Kit bent down to pluck a sprig of thyme and sniff it before handing it to Celia. ‘You use herbs in your mysteries, Mistress Celia?’
Celia crushed the thyme in her hands before smelling it and answered him. ‘I have no mysteries, Sir Christopher, but yes, I use the herbs. Like Mistress Ginner, of whom you may have heard, I serve those women among us who need help in their sicknesses. Culpepper hath shown us the virtues herbs possess, and both my father and I believe that they possess others, yet unknown. Since the willow gives us surcease from pain and mould from many plants aids in healing wounds, may it not be that other plants have their virtues, too? It is for us to discover them and to use them as the stars direct.’ And she slipped the thyme into the small pouch which swung at her waist and walked composedly on.
Kit, from his great height, looked down on her. She was not small, he noted, but neither was she over-tall. A woman to reach above a man’s heart, he thought. And what a strange woman. She had spoken to him as soberly as though she were a scholar and he another, nothing of a woman’s traditional coquetry about her.
He answered her as he might have done a scholar. He thought that George might have failed to win her because he spoke to her lightly, as he did to all women.
‘And the plague, mistress? Do you think there might be a specific against that? A fine thing if there were.’
Celia knew, as Kit did, that the plague was abroad in London and the numbers dying from it were growing each day. From being a thing distant from the haunts of the powerful and the comfortable, like Adam and herself, it was coming disturbingly near and to catch it meant almost certain death.
‘No herbal specific of which I or my father know, but…’ Celia paused; she was fearful that he might mock her if she spoke of what her father thought he knew.
‘A “but”, Mistress Celia? What does thy “but” conceal or reveal? Pray tell me.’
Celia looked up at him. Her eyes were as grey as clear water before a storm, Kit thought. Her face as calm as that of one of the many statues of the goddess Diana he had seen in Italy. It was not a holy, but a classic calm. If he touched her damask cheek would he feel flesh, or marble?
Kit’s hand rose. He checked himself. To win his bet would be far more difficult than he had thought. To go too fast would be to lose her. She would close herself against him as she had closed herself against Buckingham. She would live in a bubble, would be seen, spoken to, but not reached—forever sealed away from him.
Would she be so for any man? Or was there some Hodge, some decent, dull merchant to whom she would surrender her treasure? Or had she vowed herself a vestal virgin to the pale moon?
His hesitation, the thoughts hastening pell-mell through his head, took but an instant of his time. Celia barely noticed his movement, or his hesitation, and said again without artifice, ‘But Father thinks that perhaps we misunderstand the cause of the thing. He says that if it is mere bad air then why does the plague so often confine itself to the poor? The air is as bad in many great houses and yet the plague most often leaves them free. He thinks that perhaps it is because the houses of the rich are spacious, and not huddled together, hugger-mugger; that instead of shutting those infected away, as the law has recently ordered in St Giles in the Fields, we ought to put them outside and let them live in the open. What is there, he also asks, that the rich do and the poor do not, which makes the difference between them? Or mayhap it is the other way around; it is what the poor do.’
She fell silent. She had spoken too long and too vigorously, but she and her father had thought much about the plague and how to contain it.
‘And the stars?’ asked Kit slyly, for he thought astrology a cheat, but would not tell the astrologer’s daughter so. ‘Why do they not tell your father where, how and why the plague works on us as it does? If they are so powerful over our destinies, that is a question which they can surely answer.’
‘That I know not,’ said Celia frankly, her brow a little troubled. ‘The stars do tell us when the plague is coming. All the charts which my father and I prepared for our almanack this year foretold its arrival, and it has come. Master Lilly, too, agreed with us. Perhaps there are things which we may not know…’
‘You dispute as well as any scholar,’ remarked Kit, fascinated by her, admiring first her full face turned towards him and then her profile, pure against the dark of the house.
‘So I have been taught,’ she answered. She had never spoken so long with any man other than her father and had not thought to spend an afternoon discoursing with one from Charles’s court. Nor had she thought that he would speak to her so gravely. Buckingham had always teased her, tried to make her talk nonsense, and had talked nonsense to her. She had no answer to that, so rarely answered him.
This man, now, was different. She stole a glance at Kit and admired his powerful face, his haughty pride, barely held in check. She knew he was proud because he bore the marks of it as the old text she had recently read had told her: ‘head high, eyes steady, mouth firm—he looks to the distant, not the near—carriage erect, voice sure’. To win his respect would be a fine thing, and already he spoke to her not as a woman to be lightly handled and then thrown away but as a fellow soul to dispute with, as he would have disputed with her father.
‘You do not believe in astrology, then, sir?’ she asked him as she would not have done had he merely played the light game of love with her.
‘I do not believe in anything that I cannot see, touch, or experiment with. I am with Prince Rupert in that,’ was his reply. ‘But, mistress, we must to the house again. The Duke and your father will wonder what has kept us and will not like to believe us if we say that we were having a most scholarly discourse. Such is not the usual converse of man and maid left alone together!’
Celia did not blush, or raise a hand to flap at him, but nodded her head in agreement. ‘I had forgot how long we had been alone,’ she said, ‘in the pleasure of our discourse. You are perhaps a member of the King’s great society which seeks to discover the secrets of the world in which we live.’
‘Most surely,’ agreed Kit, leading her back to the house. He was a little surprised that she knew of the Royal Society, but then if her father spoke freely to her of his work, and she had read widely, as it was plain that she had, then she was like to know of it.
‘Oh, I wish,’ said Celia wistfully, looking up at him so that Kit felt that he was about to drown in the grey waters of her eyes—and what a splendid death that would be—‘I wish that I were a man that I might be present and listen to the sages and the learned men speak. Sometimes when Father hath company I am allowed to be present, but I am not allowed to speak. I may merely listen.’
‘And what a waste—’ Kit was suddenly a gallant, a true member of the King’s dissolute court ‘—that would be. That you were a man, I mean, mistress. You are too fair to be a man.’
‘And that,’ she said gently, as they reached the door to the house where they could hear Adam and the Duke speaking together, both having drunk too well, and their voices rising and falling almost as though they were singing, ‘is what I most complain of. That it is my looks which men think of and never of me—the Celia who has thoughts and dreams that a man might have, but may rarely express them.’
She had thought him different but she had been wrong. He was a man and a courtier and he might dally for a moment with her and speak as he might have done to one of his fellows, but that was no matter, she was, forever and ever, merely a woman, and that she must endure.
Kit knew that he had sounded a false note, and that with it he had lost all that he had gained with her. But no matter. He could not believe that she was so different from all the other women he had known. Her wooing and winning would take longer, and would follow a different path, but the end would be the same—if only he guarded his tongue and showed to her that face of him which she would most like to see.
Buckingham