Crocus Hour by Charlotte Randall

Author:Charlotte Randall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742288376
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2009-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

The morning after our trip to the west, we took up our usual positions on the stone seat in the walk. There was already a very warm and quite strong breeze blowing from the north-west, and it was shaking out the loose blossoms from the spring-flowering trees. They were coming down as thickly as flakes in a snowstorm. I held up my hands, and the tiny pink and white petals fell softly onto my palms and were then blown by the wind in an oblique blizzard along the path. Henry’s hair was soon sprinkled, and there were drifts forming at the roots of the rose bushes and other shrubs. Henry’s wife, sitting with us in her long white nightgown, laughed girlishly.

We remained sitting in the sun with our empty coffee cups in our laps, and eventually Henry continued his lecture on the plants in the walk. He said that if one wanted to duplicate many of the ancient cures one would require a zoo. Well, not exactly a zoo, he corrected himself, not many of the large mammals were of much use, except for virgins and unicorns …

‘Virgins!’ I interrupted.

‘Come now, surely you know about the wonderful properties of virgins’ milk?’ he teased.

At the very least one would need a terrarium, Henry carried on, although a reptile house would be even better, not to mention a grotto with bats and spiders, and a pond for the amphibians. Nowadays, of course, one would need a tropical rainforest, an unscalable mountain, an ocean floor, an ice floe, a coral reef and a previously undiscovered primitive tribe. He added as an afterthought that while serious pain was a big issue, what with the opioids’ problems of side-effects, addiction and tolerance, mankind was losing his willingness to endure something as simple as a temporary skin rash.

A warm gust of wind through the tree under which we were sitting sent an avalanche of pink blossoms down upon us and we had to stand up to shake ourselves free of the petals, which were stuck even to our eyebrows and eyelashes. The blossom-storm in the apothecary’s walk had the sudden aspect of a hallucination, and I would not have been surprised to see Taaroa, clad only in his loincloth, madly shaking the spring trees before sitting down with us and making a fourth on the bench.

When we were settled again Henry informed me that in spite of what he had just said, it was pleasing to learn, as he recently had, that research into substances obtained from the cone snail had resulted in the development of promising new drugs for serious pain relief; and how would that have happened if man had not been plodding through humid jungles and ripping his knees open on coral reefs looking for the amaranth, the universal panacea, that damned skin-rash balm?

In the pause after his rhetorical question, my thoughts returned to Henry’s wife.

‘You said the male witch turned up on the doorstep,’ I prompted.

‘That’s right,’ Henry replied. ‘My wife—Marian—invited him.

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