In the Garden of Iden (12 page)

N
EXT MORNING I
packed my field kit, though rain still sheeted down the leaded windows. We had all accepted the fact that it wasn’t ever going to stop, but I hadn’t let myself think about having to work in it.

Sir Walter was seated at the long table in the great hall when we came down; he was breaking his fast on buttered eggs and fried beefsteak. Nicholas sat opposite him, though he was not eating: they seemed to be having an argument. Nicholas’s fists were clenched, making the knuckles white. Sir Walter’s face was red, and his eyes protruded slightly. They fell silent as we entered the room.

“Good morrow, good friends!” cried Joseph easily. “And is this the morning meal in England? The famous English beef?” His gaze took in the eggs, fatty beef, and butter, and Nefer and I could hear him ticking as he evaluated what the cholesterol was doing to Sir Walter’s arteries.

“It is even so.” Sir Walter turned glaring from Nicholas. “Shall I order another mess of eggs fried, Doctor Ruy? Or there is excellent venison pasty, cold—”

“I think not.” Joseph smiled. “Our Spanish stomachs are not yet accustomed to English abundance. We eat but sparingly before the midday. Perhaps a little of your English small beer and plain barley bread? What say you, ladies?”

I was dismayed. No coffee? Of course not. Not even any tea, yet. Orange juice?

“There were excellent oranges in your garden,” I ventured, curtseying. “I would be most honored, gentle sir, and most grateful, kind sir, to taste of one.”

“Fair lady, what you will! You shall have a paste or conserve of orange, or perhaps a dish of cloves and marchpane kneaded up with peel of orange, or a dish made up with oranges boiled with parsnips—”

Joseph was shaking his head at me. “Even a plain orange, simple of itself, please you,” I stammered.

“
Raw
?” Sir Walter looked incredulous.

“At some better time, daughter, when good Sir Walter need not send his poor servants out into the rain for such a trifle,” reproved Joseph.

“To be sure, my father. Sir Walter, I pray you excuse my inconsideration.” Bright pink with mortification, I curtseyed again and sat down. When I raised my eyes, I found myself looking straight into the cold stare of Nicholas Harpole. I lowered my eyes hastily.

“No, no, we will have a new custom now, a dish of fruit to the table,” Sir Walter said gallantly. “There are orange groves in Seville, as I hear tell. Are there oranges in the New World?”

“No, my friend, the fruit there is of a different sort from our accustomed fruit,” Joseph told him. “There is, for example, the
aboccado
, which doth resemble your English pear, save that …” Blah blah blah. I sat there burning with embarrassment. After a while I sneaked a look at Master Harpole. He was still looking at me.

Servants brought in our bread and beer, and I picked at mine, still preoccupied with being a self-conscious teenager. Joseph talked on and on, too boring for words; then, suddenly, there was light in the room, as though God had opened an eye and looked in the window. It took us all a moment to realize that it was the sun.

“Why, look you, the rain hath ended,” remarked Sir Walter. “Lady Rose shall have her orange at last, shall she not? And see my garden at its best to boot! Pray you, Nicholas, bear her company and show her what oranges there are.”

Nicholas rose to obey, and so did I, groping for my field kit. And so did Nefer, like the good duenna she was supposed to be. “Doña Marguerita!” Joseph spoke up. “By your leave, remain with me. I would discourse with you privily concerning certain things.”

She gave him a narrow look and sat down.

“Lady.” Nicholas gestured toward the doorway. In silence he led me from the house and out into the garden.

There were still clouds breaking up and rolling back, but most of the sky was blue. The difference was breathtaking. England seemed three times bigger. The garden was, impossibly, more green; the beech trunks shone like bronze. Somewhere near us a river rushed and chattered. Birds cried out. England was aggressively alive, to the point of being intimidating.

By the time we reached the orange tree, the wet grass had soaked our shoes. Nicholas squelched up to the tree and assumed his tour-guide stance.

“The orange, Lady,” he told me. I looked for a ripe one.

“Truly I did not think to put you to trouble,” I murmured. “I minded not where I was. In Spain it is our custom to have fruit at breakfast.”

“Your Spain is not our England,” said Nicholas.

“That’s true too. I pray you excuse me.”

“What needs your excuse? Sir Walter has bid you make free with his oranges. Take his oranges therefore and so make an end of it, Madam.”

Green leaves dripped on me. He stood so perfectly still, with such composure, and his voice was so beautiful saying such cold things. I pulled an orange down and showered us both with late rain. He did not even flinch, but watched distantly as I dug my thumbs into the peel and tore the orange into sections. It did not want to be peeled. Juice dripped on my palm, ran stickily down my wrist. “Will you have any?” I held out a piece, vain social gambit.

Without thinking he reached to take the fruit from my hand; then halted and jerked away, with an odd expression in his eyes. He took a full pace backward from me.

I gaped at him. Then I understood. Judeo-Christian mythology, right? Adam and Eve in the Garden, primal woman as tempter to sin. What
subtle
symbolism. Now I hated him.

“Thou ill-mannered and arrogant man!” I exploded. “Thinkest I have read no Scripture and will not see the insult in thy refusal?” I switched to Greek. “And have you read the Gospels in Greek, as I have, uncivil one?” I switched to Aramaic. “Let me tell you, young lord, this is not Eden and you are not Adam but rather Lucifer himself, you are so full of pride, so do not compare
me
to Eve!” And to Hebrew: “Shame on you! I am a stranger come into your country and have done you no wrong.” And to Italian: “If you hate the Pope, you may write him an insulting letter for all I care, but I assure you he is not hiding in my skirts!” And to German: “Now I wish earnestly I were again in Spain, for though God knows it is a land of monstrous cruelty, yet folk there have good manners!”

Of course I had to spoil the effect by flinging the orange at him too. He sidestepped it neatly without appearing to notice. The orange sailed out of sight and landed with a soft thump somewhere in the grass.

“I’m sorry,” I said at once, in English again. He stared at me a second longer before he recovered himself, setting his scholar’s biretta straight on his lank hair.

“Well, I am cast down. The point is taken, Lady. You speak eight languages.”

“More,” I said resentfully.

“Is it even so? Well, well, there’s a marvel. And canst quote Scripture too!” He said it snidely enough, but he came a step closer.

“Folk have tongues to proclaim truth in Spain as well as elsewhere,” I said. “But they dare not. Nor would you, señor, if you were there, lest the Inquisidors come for
you
. And if once you learned a lesson of silence from them, you would not soon forget it.”

I was pale and shaking. The adrenaline rush, of course, but it was effective. He came close and peered into my eyes. “Now, I truly crave your pardon,” he said abruptly. “But if you do not love your Inquisition in Spain, you may imagine how much the less we wish to see it here in England.”

“Pray to God, Master Harpole, that you never have such cause to hate it as I do,” I said. There. Would the old trump card work?

It did. His hostility was deflected. He took my hand in his own and squeezed it. His hand was warm.

“Well, what a fool I am,” he said. “Come you, Lady. Another orange, and shall we walk this garden whiles the sun doth shine? What would you see here?”

I swallowed hard. “I would see Julius Caesar’s holly bush again,” I told him.

He led me straight to the miracle hedge. I set down my field kit (designed to look like a quaint wicker basket) and drew out my holo camera (designed to look like a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles). I held them up to my eyes and paced slowly along the hedge, shooting the images, grateful for the work to calm my nerves. Nicholas leaned against a tree, watching me.

“Had you your learning from your father?” he inquired at last.

“I had.” I broke off a leaf and held it up to the lens, turning it slowly. “He is a doctor, as you know, and a very learned man. I am his only child, wherefore he hath taught me much.”

“Ah.” Harpole nodded. I groped for my knife (designed to look like a knife) and cut a whole sprig to display for the imager.

“He hath many books, on divers dangerous subjects, which, were they found, he would be burned for a heretic at least,” I ventured. Well, it was true. “And, sorrow to tell, he was for some while in the dungeons of the Inquisition.” Also true.

“I am sorry to hear it.”

“They did not murder him, praise God; but he came from that place a ruined man,” I improvised.

“He hath healed himself well, then. He looketh not old,” remarked Nicholas.

“That is thanks to a certain Greek physick he hath learned of. I promise you, sir, were it not for that, he’d be in his grave now this many a year.” Certainly true again. “There was great learning in Spain once, sir, though none would know now.”

He just nodded.

“You have read your Galen and Averroës, then,” he said. Was he setting me a trap?

“Yea, and my Avicenna too, howbeit the Moors are not so well regarded as formerly.” Under guise of examining the hedge’s roots I thrust a soil corer in for a sample. I wrapped it with the holly branch and folded it into the basket. Not two feet away I spied a beautiful little specimen of
Calendula albans
and pounced on it, holo camera at the ready. Nicholas observed me closely.

“You see this for what it is, then,” he remarked with gloomy satisfaction. “A rarer thing than ever the old knight’s Portingale orange, but because it is no more than a little pale flower, he regards it but scant.”

“For the light shineth in the darkness, and darkness comprehendeth it not,” I quoted smugly. “John, chapter one, verse five. Tell me,” and I slipped into Latin for clarity, “where does Sir Walter find these unusual plants?”

“He collected some of them himself, when he was a young man.” Nicholas matched me verb for verb easily. “And now he has a standing offer out in this part of the country for anything rare or strange. The result is that men come continually to his gate with two-headed calves, or with common plants that have been altered to make them look rare. One man brought a cherry tree with tin bells fastened to its branches with wire and tried to make us believe they were the natural fruit of the tree. Sometimes Sir Walter has been deceived and paid money to a charlatan. Still, sometimes one will come bearing a true wonder for sale: and then the silly old man buys it out of habit, without true understanding of what he has bought. So he bought this flower.”

“Do you make a study of botany too?” My heart beat faster.

“No. But I know enough to discern that a white marigold is a marvel, whereas a unicorn is a lie.”

“What is this unicorn? I have heard it spoken of three times now. I would pay money myself to see it.”

He smiled contemptuously, but on him it looked good, and at least the contempt wasn’t directed at me now. “Why, you may see it for yourself.” He extended his right hand and took mine. “Come, Lady, and do not fear. He is a tame beast.”

Only slowly I let go of his hand. We walked on through that garden, past banks of flowers lifting their unbelieving heads to the sun, past beds laid out in patterns intricate as Morisco tiles. Down a lane between clipped privet hedges we caught a glimpse of little white flanks. Nicholas flung out his arms and announced: “The unicorn of Hind!”

The tail end backed out of the marjoram knot the animal was destroying, and a little head appeared, to look at us inquiringly.

“Ay!” I exclaimed, and bent down to stare. It thought I had a treat for it and came trotting up to see.

“Don’t tremble, Lady. It will do you no harm,” said Nicholas with a straight face.

“He’s a goat.” I examined him. He was as white as milk, his tiny hooves had been gilded, and some cruel surgery had been done to his horn buds before they had sprouted, and some crueler binding had fused them into one stubby twisting spike. But he was a sweet and trusting little goat all the same.

“A goat!” Nicholas held up his hands. “Can this be true?”

“Señor.” I looked up at him. “I was born in Spain. I know a goat when I see one.”

He just folded his hands.

“Go, goat.” I swatted the unicorn’s flank, and he ran off to do further damage to the herbs. “And yet, strange to tell, there is such a thing as a unicorn.”

“Surely not!”

“Truly, but it looks nothing like this. A big creature, rude and ugly. It is called in the Greek,
rhinoceros
.”

He nodded, sounding it out. “Unfortunate. Sir Walter would not be pleased to discover that he paid twenty pounds eightpence for a goat.”

“Why tell him? The worthy Erasmus says, in his
Praise of Folly
, that no man is so happy as he who lives under an illusion.”

“Very true.” Nicholas’s eyes lit up. “You have read Erasmus? What do you think of his
Ichtuophagia?
”

Thank God, thank God I’d accessed that Strongly Suggested column. “I think it is outrageous. All the same, I agree with what he says,” I replied with perfect composure.

“So you admit that it is unnecessary to salvation to eat fish on fast days?”

“Oh, señor, really, what nonsense.”

“Even if the Pope commands it?” he pressed.

“Particularly so. Do you imagine God cares what we have for dinner? How can one worship when religion is so ridiculous?”

He opened his mouth to speak, then paused. “You have no faith, then,” he said after a moment. There was a silence while we considered each other. “I have an excellent book I would like you to read,” he said at last.

“Ah! He is going to convert me to the Church of England!” I exclaimed.