Читать книгу The Knot - Jane Borodale - Страница 9

Chapter II.

Of BISTORTE. They grow wel in moist and watery places, as in medowes, and darke shadowy woods. The decoction of the leaves is very good against all sores, and it fastneth loose teeth, if it be often used or holden in the mouth.

IT IS LATE, BUT HENRY LYTE can never sleep easily on the eve of a long journey. He sits with the trimmed candle burning low and ploughs on with his translation. He is an orderly man who likes to work in a state of neatness, which should stand him in good stead for the task ahead of him. There is, after all, a place for brilliance of mind and there is a place for method, and he feels he may have enough of the latter to complete all six hundred pages. He has ink of different colours ranged in pots on his desk; red, black, purple, green and brown, for different types of fact or notes, and he likes a sharp nib. Surrounded by other men’s herbals for ease of cross-reference, he is working directly from the French version as L’Histoire des plantes, which is itself translated out of the Flemish by Charles l’Écluse, or Carolus Clusius, as the great man prefers to be known. He hasn’t decided what his own is going to be called. A title is crucial and difficult to decide upon, he’s finding. The original work, startlingly detailed and scholarly, was published in 1554 as the Cruÿdeboeck by the learned Rembert Dodeons, a master of plants and medicine, whom Henry himself had met when he was in Europe as a young man all those years ago. Sometimes Henry blushes with embarrassment to think that he has been so audacious as to consider himself man enough for this enormous undertaking. Why him? Not a physician, not an expert in anything. It is almost ridiculous, but the project is well underway now, too late to turn back.

He has finished butterbur and begun bistort today, which is a familiar kind of herb to him. Some plants are easier to render quickly because it is very clear from their descriptions or the Latin what their equivalents might be in English. Others are not, and he will have to return to those later, get specialist opinion, exercise extreme caution and assiduousness in applying names to them. The excellent plates by Leonhard Fuchs are also of considerable help in identification, but grappling with the French is his own charge entirely. He hovers over a disputable word. What is ridée in English? He thinks. He notes down rinkeled, folden, playted or drawn together. He considers his sentence, and then writes the great bistort hath long leaves like Patience, but wrinkled or drawen into rimples, of a swart green colour.

He can hear from the creak of boards upstairs when Lisbet leaves the children’s room and goes off to where she sleeps in the chamber over the dairy in the north range. With her departure all four children settle down in their beds and a quietness conducive to writing subsides throughout the house. For two full hours Henry works hard enough to forget most of what weighs on his conscience, though it is a temporary displacement. When the second candle is burnt about halfway down its length, he retires to bed to dream of nothing.