“You must come round and show me what it is you want,” I said at last; and I covered up my embroidery and prepared to take her to the herb plots in the kitchen garden, as the most likely spot to find out what she was in need of.
But halfway, Mrs. Eccles stopped dead, shook her head, and called out, “It never grow’d there, I be sure it never did. I know it does there,” and she pointed back to the Abbey, “for I have a-know it afore yer was born, and, my dear, it war along top-side of the mound, at back of the red wall, where the missus used to grow her fever drinks, and where they put in cabbages for Christians and cows alike.” As she spoke my funny old friend turned her back on the kitchen garden, and made for the quadrangle as hard as her old legs would take her. Mouse and I followed hot-foot behind. Suddenly Mrs. Eccles came to a dead stop at the foot of a green slope, on which the red wall was built, and pointed with her black stick, at a green shrub above her.
“There her be,” she cried triumphantly, “sure enough, same as a galenny’s nest, snug and safe.”
I scrambled up the bank, and Mouse followed with a bound. The old body was almost breathless for a minute, but went on pointing like a pointer at the shrub.
“What is it for?” I asked. The shrub in question was a bay tree, and in a severe winter in the nineties, had almost died, but last spring it revived somewhat, and sent out a few weakly branches this summer.
“What does I want it for?” repeated Mrs. Eccles. “Why I wants it for salvation; to save my boy from the Lightning.” Then she went on to tell me, with a burst of eloquence, about the Shropshire belief, to the effect that a spray of bay-leaf, or a feather of an eagle, if worn in a cap or hat, can preserve the wearer from lightning.
“The big hawk’s feather, there’s none as can get now,” she said. “The railways and the holiday-makers have killed they, but they have left the bay trees.”
Then I remembered having heard that Mrs. Eccles’s husband, some forty odd years ago, had been killed whilst haymaking, struck by lightning. “’Twas the death of Job, his fork,” an old man had once told me. “The lightning came clean down, and struck him by the command of the Lord.”
“If my gude man had had but a sprig, he might have been hearty now,” broke from Mrs. Eccles; and she went on to tell me that her grandson, Joseph Holroyd, “war goin’ to work for Farmer Church, and that she had come here, for I know’d as you’d provide.”
I opened the little knife on my chain, and cut off a sprig and gave it to my old friend.