‘Nor the carrots,’ Mote says, thinking of all his duties, ‘the carrots most particular. But the nature of this closed-up soil will be warmed and loosened if we keep on with it. If we can find more dung to see us through this year at least.’
‘I may send word over to the Lockyer’s. They have so many horses at livery they are bound to have a surplus to requirements.’
‘Horse dung is only any use if it has stood a year.’
‘I know that.’
‘Or it burns.’
‘Yes,’ Henry says. What is this goddammed habit Mote has, of trying to teach him all the time.
Over where the plum orchard is to be the Sorcerer shrieks manically, and it still sounds horribly like laughter.
‘We’ll turn in that dung, like you say, and we’ll be half-there already.’ Henry says, and then feels suddenly nettled into resolution.
‘You know what? By spring we’ll be planting in it.’ He claps his hands together. ‘Let’s get cracking.’
Tobias Mote looks startled. He chews a corner of his grimy thumb and then nods secretly, imperceptibly to himself as if it was all to be expected.
‘I’ve a lot on my hands, then. I’ll need at least another boy to help me, if that kitchen garden up there is to feed more than a nest of starvelings,’ he says. ‘And if it gets too much, well.’ He spreads his hands out wide to show the true reach of his feelings, and pretends to yawn, his grey teeth showing. ‘There’s sundry other gardens in the parish could do with tending.’
This is certainly true.
‘Blackmail,’ Henry says. It’s not as though he hasn’t already considered the situation he could find himself in without a competent gardener. He can’t do this thing on his own. But Henry is definitely bothered by Tobias Mote. He does not match up to expectations. He does not pause between spadefuls of earth and consider the weather evenly and at length. He laughs too much. He has opinions.
Yet he has been here for very many years and knows the soil like one of his family. His father had been stockman here for most of his working life until his death, and Tobias had grown up running in the meadows with the kine. He knows what the very grass on this clay soil tastes like from field to field. He knows about the particular way of the wind here, and the likely pattern of rain and the sheltered places. He’d first learnt his gardening from his mother, whose patch was the most burgeoning in the village, and a husbanding man called Colleyns, who he had gone to as a boy about sixteen when he knew he preferred pears to driving cattle down to the other side of Pricklemarch Bridge, say. Tobias Mote has been gardening this soil at Lytes Cary for nigh-on thirty years. Henry knows that he would be foolish to deliberately lose a man’s skills just like that.
‘Would another four shillings a year make all the difference to your sense of optimism about this project?’
‘It would,’ Mote says to the sky in general, without a trace of irony, without turning round.
Some little brown thing is flicking up leaf mould – a wren, a mouse – they look the same sometimes from the corner of one’s eye. That reminds him, he needs to set traps tonight. As soon as the cold weather comes, mice are all over the house, getting into the pantry, the stores, behind the panelling.
‘Master?’ Tobias Mote scratches his neck, then stops.
‘What?’ Surely to God he won’t ask for more.
‘It’s just that there’s a bit of talk going about. Not much, only a word or two. I just was wondering …’
‘What?’ Henry says coldly.
‘If you knew of it, and if there is a way it might be stopped.’
Henry is in no mood to discuss family matters with his gardener. ‘I have heard nothing about anything,’ he says, ‘and do not care for it.’
‘You don’t care to know what they are saying?’
‘I do not listen to the wigwag of idle tongues.’
‘Alright.’ Mote shrugs in a way that suggests he will try again later, and carries on with his spade. ‘It’s just that—’
‘No!’ Henry rounds on him. ‘There is too much to do today for all this. Far too much.’
‘I’m going for my dinner soon,’ Mote warns him, unnecessarily. ‘It’s already late.’
And so it is. The day passes very quickly, and it seems no time at all before a fat, white moon has shot up into the sky with startling rapidity, shrinking as it does so, and its gaze seems harder, more judgmental, up there above the alder, than it had all vastly soft and gaping down on the horizon. Tobias Mote goes off down the path towards Tuck’s, he is small and spry and lithe. He is not at all what Henry imagines a gardener to be. This vexes him more than he can put into words, but he tries anyway, complaining to his wife over meals and in bed.
‘A gardener should be big-handed, slow, move steadily like a root moves in the soil, not flitting quick and tense between the beds, perspiring freely, energy bounding out of him with every springing step. Damn it, Frances, that man almost crackles about the garden. Will that be bad for the plants?’
He wants Frances to laugh then, and get up from her chair and go to him to soothe his troubled feelings and gather him into her fine encircling arms, and suggest an early retirement to bed for the night, but she does not; she is playing at being the dutiful wife. Instead he watches her bite a length of her thread from the reel and hold the needle close to her face to see its narrow impossible eye in the candlelight. He feels desire kindling in him as she puts the end of the thread in her mouth and makes it firm and damp between her lips, and then the thread is through. Henry looks despondently at the interminable hem she is stitching along, and knows there will be no consolation to be had from her tonight. It is not that she is shy, or reticent about her new role as a wife, and she even listens to him as she works, something it must be admitted that Anys did not always do. But he is finding that her poise and coolness disconcert him on a daily basis.
She has very good teeth, he thinks, looking into the fire, at least he has that to be grateful for.
1566
Chapter VII.
Of SHEPHEARDS PURSE. It hath sound, tough and pliable branches, of a fote long, with long leaves, deeply cut or jagged. The floures are white, in place whereof when they are gone, there riseth small flat cods, or triangled pouches, wherein the seede is contained.
CHRISTMAS AND TWELFTH NIGHT have been and gone, but scraps of ivy and mistletoe are still up in the hall. They drive Henry mad, everywhere he treads, little, limp leaves beneath his feet, but it’s been a pleasure to have a reason to open up a vat of Gascon wine, and make spiced hot hippocras by the fireside, share it out on those cold, stark nights. They all survived the tenants’ feast and there were no disagreements. The girls enjoyed the juggler that came on Boxing Day and Old Hannah surpassed herself with tarts, roast meats and suckets, though Frances didn’t seem to enjoy the Christmastide victuals as much as he did. He hopes she is not sickening for something, as wintertime is not ideal for having doctor’s visits in the night, the roads can be treacherous.
No word though from his father during this time, which is a source of great sadness to him. He had sent a fat goose over to Sherborne, but received no word in return. He always misses his mother at Christmas, and he observes the girls and knows how much they must miss theirs, too, though they never complain. Anys loved games at Christmas. Of course after she died Mary in particular was inconsolable, crying for hours on end, clinging onto her poppet. Florence was just a newborn. Jane did not speak. Edith, the eldest, bustled about the younger ones, in fact he hardly saw her, but even she has a look in her eye still that he finds hard to describe, except that it is like a dullness, as though some essence in her had died away.
The memory of his own mother Edith is now so eclipsed by the