The Knot

‘I had no choice but to marry, I have four surviving daughters to consider. Four, dammit! They cannot run free in the mud like dottrill or little urchins. They need a woman’s hand to oversee their maturation, to bring them up in a civilized way until they are of age and can enter the world as wives and then mothers. They need to know French, totting-up, how to stitch, how to make sweet malt, bind a man’s wound, how to be in charge of the kitchen. Not everything can be taught by a nurserymaid.’ He indicates out of the window at the rainy scene. The grass is sodden and deserted, though to the far left a cow is being driven into the yard from Inner Close for milking.

‘Look at it out there,’ he demands, to the empty room, ‘what civilizing influences will be had by them if I do not seek it?’

He regrets that there has been no time for grieving – practical matters to attend to when a family member dies seemed on this occasion to take all his vigour for months afterwards, he has felt blank and sucked dry of any melancholy or other emotion. He does not mean he didn’t suffer pain but that he felt it like a physical blow to the body, so that he sat by the hearth alone at night aching as though he’d been in a fight. Yes, it was just that he’d been in a fist-fight with death on behalf of his wife and had lost. It is all perfectly normal. Doesn’t everyone suffer deaths within their close family circle?

In the year that his own mother Edith died, coffins went up the road to the church almost every week. There had been fair warning that death was to be afoot that year – in March around Lady Day there had come a great comet, reddish like Mars, half the size of the moon in diameter, with a flaming, agitated tail that stretched itself across the night sky and scorched a rightful terror into the hearts of those who looked upon it. There were many who said it was a clear token from God that the end of Catholic rule was near, and that Queen Mary’s tumour may have begun with its manifestation. A comet is a sure sign of change, or death. He hopes never to see another body like it in the sky. His mother had died in exceptional pain, drenched in sweat and gasping for air in what had been the hottest summer for eleven years, as she clung to his hand for those last dreadful days. Sometimes across his knuckles he feels the grip of her bones still, has to flex all his fingers to free himself of it. And sometimes when his eye catches at the horizon just after sunset, the first bright sight of Venus makes his blood pound momentarily, mistakenly. It is surely unthinkable that another comet of that stature could appear twice in a man’s lifetime.

His father, remarried himself after Edith’s passing within two years, has no right to listen to any bad claims against his character. It’s just the usual way of things, to marry again.

‘Everybody does it,’ Henry goes on aloud to no-one. ‘Hadn’t I waited a decent length of time since Anys was taken from us by the will of God? By God’s will alone. It had been nearly a year.’ With this last thought, a draught blows under the door, and for a second he almost thinks he can catch the scent of her brushing against him like a substance.

Anys smelt of leather polish and warm skin and oats. She smelt of hard work and prayerbooks and children and bread. He is sure he has remembered that right. He is sure she knew how well she was esteemed by him. He swallows. The whole business is unavoidable. He leaves the study hastily, goes to the last of his new wife’s boxes stacked in the hall, and carries them up.

He had lost two servants soon after the funeral, but they’d each had good reasons, as they explained, for their change of situation. Lisbet is the new maidservant, she replaced Sarah who was a diligent worker. He had let her go with regret, Anys had thought so well of her. Lisbet is tolerably good, but he did wish he couldn’t hear her feet slopping down the corridor all the time when he is trying to concentrate. Why does she never pick them up when she walks? It occurs briefly to Henry Lyte that her shoes might not fit properly. She has a pleasant enough face. There is even something quite appealing about the crooked tooth that juts out a little over her lip, though it is the kind of countenance that will not age well, and of course he knew her mother. He prefers to hire local girls like her, they stay for longer, ask fewer questions, and he doesn’t think she can have heard anything of what happened. The misunderstanding will all simmer down and be forgotten. He hopes that Frances herself will never hear what people have said of him. It is just a matter of time. People forget so easily; memories are flimsy, friable things that get buried and mulch down into the past like vegetation. A few will stick, of course, inevitably. His memory of what happened is already concentrated to a few sparse images that he cannot shake off. One can be forgiven for forgetting a detail here or there – even though details, the little unimportant daily things amassed together over time, are what makes up most of living. What does his own life add up to, he suddenly wonders. In forty years, a hundred years, three hundred, what will be left of him?

He recalls a distinct, disturbing sensation he had once in his early days as a student a long time ago, in one of Oxford’s many bathing houses. It was not the sort of place that he was to frequent very often, but he was a young man missing home, missing his mother, and had gone for comfort, a little bit of human warmth that could be bought straightforwardly with sixpence.

A pretty doxy by the name of Martha was rubbing at his back with oil, plying her knuckles to his spine, to the very bones inside his muscles, and smoothing backwards and forwards across his shoulders in a shape like a figure of eight, her breathing ragged with exertion. There was a good savour of flowers or resin all around. Afterwards she was friendly to him, and didn’t seem to mind that he had fallen asleep.

‘How was that?’ she’d asked, prodding him gently and pouring a drink from the jug. He’d thought carefully, yawned and sat up. He examined the back of his hands, turned them over as if seeing them for the first time.

‘It was like … being rubbed out,’ he’d said eventually. It was the only way to put it.

‘Out?’ she’d queried, her brow wrinkling up as if she hadn’t heard this one before, and pouring herself a measure too, just to take the edge off. She had a busy night lined up.

‘Like being erased,’ he’d said, ‘quite worn away into nothing. No trace of me left at all, not a bump or ridge to show I’d existed.’ As if it were his history that was being smoothly abolished with her accumulating, efficient strokes, in just half an hour. He had an image of himself face down in the earth, being slowly flattened and absorbed into its clayish mass, and it had felt inevitable, nothing out of the ordinary, as though this was what happened to everyone. Which it does in the end, of course, for who gets remembered? Almost all of us go back to the earth to be worn away into nothing again.

She hadn’t laughed, he recalls, but pursed her lips as though it was not at all the answer that she’d wanted. She stood pinning up her curls and ducking in front of the polished plate that served as a glass to catch her reflection. ‘You should go to church more if you want that kind of talk.’

‘I don’t mean my soul,’ he protested, confused that she was so offended. ‘I mean my presence on this earth as we know it.’ But she had a customer waiting, he could hear his shoes scraping outside on the boards, and she’d gone to the door and held it ajar for him to depart.

Chapter IV.

Of CELANDINE. The small celandine bringeth forth his fleure betimes, about the return of Swalowes in the end of Februarie. It remayneth flouring even untill Aprill, and after it doth so vanish away.

IT HAD BEEN SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH OF ANYS that he’d begun planning his Knot garden in earnest. On paper at first, endless sketches and discarded ideas that he would pore over by candlelight in the evening when it was too dark to see anything outside. He made occasional visits to costly gardens in London, and drew on recollections of aromatic, unattainable gardens in Europe that he’d seen as a youth. The ground itself here needed preparation. There was a lot of dross to get rid of on the site, including a defunct fallen-down building where his father had reared pigs before the new sties were built. This was removed, piece by crumbling, splintery piece. It is always surprising how small the footprint of a demolished building appears. How could so little space have enclosed so much?

‘Much faster to take down a building than to put one up,’ one of the labourers had informed him, as though Henry had no sense of practical matters. It took little more than an afternoon to do. There was a lot of other debris to clear away, an old trough, piles of inexplicable rotting logs and branches, crawling beneath with worms and woodlice.

‘Look at that. A garden is teeming, isn’t it,’ Henry had said, brimming with cheerful purpose in the fresh air, as he squatted to examine a yellow centipede, rippling in kinks against the damp earth. ‘The very stuff of life itself.’

‘If you’re lucky,’ his gardener Tobias Mote remarked, straining to lift something into the barrow to take to the bonfire. Henry looked at him to check he was joking. ‘Seeing as the job of nature is to feed on death.’

Sometimes Henry wishes that Mote’s voice wasn’t so dry, so opposite to what he hopes for.

The pegging-out of the borders and the Knot, however, had been one of the most exciting moments so far in this process. The simplicity of unwinding each ball of twine in the hand and walking backwards, squinting, squaring up and measuring sideways with the feet, pushing in the stake like a New World explorer with his claim. Mote worked alongside him, scratching his head, making unhelpful, tardy suggestions where none was wanted, because everything was decided now in terms of form and symmetry. The garden was like a grid for days from the upper windows before they took the twine away, making last-minute adjustments to the guidelines they’d whitewashed. It was a sheer delight to see it stretched out down there. What had existed previously only on a small piece of paper as the final meticulous inked plan for the structure has now been unravelled from inside his head, squared up and made manifest.

Now he has the shape out there, but what he will plant is still to be decided upon. Roses, definitely roses. He also has a master plan for content, and marks in his choice of plants and herbs as they occur to him. This plan by contrast is chaotic, filled with crossing-out and scribbled re-inking. He paces about outside making mental lists to write up later, checking up on the bricklayers putting up the new walls course by course which will shelter his tender specimens from the winter harshnesses that they will have to suffer, looking over the work of the men he has hired in for the week because there is more digging than he and Mote can manage if they are to get it over with in time for planting. Today the four of them work steadily across the earmarked areas; Thom Pearson from over at Tuck’s Cary Manor just a stone’s throw from the stables here, William the oldest son of Hunt of Podimore who leases the windmill, Ralph Let, and some other man from Devon who was passing through and had asked for work.

‘Lucky to get Ralph,’ Tobias Mote says with a wink. ‘He’s good at that, being parish gravedigger he’s had a lot of practice, brings his own spade, just never mind what that spade iron’s gone through; very full that graveyard is, a lot of folk dead these days, begging your pardon. Just don’t turn your back on him – he’d nimble you in.’ Mote laughs with his face like a weasel’s, his eyes closed to slits.

The diggers have broken the persistent turf all down what will be the raised border. It’s coming along. To anyone else the scene looks like chaos, but Henry Lyte is beginning to have it all mapped out in his mind’s eye, the raised square beds, the enclosing walls, the espaliers, the roses, the medicinal herber. And close to the house, this garden will have at its heart a perfect Knot; green, intricate, fragrant, a convergence of senses.

Henry is not in favour of the kind of closed Knot currently fashionable that he has seen so many times in London, laid out to weedless, barren segments of coloured sand in red and yellow and other garish hues, intersected by rigid, close-clipped hedges, 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.

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.