‘Your list was rather long.’
‘We’ll see what comes. When is the boat due?’
‘Around three.’
‘So we could start planting before dinner at five.’
‘Patience was never one of your virtues, Father.’
Two hours later Dr Pentarius and his daughter were standing on the steps leading down to the water. They saw a black speck separate from the flotsam of craft towards Hammersmith and transform itself into a skiff with a single oarsman rowing with power and regularity. As the boat drew into the steps, Kingsland stepped down and took the rope. Not until the skiff was secure and the oars had been stowed did the rower look towards the doctor and his daughter. But by then their attention was directed, not at him, but at the treasures the boat contained. Fronds of green, brown and yellow emerged tantalisingly from ragged bundles of sacking; bare roots, bulbs and tubers spilled from open baskets. Most intriguing of all were the lumpy sacks that did not yet reveal their contents.
The tousled black hair of the apprentice from the Chelsea garden was suddenly thrown back. Serious eyes, deep-set in a swarthy handsome face, engaged those of the doctor and his daughter.
‘Good day, Sir,’ Dr Pentarius said, extending a hand. ‘I can’t recall that we’ve met at Chelsea.’
‘Carlos, Sir,’ the apprentice replied, taking his hand. ‘New from Leiden, where some of your plants have come from.’
‘From Leiden? I gained my doctorate there. As a student I knew the garden well. It was where my fascination with plants really began. But should you not therefore be called Carolus?’
‘My origins are more… distant, Sir.’
‘Well, Florence will give you tea in the kitchen and you can discuss planting with Kingsland. There’s lodging in the stable, if you would like to stay.’
‘That’s kindness indeed, Sir. It would ensure an early start tomorrow.’
Dr Pentarius looked again at the apprentice’s olive skin and burning eyes. He was unsettled by a confidence unusual in one so young. He decided to explore it.
‘Did you by chance have difficulty with the Dendranthema?’
‘I chose for you the variety sinensis. In my experience it has the more vigorous growth.’
‘Thank you. Margaret will assist in checking the inventory,’
Dr Pentarius left them, but he did not go far. He stood back in the depth of his study and watched the apprentice unload the skiff with muscular brown arms; then, with Kingsland’s help, drag it out of the water, up the slipway and onto the grass, where they overturned it.
On the days that followed, Dr Pentarius arose ever earlier to walk the bare gravel paths that in the dawn light resembled a rough square of lace. He displaced the stones to determine if soil had been spilt; he measured with the span of his hand the distance between seedlings of the same species. To his surprise the level of water in the pond had retained its depth, attesting to the integrity of the puddling, but already he imagined there a more formal structure that would one day bear a fountain. In his mind he saw the verdant square rising ever higher like a building on its foundations. He saw it as it would appear from the river or from the road, the palms and the giant ferns elevated above the bland density of the clipped box hedge, inviting curiosity and admiration. But most of all he savoured what the garden would yield – the medicines and remedies with which he would experiment.
The next morning, while preparing tinctures in his dispensary, Dr Pentarius watched with satisfaction the three figures labouring in the garden. When Margaret excused herself from lunch he thought no more of it, then set about tidying his study to receive his patients. But even before he had finished his first examination he found himself returning to the dispensary, standing well back in the shadows to observe. It did not please him to see Kingsland working alone. ‘There was a discrepancy in the inventory we needed to check,’ Margaret told him at dinner. For the first time that he could recall, Margaret averted her eyes from his; then she left the room before Florence, their maid, appeared with dessert.
On the morning of the fourth day Carlos told him the planting was complete.
‘Then why are there still bare patches?’ he asked.
‘For future needs,’ the apprentice replied.
Dr Pentarius decided to spend the afternoon with Forsyth at Chelsea. He wondered about leaving Margaret alone and regretted giving Florence leave to visit her parents in Putney, then chided himself for being irrational. Nevertheless, to Forsyth’s surprise at his mounting agitation, he reversed his original decision to spend the night in town.
Climbing back up the steps from the water at dusk he was reminded of Lord Somerset’s son and set out to find Margaret to ask if there was news. As he crossed the lawn, he saw what he now realised was driving his thoughts – the skiff still as it had been placed there. With beating heart, he hurried his steps. He searched the house from the servants’ rooms under the roof to the depths of the cellars where he stored his harvested plants. Then, returning to Margaret’s room as night finally closed in, he looked across to the stables, invisible beneath the trees but for a faint reticulum of flickering candlelight that seeped between the warped and badly jointed boards of the hayloft above.
With trembling hands Dr Pentarius tried to replace his father’s riding whip on the two hooks on the wall of his study. But it fell dangling, and from it red drops hit the floor and seeped between the boards. But it wasn’t the blood – that much seemed deserved – but his final misplaced blow splitting the man’s face that caused him anxiety. He picked up a cloth and wiped the object as clean as the plaited fibres would allow. Then he lit a fire in the grate to destroy it. He lay back in his chair, trying to sleep, but the images of the entwined bodies of his daughter and the apprentice rhythmically writhing in the loft of the stable would not go away. He made himself an infusion of Hydrastis, accepting that the deep, dark dreams that would inevitably follow were at least better than wakefulness. Before the drug took effect he took a candle from one of the wall sconces and went upstairs to Margaret’s room, expecting to find her shaken and contrite, perhaps even receptive to an accommodation of their different passions. But her room was cavernous and empty through the gaping door. He went to the stable, where his horse regarded him with quiet nonchalance as he looked in vain for signs of human presence.
The following day the house remained silent. There was no word, no sign, from his daughter or the apprentice. When he questioned them, Florence and Kingsland just stared at him blankly, and he was too proud to probe their silence further. The upturned boat assumed the character of a beached whale that promised to remain until its carcase rotted away.
But one morning a week later, after a night of turbulent imaginings induced by a larger than usual infusion, Dr Pentarius found the boat had gone. He wandered, desolate, into the physic garden. He noticed, but without particular interest, that the bare unplanted patches were now filled with fresh green seedlings he did not recognise. He resolved to ask Kingsland about it, then forgot to do so.
As the nights grew longer, the days each seemed to pass through the same spectrum of grey. Perpetual mists hanging over the river foreshortened its vistas, transforming it into a lake traversed only by the most mundane of commercial craft. There was no longer a reason for the splendid barges and gay skiffs of early summer. Besides that, the frequent rains had made the road by the river an obstacle along which only the most intrepid of his patients chose to venture. Of his daughter and her lover there came no word.
Yet the seasons were not wholly unkind to Dr Pentarius. The autumn leaves falling across the physic garden softened its impact on his gaze and obliterated the imprint of the upturned boat on the lawn. He wondered if Kingsland understood his instruction to leave them be. Christmas passed almost unnoticed. Then snow fell, long and deep, marking both an end and a new beginning.