The Girl Green as Elderflower (16 page)

But kindly Kit, forgiving the hungry child his robber’s manners, came to them and showed them where the beans were to be found. And then, chattering in their unknown tongue, they eagerly devoured them, and by signs asked for more. And for a long time they nourished themselves with beans entirely.

Concerning this the priest had many doubts, for beans are condemned by Pythagoras, and are thought by some to contain departed souls. And as Bartholomew the Englishman has written: ‘By oft use thereof the wits are dulled and they cause many dreams.’ But the children, growing by degrees stronger and ceasing to bewail their outcast condition, became accustomed to eat whatever was set before them, and by signs made the priest understand that until then they had refused other food only because of its strangeness, and from fear that it would poison them. But once their trust in Kit was firm, they would accept any dish from her hand; and from her their trust was extended to all the people of the manor, and they became happy, hearty children. But the boy was often shaken by fits of passion, and the soldier, who was growing to love him, said: ‘Out of this bean will sprout a terrible knight.’

The lady’s time drew near, and her son, a boy of nine years, came to visit the manor from the bishop’s household where he was being schooled. And being so young, and vain of his little learning, as well as charmed by the pointed face and strange eyes of the green girl, he made a doggerel rhyme about her in Latin, calling her Viridia. And he sang it to his mother’s harp.

By which he meant, or wished to mean:

In due course the lady was delivered of a daughter, whom the knight welcomed with a good grace, though he had prayed for a boy, for his son Mark, he felt sure, was destined for the clergy or the court, and he longed for a little soldier. At the baptism of the child, whose name was Lucy, the green children watched intently, and the girl, pointing at the baby and at Mark, and then at herself and the green boy, made it understood that they too were brother and sister.

After that baptism the priest took to spending much time with the children, and began to teach the boy his letters, from a feeling that he might in this way come to have some knowledge of their language. The boy was no diligent scholar, having an adoration for horses and hawks, but the girl, very strangely for a female, took to learning with the ardour of a clerk, and soon not only wrote fairly, copying both English and Latin, but acquired a knowledge of our tongue, which she spoke with sometimes comical grammar, but in a clear precise accent like a lady.

So through her the priest instructed the boy in the tenets of our faith, and in time both were regenerated by the holy waters of baptism. The priest had wished to name them Barbara and Peregrine: each name, as he said, meaning ‘stranger’. But because of the boy Mark’s rhyme, the girl had long been called either Amabel or Mirabel, and at the lady’s insistence both names were given to her at the font. As for the boy, the knight said that he was made to be a warrior, and must carry the name of the most glorious and holy of warriors, and he was therefore baptized Michael.

But not long afterwards the boy began to dwindle and pine, and when he grew too weak to walk was laid in a truckle bed in the hall, where at meal times his green eyes watched the company wistfully. He could eat little, though kind Kit brought him, in his own silver-rimmed mazer, many delicacies easy to stomach. The priest and the lady were frequently with him, and his sister always, and just as often the lame knight’s chair was beside the bed. The two never spoke, but the soldier would look with a yearning helplessness into the child’s eyes, in which there was more blue than formerly.

There came an evening when the soldier took his usual place, carrying with him a handful of beans which he himself had gathered in the moonlit garden. The child accepted them with a wan smile, and after swallowing one or two, said in English the word: ‘Grace.’

Then a change came over his face, and reaching out he took the stick which leaned against the knight’s leg, and gazed long at the face which was carved on it. And to himself he murmured one word in his own tongue.

‘Amabel,’ said the soldier, ‘what does he say?’

The boy murmured again, and the girl said, her face thin with dread: ‘He says: “Green.” He says: “Home.” He says: “Green home.”’

The boy’s green-blue eyes, fixed on the carved face, slowly closed. With his free hand he touched the knight’s crippled knee, and then he died.

The soldier and the girl, leaving him to the priest and the woman, went out into the garden. And under the stars and the moon, looking up, the knight said: ‘There, perhaps, he goes, into that awful vastness, where the warrior-archangel will receive him with loving-kindness and guide him to his green home.’

As a star fell, the girl, who had been disturbingly still, burst into a passion of tears. The soldier, with tears on his own lean cheeks, clutched her to him, and stroking her hair, which in the moonlight was blonde, said: ‘Oh Amabel, oh little Mirabel. There are more green homes than one.’

Seven years passed. The girl, growing perfect in our tongue, also most surprisingly showed herself at fourteen very skilled in music, and a scholar the equal of any abbess in the land. The priest somewhat ruefully admitted her his superior. Yet she was no abbess in the making, but chambermaid to the lady and nursemaid to her little daughter, and as a foundling and a stranger there was no girl or man on the manor who did not think her of lower station.

Among the youths of the manor was one Robin, a dark lad of pleasing and humorous countenance, foster-brother to the knight’s son Mark. For months he had watched the girl with an admiration in which there was something curious and sly. And one day in late May he said to her: ‘Mirabel, you used to be partial to beans. Shouldn’t you like to come with me and smell the beanfield in flower?’

When they came to the beanfield, the sweetness of it was an intoxication to the girl, and she stood among the flowers with her elfin face rapt, as if ecstatic with wine. Her skin, by that time, was between green and white, as at that moment the elderflower was. Her fair hair, though streaked with green, had turned lightest blonde, and her eyes were a confusion of green and hazel.

The boy Robin, with a secretive grin, loosened the drawstring of his linen breeches, and said: ‘Hey, Mirabel, ever seen one of these?’

The girl’s beautiful eyes showed shock, and some disgust. But the boy, quite gently yet with his customary indifference, simply clasped her and laid her down among the beanflowers.

Long afterwards, Robin told everything to a crony. ‘She have all the clothes off me,’ he said. ‘It was like she want to swallow me whole. She keep calling out in her foreign lingo. And she say: “Oh, you’re warm,” she say, “you’re mine.” She say: “Robin, love me, love me.” She say: “Oh, I was alone.” When I couldn’t do no more, she just hold me like a baby, and she say: “You’re mine,” she say “you’re mine.”’

For weeks after that the green girl and the dark boy were lovers. But because of her strange intensity, or because, more likely, of a coolness in his own nature, he began to avoid her, and took up with Margery, she who was the laughing-stock of the dairy because, for beauty’s sake, she had been seen to wash herself in milk. For a long time thereafter the green girl seemed in her inscrutable way to mourn. But some yearning had been awakened in her by the lad’s body, and when cheerfulness returned she became (as the knight afterwards told the Lord Abbot)
nimium lasciva et petulans
, that is, very lascivious and wanton.

One day the girl came upon Roger, the man who had been lord of the harvest when she and her brother were discovered, alone in a wood, sitting on a log to take his noonday bread and beer. She seated herself beside him, and accepted some beer. At last the man broke his silence to ask a question which had been in his mind for nearly eight years. ‘Tell me straight, gal, where was you and young Mikey from?’

Without answering, the girl took the knife from his waist, and choosing a piece of rotten wood began very skilfully to carve. When she had finished, she showed the man her work.

‘Oh-ah,’ said Roger. ‘A woman, and up the stick.’

The rude figure was indeed of a grinning woman, large-breasted and hugely pregnant.

‘That,’ the girl said, ‘is our goddess. We were children of the flint-mines. Day after day, year after year, century after century, we crawled along the galleries of our mines, loosening flints with our picks made from the antlers of red deer. I do not understand our life. I do not understand how we came here. But suddenly we found ourselves in that pit, in the blinding sun and stunning heat, and could discover no hole leading back to the gallery. And so we lay there weeping, until seized away.’

‘I do believe,’ said Roger, ‘that you might be talking about Grime’s Graves.’

‘I have never heard that name,’ the girl said. ‘I remember only our mines and galleries, and our goddess, before whose figure carved in chalk a little lamp burned.’

‘And what about your god?’ asked Roger, and sniggered. ‘She didn’t get that way on her own, if I recall the facts of life.’

The girl took up the knife again, and turning aside, her long greenish-fair hair dangling, began to carve once more. When she had finished, she held out to Roger a phallus, the glans and testicles painstakingly distinct.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is our god.’

‘Something tell me,’ said Roger, ‘I sin him before. Yes, and not so very far from here.’

For answer the girl pulled the drawstring of his breeches.

Afterwards she said, or pleaded: ‘Roger, you love me?’

‘Love?’ said the taciturn man. ‘Why, gal, that int one of my words. But,’ he said, giving her a slap on the rump, ‘I’ll say this for you, you int a bad little old poke.’

The girl liked to haunt the woods and the heaths, and in another wood one day the soldier, walking for exercise of his leg, found her lying among last year’s leaves. Over her head an elderbush, its flowers in their last fragile fullness, smelled overpoweringly heavy.

‘Mirabel,’ he said, with the help of his stick and with a little difficulty sitting beside her, ‘Mirabel, you are no longer a green girl. You are the fairest and whitest of girls, as white as elderflower.’

The girl said nothing, but taking the knight’s stick she gazed intently at the carved face, as the dying boy had done, a memory which softened the melancholy soldier.

‘This,’ she said, ‘is our god.’

‘A strange god,’ said the knight. ‘One would say a cruel one.’

‘He is,’ said the girl, ‘the bringer into being, and the destroyer. He is neither cruel nor merciful, but dances for joy at the variousness of everything that is.’

‘Then, Mirabel,’ said the knight, ‘having said so much, you may tell me now from where you and Michael came.’

The girl thought, and taking his hand, once so sunburned and strong, now so thin, she said: ‘I shall tell you.

‘We are people,’ she said, ‘of the land of the Antipodes, where, years ago, a man from your world made a visit. He was a swineherd of Derbyshire, and had lost a sow of great value, about to farrow down. In dismay at the thought of the steward’s anger, he followed it to a certain cave near the Peak, which is called in the British tongue
With Guint
, and in English the Devil’s Arse, because of a violent wind which blows from it continually. Overcoming his fear, the swineherd traced the swine into the cave, and as at that time it was free of wind, he followed long and long through the darkness. At last he came upon a lighted place, and from there emerged into a fair land of spacious fields, where he found reapers harvesting the ripe corn, and among the hanging ears of corn recognized his sow, which had brought forth her litter.

‘Marvelling and congratulating himself on this event, the swineherd spoke for a time with the chief man of our land, letting him know what had occurred. And then, taking a joyful leave, he returned with his charges into the darkness of the cave.

‘Emerging from its mouth, fresh from the harvest fields of the Antipodes, he was amazed to find that in Derbyshire winter frosts persisted everywhere. And some have said that the winter sun is not the real sun, but as it were a deputy. But of this I understand nothing, though of the swineherd’s visit I have often heard, but only know that Michael and I, straying into a cave and wandering far through the darkness, found ourselves at length not in Derbyshire but in Suffolk, in great affright and with mourning for our land which will never see us again.’

‘Poor child,’ said the knight, and stroked her elder-soft hair. ‘But mourn no more, my pretty.’

The girl bent her head to kiss his other hand, and then looked at him with eyes in which there was only one meaning.

Long afterwards, kneeling beside his lean body, she kissed his scarred and twisted leg (for for her pleasure he had made himself naked as a worm), and cried: ‘Oh my fair love, oh my warm, wounded love.’

And that was not the last time that the knight and the girl had such commerce. But a sort of shame was on him, because of his wife and because the girl, so young, had grown up in his household. So ever afterwards there was in company a constraint between them, and on some evenings in the hall the girl would look at him with leaf-shaped eyes in which there was a little hurt, but more compassion.

In the hall one winter night, seated with the priest before the fire, the girl took up the lady’s harp and sang a hymn, beginning:

Which is in English: