The Knot

He rises from his desk to kiss Henry.

‘You’ve missed Peter,’ he says. ‘Oxford drew him back a day early, as he leaves very shortly for Heidelberg and has things to wrap up before his departure.’

Henry Lyte is disappointed, everyone is going somewhere, it would seem, and he is sorry not to have the chance to say adieu to Peter. But it is always engaging to spend time in William Turner’s house. There is always something very obstructing to debate, some nuisance ignorant with a bad opinion holding his own torch wrongly.

‘People are so easily offended,’ William Turner complains, waving a letter. ‘Do they have no resistance of their own that my view can rake up theirs like ponds so hastily?’ Henry Lyte smiles. He has many a time had his own self raked over by Dr Turner, but he has learnt to live with it; there is too much to gain from being with him.

Dr Turner peppers his speech rapidly with Latin and Greek, so that Henry, who is much more comfortable with French, has to concentrate hard to keep abreast of him. Often in Turner’s company he wishes he had paid closer attention to his studies whilst at Oxford. University is wasted on the young, he has decided, without strict guidance. He was too occupied with pacing between the taverns of the town in a long coat drinking malmsey until the small hours of the night and sleeping with doxies, though he did read every volume of Dioscorides, Matthiolus, Galen, Pliny that he could. A normal existence, anyway by all accounts. 1546, when he left and married Anys, daughter of John Kelloway of Cullumpton, was the year in which all that ground to a halt and his responsibilities seemed to begin, sharply.

‘Have you begun that work you crow so often about? Your opus de singulis?’ Dr Turner is a demanding man, who will not let a thing pass once mentioned.

‘You mean the translation of Rembert’s herbal? I have started it. It is quite slow to get going.’

‘I am waiting for the competition!’ His laughter is hoarse but not unkind. He considers Henry when the mirth has left him. ‘You will need to be very contained to write that book, young man. There will be times when you must shut your ears and eyes to anything outside the vessel of your undertaking. And once you are done, the dissatisfaction with it will pour in from all sides. Easier to find fault with a wheel already rolling than it is to build one up from raw timbers.’

Dr Turner’s eye has a little more white about it than one might expect in a calmer man. He is old now, but they say he was once very handsome, like an ox in his prime.

‘I think it will take me a long time. It mentions eight hundred varieties of plant. Not only does it have to be translated accurately from the French, I shall need to seek out every single name in English, which part I believe shall be the hardest.’

‘There will be much scholarship in its making. You may achieve it.’

‘I don’t know, Doctor, I—’

‘You will need to be tenacious. But there is something of the limpet in you. Not a fast mover on your rock, but you cling on tight.’ Henry bridles, quick to sense criticism where perhaps none is intended.

‘Should I speed up, Doctor, how should I do that?’

‘Drink more hare’s piss.’ Dr Turner’s back is to him as he searches for a book he needs shortly for a service, then starts away down the corridor.

‘What kind of advice is that?’ Henry calls, aggrieved. His diminishing back looks square and spiky in its black church garb that doesn’t fit about the shoulders. He has no patience for a tailor fiddling about him, and it is clear his wife has but hasty measurements to pass on for an impossible task. Dr Turner is not a man who glides his way to anything. His sermons are punctuated with enraged jabs as though even the air itself between him and his congregation needed prodding into discipline. He is not a man with whom you’d dare to share a lukewarm half-thought unprepared, unless you felt like being torn into tiny pieces for the evening’s sport.

‘Come,’ he says, and beckons Henry Lyte to follow him downstairs. ‘There is something I must show you.’

The doctor is showing signs of his age, and stumbles on the path out into the garden. This labour of his latter years has paid off in the shape of a most glorious plot to the south of his house, with a small orchard of the choicest variety of fruits, and a horseshoe of beds laid out to herbs and flowers in the final states of blooming, though most are tatty and seeded into heads or fruiting now. In a few days there will be frosts and all will be blackened, but for now these latter-end herbs still cling to their season.

Dr Turner stops by a low wall and points into a browning, damp tangle of small climbing herbs that have colonized the stones over the summer and are dying back.

‘What do you see there, Henry? Does a thing strike you?’

Henry Lyte gets down on his knees and obligingly blinks and peers. ‘Well, Doctor, I …’

‘No doubt you see remnants of pennyroyal, Pulegium, and mosses of various sorts and a little bit of old unwanted yellowing Aegopodium podagraria that I must speak to my garden man about, and something else, Henry.’ His voice drops. ‘What is it?’

Henry Lyte is aware that the knees of his hose are very wet now from pressing at the lawn. A small fat spider, her belly full of eggs, is climbing up a crown of murrey-coloured stalks. ‘I see herb Robert,’ he says eventually. ‘Flowering late, in your sheltered haven.’ Dr Turner cackles then and rubs his crabby hands together.

‘You do! Geranium robertianum is a humble little herb that, as Dioscorides has told us, is to staunch the blood of green wounds and is used against corrupt sores and ulcers of the paps and privy members. And here, nestled as to its custom against the wall, and its purple-pinkish five-fold petals … Ah! And you have seen it for yourself at last.’ Dr Turner’s face is shining at the sight of Henry Lyte’s astonishment. He squeezes his hands together now as if in fervent prayer, and cocks his grizzled head on one side to hear the answer. ‘What is its difference?’

‘This flower is white, where it should be purple. Every single flowerhead upon its stalks is white as snow. I cannot believe such a deviation is possible without intervention, a natural anomaly.’ Henry Lyte cannot take his eyes away from it. ‘What does this mean, for scientific study, for our understanding of the way that nature takes its forms?’

‘It means that the Holy Spirit takes many guises, and does not eschew a humble weed to show that the power to change things takes many forms, and can begin in simple ways, in obscure corners. Not for nothing do the country people call this plant poor Robert. I say it is God’s way of showing how nothing is fixed – that this earth is in fluxus: a constant state of being made, of being in change. This is a glorious thing, yet found in a moist and shady corner which our eyes are trained to overlook. The same ignorants might say this is the work of malevolent, unchristian spirits such as Robin Goodfellow, appearing in disguise to mock God’s choices. You and I, Henry, are here to prove that this is never the case. We do not deal in falsehoods, you and I. We are true scientists, physicus, studying the work of God. Only what we see before us can be verified, with the exception of the will of God itself. Nothing is to be taken for granted. Only God’s will is absolute.

Henry feels a flicker of doubt.

‘But, if—’

‘It means, take nothing for granted, Master Lyte. Apply all your powers of observation in your work. If you do it thoroughly, your work will be of use to someone.’ Dr Turner’s outsize, drooping sleeves hide knobbled, twisted hands with fingers like root vegetables, and when he prods one’s chest to instil a point, it is almost painful. Henry Lyte tries not to flinch or rub the spot.

‘I am worried, Doctor. I saw a beggar in the porch as I came here this morning and—’

‘What use is that, Henry?’ he barks. ‘Whether or not you worry about some man in the street you saw in passing makes no difference. It is what you do next that counts. Otherwise it is a form of vanity and odious self-reflection.’

‘I did worse than that, I gave the man a large quantity of money, and then he disappeared. I can’t explain, but I do feel very bad about it,’ he says. He know that sounds weak-willed. He is irresponsible, a bad citizen, worse than those women for at least they, in their ugly, easy complacency, did not actually go out of their way to court trouble for the man. He pictures the beggar made vulnerable with that gold in his hand, killed for it by other beggars, vagabonds or lawless rufflers. He pictures him in the tavern drinking it off in a night, and dying of drink. And who would know?

Dr Turner leans forward on his stick so that Henry can see up close the very substance of his face. It is like a natural exclamation of rage. Hair sprouts from his nostrils, his eyes are red-rimmed. ‘It is not about salving your conscience, Henry. It is about changing things. You have been blessed with certain privileges, and in the eyes of God you must employ them in ways that create a change. I was brought up where the stink of the tannery permeated every crack of life, every breath, each mouthful of food. I was inured to its poison, and yet I never wish to forget what poison is or what it does to men. There are many different kinds of poverty, Henry,’ Dr Turner says. ‘Who are you or I to say that one man’s suffering is worse than another man’s. It is not our task to judge between sufferings, only to help where relief can be given. Your man may well have made those sores himself by laying irritants like spearwort or crowsfoot upon his members, a known practice in these parts amongst their kind. But what else is he to do, being whipped from parish to parish? With no home to speak of. Poverty is the visible, residual poison of a bad society, it eats away at the lives of those who have little or cannot help themselves.’ He pushes his cap about on his head.

‘These changes in the Church are not moving fast enough to reinstate an antidote. All this mealy-mouthed absolution and confession that we’ve lived with for too long has made us lazy.’ He snorts. ‘That’s not a way to improve the world, is it? People don’t like to hear that. How much easier it was to go to a priest, smell the frankincense, bleat unworthiness and be absolved like infants. Cut into a Catholic’s flesh and be warned, you may see whey running from the wound instead of blood.’

Henry looks shocked.

Turner flaps his hand dismissively. ‘There is still too much Romish pox about.’

‘If a man has to make amends how can he properly go about it, if he is not to just hand out bits of gold?’

‘By making an effort.’ Never had such a simple word sounded so menacing and unachievable.

‘God gave you hands, didn’t he?’ Turner holds open his own palms skywards as if to be inspected.

‘Use them!’

Henry’s ears are ringing all the way home.

Chapter VI.

Of TUTSAN or PARKE LEAVES. At the top of the stalks groweth small knops or round buttons which bring forth floures like St Johns grasse, when they are fallen or perished there appeareth litle small pelets very red, like to the colour of clotted or congealed dry blood, in which berries is contained the seede. The roote is hard and of wooddy substance, yeerely sending forth new springs.

THE GREAT FROSTS HAVE COME. The fields and hedges are white and the early morning air in the ribbon of valley beneath the slope is quick with birds. The redwings are here, getting down to the business of stripping the last of the haws, and filling the hedges with a gregarious, weighty presence that sets the squirrels chattering angrily. Crisp, seeded heads of wild angelica are spiky with crystals.

Henry walks down to Broadmead to cast an eye over the cattle. They should be brought in for the winter now; they stand cold and miserable in the hoary grass, breath in clouds about them. He must talk to his stockman. He walks on and stops by the Cary, the little course that runs down off the Mendip, through Somerton and winds out across the Levels. There is vapour rising from the river. One moorhen nervily shrugs itself through the water at the edge near the overhanging reedy bank, black plumage against the blackish water, a faint wake the only clue to its movement.

He calls in at the barton to see it is ready for cows, and then goes back up the hill to eat with his family. He takes a shortcut across the back of Horse Close, and then without thinking turns past Widow Hodges’s place. Rounding the corner of the new wall he comes across her suddenly, weaving a wide-mouthed, greenish basket in the cold without looking at her hands, as if they had a way of their own and could work on without her.

‘Good day to you, Master Lyte,’ she says. Her nose is running. Her hands are very pale in the November light, almost flashing as they move, twisting withy against withy. The flickering lids of her eyes are very dark and seem to latch on to his movement as he passes, as a hawk’s gaze might, fixing to the warmblooded gait of rabbits. He is unwilling to put his back to her, and turns once to raise his hand absurdly as he bids her good morning.

It is warm in the hall by comparison. He stamps the frost from his boots. Hannah has boiled black puddings and somehow the cold makes them all seem even more delicious.

‘That woman gives me the shivers, Frances,’ he complains.

‘Your Widow Hodges? All men find old women disconcerting, Henry.’ Frances is amused. ‘Once past childbearing age, a woman’s use is ill-defined even if working, particularly if she has no husband to tend. Men are unsettled by their ugliness. They are afraid of withered things.’