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

Mary has her own regime: no one feels inclined to interfere. She forages in the Reverend's garden. At first light and dusk she sails up to the woods, returning with her apron full of angelica and cowslip and woundwort, and other plants less readily named.

She wears one of Mrs Cole's old dresses, the housekeeper being the nearest in size, though it was necessary to take up the hems in Dido's chamber, Mary standing before them, quite at ease, like a princess in the company of her maidservants. It was then, as they dressed her, they saw the tattoos, a shower of blue stars over the soft of her thigh and rump, extending downward to the crease of her knee.

She gives rise to talk, of course. Talk of spells, of the evil eye, of necromancy. And yet there is such a mildness in the stranger that come St Michael's Day, Mrs Cole, somewhat to her own amazement, consults Mary about her swollen knees, and Mary treats her, pressing with her hands against the joints until there is a puddle of fluid around the housekeeper's feet. ('Lor',' says Mrs Cole to her gossip the following Sunday, holding up her skirts to show the evidence, the newly restored, muscular ruby globes of her knees. 'What hands she has. What hands!')

By Whit Sunday, James is out of his sick-bed for the first time; a clownish figure in an old suit of the Reverend's, shuffling about the yards and garden, often found asleep, lying in the grass, or even curled on the carpet in the parlour.

To the Reverend's relief, James shows no more desire to climb trees, no evidence of a continuing distraction. Whatever he has

been, whatever strange latitudes he has travelled in, he now appears quite sane, answers sensibly all enquiries, though these do not as yet extend beyond the simple catechism of: 'How do you do today, sir?' 'Better, I thank you'; Will you walk today?', 1 shall'; 'Will you take some refreshment?', 'A dish of tea if I may, sir'.

Little or nothing is learnt of his history between the last time the Reverend clapped eyes on him in his rooms in Russia, and his reappearance in the apple tree at Cow. Lady Hallam, following the case from the airy prospect of her park, counsels patience.

With summer flying into the trees and woods, the fields high with corn and the village braced for the great work of the harvest, there is an air of transformation about the Reverend's house. Tabitha - the talk is not hard to come by - is enamoured of a soldier, a northerner, down for the harvest, spilling stories of war and cities at the far ends of the earth. George Pace wears knots of wild flowers in his hat as though he were a guest at a perpetual wedding. Astick visits regularly to view James's progress, and his daughter, such an awkward, spiky creature six months before, has acquired a fragile and unnerving beauty. What, ponders the Reverend, is not possible in such a season?

The nights of the first week in August belong to some more southern country, have flown up from Italy or Moorish Africa. Squadrons of slowly sailing stars inch across the heavens. The narrow casement windows of the cottages and the great sash windows of the Hall stand wide to stray breezes. Lady Hallam sits up till dawn, dabbing at her temples with a scented handkerchief, looking out over the paling darkness of her parkland, listening to the shriek of the peacocks and allowing herself, in the privacy of isolation, the luxury of a profound melancholy.

The Reverend also keeps late hours, walking softly about the heat-ticking house, hearing occasionally from the rooms above the creak of a floorboard as someone goes to the window for a draught of this musky, mysterious air. It cannot last, but if it could! The

Reverend imagines the village of Cow translated into La Vaca, the fields fiill of vines, the villagers tanned and swaggering, the church a mysterious pool of shade.

Near the last of this halcyon season, the Reverend steals out of his house in the small hours, wigless and coatless, a good stick in his hand, the taste of wine in his mouth. He sets off towards the woods across fields of grazing. He has no conscious destination in mind and only after twenty minutes' steady progress under a moon that throws on to the grass behind him a clearly defined shadow does he realise where he is headed. The 'ring', he calls it - it has no more proper name he knows of, is marked on no maps. Indeed, there is little or nothing to mark, merely a circle of oak trees, though he has found there, while picking mushrooms, certain stones, suggestively marked, that make him think there was once something there, a pagan temple perhaps, and it pleases him to imagine some white-robed predecessor of his, officiating at ceremonies before the woolly-haired ancestors of the present villagers.

He walks for ten minutes under the canopy of trees and breaks into the ring, certain now, seeing it lit by such a moon, that he is walking into sacred ground.

A man is sitting on a tussock in the centre of the ring. The Reverend freezes, grips his blackthorn more tightly, readies himself to melt back into the treeline, but the figure turns towards him and the Reverend stops. 'Is that you, Dr Dyer?'

'It is.'

The Reverend approaches, stiU cautious, as if this figure, not quite substantial on the tump, might yet prove false, a figment of his own mind, or worse, some familiar of the place. These woodland spirits, whom the Reverend cannot quite bring himself to disbelieve in, are said to be very ingenious. And who better to play tricks on than a portly, middle-aged, moon-drunk cleric?

When they are close, James says: 'Pity the poor lunatics on a

night such as this. I have heard three or four since I