‘No John,’ she snaps, in front of everyone. ‘It was that the horse was inadequate.’
Nobody else seems to blanch at the way she speaks to her husband before company. For a second he catches Jane’s eye, and then when he looks at his father he sees a small red patch, the size of a coin, flare up on his left cheekbone. Even when the conversation veers towards the matters of local taxation that usually rouse his father to table-thumping vehemence, he toys with his table knife in silence. Either he is feeling unwell or he, too, has something heavy weighing on his conscience or his family affairs. Henry looks across at his own offspring and tries to imagine their roles in reverse. He is a very different kind of father, isn’t he? But after all, children rarely consider the innermost feelings of parents, indeed they do not seem to have them, which is the natural order of things.
The girls are very quiet during this visit. Jane in particular says not a word, she sits still through the meal; bowing her head as they say grace, eating neatly what is put on her plate, dabbling her fingers clean in the waterbowl. She is occupied in watching, taking in whatever strangeness it is happening just under the surface in all of them, her eyes flicking between the adult faces as they speak. Henry wonders how she can be aware that something is wrong. On the surface this is a perfectly ordinary family day. After all, nobody else could possibly know that there was such a storm swilling inside him. Why should they? Any guilt or resentment is entirely his own, entirely invisible.
Joan Young. Even her name is a contradiction, she is the furthest from young a body could ever be, representing for him all that is shrivelled, bitter, hardened. There is a shallow stream he knows up on the Mendip which, if one drops a stick or small object in its flow, with alarming rapidity will grow a crust of greyish lime about it, as hard and coarse as any stone. He imagines that someone caught habitually in her presence could suffer a similar fate, because stoniness exudes from her very soul, like a contagion. He can see it slowly afflicting his father, a callous skin edging across his being. Looking at his father is like looking at himself as he would appear in twenty years if he had a crust of stone grown over him.
Frances is the last to join them at the table, in fact she is distinctly late by the time she glides into her seat. Henry is not sure if she has done this on purpose, even though she is very pale. He hopes she doesn’t have the green sickness, from which his sister used to suffer.
‘Ah!’ his father says, rising briefly as she takes her chair beside Henry.
‘I’ve always been a good riser,’ Joan Young remarks.
‘Even when expecting, madam?’ Frances smiles sweetly at the nearest child and takes some bread from the basket, and then the long-awaited beef course arrives and there is much chatter and diversion.
Henry looks at her astounded.
No-one else seems to have heard what she said. What is the matter with everyone, are they deaf? And though he keeps on staring at her through the rest of the meal she does not speak again after that, and the conversation veers towards his father’s lawyer who is unwell. When they have finished eating Henry follows her down the corridor into the kitchen and closes the door.
‘Madam, did you mean to—’
‘Shhh.’ She puts her finger up to her lips and smiles, her eyes dancing.
‘That’s all you can say? You can’t leave a man unsure over something like that! I beg you!’
She touches his arm. ‘We’ll see. I am rarely so late with my courses, and I have begun to feel sick these last few days. But it may be nothing.’ She will say no more.
Henry’s heart is racing inside his chest with familiar apprehension and hope. ‘A child!’ he whispers to Blackie, who thumps the stub of her tail once on the flagstones. This time it will surely be different. His new wife’s first baby.
Henry pays slightly less attention to the rest of the day than he should. Ignoring his father’s reticence, he goes with him anyway to examine his windmill up in Cowleaze field though the tenant is out, then they skirt across to Inmead. Though they stand and look out at the view to the wet moorfields, they do not speak, and as his father does not ask about the trees he does not tour the orchards with him as Henry had planned. Indeed they do not do anything he planned; he feels rather superfluous, as though he were following his father about in the same, slavish manner as Blackie, trotting at his heels. His mind is elsewhere now, though, and he is almost grateful when the horses are got ready early and his father and stepmother leave despite the special supper being prepared.
The very house itself seems to let out a sigh of relief to see Joan Young gone, as the carriage containing her pulls mercifully out of the yard and onto the track towards the road, trundling back off to Sherborne again where she belongs. His father had not mentioned, Henry realizes, any sale of cows.
He goes straight to the parlour to find Frances, to examine her closely for clues.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘That was not a complete disaster, was it.’
‘Is there no stone which that woman will leave unturned?’ she exclaims, quite amazed at Joan Young’s rudeness even though she had been warned.
‘Probably not. But she is your mother-in-law, and there is nothing to be done about it,’ Henry says.
‘Why is she like that?’
‘Because she had seen herself here, upon marriage to my father. Here at Lytes Cary. She believed that she would be first lady of this manor, did not anticipate that he would stand aside and allow me to manage the land, while he retired with his new wife to an unimposing though pleasant enough house in Sherborne. By virtue of my being the sole heir to my father’s estate as eldest son, I have ruined her plans – and she is always reminded of this on coming here.’
Chapter VIII.
Of CINQUEFOYLE, or Five finger grasse. The great yellow cinquefoil hath round tender stalks, running abroad. The roote boyled in vineger, doth mollifie and appease fretting and consuming sores.
IT IS THE TWELFTH OF MARCH, and the second week of Lent. Outside in the last of a spring frost the plants are made of glass, the sun full upon them, a few melted drops catching light and winking colours. Henry walks the edge of the estate, steam rising from the river like a pan seething. The wood is a theatre, cutout black twigs shot through with vapour and diffuse beams of light against which birds flit, softly translucent. The willow’s tawniness is flaring to orange with the year’s growth, a supple bristle of shoots. Coming back through the garden Henry watches honey bees among the snowdrops, their legs fat with yellow catkin pollen. He remembers to avoid the upper garden door, so that he does not have to speak to Widow Hodges.
Today Henry takes delivery of seeds.
Looking through them when the man has gone, he has to admit that he’s probably bought too much. There are others on order, too, but the seedsman doesn’t pass through very often and Henry was keen not to overlook a chance to buy many sorts. The man had parsley and radish which he said had come from nearby, and endive, cucumber, anise, lettuce, purslane and pompion from further afield, mostly London. Henry also took pear kernels brought from Worcestershire, and he was tempted into buying fourteen liquorice plants, even though he suspects they will not do well on this kind of soil.
It is like a banquet, a seed banquet at his desk as he sits there opening the little packets one by one and relishing their differences: pale seeds of angelica like discarded shells of dull, brown beetles – flat and ribbed as if each one had been squashed in the overcrowded seedhead. He puts one into his mouth for that explosion of resinous savour, harsh at first then with a distinctive soapy undertow. Astonishing, he thinks, going on chewing, his tongue tingling and numb, how such insignificant, woody flecks can unleash such potency. He has seeds of ammi, too. Horribly dry and bitter. Smallage lives up to its name; the seeds are minute, scarcely bigger than grains of sand or mites. Alexander seed is black and large, like fat rat’s droppings. Gromwell is of a cold dense grey like that of tin-glaze china, quite startlingly like the eyes of cooked fish – with a high shine on each, and a faint patch of yellow blush. Not perfectly round, these seeds