John Saturnall's Feast Read Online Free

large leather-bound book was propped open.
    John knew the pages from stolen glimpses: the drawings of fruits, trees, flowers, roots and leaves, the blocks of forbidding-looking writing. That was as close as he was permitted. She put it away when the women came calling. Now, at John's glance, she reached to close the covers.
    She had been up the slope, he knew. Her bulging collecting bag leaned against the wall. He breathed in carefully and smelled the fruits of her latest labours: fresh elder, henbane, dead-nettle and redwort . . . All familiar. But another smell filtered through the coarse mesh of the sacking, teasing him with a flowery scent. Absent-mindedly, he reached back to touch the bump on his head.
    ‘They beat you again, didn't they?’
    She always knew. He looked up to find her staring then shook his head mutely, bracing himself for the interrogation. But as he squirmed under her gaze, a fat plume of smoke billowed up and his mother began to cough. She covered her mouth to protect the liquor in the cauldron and leaned with one arm braced against the hearth while the spasms racked her frame. John snatched up the jug and hurried outside.
    She was past thirty years. ‘Mother Susan’ was how the night-time callers at the hut called her. Or ‘Goodwoman Susan’ when the rear-pew women roused her from sleep. They had used to call in the daytime, handing over their penny loaves for her remedies, offering measures of barley if she would dispense her advice or a grimy coin if she threw on her cloak and followed them. She took promises if they had nothing better. Now they crept up the path after dusk with their offerings and tapped softly on the door. He watched the anxious faces enter. Then the hushed talk began: of aches and bleedings and crampings, waters breaking or not, babies turning or twisting, cauls too thin or too thick, or torn, or lost in the women's labyrinthine bodies.
    They blessed her when her potions eased their labour-pangs. Or when her hands held up a wailing infant. They sent her back with collops of dried bacon or lengths of dimity from which his mother made his clothes. But they crossed themselves too, John knew. Behind her back they called her different names. She roamed the village at night with her covered basket, they told their children. She'd tie a noose round their guts with her stringy black hair. Mother Susan brought them into life, they said. But Ridder Sue could make them disappear. Like a witch.
    John dipped the jug in the trough behind the hut and hurried back. His mother drank. When the coughing fit calmed, she reached for her bag. John watched her pull out a handful of thick green stems and snap them with a twist of her wrists. The tang of fresh elder sap cut through the smoke.
    Newly cut branches kept away flies, John knew. Boiled, their liquor loosened the bowels. Judas hanged himself-from an elder, Old Holy had told them in one of his lessons. And the sticks made blowguns. You had to poke out the pith.
    John's mother dropped shoots into the kettle set within the cauldron, took a ladle and stirred, her ladle drawing slow figure-of-eights in the steaming liquid. A measure of water followed and a little of the liquor from one of her jars.
    It took the blink of an eye to taint a liquor, she had taught him. Snapping a root too short or boiling it too long; a pinch too little or a peck too much; gathering bulbs beneath a waning moon or on the wrong days in the year. The liquid in her kettle would be strained and cooled then mixed or left pure. Then she would pour it off to join the stoppered jars which stood in neat rows beside the chest: her decoctions, simples, liquors and potions.
    Moonlight was glowing through the window-cloths by the time his mother shook the drips off her ladle and reached for their supper-pan. From the Starling cottage below, Jake and Mercy's arguing voices drifted up. The back log shifted and sparks flew up the chimney. Sitting against the wall, John waited for