Sarah Gristwood - The Girl in the Mirror

It didn’t look great, through my bleary eyes. The voyage had been so slow it was almost dark again when we clambered from the big ship into rowing boats, and then up a shingle bank. Broken crates of cargo were all I could see, with piles of reeking oyster shells and a stink like the privy. But there was a large man talking to Jacob, not in the French I’d spoken at home with Maman but in the Flemish I understood just as easily.

‘… safer this way than docking nearer the City. The authorities sympathise with refugees in theory, but the sheer numbers are making them queasy.’ His well-fed face turned to acknowledge me. ‘But I’m sure you’ll soon make a home here,’ he said to Jacob, ‘you and your boy.’

PART I

To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heavens;

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant,

and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal, a time to break down,

and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn,

and a time to dance.

Ecclesiastes 3:2

For it is an old saying. The pot or vessel shall ever savour

or smell of that thing wherewith it is first seasoned.

A Werke for Householders , Richard Whitforde

Spring 1584

‘Are you John or Jan?’ He was eight or nine, older than me, and sturdy with the gap-toothed, scrawny sturdiness of the London streets, but though his feet were apart and his chin thrust forward, and the scabs and the bruises spoke him a fighter, he was looking at me with curiosity rather than hostility.

‘I’m Jeanne, Jeanne Musset,’ I said honestly, pronouncing it the French way my mother had taught me.

‘That’s what I told Diggory. I told him if they called you Jan, it meant you’d come from the flat countries. Is it true they have to dig ditches there to soak up the sea?’

I nodded dumbly, and he seemed to realise I was too shy, or just too uncomprehending, for there to be any more interest in me. But from that moment I had the acceptance, or at least the tolerance, of the boys in the street. The other boys, I should say.

I’d arrived in England in boys’ clothes, and boys’ clothes were the next set bought for me. I’m not sure Jacob ever declared to himself a decision to deceive. Simply, he had no framework in which to imagine the rearing of a girl. Later I understood that he could just about envisage the company of a boy, a younger Jacob. An apprentice, you might say. And I suppose, without any conscious sense of reluctance on my part, I set about becoming what he needed me to be.

That was one thing I learned in the garden where we went on summer evenings and on Sundays. Plants can adapt to the most extraordinary conditions – a geranium forced to bloom in winter, blanched celery grown up without light, or an espaliered pear tree. The garden didn’t belong to us, I learned. Like many others, Jacob rented his little patch of land, just outside the City. Like the others he grew cabbages and radishes, frilled parsley and gooseberries, and from the last tenants we had inherited a fine russet apple and a walnut tree. But he also grew flowers, and rarities when he could get them – new shades of double primrose, or martagon lily.

As a child, I loved our Sundays. ‘Their gardens are the best thing about the English,’ Jacob said grumpily. Even he would warm and soften as he packed the earth around some young seedling with a tenderness he was never able to show me. But he did set me free to run along the rows of twining peas and small jewelled strawberries. There was a seat made of packed earth and turves, which he planted with low growing periwinkle, and sometimes, if he were working late, he’d perch me there when I got drowsy. I was allowed to trample the heaps of good-smelling cuttings, of hyssop or thyme or rosemary; to pinch the dead heads off the gillyflowers, and stick my fingers into the foxglove bells.

‘Watch out for the bees,’ the fat market-women would tell me, smilingly, and I’d listen to the humming from the skeps on the wall, before I ran off again to chase the butterflies. Outside, in the street, I’d seen little girls playing with scraps of cloth on sticks, or twisting handfuls of straw into dollies. But in the garden there were no girls or boys. There was just pretty.

I’d pick snails and caterpillars off the leaves, and fetch water in a copper pot from the well that served the gardens. I began to notice that different plants grew in different ways, and sometimes, if I sat near Jacob’s feet of an evening when he read his gardening books, he would pass them over to me. Once I saw that he was looking down at me, oddly. ‘Your mother loved gardens, too,’ he said quietly.

I remembered it, because it was so rarely either of us spoke of the past, or of my family. It was as if a kind of shyness held us both in thrall. Greedily, silently, over the years I hoarded every tiny detail Jacob did let slip, and secretly, in my mind later, I would add another minute piece to the jigsaw puzzle of my family.

Sometimes, in our garden, he’d grumble that in this country the grass grew so lush it choked all the flowers, and as he set me to pull up the fat emerald clumps, I fancied I could remember a shorter, spikier turf under my fingers, and a mead where the flowers shone out more brightly. Once, wishing perhaps to praise me for picking out the Latin name of some strange flower, he said it would have made my father happy.

As I grew older, just occasionally, he’d tell me stories from his own past – or that part of it which touched on the plants and the gardens. That book I had felt on board the ship was his greatest treasure – a hortus siccus , a whole garden of dried plants arranged according to their form, the Continental way. I learned that the great adventure of our age lay in understanding the way a weed grew, just as much as in travelling over the sea. This was one field where we of the new religion led the way, he told me proudly. He’d studied botany at the great university of Montpellier in the south of France, where many fled from persecution in the north. Though at first I understood little of what he told me about it, gradually the names of the men became familiar to me – Andrea Cesalpino (‘He works for the Pope now. Pity, a pity …’); Charles de l’Écluse, who ran the emperor’s botanic garden in Vienna, with his elegance and his generosity; Matthias de l’Obel with his orderly mind, classifying plants by the shape of their leaves and the way they grew from the stem or the tree. I liked it, when Jacob showed me how that was done. There was something about the sureness of it that pleased me.

Several of the great plantsmen were living in London now: Master de l’Obel visited us from time to time, and he and Jacob would chew over the plants and gardens they had seen until they came alive in my memory, too. They seemed to avoid anything more personal, however intently I might listen for it. Flemish gardens had more rare plants than any in Europe, Master de l’Obel said once, ‘But who can live in a land watered by blood?’ Then, catching me listening, he quickly changed the subject.

Jacob knew several of the other plant collectors here – James Garrett, the Huguenot apothecary, and Master Garth, whose connections with the southern Americas brought many rarities his way. They even passed some business to Jacob, but he was too uncompromising a man to fit for long into that or any other community. The few people who really made up my world came to me in other ways. There were the Hills, who rented the bigger patch of land beside ours, with cherry trees standing sentinel in the rows of herbs, and a pool and, most magical of all, a curved shape of willow like a tiny house with a vine growing all over it, and bunches of hard little grapes like beads hanging from the ceiling. They had a daughter – fourteen, almost grown up – who told me how to use the sops-in-wine and helped me play games with the cockleshells that edged the border. Master Hill was well to do, and though occasionally he grumbled his family would bankrupt him some day, more often he liked to boast that they had a garden that would do for a fine lady. Master Hill was a man of connections, Jacob said, and once he bought his wife a present that made me stare at it, round-eyed: the shape of a cocklolly bird, made all from living rosemary.