Free The Physic Garden by Catherine Czerkawska Page B

kindly to me. I had begun to collect specimens for him during the previous spring and summer. But now I saw a very great deal of him as he walked about the gardens, even at times when the weather was particularly inclement. He didn’t seem to mind. There were days when, had I not been engaged on all kinds of renovations, hefting stones like a convict, I would most certainly have been indoors, toasting my toes beside the fire, but Thomas seemed impervious to cold, rain, sleet or even the occasional flurry of snow.
    He was a very striking man. He would stride along with the air of having his head in the clouds. He had a rather stern face, which belied his essential good nature. He had curly hair,which he tied back with a ribbon, and grey eyes that he sometimes felt the need to strengthen with a pair of round spectacles that sat somewhat incongruously on his nose. He was slender, but gave the impression of a certain vigour and capability. His hands, when you looked more closely at them, were something like the hands of a working man: strong and a wee thing calloused and freckled. He was nothing like most of the professors who would wander about the college gardens, deep in scholarly thoughts, as though they were not quite of this world. Nothing like the professor who had called me a perpetual motion machine, and excused me a beating because of it. There was a fey look about some of them. I thought they hardly even noticed me but it was not in the way the nabbery would deliberately ignore you because you were one of the lower orders. No, it was more that their minds were so wholly elsewhere that they saw nothing: not the young scholars who regularly created mayhem among the trees and flowers, not us gardeners who were always trying to curb their excesses without seeming to insult them, not even the sight of a pretty maid would have disturbed them in the middle of their cogitations. Except that Thomas Brown was nothing like that. You got the feeling that Thomas noticed everything.
    He always passed the time of day with me and stopped to watch me working, but there came an afternoon when there was a woeful, thin sleet, borne on a snell wind which battered it into our frozen faces, and on that day, he watched for a while and passed a few pleasantries , and then he came up to me and offered me a silver flask.
    ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out to me.
    ‘What’s this?’
    I squinted up at him, my face stinging, my eyes watering. It was such an extraordinary occurrence that I thought he wanted me to do something for him, that he was giving me orders of some kind. I didn’t realise at first that he was actually giving me his flask.
    ‘Drink it and see!’ he said.
    I put the flask to my numb lips and swallowed. I remember theintense shock of it to this very day. There was an explosion of peat smoke, spring water, seaweed and honeysuckle in my mouth – my first taste of a good whisky from the islands.
    He grinned at me and nodded. ‘Go on. Take another swig. It’ll put a bit of life in you. Colour in your cheeks. You look so cold, William.’
    ‘That’s because I
am
cold. But this is very good.’
    ‘Oh I know.’
    ‘Where does it come from?’
    ‘Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.’ He sat down on a low wall, close beside where I was working in all the sleet, huddled his blue wool coat around him and took a swig from the flask himself. It struck me that he didn’t even wipe the bottle before he put it to his lips and that small gesture of complicity touched me.
    ‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘one of my students is island born. He comes from the Isle of Islay, out in the west, and he brings this elixir to Glasgow with him. To remind himself of home, I expect. He calls it the water of life. “Can I give you a wee sensation of the water of life, Doctor Brown?” he said to me, once. The next time he went home he brought me rather more than a sensation. Afterwards, I found out that the name of his house means