The Knot. Jane Borodale

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ