The Knot. Jane Borodale

the copse, Henry is reminded of a reddish-brown moth and thinks it softly beautiful, until he sees its decisive landing in the ash tree, cruel feet outstretched and latching onto the bough so swiftly that he flinches. It is a meat-eater, through and through.

      Chapter IX.

      Of PLANTAINE, or Waybrede. The third kind of plantaine is smaller than the second, the leaves bee long and narrow, with ribs of a darke greene with smal poynts or purples. The roote is short and verie full of threddie strings.

      FRANCES QUICKENED TODAY. Henry can’t feel it of course, though he puts his hand dutifully on her belly, but he praised God for it; another healthy child kicking in the womb. He can never picture a miniature human in there, like those shown in the diagrams in medical books. His mind’s eye suggests rather that it is a pinkish kind of grub or caterpillar, that will later transform into something more recognizable, when it is pressing tiny feet and hands against the inner side of her belly skin. He is after all an experienced father. There were the births of Edith, Mary, Jane and Florence, and there was the other birth too, but this is too painful for him to remember. This last memory is the one that is slippery, evasive, so deeply interred that he can’t even acknowledge it. He is adept at forgetting; extremely adept.

      ‘Come and see the garden today, Frances!’ he says, on impulse.

      ‘Then you must wait while I find my old shoes,’ she says.

      ‘No, now! Come at once! It is the end of April and you have not seen what has been happening out there,’ Henry makes himself laugh, tugs at her hand. And as they go out together to see the progress of the Knot and its surrounding borders, Henry begins a descriptive verbal tour for his wife, so that she can imagine how it is to grow. What will be here and here. What will be high, what will be climbing. He ignores Mote, who is grinning to himself as he listens to Henry’s enthusiastic, expansive rendition of how it is to be.

      ‘Picture its frankness,’ he entreats, ‘fat and green. Here will be the gillyflowers, and these little slips of lavender will have grown into plants by then, and see all these frondy bits of dill coming up, and these are the apothecary’s rose, and these the damask. What do you think?’

      ‘I do love roses.’ Her tone suggests that there is doubt involved in all of this.

      ‘The beehives are at the far end by the garden. If you sit up here by the house they will never bother you, and here is a good corner where the sun warms the wall. Even the little rock lizards bask in this spot.’

      ‘It really is quite hard to picture, Henry.’ He knows she is only allowing herself to see the mud, the parts that are not finished.

      ‘Think of a lily. Think of breathing in the plant’s waxy freshness like a draught of vital spirit.’

      Frances does smile politely.

      ‘Think of a rose, then, think of bringing a fresh pink rose up to your face and drinking in its scent. It will have opened that morning and you will have your basket with you in order to gather many more, perhaps to make an aromatic water in your stillroom that very day while the blossoms are wholly fresh. If you like there could be a seat here for you to sit on, by the roses.’ He fetches a cask for her. ‘Try it!’

      ‘And my face won’t catch the sun?’

      ‘Your fair white skin would be shaded by the briars overhead.’

      She looks suddenly keen. ‘And could we have that by the week in July when my mother comes to visit for my lying-in?’

      ‘Well, no, it may take a couple of years to reach overhead.’

      She looks back at the house. ‘Everything takes so long. Can’t you just buy bigger roses, more full-grown, and get the men to twine them up as if they’d been there months and months?’

      ‘Roses do not like being moved – better to wait and coax them up the wires at their natural pace if you want them to last their proper lifetime’s span.’

      Frances is becoming concerned for the state of her shoes and the mud that she will be treading into the house.

      ‘Every time I come out here, Henry,’ she points out. She knows perfectly well that one cannot rip up roses by the roots at whim. She is being wilful in her lack of interest. Henry cannot understand why she does not enjoy the garden more. To be sure there are many bare patches and places where herbs are not added yet, but he has described to her the wholeness of it, its beauty that by next June will surely dazzle her.

      ‘And is it all very costly, darling?’ she adds lightly. He looks at her. In the sunlight her straight black hair shines as though it is polished. She is not at all like a flower, he thinks. She is mineral, crystalline, waxy, brittle. The cost of his garden is not something that he wishes to discuss, he realizes.

      ‘How you can spend so much time inside the house without fresh air is quite beyond me,’ he retorts instead, as she walks away. He is very annoyed that she is blind to the garden’s soft growth, its promise. Mote smirks at the masterwort in the bed behind him, saying nothing.

      He opens the garden door and leaves the neat, planned, incipient beauty of his Knot and strides off to inspect the orchards and the wilder, rampant plants in the wayside. He will clear his head, stretch his legs, shake off that disappointed feeling that comes from not being able to rouse enthusiasm in another being for something that one loves.

      As he walks about, gradually and in truth for the first time in his life he begins to see the plants around him in terms of both their particularities and their potential. He begins to examine them all with a mounting respect and excitement for their distinctions, going from plant to plant, getting lost in their worlds, making mental notes, determined to write down what he’s observed when he returns to his study. Next time he will bring a notebook outside, and something to write with. He looks closely at the yellow loosestrife with its expanding, hairy, silky, fat stem, a plain-looking plant. He admires a specimen of elecampane; muscular in its softness, stiff with preparing to grow. He sees wild feverfew, with its almost sticky leaf; comfrey, a foot tall now, relaxing out of its growth into a soft almost reptile skin; and there is lady’s smock; pinkish, wavering in the air as though alert or tense. In the orchards the Dunster plum tree has rounded leaves peeping from the smooth twigs. On the greengage, tight waxy points are bright yellow-green, thin and strong. The apple leaves are opening raggedly on the branch like a conjuror’s flourish, and the quince is decked with little piles of hairy leaves, long pile like the hair on a young woman’s jawline. On the medlar are mild, elegant fingers of leaf and pinkish buds. Those leaves are fine in texture, rippled. He applies most observation to his favourites in the pear orchard. Their white blossoms are open like hats, and the leaves silver-soft, with a white-green tip that is crisp to the touch, and shedded brown husks at the base where it has sprouted. He watches a metallic green beetle clinging and clambering inside a blossom, and sees the boughs are dripping with mosses and crusted with three kinds of lichen; bearded, creeping, yellow. He wishes he knew more.

      He wishes he could have some word from his father, who has kept up a resolute silence although Henry has written to share the good news about Frances’s condition. It is often surprising when a man gets what he hopes for, but so rarely does it come in a guise that one could have predicted. For a moment he has the most peculiar, overwhelming sensation that something vast is creeping up on him, drawing nearer. He turns around in alarm but it is only Blackie, trotting over the wet grass towards him, blunt tail in the air.

      Chapter X.

      Of BLOOD-STRANGE, or Mousetails. It floureth in Aprill, and the torches and seede is ripe in May, and shortly after the whole herb perisheth, so that in June yee shall not finde the dry or withered plant.

      HE NEEDS TO GO AND COLLECT A HUNDRED ready-set slips of gillyflower, on order from Mistress Shaw, an old woman of some sixty years that lives in Wells. At its best her garden is a fat, colourful kerchief of blossom, and the children always vie to come with him in the cart when he goes to her for plants and seed. Rumour has it that as a young girl she was a Benedictine novice in a London convent, but that she left the calling and walked south-west long before the upheavals in the Church began. They say