“I am glad I find you well, doctor,” I said as he allowed me into his room, as packed with books and as littered with paper as I recall the quarters allotted to him at Compton Wynyates.

“You do indeed, Jack, you do indeed,” he cried, “for I no longer have to teach snotty-nosed youths like yourself. And, if God’s will be so, will shortly no longer have to teach anyone at all.”

“I congratulate you on your escape from servitude,” I replied as he gestured me to move a pile of books and sit down. “You must relish your improved estate. From being a family priest to being a Fellow of New College is a grand recovery for you. Not that we were not all extremely grateful for your earlier misfortune. For how else would we have had such a learned tutor?”

Grove grunted, pleased at the compliment, but half suspecting I was joking at his expense.

“It is indeed a great improvement,” he said. “Although I was grateful to Sir William for his kindness, for if he had not taken me into his household, I would have starved. It was not a happy time for me, I’m sure you realize that. But then, it turned out to be an unhappy period for you as well. I hope that life as an undergraduate is more to your taste.”

“Well enough, thank you. Or at least it was. At present, I am in grave trouble, and I need to beg you for help.”

Grove seemed concerned at this bald statement and earnestly asked what was the matter. So I told him everything.

“And who is this witch?”

“A woman called Sarah Blundy. I see you know the name.”

Grove looked dark and angry at the mere mention, and I thought that perhaps it might have been better had I not said, but in fact I did well.

“She has caused me great grief recently. Very great grief.”

“Ah, yes,” I said vaguely. “I did hear some slanderous talk.”

“Did you indeed? Might I ask from whom?”

“It was nothing, merely tavern gossip. I had it from a man called Wood. I straightaway told him his words were shameful. I came close to boxing his ears, I must say.”

Grove grunted once more, then thanked me for my kindness. “Not many people would have had such an honorable response,” he said curtly.

“But you see,” I continued, pressing my advantage, “she is a dangerous character, in one way or another. Everything she does causes trouble.”

“The witchcraft is confirmed by astrology?”

I nodded. “I do not trust this Greatorex absolutely, but he was adamant that I was bewitched and that she was formidably powerful. And there can be no other source of it. As far as I am aware, no one else has cause to resent me in any way.”

“And you have been attacked in your head and your guts, is that right? By animals, and visited in dreams.”

“On several occasions, yes.”

“But if I remember, you had such headaches when you were a child as well, is that not the case, or is my memory playing false?”

“All people have headaches,” I said. “I was not aware that mine were of any greater intensity.”

Grove nodded. “I feel you are a troubled soul, Jack,’’ he continued in a kindly fashion. “Which distresses me, for you were a happy child, even though wild and untameable. Tell me, what concerns you, that your face is become set in such an angry expression?”

“I am under a curse.”

“Apart from that. You know there is more than this.”

“Do I need to tell you? Surely you know the disasters that have afflicted my family. You must; you were in Sir William Compton’s family long enough.”

“Your father, you mean?”

“Of course. What distresses me most is that my family, my mother in particular, wishes to forget the whole matter. There is my father, his memory weighed down by this accusation, and no one except myself seems concerned to defend him.”

I had misjudged Grove, I think, for I had a childish apprehension of seeing him, half expecting that the passing of years would be as nothing and he would again pull out his rod; it was as well that he was more able to treat me as an adult than I was to think as one. Rather than telling me what to do, or lecturing me, or giving advice I did not wish to hear, he instead said very little, but listened to me as we sat there in his darkening room, without even getting up to light a candle when the evening lengthened. Indeed, until I spoke of my troubles that evening in New College, I had not realized I had so very many of them.

Perhaps it was Grove’s way of religion that made him so quiet, for although no papist, yet he believed in the confessional, and would give absolution in secret for those who truly desired it, and whom he trusted to keep their mouths shut. In fact, it occurred to me that, if I so wished, I could at that very moment blight his chances forever and secure Thomas’s place. All I had to do was beg him to hear me, and then report him to the authorities as a hidden Catholic. Then he would be too dangerous for preferment.

I did not do so, and perhaps it was a mistake. I thought Thomas was young, and another parish would come along in due course. It is natural (so I now know) for youth to be in a hurry, but ambition must be tempered by resignation; enthusiasm by deference. I did not think so then, of course, but I like to believe there was more than simple self-interest in my decision to spare Grove from the disgrace I could have visited upon him so easily.

Self-interest there was, as I shall reveal; in fact I later wondered at the mystery of Providence which led me to him, for my distress led me to my salvation, and turned the curse under which I labored into the agent of my success. It is remarkable how the Lord can take evil and turn it into good, can use a creature like Blundy to reveal a hidden purpose quite the opposite to the intended hurt. In such things, I believe, are the true miracles of the world, now that the age of prodigies is past.

For Grove was teaching me again, in the best disputational fashion, and I never had a better lesson. Had my real tutors been so skilled, I might even have taken to my legal studies with more of a will, for in his hands I understood, if only fleetingly, the heady brew that argument can be; in the past he had confined his instruction to fact, and drilled us ceaselessly in the rules of grammar and suchlike. Now that I was a man and entered into that age when rational thought is possible (a sublime state, given to man alone, and denied by God’s will to children, animals and women), he treated me as such in matter of education. Wisely, he used the dialectic of the rhetor to examine the argument; he ignored the facts, which were too tender in my mind, and concentrated on my presentation to make me think anew.

He pointed out (his arguments were too close for me to remember the precise stages of his reasoning, so I present here only an outline of what he said) that I had presented an argumentum in tres partes; formally correct, he said, but lacking the necessary resolution and thus incomplete in evolution and hence in logic. (As I write this, I realize I must have paid more attention to my lessons than I knew, for the nomenclature of the scholar comes back to me surprisingly easily.) Thus the primum partum was my father’s disgrace. The secundum was my penury through being disinherited. The tertium was the curse I had fallen under. The task of the logician, he pointed out, was to resolve the problem, and unify the parts into a single proposal, which could then be advanced and subjected to examination.

So, he said, consider afresh. Take the first and the second parts of your argument. What are the common threads which link them together?

“There is my father,” I said. “Who is accused and who lost his land.”

Grove nodded, pleased that I could remember the basics of logic, at least, and was prepared to lay out the elements in the correct fashion.

‘ “There is myself, who suffers as a son. There is Sir William Compton, who was executor of the estate and comrade of my father in the Sealed Knot. That is all I can think of at present.”