The Knot. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ