The Knot. Jane Borodale

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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