es were coloured, and she could tell stories, and with a fine comb she would scratch the lice out of his head when they became troublesome. But at other times she was hateful, bustling after him and saying: ‘Jackie, do this! Jackie, do that! Jackie, Jackie! Where’s my little page?’ Then he would have to help her set up her loom or pound ginger or pick over feathers for pillows, or she would send him out to collect dew for a facewash; for being a townswoman she was full of such notions. And her stories, after all, were not worth much. Though they were of different places they were all about herself; and wherever she had gone she had always been the same Pernelle, cleverer and more meritorious than anyone else. If she spoke of anyone else, it was always her three nephews, who were such fine brisk boys, no bookworms. You would never see them with their eyes reddened by crying over grammar.
‘Grammar, grammar! Who’s the better for grammar? The Apostles had none.’
‘Saint Paul was a scholar,’ said Ursula.
‘So they say. But he was never Pope. That was for Saint Peter who was only a fisherman. Saint Paul’s grammar never hoisted him so far.’
She plunged her smooth hand into the belly of a goose.
‘If you had seen as much of the world as I have you wouldn’t care to have the priest stuffing your boy with grammar. All this hickorum-hackorum never filled a belly yet. Look at my brother-in-law the armourer. He can neither read nor write but he can afford to pay two clerks to keep his accounts for him, and in his house there are three beds, one of green serge, one of russet, and one of a most beautiful blue. The abbess of Shaftesbury hasn’t finer beds. But plenty of poor honest souls lie on rotten straw while these abbots and abbesses loll on goosedown, thinking over their Latin. Let them work, I say! Let them earn a living as other people do! Many’s the day my brother-in-law has worked twelve hours at a stretch, forging link after link till the eyes stood out of his head. Quite right, too! We are put into the world to labour. Let them labour like the blessed Apostles, that’s what I say. And if your Jackie were my Jackie I’d take him from those books and send him off with the masons.’
Jackie’s heart assented to these last words. As learning went on it became less agreeable. There were fewer discoveries in it, it lengthened out like a midday road. Sir Ralph had ceased to teach him what he could repeat to the astonishment of others. There were no more anecdotes of the basilisk, the swallow curing her blindness, the virtues of precious stones. Instead, it was all proportions and properties, things impossible to remember. And there sat Sir Ralph, plucking at his lower lip, brooding some thought of his own, or endlessly, scornfully patient.
‘The Proportion of Diapente, I said. What is the Proportion of Diapente? Pooh, you will never learn! And why should you?’