'They were created for mornings such as this. I am come on an errand and that is to beg a favour of you. You know it is our custom to have Dr Thome bleed us the day of the tithe supper; well, poor fellow, he has took a fall from his horse and clacked his head and cannot come and the nub of it is will you oblige us? For myself I am content to miss, but my sister . . .'
There is a brief silence while James buttons the legs of his breeches. Below the window the dogs set up a sudden clamour. The Reverend fidgets and steps backwards to the door. 'No matter, no matter at all.'
James says: 'Nay. We must not disappoint your sister.' They grin at each other. 'I wish you joy of your sport.'
'You would not care to join us?'
'I'm a poor sportsman and I've an unaccountable fondness for hares. And this leg' - he pats his right knee - 'would hold you up.'
'As you like, then. I shall see you at dinner.' The Reverend hurries off, takes the steps two at a time. From his room James hears the party move off, the barking of the dogs scraping and scraping at the sky, ever more faintly.
He washes his face in a basin of shocking cold water, smooths his hair and examines his hands. One small scar on the left stands out like a tiny raw nipple, seeps a fluid. Of the other scars, fifteen or twenty on either hand, there is nothing to complain of beside a tiresome itching. Nothing to be unpleased about.
He takes up his razor, holds it out and examines the blade. There is, at first, a quite perceptible movement, a trembling at the tip, but it settles and grows acceptably steady. He shaves in front of his small, cranky mirror. The stubble of his beard is darker than his hair, a more vigorous growth altogether, as if welling from a more wholesome part of himself, some part more atune with his two and thirty years than the weathered mask of his face, the grey hair of his head. He smiles at his reflection. The first true day of spring comes in the heart of winter. Who is to say I shall not grow entirely well again?
He pulls on the supple dog-skin gloves with which he protects his hands, and goes in search of food, walking into the kitchen where Mrs Cole and Tabitha and Mary and a girl by name of Winifred Dade are preparing the tithe supper.
'Lor' but we are boarded!' cries Mrs Cole, seeing James. She leaves off her pie-making to fetch him cold meat out of the meat safe. 'Shall you have some nice eggs. Doctor, what Winny brought from home?'
'A little of the mock goose and a shive of bread will be a feast, I thank you, Mrs Cole. Morning to you, Tabitha, Winny, Mary.' The girls, red-faced from the heat of the fire, look at each other stupidly and bite their lips. James does not see. He is regarding Mary who is sat at the great table, slicing onions.
'The onions do not make you cry?' He makes no dumb show to explain himself, such as the others do. Though he has never heard her speak a word of English, he knows how perfectly she understands him, both when he speaks and when he is silent. Now she answers him by cutting two neat pearly rings from the onion, fetching them up delicately with the knife and depositing them by the meat on his plate. Quietly, he thanks her.
He eats, content among the scuttle of the women. If he sits quietly they will forget him and he can view them in their female world, see them almost as if he were another woman among them.
It moves in him faint, powerful memories of his mother and sisters and the maidservant, a singer of nonsense songs, whose name he has completely mislaid. He revels in their skills. What excellent surgeons these women would make! And might not he make a passable cook? He would like to ask if he might join them, cut vegetables or mix the sweet mess of a pudding, but that would disturb them and the girls would lose their concentration.
When he has done, he slips out of the kitchen, a small pot of warm water in his hand, and enters the garden. He pauses, listening for any sound of the coursing and thinks perhaps he hears it, a faint echo of savage barking. By the side of the parsonage is the Reverend's glasshouse. It is a small construction, too low to stand quite upright in, full of pots, tubs, the reek of geraniums. Here he has appropriated a corner for his experiments, and is pleased to find his cannabis plants, their soil lagged with straw, surviving the cold nights. He checks his sponges on their slatted shelf, brushes away the beginnings of a cobweb and takes one of the smaller sponges, slipping it into his pocket. The sponges are his joy, the ripest success - though heaven knows, a very imperfect one - of his investigations into analgesics. He began it six months back, writing to Jack Cazotte in Dover, whose name he had remembered out of the air, having once had dealings with him during the days of his practice in Bath. Three weeks after writing, the first neat aromatic package arrived, the first of many containing herbs, seeds and compounds, together with Cazotte's advice, and pages copied out in Cazotte's neat hand from learned books such as James had no access to. Thus, from Pliny, James learnt of the properties of the mandragora root, how it might be steeped in wine and how it was often used in former times, mercifully or cynically, to lighten the agony of prisoners under torture. With vinegar and Asian myrrh - and curiously inflamed emotions - he concocted the potion offered
