I left the rest house and found Johnny waiting for me by the riverbank a few miles to the south. He was impatient to see a house we had glimpsed several days earlier; his eyes were narrowed in a frown and he did not seem to want to hear about my strange new neighbour. When we found the house, it was smaller than I had remembered it: a compact whitewashed cube, its only ornamentation a pair of pilasters on its façade. It appeared abandoned, and we did not have any trouble pushing the heavy wooden doors open. The space inside seemed far too large for the shell that contained it; it swelled up above us in the one enormous room that made up the front portion of the house. It contained no upper floors: when I lifted my head to look at the ceiling I could barely make out the rafters in the inky darkness above me. Beyond that initial cavern a door led into a small courtyard overlooked on all sides by a further building concealed behind the unprepossessing exterior we had frowned at from the street. Instantly I imagined that courtyard filled with heavy earthenware pots containing ferns and goldfish; I saw the shutters painted eau de Nil green; I heard the haphazard clanging of saucepans and smelled the aroma of pungent curries. We clambered up the steep narrow stairs and ran through each of the empty rooms, flinging open the shutters to let in the light. One of the smaller rooms reminded me of my bedroom at Hemscott, its low ceiling instantly recalling the lonely sanctuary of my childhood. I looked out the window. The great silty river meandered gently by, so slowly it barely appeared to move at all. An ancient tree, its massive trunk enrobed in a tangle of epiphytic roots, hung thickly over the water beside a frail pontoon that protruded into the river. Small cherubic children swung naked from the thick hanging vines and splashed into the water below; their laughter filled the still morning and made me inexplicably sad. When Johnny came into the room he found me standing at the window, blinking into the distance. He asked if I was alright.
I nodded and said, “This is it. This is home for you.”
ARTEMISIA ABSINTHIUM, commonly known as wormwood, is a hardy perennial with feathery silver-green leaves. It thrives in a variety of garden conditions, its fine foliage providing useful contrast to broader, darker leaves in mixed borders such as those we had at Hemscott. Even after the garden began its descent into dilapidation, the artemisia remained vigorous, its pale green glowing amidst the creeping, darkened tangle around it. It is also reputed to have hallucinogenic properties, and is a principal ingredient in the making of absinthe. One of its qualities stands out over the others: its bitterness. Simply crush a leaf and place it on your tongue and its acridity will be evident. The ill effects of wormwood have assumed legendary status, enshrined in no less a work than the Bible: the end of the world will, according to the simply divine St. John, be announced by seven angels. For those of you lucky enough to have escaped a religious education, you need only know that the third of these angels causes a great star to fall from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers and upon the fountains of waters; and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and the third part of the waters became wormwood and many men died of the waters because they were bitter.
