I remembered the cordials that she had made for some of the tenants who had been sick during the winter, and how I had teased her about it, calling her midwife and apothecary.
“How do you know about these things?” I said to her.
“I learned them from my mother,” she said.
“We are very old, and very wise, who come from Florence.”
The words struck some chord in memory, but I could not recollect just what it was.
To think was still an effort. And I was content to lie there in my bed, her hand in mine.
“Why is the tree in leaf outside my window?” I asked.
“It should be, in the second week of May,” she said.
That I had lain there knowing nothing all those weeks was hard to understand.
Nor could I remember the events that had brought me to my bed.
Rachel had been angry with me, for some reason that escaped me, and had invited Mary Pascoe to the house, I knew not why.
That we had been married the day before my birthday was very certain, though I had no clear vision of the church, or of the ceremony; except that I believed my godfather and Louise had been the only witnesses, with little Alice Tabb, the church cleaner.
I remembered being very happy.
And suddenly, for no reason, in despair. Then falling ill.
No matter, all was well again.
I had not died, and it was the month of May.
“I think I am strong enough to get up,” I said to her.
“You are no such thing,” she answered.
“In a week, perhaps, you shall sit in a chair, by the window there, to feel your feet.
And later, walk as far as the boudoir.
By the end of the month we may get you below, and sitting out-of-doors.
But we shall see.”
Indeed, my rate of progress was much as she had said.
I have never in my life felt such a ninny as the first time I sat sideways on the bed, and put my feet upon the floor.
The whole room rocked.
Seecombe was one side of me, and John the other, and I as weak as a baby newly born.
“Great heavens, madam, he has grown again,” said Seecombe, with the consternation on his face so great I had to sit down again for laughter.
“You can show me for a freak at Bodmin Fair after all,” I said, and then saw myself in the mirror, gaunt and pale, with the brown beard on my chin, for all the world like an apostle.
“I’ve half a mind,” I said, “to go preaching about the countryside.
Thousands would follow me.
What do you think?” I turned to Rachel.
“I prefer you shaved,” she said gravely.
“Bring me a razor, John,” I said; but when the work was done, and my face bare again, I felt I had lost some sort of dignity and was reduced again to schoolboy status.
Those days of convalescence were pleasant indeed.
Rachel was always with me.
We did not talk much, because I found conversation tired me sooner than anything else, and brought back some shadow of that aching head.
I liked, more than anything, to sit by my open window, and to make diversion Wellington would bring the horses and exercise them round and round the gravel sweep in front of me, like show beasts in a ring.
Then, when my legs were stronger, I walked to the boudoir and our meals were taken there, Rachel waiting upon me and caring for me like a nurse with a child; indeed, I said to her on one occasion, if she was doomed to a sick husband for the rest of her life, she had no one to blame but herself.
She looked at me strangely when I said this, and was about to speak, then paused, and passed onto something else.
I remembered that for some reason or other our marriage had been kept secret from the servants, I think to allow the full twelve months to lapse since Ambrose died before announcing it; perhaps she was afraid I might be indiscreet in front of Seecombe, so I held my tongue.
In two months’ time we could declare it to the world; until then, I would be patient.
Each day I think I loved her more; and she, more gentle and more tender than ever in the past months of winter.
I was amazed, when I came downstairs for the first time and went out into the grounds, to see how much had been achieved about the place during my sickness.
The terrace walk was now completed, and the sunken garden beside it had now been hollowed away to a great depth, and was ready to be paved with stone and the banks faced.
At the moment it yawned, dark and ominous, a deep wide chasm, and the fellows digging there looked up at me, grinning, as I stared down at them from the terrace above.
Tamlyn escorted me with pride to the plantation—Rachel had called in to see his wife, at the nearby cottage—and though the camellias were over, the rhododendrons were still in bloom, and the orange berberis, and leaning to the field below the soft yellow flowers of the laburnum trees hung in clusters, scattering their petals.
“We’ll have to shift them though, another year,” said Tamlyn.
“At the rate they’re growing the branches lean down too far to the field, and the seeds will kill the cattle.”
He reached up to a branch, and where the flowers had fallen the pods were already forming, with the little seeds within.
“There was a fellow the other side of St. Austell who died eating these,” said Tamlyn, and he threw the pod away, over his shoulder.