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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.’
