Her face fell a little when she discovered that it was only Samuel Skerry, the little crooked-backed shoemaker who lived with his apprentice in a tiny cottage, one field away from Master Simon’s garden. A scowling, morose fellow the shoemaker was, but Goody Parsons’ eager tongue could never be stopped by that.
“Spring is surely coming at last, neighbour,” she began, quite undisturbed by Skerry’s sullen greeting. “Here is another winter gone where it can trouble old bones no longer.”
“Spring indeed,” snarled the shoemaker, in his harsh voice, “why, the wind is cold as January and every key-hole in my house was shrieking aloud all last night! Where see you any Spring?”
“I have been, but now, to visit Master and Mistress Radpath,” she returned, “and their garden is already green, with a whole row of golden daffodils nodding before the door.”
“Ah,” answered her companion, “trust Master Simon to have some foolish, useless blossoms in his garden the moment the sun peeps out of the winter clouds. Does he never remember that so much time spent on what is only bright and gaudy is not strictly in accord with our Puritan law?”
“It was with herbs from that same garden that he healed you and many of the rest of us during that dreadful season of sickness,” retorted Goody Parsons, “and did you not lie ill for two months of that summer and yet have a better harvest than any year before, because he had tended your fields along with his own?”
“Ay, and preached to me afterwards about every nettle and bramble that he found there, as though each had been one of the seven deadly sins. No, no, I like not his ways and I am weary of all this talk of how great and good a man is Master Simon. I fear me that all is not well in that bright-flowering garden of his.” The shoemaker nodded craftily, as though he knew much that he would not tell.
Goody Parsons edged nearer. She was grateful to that gentle-voiced, kind-faced Master Simon who had helped her so often in trouble; she loved him much but, alas, she loved gossip more.
“Tell me what they say, good neighbour,” she coaxed.
Samuel Skerry was provokingly silent for a space.
“They say,” he said at last, “that in that garden—beyond the tulip bed—behind the hedge—”