Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

He says: 'I think, then, we have some hope of saving her. Shall we make her well again, child, eh?'

He gestures to the boy to foUow him. They come to a passageway, then to a door. The room inside is warm from the sun that cuts in through the half-open shutters. A spacious room but almost sunk beneath the clutter of the apothecary's trade. James

sniffs the air. Here are scents unlike anything he has experienced before. Bitter and metallic, but also sweet, as if the apothecary had mixed together flowers and anvils, gunpowder and rotten eggs, to create a unique, stinking perfume.

In the centre of the room is the work-bench, crowded with mortars, gallipots, smoke-blackened knives. There is a rolling-board for making pills, a small pile of crabs' claws, a human skull, and several books with crinkled yellow pages, as if they had once been under water. From the ceiling hang bundles of dried plants.

Says Viney: 'Now, child, we shall find something to make the Widow mend. An infusion of borage perhaps.' He reaches up and takes a fist of blue, star-shaped flowers. 'And something to purge her. When evil is at work in a body we must expel it.' He takes senna leaves and ginger. 'My art - do not touch that! - is to mediate between man and nature. This art was given to our forefathers by God - Ay, pass me the pot - thus all healing is divine - set it upon the stove - It is the arrogance of modern doctors that is their undoing. We can neither heal - that is the lung of a fox -nor be healed without humility. There now, the water will draw the goodness from the plants. You are an able assistant, James. I shall mention as much to your father.'

When they ride back to Blind Yeo, James sits in front of the apothecary, his fingers tangled in the mare's coarse mane. The country people say: 'Gad speed 'ee, Mr Viney', 'Good morrow to 'ee, sir!', 'Be that the Dyer boy ridin' up so mighty wiv 'ee?'

The to-ing and fro-ing to Madderditch for medicine is James's particular duty. He spends longer and longer in the apothecary's den, watching and then helping in the preparation of mixtures and ointments and gargles. He learns to roll pills, to make an emulsion from the yolk of eggs, to prepare oils from lavender and cloves and ginger. Viney himself is more engrossed with his metals, his crucible and furnace, his pyramids of numbers. More

than once they are forced to flee from clouds of noxious smoke, running out into the garden to gulp lungfuls of air while the aunt shakes her fan at them in exasperation.

But the Widow rallies, though now she is as mute as the boy, her voice lost for ever above the summer fields. At Christmas she leaves her bed, her back pocked with sores, her face sunk on to the bones of her skull. There are no more visits to Madderditch. More than ever the boy keeps his own company, comes and softly goes. His silence, his dumb indifference, is taken for revolt, for insolence. Joshua beats him, flies out in real anger. Even Elizabeth treats him coldly, enraged that he should draw such attention to himself, and thus to her and to history. She watches him one morning, climbing up the side of the hill-fort like some grim diminutive tribesman, and thinks: Would that he does not stop. Would that he goes on, climbing and climbing. Would that this were farewell.

Yet it cuts her heart to think it.

It is the summer of 1750. The year of the London earthquakes. The hottest summer of the boy's life, hotter even than '48, when the locusts came. He is lying on his belly on the side of the hill, watching the wedding preparations in the orchard below. Small figures, just recognisable, are fetching and carrying from the house. He does not hear the stranger approach over the muffling grass until a hand catches him about the scruff of his neck and hoists him to his feet.

The stranger eyes him; eases his grip, says: 'Now here's a pretty bird for the bag. Hiding, child, or spying? Are you a native of this place?'

James wriggles free, rubs his neck, nods.

'Then, Robin Goodfellow, you are hired. Which is the Dyer farm?'

James points down the hill. The stranger squints, fans himself with his hat, spits at a bee. For a time he seems to consider it, the wisdom of descending. At length he says: 'Lead on, boy,' and they go, crabwise, towards a knot of sheep in the shade of an elm tree by the gate that leads to the road. As they walk, James steals glances at the man: the holy blue of his eyes, the pock-marked skin, the goat-hair wig dusting the shoulders of his coat with its powder. The stranger wears ribbons on his coat, yet it is difficult to imagine him as an acquaintance of Joshua's, still less of Jenny Scurl or Bob Ketch. Cetainly he is no farmer; nor does he seem a pedlar, for he has no pedlar's pack. Nor a gentleman. More than anything he reminds James of the actors who played at Moody's farm two summers past and who he watched through a knot-hole as they changed and danced and bellowed to each other among the rat-gloom of Moody's barn.

Coming to the road, the stranger begins to talk more loudly, as if he distrusted his surroundings, yet did not wish to appear on his guard.

'. . . A wedding, boy, why, 'tis one of the finest things imaginable, most prodigiously, of course, when one is not related to any of the parties involved. You have attended one before? Your parents' perhaps?'

James shakes his head.

'A funeral, however, is to be preferred. A fellow with a respectable suit of clothes may live comfortably on little else but the vanity of the dead for years together. I attended one