided upon. Roses, definitely roses. He also has a master plan for content, and marks in his choice of plants and herbs as they occur to him. This plan by contrast is chaotic, filled with crossing-out and scribbled re-inking. He paces about outside making mental lists to write up later, checking up on the bricklayers putting up the new walls course by course which will shelter his tender specimens from the winter harshnesses that they will have to suffer, looking over the work of the men he has hired in for the week because there is more digging than he and Mote can manage if they are to get it over with in time for planting. Today the four of them work steadily across the earmarked areas; Thom Pearson from over at Tuck’s Cary Manor just a stone’s throw from the stables here, William the oldest son of Hunt of Podimore who leases the windmill, Ralph Let, and some other man from Devon who was passing through and had asked for work.
‘Lucky to get Ralph,’ Tobias Mote says with a wink. ‘He’s good at that, being parish gravedigger he’s had a lot of practice, brings his own spade, just never mind what that spade iron’s gone through; very full that graveyard is, a lot of folk dead these days, begging your pardon. Just don’t turn your back on him – he’d nimble you in.’ Mote laughs with his face like a weasel’s, his eyes closed to slits.
The diggers have broken the persistent turf all down what will be the raised border. It’s coming along. To anyone else the scene looks like chaos, but Henry Lyte is beginning to have it all mapped out in his mind’s eye, the raised square beds, the enclosing walls, the espaliers, the roses, the medicinal herber. And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect Knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses.
Henry is not in favour of the kind of closed Knot currently fashionable that he has seen so many times in London, laid out to weedless, barren segments of coloured sand in red and yellow and other garish hues, intersected by rigid, close-clipped hedges, the whole intended to be amusing from inside the house, or along the gallery or walk, like a dead kind of outdoor carpet. He has no wish to go about decorating his land like that, but hopes to coax from it an exquisite, flourishing entity; something wholly alive and changeable, a place where man and nature can meet and within which he and others will be able to study the riddles of botany. He knows his ambitions for it are high, that it will be hard work.
He goes on considering. Espaliers there against the warmth of the bricks, he decides, and perhaps a further row of espaliered trees at right-angles to the wall itself – offering glimpses through the layers of branches, as into green and fruited chambers.
But what kinds of fruit? He would like very much to be bold enough to try to grow apricots. He has eaten them abroad straight from the tree, the warm, furred skin of them bursting under his bite, the juice running in his mouth. He has eaten them in this country at other men’s tables, both the tender yellow kind and the tougher sort, flavourless, the green of raw turnip. He has enjoyed dried apricots too, shrunken to a brown leather of sticky molasses sweetness. His mother used to call them St John peaches, ripe only in June. Of course she would remember when monks once sold them from the Abbey, when their walled enclosures were secure. He can just remember the day that the Abbot of Glastonbury was hanged on the Tor. He remembers particularly because his father owed the Abbot money, and there was uncertainty afterwards with what to do about the bonds. Don’t worry, the Crown will be hounding me for it soon enough, Henry recalls him soothing his mother. The King’s agents had moved in and taken the Abbey and all the contents. Henry had ridden past Glastonbury a few days later with his brother Bartholomew on an errand, and seen the distant sight of the Abbot’s misshapen figure up there, swinging by his broken neck. At the time it had felt like the world was ending. It was hard to know which God to turn to, He seemed to differ according to who one spoke to about Him. Henry had dreamt constantly of brimstone, smouldering deadly, choking fumes, all the terrible punishments his grandmother had warned him about if he strayed from the good path laid down by God. He must have been about eight years old, sat between his parents at the hearth, his mother’s anxious face rosy on one side from the heat of the fire. His mother loved all fruit, of course.
And what else should he grow here? Perhaps there could be an entirely separate plum orchard. Imagine the tiny stellar blossoms appearing in early spring, before the apples and pears. One fruit that can be simultaneously green and sweet is the greengage; perfect greeny globules of juice, almost gelatinous with being ripe, melting to fibres that lodge between the teeth. He too loves all fruit, but thinks perhaps the greengage is his favourite prunus. A plum orchard should be near the house, because the blossoms, coming early in the spring would be so cheering. For the other orchards, there are sixty new apple trees of sundry sorts on order, mostly whips and maidens because they will take to the soil better than if their roots were already more developed.
For the far end of the walled gardens, he thinks a vine. Sweet grapes gladden a man’s heart. And a peach tree. Voluptuous, fat-bottomed velvet fruit of heaven. A fig, fibrous juicy threads, cool seeds cracking delicately between the teeth, at their very best when they are oozing resinous juice. He would like to eat every one of them, a fig pig, he thinks, but they will be laid in the sun to darken and dry. Walnuts, for pickled walnuts of course. There are walnuts in the woods nearby but the squirrels always strip them bare. Nut trees are lucky, perhaps he will have two or three.
But what he knows best and what will do best on this difficult clay ground of theirs are pears. The orchard is already filled with almost forty varieties of pear but there are many more to choose from that he has not tried. Perhaps having one here against the lea of the sunny-sided wall might bring even an early variety forward in the fruiting season. Imagine that – the first ripe pear in the borough.
He ducks through the space where an oak door will sit on the hinges to be made at the blacksmith’s just as soon as he can get into Ilminster, and checks the wall from this side. For a moment he is dazzled by the low sun.
‘Master Lyte?’ a voice rasps.
Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He blinks and sees that it is Widow Hodges, sat almost under his feet outside her dilapidated tiny cottage on a low stool, silently working withy into baskets as she does on most days when the weather permits it, though rarely in winter, when weeks can go by without her emerging as if she were dormant, or dead. To be frank he usually takes care to avoid chancing upon her, as most people do. He can never tell if she is merely old, or ancient, but she has struck an unreasonable fear in him since he was a child. Perhaps he should know more about his tenants, but there are exceptions to every rule he makes for himself.
‘I saw you knocked down those pigsties, Master Lyte,’ she grates out. Her voice is cracked and tired, like something left at the back of a cupboard and never used properly. ‘You’re not going to be doing away with my cottage?’
Henry assures her that he plans no such thing. Childishly, he tries to avert his gaze. Her wrinkled face is twisted into puckered lines and dots where her eyelids meet her cheeks. She is blind, and the eyelids themselves are flat, grotesque.
‘We are going round you with the new garden wall, dame, no cause for worry,’ he shouts cheerfully, backing away as if very busy with something. ‘The wall runs to the back of your dwelling.’
‘I heard all the noise,’ she goes on saying. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it these weeks since. It’s just I’ve been here a long time, Master Lyte. A very long time.’
It is almost All Souls’, he thinks, as he goes back to his study to note down the last of his financial outgoings before the end of the month. October has flown by. There is little of note for the rest of the afternoon, bar a brief flurry of noise from the other side of the house when in the kitchen one of the servants scalds her hand on a kettle, and then the boy comes with the packhorse for his father’s grain. Henry Lyte has to pay his father two bushels each of wheat and dredge malt every week to supply their household brewing and bread over at Sherborne. Sometimes he wishes that they would take a fortnight’s worth at once, or more, and leave him in peace. His stepmother Joan Young (he will not call her Lyte, nor mother; she is no blood of his) declares that there is no provision for storage at their house, but Henry knows it is an excuse to keep a weekly eye on proceedings at Lytes Cary. She is becoming far too interested in it.
After this he is able to be utterly absorbed in his accounts. Henry puts aside what he needs to pay the tithingman of Kingsdon for the queensilver, which is sixteen shillings the quarter, and works out what he is owed himself on the field rents since Lammas. These accounts done, he is free to return to his work on the herbal.
As a grey evening draws in again, earlier and earlier now it is so close to Hallowtide, there is an interruptive, particular tap on his door that has become familiar to him this last fortnight, and Frances comes into the room.
‘You have not lit the candle yet, Henry,’ she says.
‘I can see well enough.’
‘They have been calling supper.’ She sounds annoyed, but goes to her husband’s side and touches him lightly on the shoulder. He puts down his pen and a sentence hangs unfinished; Medewort doubtlesse drieth much, and is astringent, wherefore it restraineth and bindeth … the word manifestly floats newly inked, untethered to any other on the page. It can’t be helped. Her fingers are indeed very pale and smooth. What she lacks in warmth of speech, he has decided, she makes up for in other ways. Her presence glitters softly out of the corner of his eye as she picks up a pebble on his desk and turns in the gloom towards the light to examine it idly, puts it down again. She smells of subtle things, something like damask rose perhaps or musk ambrette, a dusky, milky scent that he presumes she must buy from a London perfumier in a bottle, though he likes to think it is her skin itself that secretes such promise, such difference from what he is.
He has a sudden thought of her fingers as they would be if closing round his own, against his limbs. He finds that he understands her with more clarity once the matters of the day are over. He likes the silences produced at night – the dwindling need for words and explanations. A silence lit by daylight has to be used fully, taken advantage of, but at night a silence could be simply encountered, dwelt in, quite for its own sake. He wishes that on balance it might not be unreasonable to dispense with supper altogether and suggest the bedchamber. Of course it would be very unreasonable, but he admits her presence excites his senses, distracts him.
When he lies with her at night, she does not envelop him as Anys used to, with gentle arms and her eyes appreciatively closed. Frances keeps her eyes open and fixes him with a gaze that he cannot read or enter into. He thinks it is curiosity that makes her do this, but he can’t be sure. Her body is very different from Anys’s, too, more taut, rawboned. She does not seem to object to him paying her proper attention in bed; indeed, more than once he has had the distinct sense this gives her a gleam in her eye, but again it is hard to be sure. His father always told him that whores are the only women who enjoy their carnal duties to the husband, and he would not like to think badly of her. For himself of course he prefers to think of it as natural procreation rather than venery.
‘But what will you do with all this effort, this … learning, Henry?’ she asks unexpectedly, as if puzzled. She has never asked a thing about his work before.
‘Do you mean my book?’ He lets her wrist go and begins to gather up the pages that are dry into a bundle.
‘I mean the book, the time in the study, those letters that come, the exertion generally.’ He can’t see her expression.
‘I don’t have a publisher yet for my translation, but I have high hopes. My dear,’ he adds briskly, as she stifles a yawn. ‘Is it late? Is it white herring for supper again? No doubt it can’t be helped, on a Friday. When a thing is plentiful there is always so much of it.’ He wonders why his habit is to speak so loudly when he talks to her.
‘Could we go up to London before Christmas?’ she asks.
‘London? Certainly not. There is too much to do. The roads are a nightmare.’
Neither speaks for a moment. Outside by the gate a dog is barking. A dog barking at dusk always sounds louder, he thinks, than during the day. A log slips on the fire irons, and a shower of sparks flies up the chimney.
‘Why do you suppose that old woman never does her work indoors?’ Frances asks.
‘What woman?’
‘Whom you spoke to this morning, the old basketmaker.’
Henry frowns. ‘What makes you mention that?’
‘I’ve been watching from the bedchamber window, she sits out there all day.’
‘Perhaps her rafters are too low – those rods of willow reach very tall at the beginning of a basket. And you will have seen how they take up room to the sides as she weaves, her cottage must be too cramped for such activity.’
‘Or perhaps she needs the brighter daylight to properly see what she is doing.’
‘She is blind. Her eyelids have been sewn shut for nearly thirty years.’
‘Oh!’ Frances flinches at the thought.
There is a silence. Really he’d prefer to start a new page of his translation, but he cannot do it with Frances standing by him. He cuts a nib for later. He might get up to fleabane by tomorrow. Hote and dry in the third degree. It is going to take him ten years or more at this rate.
‘How did she become blind?’ Frances asks.
‘Mmm?’
‘The old woman.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ There is something vaguely tugging at his memory as he says that, something odd and unpleasant from way back when he was a boy, but then it is gone. He does remember the talk around the time that they sewed her lids shut to cover up the mutilation.
‘I was away at school but they said her screeching was heard right down on the Fosse Way. After that when I was disobedient I thought that the redness I saw when I shut my eyes was God showing me the colour of blood, a warning not to cast my gaze unheedingly upon wicked things. I always thought she must have seen some wicked thing to get like that.’ He shrugs, looking at his manuscript. ‘The savage, unfair minds of children.’
‘I can’t imagine a noise like that coming from her.’ Frances is still at the window.
‘She’s got a stone’s silence about her most days. Squatting there in the middle of her webs, though like most old women she can also pounce on a man with unsolicited speeches, if he should forget to go by the other path. How she knows who it is that’s passing is any man’s guess, but she always does.’
Once a month Henry sees Widow Hodges at the market in Somerton, selling her baskets. He’s seen her struggling up onto the cart pulled by a decrepit skewbald that another old woman, with whom she shares profits, drives over from Kingsdon. Years ago, he used to see her plying her wares further afield, such as the St Paul’s Day Fair at Bristol, but she is too old now for such distances.
‘Maybe she does need the light to work by. I’ve heard some can see the brightness of the sun. There are degrees of blindness, Henry. Many different kinds.’
‘There are many different kinds of spider.’
He thinks of her as sat at the heart of a web. He can’t help it. Even though she is blind, when he goes by her cottage he has a suspicion that she has an inward eye on him, some kind of sentient finger or whisker stretched out to feel the twitch of his passing. There is something about the way she cocks her head as he approaches that makes him shiver, without a pause in the rhythm of her fingers catching the withies, knotting them down, netting his details.
Chapter V.
Of MOUSE EARE. A man may finde amongst the writers of the Egyptians, that if a bodie be rubbed in the morning early, before he hath spoken, at the first entrance of the moneth of August with this hearbe, that all the next yéere he shall not be grieved with bleared or sore eyes.
HENRY LYTE HAS GONE OVER TO WELLS to buy various items. He wants to go himself rather than send a servant, for he has heard that his old friend Peter Turner is in town staying with his father – the radical Dean of Wells Cathedral, and botanist of note, Dr William Turner. The ride over is back-endish, yellowing stalks collapsing over the paths, the sweet smell of fruit and rot everywhere, too many insects. He is glad that he still has the Turners to discuss matters of botany with. Another good friend Thomas Penny – in whom he had a fellow fieldworker, together scouring the West Country and elsewhere thoroughly for plant specimens – has just gone to Zurich because Archbishop Parker believes him to be too outspoken against the church. Dr Turner is outspoken too, but somehow retains his position here as Dean of the cathedral since his return from exile in Germany during the dark time of Mary. ‘So far, so good,’ he’d grinned the last time he’d seen him, as though it was all a conspiracy, or luck.
As Henry winds through the busy, dirty marketplace, the booths, the standings, flesh shambles and fish shambles, towards the cathedral, the clock strikes ten and he realizes he’s going to be too early. He scratches his beard, which feels itchy and unkempt, and decides to go to the barber for a trim. He dismounts and turns his horse around. The sky to the west is dark with impending rain, though the sun is out, so that the stone of Penniless Porch shines yellow by contrast. A beggar is lying inside the arch, his face blotched with sores and clutching his stomach as if he had some griping torment there. Henry hopes it is not dysentery. A woman passing by grimaces at her companion.
‘Look at that, poor man, he is in pain,’ she says.
‘But they are used to being like that. Quite accustomed. I need to get a pigeon before we go back. Or two. Do you think we need two?’ She checks in her basket then looks down at the beggar. ‘It is different for them. They don’t know any better, just as well. They are like animals in that respect.’
‘It is a shame.’
‘One must pray for them,’ she says brightly. ‘There is nothing else anyone can do about it.’
‘Nothing,’ the other woman concurs, and they glide on towards the market and the pigeon stall. Henry feels the blood rushing in his ears. He has an urge to run after them and try to make them see how they are wrong, but instead goes swiftly to the beggar and on the same, furious impulse gives him the first coin that he fishes from his pouch, which is a half-sovereign, a great amount of money to give to any man in the street or otherwise, more than a skilled mason earns in a week. The beggar’s eyes widen, and even as he puts it into the outstretched bandaged, filthy hands Henry has a spasm of doubt, but it is too late.
‘Bless you, Master, it is a sign!’ The beggar mutters, rubbing the coin against his cracked lips. He jerks a finger at the sky, and to the west now a rainbow is stretched inkily over the whole of the town, so vivid with colour it almost fizzes in the sky. He must be right. Surely this must be a good omen.
Fat drops of rain begin to spot the dry compacted earth of the thoroughfare as the sunshine fades. People jostle to take shelter under the porch, and when he turns about, the beggar has vanished.
Half a sovereign.
He had better not mention that to anyone, not Frances, not Dr Turner, he decides. But by the time he has arrived at the house, it is already weighing so heavily upon him that he must say something. The boy removes his horse to the livery and another poor man follows him up to the gate and pulls at his sleeve most insistently until he finds a coin to make him go away. He is more careful this time, makes sure it is a penny.
Turner’s naughty little dog comes to greet him, yapping at his heels. Turner has trained it to jump up and remove the corner-caps of bishops at table. Turner hates ecclesiastical trappings; the pomp and ceremony of the high church. He also hates his bishop, which is making life difficult in Wells, but Turner has always prided himself on his ability to thrive on controversy.
He rises from his desk to kiss Henry.
‘You’ve missed Peter,’ he says. ‘Oxford drew him back a day early, as he leaves very shortly for Heidelberg and has things to wrap up before his departure.’
Henry Lyte is disappointed, everyone is going somewhere, it would seem, and he is sorry not to have the chance to say adieu to Peter. But it is always engaging to spend time in William Turner’s house. There is always something very obstructing to debate, some nuisance ignorant with a bad opinion holding his own torch wrongly.
‘People are so easily offended,’ William Turner complains, waving a letter. ‘Do they have no resistance of their own that my view can rake up theirs like ponds so hastily?’ Henry Lyte smiles. He has many a time had his own self raked over by Dr Turner, but he has learnt to live with it; there is too much to gain from being with him.
Dr Turner peppers his speech rapidly with Latin and Greek, so that Henry, who is much more comfortable with French, has to concentrate hard to keep abreast of him. Often in Turner’s company he wishes he had paid closer attention to his studies whilst at Oxford. University is wasted on the young, he has decided, without strict guidance. He was too occupied with pacing between the taverns of the town in a long coat drinking malmsey until the small hours of the night and sleeping with doxies, though he did read every volume of Dioscorides, Matthiolus, Galen, Pliny that he could. A normal existence, anyway by all accounts. 1546, when he left and married Anys, daughter of John Kelloway of Cullumpton, was the year in which all that ground to a halt and his responsibilities seemed to begin, sharply.
‘Have you begun that work you crow so often about? Your opus de singulis?’ Dr Turner is a demanding man, who will not let a thing pass once mentioned.
‘You mean the translation of Rembert’s herbal? I have started it. It is quite slow to get going.’
‘I am waiting for the competition!’ His laughter is hoarse but not unkind. He considers Henry when the mirth has left him. ‘You will need to be very contained to write that book, young man. There will be times when you must shut your ears and eyes to anything outside the vessel of your undertaking. And once you are done, the dissatisfaction with it will pour in from all sides. Easier to find fault with a wheel already rolling than it is to build one up from raw timbers.’
Dr Turner’s eye has a little more white about it than one might expect in a calmer man. He is old now, but they say he was once very handsome, like an ox in his prime.
‘I think it will take me a long time. It mentions eight hundred varieties of plant. Not only does it have to be translated accurately from the French, I shall need to seek out every single name in English, which part I believe shall be the hardest.’
‘There will be much scholarship in its making. You may achieve it.’
‘I don’t know, Doctor, I—’
‘You will need to be tenacious. But there is something of the limpet in you. Not a fast mover on your rock, but you cling on tight.’ Henry bridles, quick to sense criticism where perhaps none is intended.
‘Should I speed up, Doctor, how should I do that?’
‘Drink more hare’s piss.’ Dr Turner’s back is to him as he searches for a book he needs shortly for a service, then starts away down the corridor.
‘What kind of advice is that?’ Henry calls, aggrieved. His diminishing back looks square and spiky in its black church garb that doesn’t fit about the shoulders. He has no patience for a tailor fiddling about him, and it is clear his wife has but hasty measurements to pass on for an impossible task. Dr Turner is not a man who glides his way to anything. His sermons are punctuated with enraged jabs as though even the air itself between him and his congregation needed prodding into discipline. He is not a man with whom you’d dare to share a lukewarm half-thought unprepared, unless you felt like being torn into tiny pieces for the evening’s sport.
‘Come,’ he says, and beckons Henry Lyte to follow him downstairs. ‘There is something I must show you.’
The doctor is showing signs of his age, and stumbles on the path out into the garden. This labour of his latter years has paid off in the shape of a most glorious plot to the south of his house, with a small orchard of the choicest variety of fruits, and a horseshoe of beds laid out to herbs and flowers in the final states of blooming, though most are tatty and seeded into heads or fruiting now. In a few days there will be frosts and all will be blackened, but for now these latter-end herbs still cling to their season.
Dr Turner stops by a low wall and points into a browning, damp tangle of small climbing herbs that have colonized the stones over the summer and are dying back.
‘What do you see there, Henry? Does a thing strike you?’
Henry Lyte gets down on his knees and obligingly blinks and peers. ‘Well, Doctor, I …’
‘No doubt you see remnants of pennyroyal, Pulegium, and mosses of various sorts and a little bit of old unwanted yellowing Aegopodium podagraria that I must speak to my garden man about, and something else, Henry.’ His voice drops. ‘What is it?’
Henry Lyte is aware that the knees of his hose are very wet now from pressing at the lawn. A small fat spider, her belly full of eggs, is climbing up a crown of murrey-coloured stalks. ‘I see herb Robert,’ he says eventually. ‘Flowering late, in your sheltered haven.’ Dr Turner cackles then and rubs his crabby hands together.
‘You do! Geranium robertianum is a humble little herb that, as Dioscorides has told us, is to staunch the blood of green wounds and is used against corrupt sores and ulcers of the paps and privy members. And here, nestled as to its custom against the wall, and its purple-pinkish five-fold petals … Ah! And you have seen it for yourself at last.’ Dr Turner’s face is shining at the sight of Henry Lyte’s astonishment. He squeezes his hands together now as if in fervent prayer, and cocks his grizzled head on one side to hear the answer. ‘What is its difference?’
‘This flower is white, where it should be purple. Every single flowerhead upon its stalks is white as snow. I cannot believe such a deviation is possible without intervention, a natural anomaly.’ Henry Lyte cannot take his eyes away from it. ‘What does this mean, for scientific study, for our understanding of the way that nature takes its forms?’
‘It means that the Holy Spirit takes many guises, and does not eschew a humble weed to show that the power to change things takes many forms, and can begin in simple ways, in obscure corners. Not for nothing do the country people call this plant poor Robert. I say it is God’s way of showing how nothing is fixed – that this earth is in fluxus: a constant state of being made, of being in change. This is a glorious thing, yet found in a moist and shady corner which our eyes are trained to overlook. The same ignorants might say this is the work of malevolent, unchristian spirits such as Robin Goodfellow, appearing in disguise to mock God’s choices. You and I, Henry, are here to prove that this is never the case. We do not deal in falsehoods, you and I. We are true scientists, physicus, studying the work of God. Only what we see before us can be verified, with the exception of the will of God itself. Nothing is to be taken for granted. Only God’s will is absolute.
Henry feels a flicker of doubt.
‘But, if—’
‘It means, take nothing for granted, Master Lyte. Apply all your powers of observation in your work. If you do it thoroughly, your work will be of use to someone.’ Dr Turner’s outsize, drooping sleeves hide knobbled, twisted hands with fingers like root vegetables, and when he prods one’s chest to instil a point, it is almost painful. Henry Lyte tries not to flinch or rub the spot.
‘I am worried, Doctor. I saw a beggar in the porch as I came here this morning and—’
‘What use is that, Henry?’ he barks. ‘Whether or not you worry about some man in the street you saw in passing makes no difference. It is what you do next that counts. Otherwise it is a form of vanity and odious self-reflection.’
‘I did worse than that, I gave the man a large quantity of money, and then he disappeared. I can’t explain, but I do feel very bad about it,’ he says. He know that sounds weak-willed. He is irresponsible, a bad citizen, worse than those women for at least they, in their ugly, easy complacency, did not actually go out of their way to court trouble for the man. He pictures the beggar made vulnerable with that gold in his hand, killed for it by other beggars, vagabonds or lawless rufflers. He pictures him in the tavern drinking it off in a night, and dying of drink. And who would know?
Dr Turner leans forward on his stick so that Henry can see up close the very substance of his face. It is like a natural exclamation of rage. Hair sprouts from his nostrils, his eyes are red-rimmed. ‘It is not about salving your conscience, Henry. It is about changing things. You have been blessed with certain privileges, and in the eyes of God you must employ them in ways that create a change. I was brought up where the stink of the tannery permeated every crack of life, every breath, each mouthful of food. I was inured to its poison, and yet I never wish to forget what poison is or what it does to men. There are many different kinds of poverty, Henry,’ Dr Turner says. ‘Who are you or I to say that one man’s suffering is worse than another man’s. It is not our task to judge between sufferings, only to help where relief can be given. Your man may well have made those sores himself by laying irritants like spearwort or crowsfoot upon his members, a known practice in these parts amongst their kind. But what else is he to do, being whipped from parish to parish? With no home to speak of. Poverty is the visible, residual poison of a bad society, it eats away at the lives of those who have little or cannot help themselves.’ He pushes his cap about on his head.
‘These changes in the Church are not moving fast enough to reinstate an antidote. All this mealy-mouthed absolution and confession that we’ve lived with for too long has made us lazy.’ He snorts. ‘That’s not a way to improve the world, is it? People don’t like to hear that. How much easier it was to go to a priest, smell the frankincense, bleat unworthiness and be absolved like infants. Cut into a Catholic’s flesh and be warned, you may see whey running from the wound instead of blood.’
Henry looks shocked.
Turner flaps his hand dismissively. ‘There is still too much Romish pox about.’
‘If a man has to make amends how can he properly go about it, if he is not to just hand out bits of gold?’
‘By making an effort.’ Never had such a simple word sounded so menacing and unachievable.
‘God gave you hands, didn’t he?’ Turner holds open his own palms skywards as if to be inspected.
‘Use them!’
Henry’s ears are ringing all the way home.
Chapter VI.
Of TUTSAN or PARKE LEAVES. At the top of the stalks groweth small knops or round buttons which bring forth floures like St Johns grasse, when they are fallen or perished there appeareth litle small pelets very red, like to the colour of clotted or congealed dry blood, in which berries is contained the seede. The roote is hard and of wooddy substance, yeerely sending forth new springs.
THE GREAT FROSTS HAVE COME. The fields and hedges are white and the early morning air in the ribbon of valley beneath the slope is quick with birds. The redwings are here, getting down to the business of stripping the last of the haws, and filling the hedges with a gregarious, weighty presence that sets the squirrels chattering angrily. Crisp, seeded heads of wild angelica are spiky with crystals.
Henry walks down to Broadmead to cast an eye over the cattle. They should be brought in for the winter now; they stand cold and miserable in the hoary grass, breath in clouds about them. He must talk to his stockman. He walks on and stops by the Cary, the little course that runs down off the Mendip, through Somerton and winds out across the Levels. There is vapour rising from the river. One moorhen nervily shrugs itself through the water at the edge near the overhanging reedy bank, black plumage against the blackish water, a faint wake the only clue to its movement.
He calls in at the barton to see it is ready for cows, and then goes back up the hill to eat with his family. He takes a shortcut across the back of Horse Close, and then without thinking turns past Widow Hodges’s place. Rounding the corner of the new wall he comes across her suddenly, weaving a wide-mouthed, greenish basket in the cold without looking at her hands, as if they had a way of their own and could work on without her.
‘Good day to you, Master Lyte,’ she says. Her nose is running. Her hands are very pale in the November light, almost flashing as they move, twisting withy against withy. The flickering lids of her eyes are very dark and seem to latch on to his movement as he passes, as a hawk’s gaze might, fixing to the warmblooded gait of rabbits. He is unwilling to put his back to her, and turns once to raise his hand absurdly as he bids her good morning.
It is warm in the hall by comparison. He stamps the frost from his boots. Hannah has boiled black puddings and somehow the cold makes them all seem even more delicious.
‘That woman gives me the shivers, Frances,’ he complains.
‘Your Widow Hodges? All men find old women disconcerting, Henry.’ Frances is amused. ‘Once past childbearing age, a woman’s use is ill-defined even if working, particularly if she has no husband to tend. Men are unsettled by their ugliness. They are afraid of withered things.’
‘Gardeners are afraid of withered things,’ Henry concedes, going off to his unformed Knot.
It is good to stand up straight after two hours’ digging and to quench his thirst with a long draught from the flagon Mote’s boy brings him, instead of waiting, tetchy, inside at his desk, for the slop-slop of the maidservant’s stepping up the corridor. The lawns are steaming where the sun hits the frost. He wipes his mouth. He needs to decide what shrubs to plant for the low, trimmed hedges that will form the body of the Knot.
He has considered the cost of bringing down from London some of the newly introduced box-tree. They say Buxus is best planted at this time of year, and he is tempted, because the hedges of box he saw in France and Holland were firm and densely foliated, and agreeably disposed to being clipped into shapes. But they also say it has little use in medicine, and with its reeking, astringent smell like cat’s piss it could prove a mistake for his garden. Hyssop, though apt to grow straggly, has a mildly aromatic charm of its own, and many virtues.
Henry sits down on the upturned new waterbutt, just delivered from the coopers, and examines the progress so far. The bricklayers finished their final course last week, and the garden wall stands ruddy and crisp. Tobias Mote’s children are clearing up the hardened bits of lime mortar all along its base. The joiners over at Kingsdon are measuring up now for the pair of doors.
Henry calls over to Mote. ‘Has the smith sent in his bill for the ironwork?’
‘Not yet. I can fetch the hinges in the afternoon if you’re in a hurry for them.’
‘I’d like to get them as soon as possible because the trees will be in soon and those doors will keep out nibblers.’
Mote crosses the sea of opened earth.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says. He takes off his soft cap and scratches his head. ‘It’s only that there are a few things we should mind.’ He pauses.
‘Like?’
‘Like we’re getting a bit forward of ourselves.’
‘Are we?’
‘That plot needs a lot of husbanding before it’s fit. If you want the handsomest plants you’ll need, well, diligence.’
‘What are you saying, Mote?’ Henry sighs inwardly. ‘I sense a dampening of enthusiasms coming on.’
‘It would not be seemly to start planting this year.’
Henry raises his eyebrows.
‘It wouldn’t harm to put in some trees, perhaps, come a month or two, but we ought to be getting the soil in better fettle and, as it is, that ground is overbound with clay. There’s still thorough clearing to be done, look at that ashweed, and setting our minds firmly to the shape of it all. We can’t do that if we’re fiddling around with plants already put in, and bits of earth already committed over to being sown or set with slips. It’d be an evil mess in my estimation.’
Henry is thinking that he couldn’t remember asking Mote for his thoughts on the matter.
‘It’s a big job, Master. It’s not just a few dainty pot-herbs in a frame.’
Henry doesn’t need reminding of the scale of his task. He sighs again, louder this time. It’s just that the idea of a desolate unplanted mudbath outside the house for a twelve-month is not appealing. He pictures the rainwater puddling on the walkways and the creep of the most voracious sort of weeds colonizing the blank spaces; thistles, docks, running grasses. And then after almost a year’s worth of decrepitude and neglect, once everything was waterlogged and become prone to yellow mosses and vermin, the frost would descend, unmitigated by any sheltering stalks or the overreach of wintered shrubs; needling down with violent, icy precision to split the lias paving slabs asunder, the earthenware pots he hasn’t bought yet, this very waterbutt.
‘It’ll fly by,’ Mote says, rubbing his hands together, as if it were all settled. ‘Time won’t lie long on us, as for the while we can hoe what comes up, and we’ll get the gang back to turn in the dung after St Martin’s feast in a two-week’s time. We’ll still need a fair portion of the dung over in the kitchen garden as well, remember, Master. It’s what’s needed most for a fair, well-dressed earth.’
‘Are you saying there may not be enough?’
Tobias Mote shrugs cheerfully. ‘And that all depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether you carry on with all those roses you’ve got a mind for is the truth, Master. They’re hungry buggers for the dung.’
Henry winces. ‘I see. Well we can buy in more from somewhere, can we?’
‘Probably.’ He chuckles. ‘Though that’ll get them talking.’
He can see that it would. He imagines the gossip at the market; have you heard? They’re buying in shit up at Lytes Cary. He imagines the sucked-in breath and shaken heads. Whatever next? It’ll be all over anyway, come the frosts, for those fancy plants. It makes him annoyed, the way he cares about what other people think.
‘But it’s not just the roses, Master, is it. It’s that we’ve got a ground here that is cold and stiff, which we can make more lively by the digging in of hot dung.’
‘Not near the rosemary,’ Henry adds.
‘Nor the carrots,’ Mote says, thinking of all his duties, ‘the carrots most particular. But the nature of this closed-up soil will be warmed and loosened if we keep on with it. If we can find more dung to see us through this year at least.’
‘I may send word over to the Lockyer’s. They have so many horses at livery they are bound to have a surplus to requirements.’
‘Horse dung is only any use if it has stood a year.’
‘I know that.’
‘Or it burns.’
‘Yes,’ Henry says. What is this goddammed habit Mote has, of trying to teach him all the time.
Over where the plum orchard is to be the Sorcerer shrieks manically, and it still sounds horribly like laughter.
‘We’ll turn in that dung, like you say, and we’ll be half-there already.’ Henry says, and then feels suddenly nettled into resolution.
‘You know what? By spring we’ll be planting in it.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Let’s get cracking.’
Tobias Mote looks startled. He chews a corner of his grimy thumb and then nods secretly, imperceptibly to himself as if it was all to be expected.
‘I’ve a lot on my hands, then. I’ll need at least another boy to help me, if that kitchen garden up there is to feed more than a nest of starvelings,’ he says. ‘And if it gets too much, well.’ He spreads his hands out wide to show the true reach of his feelings, and pretends to yawn, his grey teeth showing. ‘There’s sundry other gardens in the parish could do with tending.’
This is certainly true.
‘Blackmail,’ Henry says. It’s not as though he hasn’t already considered the situation he could find himself in without a competent gardener. He can’t do this thing on his own. But Henry is definitely bothered by Tobias Mote. He does not match up to expectations. He does not pause between spadefuls of earth and consider the weather evenly and at length. He laughs too much. He has opinions.
Yet he has been here for very many years and knows the soil like one of his family. His father had been stockman here for most of his working life until his death, and Tobias had grown up running in the meadows with the kine. He knows what the very grass on this clay soil tastes like from field to field. He knows about the particular way of the wind here, and the likely pattern of rain and the sheltered places. He’d first learnt his gardening from his mother, whose patch was the most burgeoning in the village, and a husbanding man called Colleyns, who he had gone to as a boy about sixteen when he knew he preferred pears to driving cattle down to the other side of Pricklemarch Bridge, say. Tobias Mote has been gardening this soil at Lytes Cary for nigh-on thirty years. Henry knows that he would be foolish to deliberately lose a man’s skills just like that.
‘Would another four shillings a year make all the difference to your sense of optimism about this project?’
‘It would,’ Mote says to the sky in general, without a trace of irony, without turning round.
Some little brown thing is flicking up leaf mould – a wren, a mouse – they look the same sometimes from the corner of one’s eye. That reminds him, he needs to set traps tonight. As soon as the cold weather comes, mice are all over the house, getting into the pantry, the stores, behind the panelling.
‘Master?’ Tobias Mote scratches his neck, then stops.
‘What?’ Surely to God he won’t ask for more.
‘It’s just that there’s a bit of talk going about. Not much, only a word or two. I just was wondering …’
‘What?’ Henry says coldly.
‘If you knew of it, and if there is a way it might be stopped.’
Henry is in no mood to discuss family matters with his gardener. ‘I have heard nothing about anything,’ he says, ‘and do not care for it.’
‘You don’t care to know what they are saying?’
‘I do not listen to the wigwag of idle tongues.’
‘Alright.’ Mote shrugs in a way that suggests he will try again later, and carries on with his spade. ‘It’s just that—’
‘No!’ Henry rounds on him. ‘There is too much to do today for all this. Far too much.’
‘I’m going for my dinner soon,’ Mote warns him, unnecessarily. ‘It’s already late.’
And so it is. The day passes very quickly, and it seems no time at all before a fat, white moon has shot up into the sky with startling rapidity, shrinking as it does so, and its gaze seems harder, more judgmental, up there above the alder, than it had all vastly soft and gaping down on the horizon. Tobias Mote goes off down the path towards Tuck’s, he is small and spry and lithe. He is not at all what Henry imagines a gardener to be. This vexes him more than he can put into words, but he tries anyway, complaining to his wife over meals and in bed.
‘A gardener should be big-handed, slow, move steadily like a root moves in the soil, not flitting quick and tense between the beds, perspiring freely, energy bounding out of him with every springing step. Damn it, Frances, that man almost crackles about the garden. Will that be bad for the plants?’
He wants Frances to laugh then, and get up from her chair and go to him to soothe his troubled feelings and gather him into her fine encircling arms, and suggest an early retirement to bed for the night, but she does not; she is playing at being the dutiful wife. Instead he watches her bite a length of her thread from the reel and hold the needle close to her face to see its narrow impossible eye in the candlelight. He feels desire kindling in him as she puts the end of the thread in her mouth and makes it firm and damp between her lips, and then the thread is through. Henry looks despondently at the interminable hem she is stitching along, and knows there will be no consolation to be had from her tonight. It is not that she is shy, or reticent about her new role as a wife, and she even listens to him as she works, something it must be admitted that Anys did not always do. But he is finding that her poise and coolness disconcert him on a daily basis.
She has very good teeth, he thinks, looking into the fire, at least he has that to be grateful for.
1566
Chapter VII.
Of SHEPHEARDS PURSE. It hath sound, tough and pliable branches, of a fote long, with long leaves, deeply cut or jagged. The floures are white, in place whereof when they are gone, there riseth small flat cods, or triangled pouches, wherein the seede is contained.
CHRISTMAS AND TWELFTH NIGHT have been and gone, but scraps of ivy and mistletoe are still up in the hall. They drive Henry mad, everywhere he treads, little, limp leaves beneath his feet, but it’s been a pleasure to have a reason to open up a vat of Gascon wine, and make spiced hot hippocras by the fireside, share it out on those cold, stark nights. They all survived the tenants’ feast and there were no disagreements. The girls enjoyed the juggler that came on Boxing Day and Old Hannah surpassed herself with tarts, roast meats and suckets, though Frances didn’t seem to enjoy the Christmastide victuals as much as he did. He hopes she is not sickening for something, as wintertime is not ideal for having doctor’s visits in the night, the roads can be treacherous.
No word though from his father during this time, which is a source of great sadness to him. He had sent a fat goose over to Sherborne, but received no word in return. He always misses his mother at Christmas, and he observes the girls and knows how much they must miss theirs, too, though they never complain. Anys loved games at Christmas. Of course after she died Mary in particular was inconsolable, crying for hours on end, clinging onto her poppet. Florence was just a newborn. Jane did not speak. Edith, the eldest, bustled about the younger ones, in fact he hardly saw her, but even she has a look in her eye still that he finds hard to describe, except that it is like a dullness, as though some essence in her had died away.
The memory of his own mother Edith is now so eclipsed by the disagreeable nature of his relationship with his father’s second wife Joan Young that Edith Lyte appears only occasionally as a kind of improbable saint in his imagination. Sometimes he dreams of her as a white, cloudy horse leaping over his head, and the leaps are like steam pouring through air. In these dreams his horse-mother never lands, is always vaulting the hedges, legs stretched mid-jump, so that he sees the underbelly, the pale unshod hoofs. In the dreams he does not know if she can see him standing there below her, his small boy’s face tilted up to the dark sky, studded with stars. Sometimes he knows her view of him would be obscured by trees even if she should look down, he netted in shadow, rooted in shadow, his leather boots sunk an inch into mud on the track so that he cannot move from the lea of the withy hedge, its overhang.
His father is becoming a stranger to him. In the last few months they have exchanged cursory messages about land matters, church dues, administration, crops and tenancies, but not a word between them about family life, no ordinary pleasantries. He has never asked after Henry’s new wife’s health, and never refers to her by name, in fact Henry is not sure he has ever mentioned her at all. He has many feelings about all of this, most of which he pushes to one side and declines to think on. But when he receives word to expect his father on Tuesday next he has no choice but to recognize the state of things between his father and himself.
It has to be said, he is not sure of his motives for coming. John Lyte’s health is not good and the ride over from Sherborne may not be comfortable for him, but according to the short letter he has sent, he insists on coming to discuss the proposed sale of various cows while prices are strong. Henry knows that he wants to check on the estate, make sure that Lytes Cary is not suffering in his son’s hands. In turn, Henry is looking forward to imparting good news about the ditches, which have been cleared already, and have him savour last season’s cider, which is exceptional. Henry always strives to please his father: this time it seems vital, and as a small chink of light falls onto that ignored, closed corner of his life which his father occupies, he begins to wonder. He wishes … oh, it is no matter what he wishes. No doubt it will all die down or be smoothed over and forgotten before long. The childish dependent part of him hopes the visit is a reconciliatory one, in which his father plans to apologize for not attending the wedding.
At the same time he resents the way this makes him feel. He wants it all to go away and leave him to get on with the real project in his mind; his garden, his pride. He wants to talk of it with his father but something prevents him, and he thinks they will not walk around to that side of the house to show off the new walls and ironwork and open beds. Though every other ounce of him cries out to try to impress his father, he would prefer to wait until the garden has found its balance, until its own presence has become distinct. He does not want his father’s disapproval spoiling his enthusiasm, and most of all he does not want Joan Young prying into the cost and workings of it all, criticizing his choice of rose, his taste, his usefulness, his ambitions.
Indeed he is hoping that Joan will stay behind, because her presence in the house makes the servants behave erratically in front of his father, which makes it seem as if he cannot properly restrain his household. At least that is what occurred on the last occasion that she came, over a year ago. It had been unfortunate, for example, that a large, black fly the size and furriness of a bumble bee had drowned itself in her glass and bobbed unnoticed all the way from the kitchen to her place at table.
In his reply to his father’s letter he had not extended a courteous wish to see his stepmother. For several nights he lies in bed at night agonizing over whether he might be making a mistake by not inviting her, and then again, is he making one if he does?
All this browbeating proves to be a waste of time, because even as he spies the newfangled, painted carriage that she insisted that his father purchase lurching up the drive, he can see from the dark, malevolent shape wrapped beside him that they will not be left alone together, that she has come. It is St Vincent’s day; the patron saint of drunkards, he thinks wryly, and as they approach he steels himself for the abomination of her company, summons the cheerful greeting he has rehearsed.
‘Father!’ he calls up, but he can see the discomfort all over his face already. His hand raises stiffly in the air, more like a warding-off than a greeting.
When he descends they embrace briefly, but then his gaze looks everywhere but at Henry. Blackie runs round the horses, barking, providing distraction.
‘Madam,’ he bows to his stepmother.
Their distaste for each other is entirely mutual. When she smiles her ghastly wooden teeth at him, it is more as if she was grinding them together. A very fast, small woman, she clambers unaided from the carriage and beetles straight across the porch threshold and disappears into the passage towards the kitchens, her sleeves trailing. No one has worn sleeves like that for twenty years. Dressed in cloth of that inky purple hue, and with her nose turned blue at the tip from the breeze on the ride, she has always looked to him like death on legs; cadaverously alive. He had detested her manner from the moment she entered their lives when he was younger; she would coil herself around his father like she owned him, in an offensive way his mother would never have wished or dared to do. In his blackest, most resentful moments, he has thought of her like rootless Devil’s Thread, wrapping its strands about the crop plants in the fields, strangling all hospitable life from them. Now though he knows to call her parasite would be disrespectful to his father. She is kin.
‘Henry?’ He can hear her shrieking for him. ‘Henry! Is this beef we are having today?’
‘I hardly know, madam, I—’ Henry stands awkwardly at the kitchen doorway, trying to avoid the glower of Old Hannah, standing by the fire with her basting spoon in hand. ‘It is not my business to poke about in there.’
‘It won’t be done on time, you know we’re hungry after the ride. Look at that fire.’
‘You are very early. Perhaps—’
‘Where’s that wife of yours?’
‘She is … upstairs, madam, and will be with us shortly.’ Henry knows that Frances will be in her chamber, staving off that minute when she must glide down the staircase like the lady of the house she is, and greet her mother-in-law with gracious if entirely feigned obeisance.
He goes to the foot of the stairs and looks up but does not call. He is not sure but thinks he hears a door being slammed at the end of the corridor. He hopes there might be a kind of unspoken solidarity between them both now that Joan Young is in the house – perhaps the only feeling that they share, but some men would have less to boast of. He takes a deep breath and goes back to the hall, to seat his father according to the rules of honour. He feels stifled with anxiety, his throat so tight he can hardly get simple niceties and phrases out. His girls appear one by one and curtsey properly before they take their places, which is a relief, and even though the guests have arrived so appallingly early Old Hannah manages almost immediately to produce a first course of roast fowls and salad, but after this it is unfortunate that the beef takes a long time to appear, and so does Frances.
‘Where is that wife? Does she exist? Of course she does, I can smell there’s a woman about the house,’ Joan says, pushing her plate about impatiently.
‘I do dislike a hiatus in a meal,’ she hisses to Edith, sitting next to her at table. ‘A gap can feel so dissatisfactory. It is fortunate that nobody important dines with us today.’ She casts her eye glassily round the hall, though as Henry Lyte knows she is short of sight, she will not have focussed much on anyone.
After all that fuss, she doesn’t eat much, helping herself to meat but draining the juice away with the edge of her spoon against the bowl as though the dish is too watery, turning the loaf suspiciously to check the underside for mould, rifling through a salad of winter cresses to find the choicest pieces of bottled artichoke, only to fling them back with a bitter little sigh and eat nothing. Though she does like bones, sucking the last little fibres of meat from them, snapping them to get at any traces of marrow concealed inside.
When Henry enquires after the journey, she runs through a tedious itinerary of the way they had taken, and how poor the roads in this part of the country, how hopeless the route chosen and how slow the horse.
His father, who until this point has not uttered a word, puts his knife down.
‘That carriage was a mistake,’ he mutters.
‘No John,’ she snaps, in front of everyone. ‘It was that the horse was inadequate.’
Nobody else seems to blanch at the way she speaks to her husband before company. For a second he catches Jane’s eye, and then when he looks at his father he sees a small red patch, the size of a coin, flare up on his left cheekbone. Even when the conversation veers towards the matters of local taxation that usually rouse his father to table-thumping vehemence, he toys with his table knife in silence. Either he is feeling unwell or he, too, has something heavy weighing on his conscience or his family affairs. Henry looks across at his own offspring and tries to imagine their roles in reverse. He is a very different kind of father, isn’t he? But after all, children rarely consider the innermost feelings of parents, indeed they do not seem to have them, which is the natural order of things.
The girls are very quiet during this visit. Jane in particular says not a word, she sits still through the meal; bowing her head as they say grace, eating neatly what is put on her plate, dabbling her fingers clean in the waterbowl. She is occupied in watching, taking in whatever strangeness it is happening just under the surface in all of them, her eyes flicking between the adult faces as they speak. Henry wonders how she can be aware that something is wrong. On the surface this is a perfectly ordinary family day. After all, nobody else could possibly know that there was such a storm swilling inside him. Why should they? Any guilt or resentment is entirely his own, entirely invisible.
Joan Young. Even her name is a contradiction, she is the furthest from young a body could ever be, representing for him all that is shrivelled, bitter, hardened. There is a shallow stream he knows up on the Mendip which, if one drops a stick or small object in its flow, with alarming rapidity will grow a crust of greyish lime about it, as hard and coarse as any stone. He imagines that someone caught habitually in her presence could suffer a similar fate, because stoniness exudes from her very soul, like a contagion. He can see it slowly afflicting his father, a callous skin edging across his being. Looking at his father is like looking at himself as he would appear in twenty years if he had a crust of stone grown over him.
Frances is the last to join them at the table, in fact she is distinctly late by the time she glides into her seat. Henry is not sure if she has done this on purpose, even though she is very pale. He hopes she doesn’t have the green sickness, from which his sister used to suffer.
‘Ah!’ his father says, rising briefly as she takes her chair beside Henry.
‘I’ve always been a good riser,’ Joan Young remarks.
‘Even when expecting, madam?’ Frances smiles sweetly at the nearest child and takes some bread from the basket, and then the long-awaited beef course arrives and there is much chatter and diversion.
Henry looks at her astounded.
No-one else seems to have heard what she said. What is the matter with everyone, are they deaf? And though he keeps on staring at her through the rest of the meal she does not speak again after that, and the conversation veers towards his father’s lawyer who is unwell. When they have finished eating Henry follows her down the corridor into the kitchen and closes the door.
‘Madam, did you mean to—’
‘Shhh.’ She puts her finger up to her lips and smiles, her eyes dancing.
‘That’s all you can say? You can’t leave a man unsure over something like that! I beg you!’
She touches his arm. ‘We’ll see. I am rarely so late with my courses, and I have begun to feel sick these last few days. But it may be nothing.’ She will say no more.
Henry’s heart is racing inside his chest with familiar apprehension and hope. ‘A child!’ he whispers to Blackie, who thumps the stub of her tail once on the flagstones. This time it will surely be different. His new wife’s first baby.
Henry pays slightly less attention to the rest of the day than he should. Ignoring his father’s reticence, he goes with him anyway to examine his windmill up in Cowleaze field though the tenant is out, then they skirt across to Inmead. Though they stand and look out at the view to the wet moorfields, they do not speak, and as his father does not ask about the trees he does not tour the orchards with him as Henry had planned. Indeed they do not do anything he planned; he feels rather superfluous, as though he were following his father about in the same, slavish manner as Blackie, trotting at his heels. His mind is elsewhere now, though, and he is almost grateful when the horses are got ready early and his father and stepmother leave despite the special supper being prepared.
The very house itself seems to let out a sigh of relief to see Joan Young gone, as the carriage containing her pulls mercifully out of the yard and onto the track towards the road, trundling back off to Sherborne again where she belongs. His father had not mentioned, Henry realizes, any sale of cows.
He goes straight to the parlour to find Frances, to examine her closely for clues.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘That was not a complete disaster, was it.’
‘Is there no stone which that woman will leave unturned?’ she exclaims, quite amazed at Joan Young’s rudeness even though she had been warned.
‘Probably not. But she is your mother-in-law, and there is nothing to be done about it,’ Henry says.
‘Why is she like that?’
‘Because she had seen herself here, upon marriage to my father. Here at Lytes Cary. She believed that she would be first lady of this manor, did not anticipate that he would stand aside and allow me to manage the land, while he retired with his new wife to an unimposing though pleasant enough house in Sherborne. By virtue of my being the sole heir to my father’s estate as eldest son, I have ruined her plans – and she is always reminded of this on coming here.’
Chapter VIII.
Of CINQUEFOYLE, or Five finger grasse. The great yellow cinquefoil hath round tender stalks, running abroad. The roote boyled in vineger, doth mollifie and appease fretting and consuming sores.
IT IS THE TWELFTH OF MARCH, and the second week of Lent. Outside in the last of a spring frost the plants are made of glass, the sun full upon them, a few melted drops catching light and winking colours. Henry walks the edge of the estate, steam rising from the river like a pan seething. The wood is a theatre, cutout black twigs shot through with vapour and diffuse beams of light against which birds flit, softly translucent. The willow’s tawniness is flaring to orange with the year’s growth, a supple bristle of shoots. Coming back through the garden Henry watches honey bees among the snowdrops, their legs fat with yellow catkin pollen. He remembers to avoid the upper garden door, so that he does not have to speak to Widow Hodges.
Today Henry takes delivery of seeds.
Looking through them when the man has gone, he has to admit that he’s probably bought too much. There are others on order, too, but the seedsman doesn’t pass through very often and Henry was keen not to overlook a chance to buy many sorts. The man had parsley and radish which he said had come from nearby, and endive, cucumber, anise, lettuce, purslane and pompion from further afield, mostly London. Henry also took pear kernels brought from Worcestershire, and he was tempted into buying fourteen liquorice plants, even though he suspects they will not do well on this kind of soil.
It is like a banquet, a seed banquet at his desk as he sits there opening the little packets one by one and relishing their differences: pale seeds of angelica like discarded shells of dull, brown beetles – flat and ribbed as if each one had been squashed in the overcrowded seedhead. He puts one into his mouth for that explosion of resinous savour, harsh at first then with a distinctive soapy undertow. Astonishing, he thinks, going on chewing, his tongue tingling and numb, how such insignificant, woody flecks can unleash such potency. He has seeds of ammi, too. Horribly dry and bitter. Smallage lives up to its name; the seeds are minute, scarcely bigger than grains of sand or mites. Alexander seed is black and large, like fat rat’s droppings. Gromwell is of a cold dense grey like that of tin-glaze china, quite startlingly like the eyes of cooked fish – with a high shine on each, and a faint patch of yellow blush. Not perfectly round, these seeds are mobile, free-flowing on his hand.
He also has dill, vervain, motherwort, thlaspi of Candy, sanicle, dittany, thyme, aristolochia, pennyroyal, calamint, centuary, alecost, herb of Grace, and wafer-thin moons of lunary; some call it Honesty but what is truth or honesty or lies to a plant? Such riches at his fingertips!
Of course for years he has bought in seeds for the vegetable yard, but this year his enthusiasm bubbles over even for them, as well as the seeds for the Knot, as though he is seeing them anew. He already has plenty of onion seed bought locally in March – maybe three pounds in weight. He digs his hand in and lets the seeds run through them in his delight as he opens each little sack and examines the contents, sniffs them, cracks a few open with his teeth. There are various peas, and borlotti beans in their stiffly undulating parchment pods.
He pours a mixture of some of the peas and beans into a pot to gloat over at his desk. They are soft red and brown and green, silkily dry, wrinkled. They are the colour of dried blood, tallow, bone, fresh larder mould, lichen. They are as hard as shingle, as light as buttons. And they are all – he feels quite overwhelmed with the sheer mass of them – waiting. He puts his forefinger to them and stirs them about. He rattles a handful from palm to palm. They are extraordinary – how has he never heeded it so well? And the promise they contain. These things seem dead, and yet … A few drops of water, the enclosing dark earth with its minerals, the warmth of sunlight; and each of these desiccated, mummified little bits of toughness will hydrate, fatten and burst into vivid miraculous sweet shoots, climbing, sinewing towards the light.
Tobias Mote looks at them doubtfully, when Henry takes a fair selection out to show him.
‘That’s a fearful lot to be grown from seed,’ he says, scratching through his rat-coloured, curly hair. ‘We’d be better off buying in little plants already set from Mistress Shaw in Wells. Only so much time on a man’s hands. Can’t produce a nursery out of thin air in a year’s stretch.’ He points with a blunt, grimy forefinger at the dug turf around them. ‘Not with all this going on.’
Henry’s good mood is unshakeable. ‘But they’ll last, even if we can’t get round to sowing everything this season.’
‘If they don’t get mildewed, or eaten by mice, or stolen; or so long as they don’t sprout untowardly.’ Tobias Mote chuckles with more glee than Henry wants to hear. ‘There’s a lot can go wrong with seeds stored badly.’
Henry stops listening to him.
For a second he thinks he hears something else behind the garden wall, strains his ears, his heart beating, but it is the low noise of ravens up in the woods that sounds like men talking.
‘Anyway, I’ve been thinking, we’ll be needing a bank,’ Mote is saying. ‘We can cast up one here where it should catch the sun alright.’
‘And grow a soft kind of cover over it – then I must add grass seed to the list.’ Henry is making notes on a board propped on an overturned cask.
‘And grass it.’ Mote repeats. Henry finds this is an annoying habit he has, of saying again what has already been said; not as if he is committing it to memory, more as if he is weighing up the readiness of what has been decided upon, as one might judge a fruit in the palm of the hand during the course of a tour of the orchard. It is not that Tobias Mote is rude or disrespectful, just that he seems disconcertingly his own man, that won’t be bidden.
‘So that it can be used as a seat for contemplation amongst the calm of the plants, facing the Knot itself.’ Henry goes on regardless, still pleased with the idea. ‘I imagine in June it will be popular.’
‘Folk can sit and kick their heels, when they’ve little to do.’
Henry Lyte looks sharply at Mote, but he can’t see any evidence of sarcasm. Mote’s countenance is fixed always either to the far distance of the horizon, detecting the weather, or straight down to the soil to the matters in hand. He digs very fast and straight, as though he were racing. Only for trees, it seems, does he make an exception and look out to the middle ground. Once Henry saw him watching a fox crossing Easter Field with a hen from the yard in its jaws, a ruddy streak trotting diagonally, its brush out straight and triumphant.
‘See that devil go,’ he’d muttered grudgingly to no-one in particular.
But on the whole, Tobias Mote seems to know what is going on around him without looking, without ceasing his thin, see-sawing whistle, without raising his eyes from the ground as he digs or rakes. His ears are small and pricked, perhaps their bristle of hairs makes his hearing more acute than other men’s. Mary calls him the troll, because she is afraid of him. If she is naughty, he only has to mention his name to make her squeal and comply with parental requests.
‘Does he do magic?’ she’d whispered once in awe, when they were discussing the crop of skirrets laid like dead man’s fingers buttered on the plate at supper, but her stepmother dislikes that kind of talk and made her get down from the table. Frances applies herself with scant duty to prayer and worship at the appropriate moments of the day but has a horror of talk of spirits and the afterlife, that makes Henry suspect that her beliefs run wilder than some. Of course he can’t be sure of this as they have never discussed it, not being something a civilized family should concern itself with. His first wife Anys, he can’t help remembering, was devoted to prayer.
‘And on the shady slope behind the bank, for who ever thinks about what is behind them, we can set primroses, or violets as a surprise, and other little shy flowers that do not mind a lack of sunshine – all in due course,’ Henry adds hastily. He is determined to remain enthusiastic about remembering details, even in the face of cynicism. He paces up and down the length of land, which Mote is now raking finely, slighting the soil in preparation for the sowing as soon as the weather seems suitable.
Henry has hired a weeding woman who lives at Tuck’s, called Susan Gander. She has been pulling out neat, tender bits of dandelion, jack-by-the-hedge and long, easy roots of withywind, so that the beds are smooth and clear, and everything is ready for committing the seeds to the earth. Some areas are sown, and some left bare for pricklings to be set out later. Susan Gander is an odd woman, Henry decides. He has caught her staring at him when his back is turned, and when he speaks to her to give instruction, she doesn’t say much in return, just nods, staring all the time even as she tosses weeds into the basket, so that she sometimes misses. He knows she’s not a half-wit, she is the wife of John Gander who is the most reliable carter round here. He thinks perhaps she may be put out because at first he found it hard to remember her name, but now he has it, and still she goes on, which is making him feel almost paranoid. It happened when he saw her at church on Sunday, he swears he saw her surreptitiously turning round and watching him out of the corner of her eye, nudging her neighbour. Her behaviour proves to him something unpleasant he has been suspecting for a few weeks now.
There can be no longer any doubt that something has begun to quietly, insidiously, circulate the district about the nature of his first wife’s death. No-one has mentioned it to him, not a single mortal soul, but he hears the whispering and sees the glances, and slowly the whole ghastly mess is rearing its head again in an unformed, pliable version of itself like a bad dream.
He goes inside, and watches the sowing of seeds from the study for a while, with more than a touch of jealousy. Mote somehow knows he’s watching, brazenly raises his hand once to him. See? Henry mutters to himself, even his own gardener prefers him not to dig in the garden. He seems to regard it mostly as his own domain. But he does trust Mote sufficiently to carry out what they have agreed. The progress is invisible from here.
Henry prays, then goes to his manuscript, though it is hard to put his mind to it. Every day as the season draws on he finds it more of an effort to apply himself to its difficulty, tinkers with what little there is of it so far. He feels mired and tense.
The next day is grey, and the lesser celandines have kept their petals half-shut. A small brown hawk with pointed wings, not from round here, has been flying between the pear trees and making the blackbirds jittery. By midday the pale sky has lowered and dissolved into a mizzling fine drift of rain that is perfect for moistening, nurturing those seeds laid already in the earth. Tobias Mote says that a successful life for any seed is determined in the first day – the first hours, even – of being planted.
Watching the hawk whirr up to the edge of the copse, Henry is reminded of a reddish-brown moth and thinks it softly beautiful, until he sees its decisive landing in the ash tree, cruel feet outstretched and latching onto the bough so swiftly that he flinches. It is a meat-eater, through and through.
Chapter IX.
Of PLANTAINE, or Waybrede. The third kind of plantaine is smaller than the second, the leaves bee long and narrow, with ribs of a darke greene with smal poynts or purples. The roote is short and verie full of threddie strings.
FRANCES QUICKENED TODAY. Henry can’t feel it of course, though he puts his hand dutifully on her belly, but he praised God for it; another healthy child kicking in the womb. He can never picture a miniature human in there, like those shown in the diagrams in medical books. His mind’s eye suggests rather that it is a pinkish kind of grub or caterpillar, that will later transform into something more recognizable, when it is pressing tiny feet and hands against the inner side of her belly skin. He is after all an experienced father. There were the births of Edith, Mary, Jane and Florence, and there was the other birth too, but this is too painful for him to remember. This last memory is the one that is slippery, evasive, so deeply interred that he can’t even acknowledge it. He is adept at forgetting; extremely adept.
‘Come and see the garden today, Frances!’ he says, on impulse.
‘Then you must wait while I find my old shoes,’ she says.
‘No, now! Come at once! It is the end of April and you have not seen what has been happening out there,’ Henry makes himself laugh, tugs at her hand. And as they go out together to see the progress of the Knot and its surrounding borders, Henry begins a descriptive verbal tour for his wife, so that she can imagine how it is to grow. What will be here and here. What will be high, what will be climbing. He ignores Mote, who is grinning to himself as he listens to Henry’s enthusiastic, expansive rendition of how it is to be.
‘Picture its frankness,’ he entreats, ‘fat and green. Here will be the gillyflowers, and these little slips of lavender will have grown into plants by then, and see all these frondy bits of dill coming up, and these are the apothecary’s rose, and these the damask. What do you think?’
‘I do love roses.’ Her tone suggests that there is doubt involved in all of this.
‘The beehives are at the far end by the garden. If you sit up here by the house they will never bother you, and here is a good corner where the sun warms the wall. Even the little rock lizards bask in this spot.’
‘It really is quite hard to picture, Henry.’ He knows she is only allowing herself to see the mud, the parts that are not finished.
‘Think of a lily. Think of breathing in the plant’s waxy freshness like a draught of vital spirit.’
Frances does smile politely.
‘Think of a rose, then, think of bringing a fresh pink rose up to your face and drinking in its scent. It will have opened that morning and you will have your basket with you in order to gather many more, perhaps to make an aromatic water in your stillroom that very day while the blossoms are wholly fresh. If you like there could be a seat here for you to sit on, by the roses.’ He fetches a cask for her. ‘Try it!’
‘And my face won’t catch the sun?’
‘Your fair white skin would be shaded by the briars overhead.’
She looks suddenly keen. ‘And could we have that by the week in July when my mother comes to visit for my lying-in?’
‘Well, no, it may take a couple of years to reach overhead.’
She looks back at the house. ‘Everything takes so long. Can’t you just buy bigger roses, more full-grown, and get the men to twine them up as if they’d been there months and months?’
‘Roses do not like being moved – better to wait and coax them up the wires at their natural pace if you want them to last their proper lifetime’s span.’
Frances is becoming concerned for the state of her shoes and the mud that she will be treading into the house.
‘Every time I come out here, Henry,’ she points out. She knows perfectly well that one cannot rip up roses by the roots at whim. She is being wilful in her lack of interest. Henry cannot understand why she does not enjoy the garden more. To be sure there are many bare patches and places where herbs are not added yet, but he has described to her the wholeness of it, its beauty that by next June will surely dazzle her.
‘And is it all very costly, darling?’ she adds lightly. He looks at her. In the sunlight her straight black hair shines as though it is polished. She is not at all like a flower, he thinks. She is mineral, crystalline, waxy, brittle. The cost of his garden is not something that he wishes to discuss, he realizes.
‘How you can spend so much time inside the house without fresh air is quite beyond me,’ he retorts instead, as she walks away. He is very annoyed that she is blind to the garden’s soft growth, its promise. Mote smirks at the masterwort in the bed behind him, saying nothing.
He opens the garden door and leaves the neat, planned, incipient beauty of his Knot and strides off to inspect the orchards and the wilder, rampant plants in the wayside. He will clear his head, stretch his legs, shake off that disappointed feeling that comes from not being able to rouse enthusiasm in another being for something that one loves.
As he walks about, gradually and in truth for the first time in his life he begins to see the plants around him in terms of both their particularities and their potential. He begins to examine them all with a mounting respect and excitement for their distinctions, going from plant to plant, getting lost in their worlds, making mental notes, determined to write down what he’s observed when he returns to his study. Next time he will bring a notebook outside, and something to write with. He looks closely at the yellow loosestrife with its expanding, hairy, silky, fat stem, a plain-looking plant. He admires a specimen of elecampane; muscular in its softness, stiff with preparing to grow. He sees wild feverfew, with its almost sticky leaf; comfrey, a foot tall now, relaxing out of its growth into a soft almost reptile skin; and there is lady’s smock; pinkish, wavering in the air as though alert or tense. In the orchards the Dunster plum tree has rounded leaves peeping from the smooth twigs. On the greengage, tight waxy points are bright yellow-green, thin and strong. The apple leaves are opening raggedly on the branch like a conjuror’s flourish, and the quince is decked with little piles of hairy leaves, long pile like the hair on a young woman’s jawline. On the medlar are mild, elegant fingers of leaf and pinkish buds. Those leaves are fine in texture, rippled. He applies most observation to his favourites in the pear orchard. Their white blossoms are open like hats, and the leaves silver-soft, with a white-green tip that is crisp to the touch, and shedded brown husks at the base where it has sprouted. He watches a metallic green beetle clinging and clambering inside a blossom, and sees the boughs are dripping with mosses and crusted with three kinds of lichen; bearded, creeping, yellow. He wishes he knew more.
He wishes he could have some word from his father, who has kept up a resolute silence although Henry has written to share the good news about Frances’s condition. It is often surprising when a man gets what he hopes for, but so rarely does it come in a guise that one could have predicted. For a moment he has the most peculiar, overwhelming sensation that something vast is creeping up on him, drawing nearer. He turns around in alarm but it is only Blackie, trotting over the wet grass towards him, blunt tail in the air.
Chapter X.
Of BLOOD-STRANGE, or Mousetails. It floureth in Aprill, and the torches and seede is ripe in May, and shortly after the whole herb perisheth, so that in June yee shall not finde the dry or withered plant.
HE NEEDS TO GO AND COLLECT A HUNDRED ready-set slips of gillyflower, on order from Mistress Shaw, an old woman of some sixty years that lives in Wells. At its best her garden is a fat, colourful kerchief of blossom, and the children always vie to come with him in the cart when he goes to her for plants and seed. Rumour has it that as a young girl she was a Benedictine novice in a London convent, but that she left the calling and walked south-west long before the upheavals in the Church began. They say that she was never wed, yet everything else she plants springs eagerly to life.
Once they arrive at her garth, which is a square of land that sits beyond the town on the flat beyond the Bishop’s palace, Mary and Jane run off to hide and reappear later with the stains of strawberries about their mouths, oozing fistfuls of redcurrants, though they swear they were not thieving. She never chastises them, which he suspects is not only because their household provides good custom for her business. On occasion he has caught that raw, hungry glance that the barren can sometimes have on seeing children, but she seems to take some pleasure in cultivating their sound running full tilt in her garden.
She has narrow shoulders, but these days a protruding abdomen makes her very wide about the middle under her gown, and walking makes her lean a little as if one side of her were puckered up. Henry Lyte sees that she must suffer from some kind of growth inside her, but knows he cannot mention it unless she does. But on this visit, which is about his fourth or fifth already that season, as he is ducking out of the gate in her garden wall, he turns back to her. Checking that the garden boys are out of earshot, he asks very quietly, ‘You have been seen by a physician, madam?’
She looks down at her hands. The knuckles are shiny with the swelling of old age, and the nails green and split and grubby with work. When she speaks he smells her breath has the unmistakable unsavoury sweet smell of rot, and he is sorry for it.
‘There is no need, Master Lyte, no need at all.’
‘A doctor would give you physic to ease your suffering, and he can prepare you for what you might have to expect.’
‘I go to church to know what there is ahead of me. And beyond that I do not want to know. I pray. I try to sleep at night.’
‘Do you sleep easily?’
‘I do not.’
Henry tries to think what he can usefully do to help her. ‘I shall have a boy ride over with a bottle of aqua vitae for you, for the pain,’ he says.
Mistress Shaw’s eyes widen. ‘No! I can manage, thank you, Master Lyte.’
‘Or I can leave half a crown and you could order some yourself.’
‘No, really, but I thank you anyway.’
He smiles, will not be put off by her firm demurral. ‘I do insist,’ he says. And when he gets home he dispatches it immediately, a corked brown bottle wrapped in cloth.
But something very strange happens, which is that Mistress Shaw sends it back unopened with the boy that very evening, and with it is a little note. I thank you again Master Lyte, but I will not take strong drink. I hasten to assure you how this has naught to do with what they say of you, which wickedness I shall not believe.
What they say? Precisely what is it that they say? He must find out. He calls his bailiff but he is still out at market. He begins to asks Lisbet but before he reaches the crux she finds a pretence to vanish away to the kitchen. There is someone else he could ask, but something makes him hesitate. In the gloomy distance, he can see Mote’s form on the edge of the garden, digging, digging. He considers sending the boy to call him in. He delays lighting the candle, so that he can keep an eye on his progress. But in any event he does not need to make further enquiries, because by tomorrow forenoon a letter from his father comes.
Chapter XI.
Of HORSETAILE. It is good against the cough, the difficultie and paine of fetching breath, and against inward burstings, as Dioscorides and Plinie writeth.
HE IS NOT SURE WHICH IS WORSE, the fact that he has disappointed him, or believing that his father would allow himself to be manipulated into this position by that woman.
He stands, transfixed, in the hall. Across the passage he can hear Frances giggling in the kitchen over the clatter of pots. Her condition is softening her, she has begun to waddle very slightly as she moves from room to room, and listening now to her voice like that makes him feel protective. It suits her, this temporary relaxing of the rules she has set herself. He hears footsteps approaching from the kitchen, towards him standing there. The smile dies on her face.
Frances sees he has a letter in his hand. ‘What is it, Henry?’
‘From Sherborne.’ He is smarting.
Frances snatches the paper from him. ‘What does he say? I cannot make head nor tail of your father’s hand – it’s like cobwebs.’
‘Here.’ Henry directs her to the passage.
Her mouth opens a crack in disbelief as she takes it in.
‘How can he even suggest such a thing? And then seamlessly he goes on to talk of picking up the barley malt on Friday. It’s scarcely credible.’ Disparagingly she turns the paper to see if there is anything of worth to be found on the reverse. ‘This cannot warrant a reply,’ she says. ‘Do not even give him the pleasure of watching you put your attention to it.’
‘But does it sound like his usual way of speech?’
‘I scarcely know him, Henry.’
‘It is that viper woman, hissing in his ear. I know it.’ Henry bites at his thumbnail. ‘Coiled in the sand over my father’s money like a clutch of someone else’s eggs.’
‘It’s just the words of a bad-tempered old man. Pay no heed. Parents can be cruellest to their children, but they may not always mean it.’ Frances pretends that it is of no consequence but her cheeks have flushed scarlet with offence. She stands for a moment, rubbing the mound of her belly and looking at nothing.
‘But to say that God will punish me,’ Henry says. ‘And that my conscience will be nothing if not tainted. This is like a curse upon us!’
‘What has provoked it?’ she asks.
Henry does not know where to begin to answer. ‘The imminent arrival of a child can bring on … change, bring unsaid, underlying matters to a head. There is nothing like new life to unleash the past,’ he says.
‘But what underlying matter could that be?’ she says, bewildered.
Above them there is a crash on the floorboards, one of the children starts to cry and she has to rush upstairs.
So certain things begin to make sense. Here is the vile rumour laid out in black and white upon the page, in his father’s hand. He is the very source of it, the wellspring, and it is unthinkable. A more bitter blow could not be had, he thinks, than being struck down maliciously by your own father. In great anguish of mind Henry sits down and attempts a reply to his imputation. My good father, he begins. Then comes a torrent of opening lines each crossed out in favour of the next.
With deep regret I received your—
I beseech you to reconsider the harshness of your—
I cannot know by what false informant you have arrived at this—
I am sickened by your—
It is an injustice, sir, that I shall not swallow—
Henry crumples up the sheet of paper and finds a fresh one. There is black ink all over his fingers, his face. He must keep to the point, he thinks, pacing about, phrasing and recasting over and over in his head until all is garbled and makes no sense even to him. What were the circumstances of his second marriage? It is hard to remember. He takes more wasted paper to the grate and burns the pieces into flakes of ash. He will try again later.
He goes out to find solace in digging at the garden. He fetches the iron spade from the shed and chooses a difficult, untamed corner to confront, where even the most persistent robin leaves him alone. By noon, he is drenched in sweat and goes to the ewery to wash thoroughly before coming to dinner.
Frances has a great liking for eggs at the moment, so they eat whitepot alongside the meat today. Usually it amuses him to see her eat such quantities, her fine frame dominated by the firm round belly so that she puts away great slices of custard pie and boiled beef in large, eager mouthfuls with uncharacteristic speed. The baby has also meant that she cannot abide the smell of green vegetables, so has to excuse herself if salad or greens are to be served. But today he does not notice what Old Hannah brings out for her, and they avoid all mention of the letter’s content before the servants, indeed they hardly speak at all.
In the afternoon he still ignores the unwritten thoughts running through his head, and goes to work out the quarter-wages for the household staff. He notes that where last year there had twice been a change of dairymaid, Bridget had been with them now since before last Michaelmas, with a marked improvement in the keeping qualities of the butter.
His hand is uneven as he sets out these figures in his ledger, he makes several mistakes, but it is evening before he permits himself to return directly to the matter. Joan Young is very clever, he thinks, to have turned his father so hard against his own flesh and blood. He shaves a new quill to a satisfactory sharpness and sits down again to set it out clearly.
Father,
You hold that I have married another man’s wife and you intend to disinherit any issue we should have. You may cut off whom you choose, but remember that Frances carries this child as my lawful spouse without dispute. Should it be found, if it please God, to be a boy, he shall bear our family name, and through me prove ultimately to be your rightful heir as a Lyte of Lytes Cary – our shared descendance. Once this child is born of my wife’s body and cries within these four walls, in law and life Frances is bound to me in property and God’s eyes. I beg you not to go against the way of natural succession without good cause. I entreat you for your blessing, pray for your good health, and remain your obedient son.
Father, never did I wed another man’s wife.
He makes adjustments, shakes the castor and slides the document across the desk to dry. Outside in the dark a nightingale pours out its ceaseless, bubbling song. He has an incongruous recollection of an evening spent once in a garden in London. The garden itself was plain and empty, the company laughing and playing a game of lawn bowls, with wild nature just visible on the surrounding hills.
Chapter XII.
Of SOPHIA or Flixweede. Groweth alongst bywaies in untilled places, and specially whereas there hath bene in times past any buildings. The séede drunken with wine or water of the Smiths forge, stoppeth the laske.
HENRY LYTE WAKES IN A SWEAT, and lies there on the bed with his heart racing. Joan Young was in his dream again like a long red tendril coiling up and up towards his neck. He looks toward the thin strip of light from the window.
The moon always makes him dream badly. Weeds in the Knot garden make him dream badly; running grasses, bittercress, nettles, sinister little towers of horsetail. It is the time of year for such things. Early summer with its abundant froth of blossom and greening fields looks idyllic to the untrained city eye, delighting in the sight of cows dotted in the meadow and nice asparagus to eat at lunch – but to be inside the working countryside is a different matter. He rubs his neck to be rid of the tight sensation he still feels there. Arcadia it is not, and no-one feels this more strongly than his wife. Frances knows that a walk in the fresh air is good for her but refuses to go out on more occasions than not. There are several types of weather that she does not tolerate – fine rain because it presents a dilemma about whether to go out, heavy rain because obviously one will get soaked, thunder because one may be struck by lightening, icy because one may slip and break a bone, damp and warm because one may catch an ague, windy because one may catch a chill, too late in the afternoon because one may get lost and not have enough time to discuss supper with Old Hannah. It is beginning to be clear that Frances is not wholly suited to the countryside. Which is why she asks again this morning if they can go to London this month.
‘London?’ Henry looks up from the book in which he jots down market matters. He thinks of the annual tasks for the land and almost laughs.
‘Impossible.’
He makes a note about the price of raw wool in his meticulous hand, and flips the pages to examine the same for the previous year. He calculates what kind of profit might be expected from his flock, how many hoggets should be sold off, how many kept. His shepherd William Warfyld has a plan to use the unclaimed field known as No Man’s Plot, which means he could afford to raise the numbers unless someone places an objection. He wonders though whether that field is just too wet. When he looks up, she is still in front of him, waiting for an answer.
‘Besides, what would you do there?’
Now it is Frances’s turn to be amused. ‘Do? Master Lyte, what do you suppose I spend my time at here that I should miss? I must run the household but it can manage without me if we are not here. After all – if we are not here, there is much less to do. We can stay with my cousin, now that mother has remarried and gone to Devon.’
‘Surely there is plenty to do wherever we are; it should make no difference?’
‘I do not mind hard work, but in London there would be less weather and more people,’ she replies. ‘And we can bring Lisbet.’ Frances, when she chooses, can set quite a stubborn line to her jaw. ‘I lack for just one thing, Henry. Fun.’
‘You’ll have plenty on your hands soon enough,’ he says, indicating her belly.
‘There are months left to go,’ she protests.
This really is very tiresome. He has several sorts of account to pay today; tailors’, mercers’, smiths’ and chopmen’s bills. He waves his hand vaguely at the door. ‘Go for a walk. Learn an instrument.’
‘An instrument?’
‘Yes, a lute. No! Perhaps the virginals.’ Reverend Tope says that a lady should only ever learn an instrument that does not cause her to spread her legs. He agrees with very little that Reverend Tope opines on, but today he is in a hurry, and other people’s thoughts can provide an occasional shortcut to thinking for oneself, can’t they? And in her condition … He is sure that one could sit at the virginals with one’s anklebones neatly together, though at this very moment he does not much care.
‘I don’t know, Frances, you are a grown woman with an entire household to run, and in the unlikely event that you have an ounce of spare time you can occupy it for yourself. Learn ballads. Anything! But London this month is out of the question.’
This afternoon Henry receives another letter from his father. There have been many sent between them now, their dealings with each other becoming at best unkind, at worst hostile, a volley of fire. But this letter, it becomes clear as he breaks the seal, is the most poisonous of them all, one that at all costs Frances must never see. This letter summons every evil that his father has been alluding to over this horrible month, but never yet dared to mention outrightly. And here it is, set down as if it were a truth, a twisted fact. If it were so, why does he not make his accusations in public? Why does he hide his venom in a letter, yet leaking breath and whispers of his intent all through the borough so that it comes to his ears slowly from all directions. His claim is that Henry himself was to blame for the sickness and death of his first wife Anys. Death. The man claims he is a murderer. Murderer. Odious, odious lies.
‘I am a good man, am I not?’ he says to himself, his carefully nurtured world falling apart inside him. ‘How can I clear my name, when there has been no fair trial?’
Chapter XIII.
Of MULLEYN. It hath great, broad soft and woolly leaves. It sheweth like to a Waxe-candle, or Taper, cunningly wrought.
WHAT THE HELL IS THIS satyrion, a kind of orchis? He has never seen one for himself, nor even had it verified, and he will not write about a kind he does not understand. He puts that section of the translation aside and waits until the simpler calls by again. In the meantime he finds he cannot respond to his father’s letter. He will. He will write soon, but not until his head has cleared. It is like a fog in there; remembering anything is more like groping about and stumbling by chance upon fragments.
When the simpler comes, he calls her in.
‘Does my lady yet need hart’s tongue or camomile for her limbick as she used to before?’ she bleats. ‘She were always such good custom off me. She’ll want a good few handful.’ She starts pulling bundles out of her pack and spreading them across the table. ‘I have a quantity and can get more. Plantain, as you call it here? Sorrel? Betony?’ The simpler is a thickset, wall-eyed woman with black fingernails. Her one good eye roves the carpet as if looking for herbs.
Henry Lyte clears his throat. ‘What do you know of standegrasses, orchis?’ he asks her.
The woman looks blank.
‘I’ll know the plants I know of, and that’s flat.’ She is not inclined to be helpful, in fact she is distinctly disgruntled. Since the death of Anys, her sales of flowers and other necessaries up at Lytes Cary have been minimal. Anys used to order roseheads by the bushel to supplement those grown at the edge of her little plot, which was eightpence a time.
‘They have two roots in the soil like a man’s cods,’ he explains. ‘One fat, one shrivelled. Spotted, fleshy leaves, thick upright stems with—’
The woman’s face clears. ‘You means butcher flowers, long purples. Too late for them now.’
‘But there are others like them—’
‘Ah! Like maybe fools ballocks, or sweetheart’s, you mean?’
‘Possibly, it’s just that—’
She looks sly. ‘I may have been approached by several gentlemen in London and once a lady for the same before. I may know of a place where they grow. In confidence, you’ll want them, like they did.’
‘In confidence? Why?’
Her eye fixes abruptly on a spot upon the floor and does not waver.
‘It’ll cost.’
Henry sighs. ‘How much?’
The woman’s good eye briefly meets his own then slides away. She shrugs. ‘If you want ’em I can get but it’ll be sixpence. Each,’ she says flatly. ‘There’s not so many of them and with my sight I’ll be scrabbling all over the hillside up off for too long before I’m spotting any. Got to make it worth my while.’
‘I shall need a variety of specimens. Whatever you can find.’
‘What did you call it? Stander grass? Never heard that. Don’t know that I call it anything much, any old name’ll do half the time, and the other half I calls ’em nothing.’ She perks up suddenly, having got her price.
‘And just the fat cod out of the two roots it has, Master? You’ll not want the slack one with nothing in it? That’s no good to Venus, Master, is it.’ Her lopsided wink is a peculiar sight and Henry Lyte looks at her uncomprehending. Surely the wretched woman doesn’t think he wants them for a provocative to venery. He has seen a recipe called a diasatyrion that mixes orchis cods with grains of Paradise and nuts and Malaga wine and candied eryngo root among other things, a sweet electuary. But he needs to observe them, and then if still fresh enough he may set them in the garden when he is done with that. He is irritated to find that his face is flushing.
‘No, no, I’ll need the whole plant, my good woman. Bring me the various sorts you can find. And try to remember where each specimen comes from. It is for my research. They have … they have no practical application whatsoever.’
The woman smirks. ‘Whatever you say. No doubt there are no other uses a man could find for them.’
She goes off into the corridor just as Lisbet passes by with a besom.
‘Several sorts of dog’s testicles for you then, Master,’ the simpler hisses out noisily, winking. ‘No bother at all.’
Lisbet drops her brush on the flags with a clatter. As she bends to retrieve it Henry Lyte sees the disgust on her face, and he is sure that by the evening the entire household will be discussing his business, as if he was practising witchcraft in addition to everything else, damn it! He slams the door behind the simpler’s squat retreating figure, behind everybody, and stands with his back to it.
‘God’s wounds! I do not have to explain myself,’ he says angrily, to the empty room.
But of course he must. First he puts his mind to other things for several days more, thinks instead of the confusion caused by too many diverse names. This is always the difficulty with employing simplers, they all have their own aberrant, singular names for a herb or plant. It is, he believes, one of the obstacles for a sharing of knowledge, or any collective progression, it is also a source of mistaken identities and the reason for many a wrong or dubious leaf finding its way onto an apothecary’s shelf by another name. Ask a local where a particular plant may be found and he will look at you blankly unless you can name it as he was taught it as a child, toddling at his mother’s knee in the grasses. But if a proportion of those who can read would learn from or recognize what they know in print, set out clearly, consistently in black and white, and in English, then a hoard of particulars would be transformed into knowledge. Misbeliefs, wrongnesses and ill-used wisdoms could be set right, and many lives saved. This thought breeds hope and frustration mixed up in him.
Increasing age is supposed to make a man grow more contented with his lot, with what God has bestowed upon him, but some days Henry Lyte can still feel something like the rage of youth inside him at the slowness of progress, at the satisfaction with the state of stupidity the world is so often content to live in, himself included.
We are so ignorant, so coarse in thoughts and knowledge! he rages at the pear trees that afternoon, stretching his back between batches of summer pruning. Our aspirations should be high, higher than they are.
But then when he goes to his pages spread out, he finds that he takes a very long time to write a sentence, to think through anything. This is the real trouble, the gap between what is needed, wanted, and what is possible for the ordinary man.
It is high summer now, brutally hot when a man has been working. When he goes back to the garden, the hot green smell of it is like a smack in the face. The annuals they grew from seed are now clambering up the walls, the stakes, thick in the beds, covered in bees.
Indoors, Frances is vast and panting, drinking quantities of buttermilk, writing lists, preparing herself for any outcome as her confinement draws near.
‘I must write to my father,’ he mentions out loud when he goes in to see her.
She sits up on her elbow. ‘Do not write, Henry. Let him stew in his own juice for a while yet. Leave it a month or so. You are his son. Make him suffer for the hurt he causes you. Besides, you may just make it worse.’
Henry does not think he has her steely reserve. But then again, she does not know the full extent of it, that last letter which she did not see was by far the worst. Every night he prays she will not hear what his father says of him. But although he can feel himself yielding, as a son, and it is natural enough to want to be on good terms with one’s father, it is easier to go along with her suggestion. Women can be very wise, he thinks. His mother was.
‘Leave it awhile. Be strong, Henry! Let it lie, just a little while longer,’ she says.
‘I shall do it soon,’ he concedes. But a day passes, and then another, and still the letter is not sent.
The orchis arrives just over a week before Lammas. He unwraps it fully and pays the simpler. A dug-up plant is always disconcerting. It is limp on his desk, an unhappy, naked tangle, dried mud everywhere as he examines it closely in order to be able to properly describe it to others, making notes. It is only later that he remembers one other characteristic ascribed to the orchis. Too late now, he thinks, with Frances approaching the time of her lying-in. It would have been worth a try. Anything would. If men do eat of the fullest and greatest rootes … they shall beget sonnes. Of course he has been blessed with many daughters. But is it not the truth, he thinks defensively, that in this world a man needs a son?
Chapter XIV.
Of ARCHANGEL, or dead-Nettle. Is of temperament like to the other nettles.
IT IS NEVER GOING TO BE GOOD NEWS when an urgent letter arrives on horseback in the late evening. Henry has not yet retired for bed and is already halfway across the hall when he hears the knock, a familiar dread already tight in his stomach when one of the kitchen boys opens the great door. As soon as he has it he recognizes the hand – it is from Nicholas Dyer, his father’s friend.
He thanks the messenger, who is sweating and thirsty and covered with dust from the late summer roads in riding from Marlborough at speed, and orders his horse be watered in the yard. Henry waves him into the kitchen for a drink and bite to eat, and still does not read the letter for some moments because he has a sudden urge to urinate, and goes hastily up to his room to use the close stool. Frances is sitting in bed sewing in the hot July dusk.
‘What was that rapping?’ she asks, pulling her thread through its length, and tucking the needle in again. The sound of the thrush’s song from the ash outside drifts in through the open window.
‘A letter from London. I haven’t read it yet, but I know what’s in it.’ He does up his breeches and sits down on the end of the bed with a creak of rope. The evening has taken on a horrible significance. He knows he will remember forever the particular sight of the loose weave of the bedcover, the smell of the half-used washing ball on the form by the bed, the ordinary aftertaste of the wine from supper in his mouth.
He breaks the seal and the stiff paper unfolds unwillingly for him, and then he reads the scant, crabbed lines three or four times over, as if there was not enough there on the page to tell him what he already knows.
He puts the paper aside and lies flat on the bed with his shoes still on.
‘What? What is it?’ Frances says.
‘He is dead. My father is dead.’
Silence. Frances puts her sewing in her lap. Outside even the thrush is quiet. Henry can hear no noise from any quarter. Not a whistle, not a breath, not a creak of anything. Then he hears his heart, going on beating.
‘What is the date?’ he asks.
‘July the thirtieth. The eve of St Neot.’
‘As I thought. I cannot even pay my due respects because today they buried him at the church of St Botolph without Aldersgate. But I must ride to Sherborne to help tie up his affairs. There will be the inventory to sort out, and many papers …’ There is no air in here.
‘If Joan lets you set foot over her threshold.’
Henry sits up abruptly and swings round to face his wife. ‘That woman may think she has a life interest but my father’s business is my own. It should all be made clear to her at the reading of the will.’
THE SECOND PART
The Time
Chapter I.
Of THOROW-WAX. It floureth in July and August.
THE ANCESTORS ARE WAITING in the hall with him, all about like silver smoke or fog. A dissolved airborne, sense-borne host of tiny flecks or particles of the continuity of living. They have his face, his hands, his eyes, they all speak at once as if from a great, hollow distance away and they have his voice, and his father’s voice, and his father’s before him. There must be hundreds of them waiting here, a faint, infinite crowd lightly shifting and jostling in the atmosphere as a shoal does.
He paces the length of the hall, waiting for the noise of hooves outside the porch. He has had no choice but to send for Goodwife Dutton and let her into the house, despite everything that had happened with Anys.
She greets him sternly, untying the panniers and bringing them in.
‘Mistress Dutton, I—’ he begins, waving at the boy to take her stocky little mare off into the stables.
‘We’ll bury our differences shall we, Master?’ She begins to unpack right there in the passage. ‘There is not much time for messing about with life, I find. Your wife is within due season? And how long has she already been travailling? Two hours, four? And the fluid humours have left the matrix? Then I must not tarry.’ She bustles past him, laden with rolls of cloth and a brazen pot from which she produces a bewildering variety of dried and fresh herbs. Without appearing to do so, Henry edges closer and tries to identify what she is about to give his wife. He thinks he can see a packet labelled Elleborus, which would make sense, and maidenhair, aristolochia, motherwort, fenugreek, but what is—
‘Hands off for gentlemen,’ she remarks, slapping his hands away with astounding rudeness and gathers them up to go into the birth chamber. She believes that nothing good ever came from books.
‘If you can bring the birthing stool,’ she orders.
She points into the kitchen.
‘Water boiling?’
‘Yes, Lisbet is—’
‘And her mother is here?’ she says over her shoulder as they go up the stone stairs.
‘Yes, Mistress Marwood is with her, and other kinswomen come up from Devon.’ They reach the closed door of the great chamber and can hear them murmuring inside. ‘What virtue does the oil of white lilies have?’ He can’t help asking.
Goodwife Dutton looks extremely disapproving. She lowers her voice.
‘Lily does make the privy parts wont to slipperiness, Master. Better than duck’s grease or the white of an egg together with the yolk, which I use on ladies of the poorer sort to loose the straits. Now, if you don’t mind? Gentlemen engender babies and then they are to leave the rest to those who know what they’re at. That’s the rules, the way of the world. You need something to do? See the maidservant has the kettles always at the ready, bolsters, hot white wine and more clean cloths. Send up caudle for the ladies. Your wife may need refreshment of good meat, but never anything with oatmeal for it will clot viscosities.’ She twitches a smile at him. ‘Then I should retire for the night, Master, if I was you, after your prayers. We can wake you if need should arise, which it will not. I’ll pass on your wishes to her for a speedful deliverance, Master.’ And with that she shuts the door in his face.
Henry Lyte closes his mouth and can do nothing but wait. He remembers now why she makes him grit his teeth, cocking her power deliberately beneath his nose because she can at times like these. Everybody knows what happened when she did not come to Anys. If she had come … well, there is no use dwelling in that, is there.
Through the muffling of the door he can hear her speaking firmly to Frances. ‘Up and kneel on the bed Madam! Kneel! In the country way! You can pray later. Your matrons will pray for you. There, you see. Good girl, good girl.’
Frances has prepared for death.
Henry fully intends to sit up all night on his chair in the corridor listening to Goodwife Dutton barking demands. For what seem like hours he strains to hear Frances’s responses but cannot hear his wife at all, no cries, nothing. All he thinks he can hear is the brush and hiss and breath of the ancestors, amassed in the draughty air just beyond the reach of the guttering pool of light cast by the candle at his feet. The dark tonight is all uncertainty, but he feels time rushing in to fill that newly opening potential. The first confinement is so often long and arduous and filled with peril, and though Henry Lyte has had other children born to him, this is the first by his new wife Frances and her strengths and weaknesses in that respect are an unknown quantity. But somehow he jerks awake and it is the grey of morning and Goodwife Dutton is before him in the empty corridor, a bundle of bloodied cloths in her arms. The ancestors have gone, their interest sated, for of course now they already know what he does not.
His heart contracts. Her face is unreadable as she tells him the news that he can hardly hear for the beating in his ears.
‘Today your wife is delivered of a strong child, Master, born at full time. Of sound limb and lungs.’
‘And is she—’
‘She laboured sore for twelve hours and is tired from her travail.’ She walks on. ‘But sitting up and doubtless will be glad to see you when she’s cleaned up well enough and has had a bite to eat.’
‘Thank God, Mistress, thank God.’ He tries to keep his voice from shaking. Henry can hear a thin, vibrating cry now from behind the door. His child! He cannot bear to wish. He must not, for it will be God’s judgement upon him if it is otherwise to what he hopes for. He goes to the chamber next door and opens a window, looks out without seeing and breathes the late summer air in deeply, his hands still trembling and sticky with sweat. What is the date? The nineteenth of September; cradled just between Ember days following the Day of the Holy Cross. A sacred day indeed!
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Jane Borodale
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An extraordinarily evocative story of obsession, love and secrets, THE KNOT holds at its heart the struggle of one man: Henry Lyte. Spanning twelve years, 1565-1578, Henry struggles with his life’s work, the translation of a Herbal which lists, for the first time, every herb, against the backdrop of his heart’s desire, the creation of a perfect, beautiful garden at the heart of which lies the Knot.After the tragic death of his much-loved first wife Anys, Henry falls in love again and brings Frances home to Lytes Cary. She struggles to come to terms with life in the remote rural setting of the Levels in Somerset, and feels the threat of the watery landscape despite Henry’s efforts to show her how the landscape he loves can bring her happiness. Henry’s father is not happy about his second marriage however, and the tensions within the family grow.Just as Henry finds a precarious equilibrium, in his intellectual and emotional lives, this sense of balance is shattered by his father’s unexpected death and the unleashed malevolence of Henry’s step-mother, Joan Young, begins.