.

the space where an oak door will sit on the hinges to be made at the blacksmith’s just as soon as he can get into Ilminster, and checks the wall from this side. For a moment he is dazzled by the low sun.

      ‘Master Lyte?’ a voice rasps.

      Henry almost jumps out of his skin. He blinks and sees that it is Widow Hodges, sat almost under his feet outside her dilapidated tiny cottage on a low stool, silently working withy into baskets as she does on most days when the weather permits it, though rarely in winter, when weeks can go by without her emerging as if she were dormant, or dead. To be frank he usually takes care to avoid chancing upon her, as most people do. He can never tell if she is merely old, or ancient, but she has struck an unreasonable fear in him since he was a child. Perhaps he should know more about his tenants, but there are exceptions to every rule he makes for himself.

      ‘I saw you knocked down those pigsties, Master Lyte,’ she grates out. Her voice is cracked and tired, like something left at the back of a cupboard and never used properly. ‘You’re not going to be doing away with my cottage?’

      Henry assures her that he plans no such thing. Childishly, he tries to avert his gaze. Her wrinkled face is twisted into puckered lines and dots where her eyelids meet her cheeks. She is blind, and the eyelids themselves are flat, grotesque.

      ‘We are going round you with the new garden wall, dame, no cause for worry,’ he shouts cheerfully, backing away as if very busy with something. ‘The wall runs to the back of your dwelling.’

      ‘I heard all the noise,’ she goes on saying. ‘And I’ve been thinking about it these weeks since. It’s just I’ve been here a long time, Master Lyte. A very long time.’

      It is almost All Souls’, he thinks, as he goes back to his study to note down the last of his financial outgoings before the end of the month. October has flown by. There is little of note for the rest of the afternoon, bar a brief flurry of noise from the other side of the house when in the kitchen one of the servants scalds her hand on a kettle, and then the boy comes with the packhorse for his father’s grain. Henry Lyte has to pay his father two bushels each of wheat and dredge malt every week to supply their household brewing and bread over at Sherborne. Sometimes he wishes that they would take a fortnight’s worth at once, or more, and leave him in peace. His stepmother Joan Young (he will not call her Lyte, nor mother; she is no blood of his) declares that there is no provision for storage at their house, but Henry knows it is an excuse to keep a weekly eye on proceedings at Lytes Cary. She is becoming far too interested in it.

      After this he is able to be utterly absorbed in his accounts. Henry puts aside what he needs to pay the tithingman of Kingsdon for the queensilver, which is sixteen shillings the quarter, and works out what he is owed himself on the field rents since Lammas. These accounts done, he is free to return to his work on the herbal.

      As a grey evening draws in again, earlier and earlier now it is so close to Hallowtide, there is an interruptive, particular tap on his door that has become familiar to him this last fortnight, and Frances comes into the room.

      ‘You have not lit the candle yet, Henry,’ she says.

      ‘I can see well enough.’

      ‘They have been calling supper.’ She sounds annoyed, but goes to her husband’s side and touches him lightly on the shoulder. He puts down his pen and a sentence hangs unfinished; Medewort doubtlesse drieth much, and is astringent, wherefore it restraineth and bindeth … the word manifestly floats newly inked, untethered to any other on the page. It can’t be helped. Her fingers are indeed very pale and smooth. What she lacks in warmth of speech, he has decided, she makes up for in other ways. Her presence glitters softly out of the corner of his eye as she picks up a pebble on his desk and turns in the gloom towards the light to examine it idly, puts it down again. She smells of subtle things, something like damask rose perhaps or musk ambrette, a dusky, milky scent that he presumes she must buy from a London perfumier in a bottle, though he likes to think it is her skin itself that secretes such promise, such difference from what he is.

      He has a sudden thought of her fingers as they would be if closing round his own, against his limbs. He finds that he understands her with more clarity once the matters of the day are over. He likes the silences produced at night – the dwindling need for words and explanations. A silence lit by daylight has to be used fully, taken advantage of, but at night a silence could be simply encountered, dwelt in, quite for its own sake. He wishes that on balance it might not be unreasonable to dispense with supper altogether and suggest the bedchamber. Of course it would be very unreasonable, but he admits her presence excites his senses, distracts him.

      When he lies with her at night, she does not envelop him as Anys used to, with gentle arms and her eyes appreciatively closed. Frances keeps her eyes open and fixes him with a gaze that he cannot read or enter into. He thinks it is curiosity that makes her do this, but he can’t be sure. Her body is very different from Anys’s, too, more taut, rawboned. She does not seem to object to him paying her proper attention in bed; indeed, more than once he has had the distinct sense this gives her a gleam in her eye, but again it is hard to be sure. His father always told him that whores are the only women who enjoy their carnal duties to the husband, and he would not like to think badly of her. For himself of course he prefers to think of it as natural procreation rather than venery.

      ‘But what will you do with all this effort, this … learning, Henry?’ she asks unexpectedly, as if puzzled. She has never asked a thing about his work before.

      ‘Do you mean my book?’ He lets her wrist go and begins to gather up the pages that are dry into a bundle.

      ‘I mean the book, the time in the study, those letters that come, the exertion generally.’ He can’t see her expression.

      ‘I don’t have a publisher yet for my translation, but I have high hopes. My dear,’ he adds briskly, as she stifles a yawn. ‘Is it late? Is it white herring for supper again? No doubt it can’t be helped, on a Friday. When a thing is plentiful there is always so much of it.’ He wonders why his habit is to speak so loudly when he talks to her.

      ‘Could we go up to London before Christmas?’ she asks.

      ‘London? Certainly not. There is too much to do. The roads are a nightmare.’

      Neither speaks for a moment. Outside by the gate a dog is barking. A dog barking at dusk always sounds louder, he thinks, than during the day. A log slips on the fire irons, and a shower of sparks flies up the chimney.

      ‘Why do you suppose that old woman never does her work indoors?’ Frances asks.

      ‘What woman?’

      ‘Whom you spoke to this morning, the old basketmaker.’

      Henry frowns. ‘What makes you mention that?’

      ‘I’ve been watching from the bedchamber window, she sits out there all day.’

      ‘Perhaps her rafters are too low – those rods of willow reach very tall at the beginning of a basket. And you will have seen how they take up room to the sides as she weaves, her cottage must be too cramped for such activity.’

      ‘Or perhaps she needs the brighter daylight to properly see what she is doing.’

      ‘She is blind. Her eyelids have been sewn shut for nearly thirty years.’

      ‘Oh!’ Frances flinches at the thought.

      There is a silence. Really he’d prefer to start a new page of his translation, but he cannot do it with Frances standing by him. He cuts a nib for later. He might get up to fleabane by tomorrow. Hote and dry in the third degree. It is going to take him ten years or more at this rate.

      ‘How did she become blind?’ Frances asks.

      ‘Mmm?’

      ‘The old woman.’

      ‘I’ve no idea.’ There is something vaguely tugging at his memory as he says that, something odd and unpleasant from way back when he was a boy, but then it is gone. He does remember the talk around the time that they