The Knot

‘I scarcely know him, Henry.’

‘It is that viper woman, hissing in his ear. I know it.’ Henry bites at his thumbnail. ‘Coiled in the sand over my father’s money like a clutch of someone else’s eggs.’

‘It’s just the words of a bad-tempered old man. Pay no heed. Parents can be cruellest to their children, but they may not always mean it.’ Frances pretends that it is of no consequence but her cheeks have flushed scarlet with offence. She stands for a moment, rubbing the mound of her belly and looking at nothing.

‘But to say that God will punish me,’ Henry says. ‘And that my conscience will be nothing if not tainted. This is like a curse upon us!’

‘What has provoked it?’ she asks.

Henry does not know where to begin to answer. ‘The imminent arrival of a child can bring on … change, bring unsaid, underlying matters to a head. There is nothing like new life to unleash the past,’ he says.

‘But what underlying matter could that be?’ she says, bewildered.

Above them there is a crash on the floorboards, one of the children starts to cry and she has to rush upstairs.

So certain things begin to make sense. Here is the vile rumour laid out in black and white upon the page, in his father’s hand. He is the very source of it, the wellspring, and it is unthinkable. A more bitter blow could not be had, he thinks, than being struck down maliciously by your own father. In great anguish of mind Henry sits down and attempts a reply to his imputation. My good father, he begins. Then comes a torrent of opening lines each crossed out in favour of the next.

With deep regret I received your—

I beseech you to reconsider the harshness of your—

I cannot know by what false informant you have arrived at this—

I am sickened by your—

It is an injustice, sir, that I shall not swallow—

Henry crumples up the sheet of paper and finds a fresh one. There is black ink all over his fingers, his face. He must keep to the point, he thinks, pacing about, phrasing and recasting over and over in his head until all is garbled and makes no sense even to him. What were the circumstances of his second marriage? It is hard to remember. He takes more wasted paper to the grate and burns the pieces into flakes of ash. He will try again later.

He goes out to find solace in digging at the garden. He fetches the iron spade from the shed and chooses a difficult, untamed corner to confront, where even the most persistent robin leaves him alone. By noon, he is drenched in sweat and goes to the ewery to wash thoroughly before coming to dinner.

Frances has a great liking for eggs at the moment, so they eat whitepot alongside the meat today. Usually it amuses him to see her eat such quantities, her fine frame dominated by the firm round belly so that she puts away great slices of custard pie and boiled beef in large, eager mouthfuls with uncharacteristic speed. The baby has also meant that she cannot abide the smell of green vegetables, so has to excuse herself if salad or greens are to be served. But today he does not notice what Old Hannah brings out for her, and they avoid all mention of the letter’s content before the servants, indeed they hardly speak at all.

In the afternoon he still ignores the unwritten thoughts running through his head, and goes to work out the quarter-wages for the household staff. He notes that where last year there had twice been a change of dairymaid, Bridget had been with them now since before last Michaelmas, with a marked improvement in the keeping qualities of the butter.

His hand is uneven as he sets out these figures in his ledger, he makes several mistakes, but it is evening before he permits himself to return directly to the matter. Joan Young is very clever, he thinks, to have turned his father so hard against his own flesh and blood. He shaves a new quill to a satisfactory sharpness and sits down again to set it out clearly.

Father,

You hold that I have married another man’s wife and you intend to disinherit any issue we should have. You may cut off whom you choose, but remember that Frances carries this child as my lawful spouse without dispute. Should it be found, if it please God, to be a boy, he shall bear our family name, and through me prove ultimately to be your rightful heir as a Lyte of Lytes Cary – our shared descendance. Once this child is born of my wife’s body and cries within these four walls, in law and life Frances is bound to me in property and God’s eyes. I beg you not to go against the way of natural succession without good cause. I entreat you for your blessing, pray for your good health, and remain your obedient son.

Father, never did I wed another man’s wife.

He makes adjustments, shakes the castor and slides the document across the desk to dry. Outside in the dark a nightingale pours out its ceaseless, bubbling song. He has an incongruous recollection of an evening spent once in a garden in London. The garden itself was plain and empty, the company laughing and playing a game of lawn bowls, with wild nature just visible on the surrounding hills.

Chapter XII.

Of SOPHIA or Flixweede. Groweth alongst bywaies in untilled places, and specially whereas there hath bene in times past any buildings. The séede drunken with wine or water of the Smiths forge, stoppeth the laske.

HENRY LYTE WAKES IN A SWEAT, and lies there on the bed with his heart racing. Joan Young was in his dream again like a long red tendril coiling up and up towards his neck. He looks toward the thin strip of light from the window.

The moon always makes him dream badly. Weeds in the Knot garden make him dream badly; running grasses, bittercress, nettles, sinister little towers of horsetail. It is the time of year for such things. Early summer with its abundant froth of blossom and greening fields looks idyllic to the untrained city eye, delighting in the sight of cows dotted in the meadow and nice asparagus to eat at lunch – but to be inside the working countryside is a different matter. He rubs his neck to be rid of the tight sensation he still feels there. Arcadia it is not, and no-one feels this more strongly than his wife. Frances knows that a walk in the fresh air is good for her but refuses to go out on more occasions than not. There are several types of weather that she does not tolerate – fine rain because it presents a dilemma about whether to go out, heavy rain because obviously one will get soaked, thunder because one may be struck by lightening, icy because one may slip and break a bone, damp and warm because one may catch an ague, windy because one may catch a chill, too late in the afternoon because one may get lost and not have enough time to discuss supper with Old Hannah. It is beginning to be clear that Frances is not wholly suited to the countryside. Which is why she asks again this morning if they can go to London this month.

‘London?’ Henry looks up from the book in which he jots down market matters. He thinks of the annual tasks for the land and almost laughs.

‘Impossible.’

He makes a note about the price of raw wool in his meticulous hand, and flips the pages to examine the same for the previous year. He calculates what kind of profit might be expected from his flock, how many hoggets should be sold off, how many kept. His shepherd William Warfyld has a plan to use the unclaimed field known as No Man’s Plot, which means he could afford to raise the numbers unless someone places an objection. He wonders though whether that field is just too wet. When he looks up, she is still in front of him, waiting for an answer.

‘Besides, what would you do there?’

Now it is Frances’s turn to be amused. ‘Do? Master Lyte, what do you suppose I spend my time at here that I should miss? I must run the household but it can manage without me if we are not here. After all – if we are not here, there is much less to do. We can stay with my cousin, now that mother has remarried and gone to Devon.’

‘Surely there is plenty to do wherever we are; it should make no difference?’

‘I do not mind hard work, but in London there would be less weather and more people,’ she replies. ‘And we can bring Lisbet.’ Frances, when she chooses, can set quite a stubborn line to her jaw. ‘I lack for just one thing, Henry. Fun.’

‘You’ll have plenty on your hands soon enough,’ he says, indicating her belly.

‘There are months left to go,’ she protests.

This really is very tiresome. He has several sorts of account to pay today; tailors’, mercers’, smiths’ and chopmen’s bills. He waves his hand vaguely at the door. ‘Go for a walk. Learn an instrument.’

‘An instrument?’

‘Yes, a lute. No! Perhaps the virginals.’ Reverend Tope says that a lady should only ever learn an instrument that does not cause her to spread her legs. He agrees with very little that Reverend Tope opines on, but today he is in a hurry, and other people’s thoughts can provide an occasional shortcut to thinking for oneself, can’t they? And in her condition … He is sure that one could sit at the virginals with one’s anklebones neatly together, though at this very moment he does not much care.

‘I don’t know, Frances, you are a grown woman with an entire household to run, and in the unlikely event that you have an ounce of spare time you can occupy it for yourself. Learn ballads. Anything! But London this month is out of the question.’

This afternoon Henry receives another letter from his father. There have been many sent between them now, their dealings with each other becoming at best unkind, at worst hostile, a volley of fire. But this letter, it becomes clear as he breaks the seal, is the most poisonous of them all, one that at all costs Frances must never see. This letter summons every evil that his father has been alluding to over this horrible month, but never yet dared to mention outrightly. And here it is, set down as if it were a truth, a twisted fact. If it were so, why does he not make his accusations in public? Why does he hide his venom in a letter, yet leaking breath and whispers of his intent all through the borough so that it comes to his ears slowly from all directions. His claim is that Henry himself was to blame for the sickness and death of his first wife Anys. Death. The man claims he is a murderer. Murderer. Odious, odious lies.

‘I am a good man, am I not?’ he says to himself, his carefully nurtured world falling apart inside him. ‘How can I clear my name, when there has been no fair trial?’

Chapter XIII.

Of MULLEYN. It hath great, broad soft and woolly leaves. It sheweth like to a Waxe-candle, or Taper, cunningly wrought.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS satyrion, a kind of orchis? He has never seen one for himself, nor even had it verified, and he will not write about a kind he does not understand. He puts that section of the translation aside and waits until the simpler calls by again. In the meantime he finds he cannot respond to his father’s letter. He will. He will write soon, but not until his head has cleared. It is like a fog in there; remembering anything is more like groping about and stumbling by chance upon fragments.

When the simpler comes, he calls her in.

‘Does my lady yet need hart’s tongue or camomile for her limbick as she used to before?’ she bleats. ‘She were always such good custom off me. She’ll want a good few handful.’ She starts pulling bundles out of her pack and spreading them across the table. ‘I have a quantity and can get more. Plantain, as you call it here? Sorrel? Betony?’ The simpler is a thickset, wall-eyed woman with black fingernails. Her one good eye roves the carpet as if looking for herbs.

Henry Lyte clears his throat. ‘What do you know of standegrasses, orchis?’ he asks her.

The woman looks blank.

‘I’ll know the plants I know of, and that’s flat.’ She is not inclined to be helpful, in fact she is distinctly disgruntled. Since the death of Anys, her sales of flowers and other necessaries up at Lytes Cary have been minimal. Anys used to order roseheads by the bushel to supplement those grown at the edge of her little plot, which was eightpence a time.