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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?’
