‘Her Uncle’s a vetinary surgeon near Banbury,’ Una explained, ‘and if you ring her bell at night, it rings right beside her bed—not downstairs at all. Then she jumps up—she always keeps a pair of dry boots in the fender, you know—and goes anywhere she’s wanted. We help her bicycle through gaps sometimes. Most of her babies do beautifully. She told us so herself.’
‘I doubt not, then, that she reads in my books,’ said Mr. Culpeper quietly. ‘Twins at the Mill!’ he muttered half aloud. ‘"And again He sayeth, Return, ye children of men."’
‘Are you a doctor or a rector?’ Una asked, and Puck with a shout turned head over heels in the hay. But Mr. Culpeper was quite serious. He told them that he was a physician-astrologer—a doctor who knew all about the stars as well as all about herbs for medicine. He said that the sun, the moon, and five Planets, called Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus, governed everybody and everything in the world. They all lived in Houses—he mapped out some of them against the dark with a busy forefinger—and they moved from House to House like pieces at draughts; and they went loving and hating each other all over the skies. If you knew their likes and dislikes, he said, you could make them cure your patient and hurt your enemy, and find out the secret causes of things. He talked of these five Planets as though they belonged to him, or as though he were playing long games against them. The children burrowed in the hay up to their chins, and looked out over the half door at the solemn, star-powdered sky till they seemed to be falling upside down into it, while Mr. Culpeper talked about ‘trines’ and ‘oppositions’ and ‘conjunctions’ and ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies’ in a tone that just matched things.
A rat ran between Middenboro’s feet, and the old pony stamped.
‘Mid hates rats,’ said Dan, and passed him over a lock of hay. ‘I wonder why.’
‘Divine Astrology tells us,’ said Mr. Culpeper. ‘The horse, being a martial beast that beareth man to battle, belongs naturally to the red planet Mars—the Lord of War. I would show you him, but he’s too near his setting. Rats and mice, doing their businesses by night, come under the dominion of our Lady the Moon. Now between Mars and Luna, the one red, t’other white, the one hot, t’other cold and so forth, stands, as I have told you, a natural antipathy, or, as you say, hatred. Which antipathy their creatures do inherit. Whence, good people, you may both see and hear your cattle stamp in their stalls for the self-same causes as decree the passages of the stars across the unalterable face of Heaven! Ahem!’
Puck lay along chewing a leaf. They felt him shake with laughter, and Mr. Culpeper sat up stiffly.
‘I myself,’ said he, ‘have saved men’s lives, and not a few neither, by observing at the proper time—there is a time, mark you, for all things under the sun—by observing, I say, so small a beast as a rat in conjunction with so great a matter as this dread arch above us.’ He swept his hand across the sky. ‘Yet there are those,’ he went on sourly, ‘who have years without knowledge.’
‘Right,’ said Puck. ‘No fool like an old fool.’
Mr. Culpeper wrapped his cloak round him and sat still while the children stared at the Great Bear on the hill-top.