Free The Age of Water Lilies by Theresa Kishkan Page A

course, as they scrambled over fields and along the river with the faint echo of old campaigns in their ears.
    Hic tamen hanc mecum poteras requi
    escere noctem fronde super viridi. Sunt nobis mitia poma,
    castaneae molles et pressi copia lactis,
    et iam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
    maioresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae . . .
    . . . remembered Flora, having been taken by the tutor’s ability to evoke those earlier times. She loved Latin for its hard, clean sound, even if she had difficulty in understanding exactly what it meant.
    â€œAh, Virgil,” murmured Gus, “my favourite poet. I had so much of him memorized when I was at school. There was always a line or two of Virgil appropriate to an occasion. As now. Let me translate that.
    Here still you may lie with me this night
    on the green foliage. There are ripe apples for us
    sweet chestnuts and an abundance of milk . . .”
    He broke off for a minute. “ Pressi is a bit of a problem. It’s a genitive participle that goes with lactis and the phrase literally means “milk having been pressed.” So cheese, I suppose. To go with those apples. Anyway, let’s say an abundance of fresh cheese, then,
    . . . and now in the distance the high gables of the farms smoke
    and greater shades fall from the high mountains.”
    â€œHow beautiful that is,” murmured Flora as Gus translated the lines she had called up from memory.
    â€œAnd poignant,” replied her lover, “when you think that the subjects of some of the Eclogues are shepherds who have lost their farms to soldiers. Sleeping on green boughs instead of their regular beds! Though they sound quite happy with it, don’t they? As we have been. At least they have apples and cheese and some chestnuts to roast, and though wine isn’t mentioned, there is almost always drink in the Latin poetry!”
    Gus shot a grouse for their midday meal next day, using an old gun hanging from the log beam. He cooked the bird with some chanterelle mushrooms he had hunted for in the woods beyond the lake and then in the rich fat, fried potatoes he had packed in his saddlebags. He swam in the lake, gliding through the rushes and out into the open water at the lake’s centre. Flora watched him splash and plunge under the surface, wondering if she had ever been as happy as she was, sitting on a stump under blue sky, long skeins of geese passing overhead on their way south.
    â€œDid you really say ‘Dame’s Bottom,’ did I really hear you say that?” Gus laughed as Flora repeated a bit of history from her village. It was the second evening of their sojourn in the cabin; Gus had come up from checking the horses for the night to find Flora wrapped in a blanket on the porch, two glasses of whisky poured, eager to talk.
    She slapped his arm. “I most certainly did not. I said ‘Dane’s Bottom.’ From the Battle of Edgington, where Alfred stopped the Viking expansion and saved Wessex and England from the barbarian hordes. Dane’s Bottom was the place where it all happened, or so we were told. A little hollow near the Kennet Avon Canal. You’d know that if you’d paid attention instead of trying to reach under the blanket!”
    â€œSo much more interesting if it had been a dame’s bottom. But I suppose a pretty girl would never have been told such a thing by her brother’s tutor.”
    â€œYou really are incorrigible. Will you pour me a little more whisky, please?” She watched the amber liquid arc gracefully into her mug. Then: “We really could be at the end of the earth, couldn’t we? So far from people. No lights. If you’d told me when I was packing to leave England that I would be spending a night in a cabin in a forest without a soul within miles, the only sounds being loons and . . . well, something large moving towards us . . . Oh, it’s