Linnets and Valerians

by Elizabeth Goudge

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  them—“you must not go beyond the Vicarage garden. Tea is at five. You are not required to attend the six o’clock evensong with Ezra and myself but I shall expect to find you in bed when I come back. Ezra goes out on Sunday nights but he will have a cold supper ready for you. One further point. It is the Sabbath and you must therefore employ yourselves in docility and silence. In the cupboard under the stairs you will find a few aids to these two excellent virtues. I am now going to my library for a period of repose.”

  He went. They helped Ezra wash up and then ran to the cupboard under the stairs. It was full of parcels which must have arrived by mail yesterday when they were being educated. They brought them into the hall and opened them on the floor. Inside the boxes were jigsaw puzzles, stamp albums with packages of foreign stamps to stick in them, painting books, paint boxes and brushes, plasticine, books to read about pirates, birds and animals, bees, kings and queens. And there was a rubber bone for Absolom. They gasped. They couldn’t believe it. Uncle Ambrose was marvelous. Apart from Father he was the first grown-up they had met who understood that you couldn’t be good without something to be good with.

  “And I said he was a beast!” said Robert.

  “Let’s go and thank him,” said Timothy.

  “At teatime,” said Nan. “He’s asleep now.”

  “I’m going to paint pictures in the garden,” said Betsy.

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  "I’m going to stick stamps in,” said Robert.

  “I’m going to read about pirates in the cedar tree,” said Timothy.

  Timothy, Robert, Betsy and Absolom grabbed what they wanted and ran out to the front garden, Nan stopping behind to put the other things away in the cupboard and then following with a jam pot of water for Betsy’s painting. They had, she found, made by common consent for the cedar tree. Betsy was spreading out her painting things at its foot, Absolom beside her with his rubber bone. Robert was on a broad branch a little way up; Timothy was still climbing. Nan gave Betsy the water and sat on the grass by her for a little while until she saw they were all settled, then she went back up the lawn to the terrace where the window of her parlor stood open among the green leaves of the rose tree. Before she climbed through it she looked back and saw that Timothy was now right at the top of the cedar tree, his book under his arm, looking out over the countryside like a sailor in the crow’s-nest of a pirate ship gazing out to sea.

  Nan sat on the windowsill and opened Emma Cobley’s book. When she had opened it yesterday she had thought it was a recipe book, for each page contained a paragraph of instructions beginning, “Take . . .” But instead of being, “Take 4 eggs and a pint of milk,” these recipes began with things like, “Take a boiled frog and the feathers of a black cock,” or, “Take

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  a root of hemlock digged in the dark,” or, “Take wolfsbane and cinque-foil and mix with the blood of a dog.” It was when she had read this last one that she had abandoned the book in terror, for Absolom was distinctly plump and Emma Cobley the witch only lived at the top of the hill. Nan knew about witches for there had been people called witch doctors in India and everyone had been very frightened of them. But now, having seen Emma going to church and looking so good, she wondered if there was some mistake. Perhaps Emma had been a witch when she was a girl and now in old age she had seen the error of her ways. Yet Emma in her shop had not looked like a woman who had seen the error of her ways, whatever she might look like in church. And then there was Frederick. No one could say Frederick was an ordinary cat. Moses disliked him as much as Ezra disliked Emma, and Moses and Ezra were good men. Perhaps if she went on reading she would find the spells changing to recipes, and Emma from someone nasty to someone nice.

  But she didn’t. The spells went on being spells. There were a few nice ones such as the one, “For making a man dote upon a woman. Take the petals of seven scarlet flowers picked at midday under the sun, red rose, carnation, geranium, according to the season, and infuse them together with vervain and endive seed and well water drawn up at midnight under the full moon. Bottle and use in secret, the back of the beloved being turned, pouring a teaspoonful into his ale or wine, prefer

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  ably his wine, especially if it be a red wine. Continue until his love be at the desired heat.” But the nice ones were few and far between and the rest were all horrible. There was one for making a person go blind, and another for making him dumb. The one for “binding the tongue” said, “At the dead of night take a root of mandrake, shape it to the figure of the person standing with tongue thrust out, pierce the tongue with sharp pins and put the figure secretly aside.”

  And there was another nasty one “For causing a man to lose his memory that he wander away and be lost, even when the man is at a great distance from you. Take a mandrake root and form of it an image of him. Then pierce the head and feet with pins, take the image to some far place, even as he is in a far place, and hide it there. The place must be very secret for if the image be found the man also will be found. Do this at a time of great darkness, either when there be thunder in the air or when the moon is hid.”

  The last spell in the book was “For making a coolness and a strangeness come between a man and woman that love each other. Take nine snail shells and crush them. Then take seven foxglove bells from a place of shade, also the feathers of a black cock and the blood of the same, and ...”

  This spell went no further. There was a spatter of ink as though the pen had been flung down, and no more. It looked as though someone had suddenly come in and interrupted Emma Cobley. She had written nothing

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  more in the book. The remainder of the pages were blank.

  Nan had been reading for a long time. She was cold and stiff and scared and did not know what she ought to do. There seemed nothing she could do at present, except wait and see. She was glad when Ezra banged the big gong for tea and she could go and be with the others and push Emma Cobley to the back of her mind. It was easy to do this because during tea they were busy thanking Uncle Ambrose for their presents, and there was the cake that Ezra and Betsy had made to be eaten, and then Andromache came in with her kittens staggering after her, giving them their first Sunday outing, and Absolom had to be restrained and Hector pacified while the six round balls of prickly fluff were nursed and Andromache was given milk in a saucer. Then tea was washed up and the rest of the day passed according to plan, Uncle Ambrose’s plan. They ate the cold supper that Ezra had left ready for them and they were in bed by the time Uncle Ambrose came back from church. But only just. Robert took the final leap and pulled the sheet up under his chin when he heard steps on the stairs. It was the first time Uncle Ambrose had come to their rooms to say good night to them after they' were in bed and they wondered what he would do. He did not kiss them as their father had been accustomed to do but he stood very upright beside their beds, Hector growing taller and taller on his shoulder, adjusted his spectacles, looked at them benignly and said, “Ha.” Then he patted their shoulders and stalked away

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  and they heard the library door close behind him. Now he was going to write his book. Nan believed that he stayed up very late writing his book. His days were not as leisured as they had been and she realized suddenly that the education of children is not a process in which the children alone are the sufferers.

  Nan woke to find the moon shining on her face. She got up and went to the window and looked out on the back garden. The full moon had just come out from behind the tower of the church and the scene was lit up as brightly as though it were day. She could see the beehives and the strange bunchy little figure standing near them. It was Ezra in his best coat. She slipped out of bed, put on her shoes and her warm dressing gown, ran downstairs, through the kitchen and up the garden. As well as the full-ski
rted beech-brown coat, Ezra was wearing his mustard waistcoat and scarlet neckerchief. His trouser leg was pulled up to show the beautiful bee on his wooden leg and in one hand he held a bunch of herbs and flowers.

  “Ezra,” she whispered.

  He turned around and saw her. “Miss Nan! What be doing here? ’Tis close on midnight.”

  “What are you doing here, Ezra?”

  “Come the first night of the full moon I talks to the bees at midnight.”

  “May I stay with you while you talk to them?”

  U k 77

  Aye.

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  He had scarcely spoken when midnight began to boom out over their heads. Nan stood beside Ezra until the last reverberation had died away over the moors and then she followed him close to the hives. Handing her the bunch of flowers and herbs to hold he took from his pocket a bag containing preserved sugar plums and pieces of barley sugar. At the entrance to each hive he laid a little offering of these sweet things, and at each hive he bowed. “Madam queens and noble bees, you sleep,” he said, “but in your dreams you will know that the offerings be laid upon the threshold. For this moon more, madam queens and noble bees, extend your protection over your domain.”

  He stopped and listened intently, and Nan listened too, and she thought she heard a faraway unearthly music as though an army of little people the size of her thumb were singing on the other side of the world. Ezra nodded his head, as though in satisfaction, and taking the bunch of herbs and flowers from Nan he touched each hive once with it, bowed again and turned away down the garden path. Nan curtsied and followed him.

  “Did you hear it?” she whispered when they were halfway back to the house.

  “What, maid?” he asked, and he stopped and fixed her with his intensely bright eyes.

  “The faraway music,” she said.

  “You heard it?” he asked in astonishment. “You heard the singing of the bees?”

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  ‘‘Was it the bees?” she asked. “But they were asleep.” “Bees sing in their sleep/’ he said. “But ’tis not often mortal ears can hear ’em. Maid, you be one of ’em.” “What do you mean?” asked Nan, a little scared.

  “I thought as you had it in your heart the moment I set eyes on yee,” said Ezra. Then, a little shamefaced, he corrected himself. “The moment I set eyes on yee and me sober.”

  They had walked on and reached the well and paused there and Nan asked, “What have I in my heart?”

  “The gold, maid,” he said. He stretched out a horny forefinger and laid it gently on her chest, to the left- hand side. “In your heart there be a nugget of pure gold and if you could see it you would see a shining like a flame. There’s not many have it but them what do have it can hear the bees singing, and call the birds to their finger. And they can lay down their life for another.”

  “Birds don’t come to my finger,” said Nan.

  “You must call ’em to yee,” said Ezra. “You call ’em, maid, and I reckon they’ll come.”

  “They come to you?” Nan asked, and then added, “But of course they do. You have the gold.”

  “Maybe,” he said soberly. “But maybe ’tis only the silver in my blood. You see, maid, there be three sorts of men and women in this world, the gold-hearted and the black-hearted and them what’s descended from the silver ones.”

  “Who are they?” asked Nan.

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  “They lived on this earth before ever the good God thought to make men and women. They was the elves and the gnomes and the giants, the fairy folk. That’s to say in England we call ’em the fairy folk, but the Master tells me that in other countries they was called the gods and that the Greeks gave ’em names, Pan, Orpheus, Persephone and other names I don’t call to mind. But gods or fairies, maid, ’twas the same breed, and all of ’em with silver in their blood. Then, if so be you’ve read your Bible, you’ll know there was war in heaven, the good angels fighting the bad angels. The bad angels was cast down to earth and a few of the good ’uns, them that was that angry they couldn’t loose their hold, fell down to earth too, holding to the throats of the bad ’uns. So then there was three breeds, the golden-hearted angels, and the black-hearted, and the fairy folk with the silver in their blood.”

  Nan had sat down on the parapet of the well. She thought a moment and then said, “I don’t think that’s quite true, Ezra. I’ve known people, especially children, who could be both black-hearted and gold-hearted. One on Monday and the other on Tuesday.”

  “That be true, I reckon,” said Ezra. “That old battle between the dark and light, it do be going on in every heart that ever beats. But as life goes on, maid, either one wins or t’other, you’ll notice. Miss Betsy, now, she’ll be good one day, bad the next, but the Master, well, I’ve never known ’im have a black-hearted day.” Ezra’s voice sunk to a low growl. “And I ain’t never knowed Emma

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  Cobley to have a gold-hearted day. And I’ve knowed Emma all me life. Her father was a black warlock, and he taught her his wicked spells, and my old mother, she were a white witch and she taught me her good ’uns. So Emma and I, we just about have the measure the one of t’other.”

  There was a long pause and then Nan said, “So the silver in your blood is fairy power?”

  “That be right, maid,” said Ezra. “And it be the power to make music and paint pictures and write poetry.”

  “You and Moses Glory Glory Alleluja both make music,” said Nan.

  “Aye.”

  “And Daft Davie paints pictures,” said Nan.

  Ezra, who was busy doing something at the back door, swung around. “Do he?” he asked. “I ain’t never been in the place where he bides. Can’t climb there. And other folks won’t go near the place. They be scared of ’im. Were you scared?”

  “I wasn’t scared,” said Nan. “Daft Davie lives in a cave and he has painted splendid pictures all around the walls.”

  “Lady Alicia painted when she was a girl,” said Ezra. “Not with a brush. With a needle. Needlework pictures. Ever so pretty.”

  “Did you know her when she lived in this house?” asked Nan.

  “Aye. I was garden boy here then.”

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  “Betsy says she lost her little boy Francis when he was eight years old/’ said Nan. “Is that true?”

  “Aye,” said Ezra. “The squire had just gone away to foreign parts and Lady Alicia and the child and his nurse went up to the moors for a picnic, to take the child’s mind off fretting for his father. The little boy rode his pony, and Moses, who was a young footman then, came with ’em to carry the picnic basket. He hadn’t been with ’em long at the time, Moses hadn’t. The squire brought him back from foreign parts when he was just a young boy in his teens. They say he bought him in a slave market.”

  “Poor Moses!” said Nan. “Go on, Ezra.”

  “What I be telling yee now, Moses told me,” said Ezra, “so I know ’tis true. ’Twas a fine day, Moses said, but misty and he felt a bit anxious-like, for he’d not been up to the moors afore and the French nurse was a flighty young woman who couldn’t get her tongue round any decent language, only her own jabberwock what Moses couldn’t make head nor tail on. Well, they had their picnic tea, right up on Lion Tor under the Castle Rock, and then the nurse and the little boy went off to play games together and Lady Alicia sat and did her picture embroidery. Moses hobbled the pony and then sat on a rock at a respectful distance with his hands on his knees till he should be wanted. It got mistier, and the voices of the nurse and the child seemed further off, and Moses he felt uneasy and kept looking at Lady

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  Alicia, but she were stitching her picture and did not notice the mist till she started to feel cold. Then she says to Moses, ‘Where be nurse and my son?’ And Mo
ses says he didn’t know but had he her permission to go and look for ’em? And she told ’im to go.” Ezra stopped suddenly. “The Master would not like yee to be out here at night, maid. You might catch cold. And he’d not like me to be telling yee such a sad story.”

  “It’s warm and bright as day,” said Nan. “And you have to tell me this story.”

  “Aye,” said Ezra. “There’s something tells me as I do. You be young but it’s always the goldens what puts things to rights, and things ain’t right up at the Manor.”

  “Couldn’t Moses find the nurse and the little boy?” asked Nan.

  “He found the nurse, lost and going round in circles, poor silly thing. She’d played hide and seek with the boy, of all the daft things to do in such a place, and he’d vanished. Moses called Lady Alicia and they hunted all ways, crying the child’s name, but there weren’t no answer, and then Lady Alicia sent Moses down to the village as fast as he could go on the pony to fetch help, for the mist was coming on thicker. All they ever found was his little hat, caught in a thorn tree beside Weepin’ Marsh. They thought as he’d drowned in the marsh. Lady Alicia believed that. Yet maybe the gypsies took ’im.”

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  Nan felt cold and shivery in spite of the warmth and brightness of the night, and she was so sorry for Lady Alicia that she wanted to cry.

  “Lady Alicia never went out of the house by daylight again/’ Ezra went on. “And she wouldn’t be visited. The squire he took to going to foreign parts more than ever, finding it dull at home. He went to look for some lost city out in Egypt and no one never heard of ’im again. It’s a sad story, maid, and you’d best come in and have a hot posset.”

  Looking toward the back door as she got off the well, Nan saw what it was that Ezra had been doing there. He had been fastening his bunch of greenery over the lintel.

  “To protect the house from the evil eye,” he told her. “I puts a fresh bunch there each full moon. There’s honesty there, Saint-John’s-wort, rosemary and rowan. That’s rowan, maid, that there with the white flowers. Come the autumn it has a berry as bright as holly. It grows in the woods and it grows on the moor and witches and bad folks can’t abide it. They’ll run from it, so great be its power for good. So any time you children be in trouble in the woods or on the moor keep your eyes open for a rowan tree. And when you’ve picked a branch of it use it like a sword. Rosemary too, that always brings a blessing. ’Tis a real holy herb. With a sprig in your pocket not much harm can come to yee. Now come and have your posset.”