Judith is making garlands of holly, rosemary and bay, and Susanna has come to join her.
‘It will soon be St Thomas’s Eve,’ I heard Judith say to her sister.
Susanna laughed. ‘Will you put a green garland under your pillow to dream who might be your husband?’
Judith flushed, and looked down at the garlands. ‘I might. Did you dream of Dr Hall before he wooed you?’
‘I had good conversation with him the many times he dined with our family before he asked for me,’ said Susanna. ‘I knew him to be a man of sense and wit.’
‘But what of love?’ asked Judith.
‘Love comes with sense and wit and kindness,’ said Susanna, smiling to show that she had all these with Dr Hall.
But love can come with trickery as well.
‘Anne’s brother tells me nay,’ I told my father, all those years ago.
Father sat back in his cushioned chair, while I stood by on the hearth. ‘I had thought he might. For surely others have offered for her, with a rich dowry such as hers.’
‘But why does he refuse, sir?’
Father snorted. ‘Because while Anne is unmarried, he keeps both her fields for himself and her services as his servant. Do you think that wife of his could keep house as well as Anne? Her godfather Edmund says she makes the best small beer in the county.’
‘Then I have failed, sir, like the others.’
‘Not at all. You must take matters into your own hands, son. Or rather your codpiece.’
‘I . . . I do not understand, sir.’
I had already been drafting an advertisement to offer myself as a tutor, as Judyth had suggested; had looked at the beech tree, now shedding its autumn leaves, and dreamt of writing a poem tonight for her to find there.
‘If Anne is with child,’ my father said, ‘then she must marry you.’
He began to sing a song I had heard many times in the tavern, though had not thought to hear in our hall.
‘Each evening is Saint Valentine’s Day,
When a lad will find a time,
Through window or through door
To be a Valentine.
Let in the maid that out a maid
Was never maid no more
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do it if they get a chance;
By lust, they are to blame.
Said she, “Before you got me into bed,
You promised me to wed.”
He answers, “So would I have done, by yonder sun,
If you hadn’t come to my bed.”’
‘You would have me . . .’
‘It is for the girl’s own good. To speak frankly, lad, her brother will not let her go else.’
‘But what if she says nay?’
But even as I thought it, I remembered Anne’s face: the heaviness of defeat that lay there, the hope when she looked at me. Anne would not refuse me.
My father looked once more at the fire. ‘She has a dowry and is therefore to be wooed; she is a woman and therefore to be won.’
Dinner: an ox tongue, roasted the French way; boiled mutton with rice; roast goose with sauce of spiced livers; a saffron broth with greens; parsnips with mustard sauce; pickled broccoli; cheese pudding spiced with caraway and nutmeg; a pudding of nectarines that had been dried, with cinnamon and nutmeg; cheese; spiced butter; biscuits. The new wine continues good.
Bowels and waters: steady.