The Marsh Herb and the Milk Cow (1674)
Part 3 of our 3 Part Herbal Story... Set On Old Cape Cod
By spring of 1674, the marshes had traded their gray for green, and the frogs had resumed their nightly arguments. Elspeth’s garden woke in earnest—mint pushing up like it owned the world, thyme creeping where it pleased, and the first bright heads of calendula turning their faces toward the sun.
It was on such a morning that a farmer named Silas Bowne came to Elspeth’s gate, hat crushed between his hands.
“Goodwife Thorne,” he began, then stopped, as if the words were too heavy to carry all at once.
Elspeth set down her shears. “Speak it plain, Silas.”
“It’s Bess,” he said. “My best milk cow. She will not eat. She stands with her head low and looks at me like… like she’s already half gone.”
Elspeth’s eyes softened. In lean times, a cow was not merely an animal. It was winter milk, butter, a child’s porridge, and sometimes the difference between staying and leaving.
“Show me,” she said.
They walked to his small barn where the cow stood dull-eyed, flank drawn tight. The smell told Elspeth something was wrong before her hands did.
Silas hovered. “She had pasture yesterday. Same as always.”
Elspeth crouched near the cow’s side and listened—then watched the way the belly held itself, as if uncomfortable with its own weight.
“She may be bound,” Elspeth said. “Or she has eaten something that fights her.”
Silas ran a hand through his hair. “What do I do?”
Elspeth’s mind sorted through what she had: the herbs she trusted for gentle persuasion, not violent purging. The old remedies for beasts were often rough as sailors, and sometimes as dangerous.
“Warm mash,” she said first. “Not cold water. And keep her calm.”
From her basket she pulled dried peppermint and fennel seed—kitchen herbs, simple herbs, the kind that did not scare a man’s conscience. She asked for a pot and warmed water, steeping the mint and fennel until the barn smelled like a summer cup.
Silas frowned. “Mint? For a cow?”
“For the belly,” Elspeth said. “Even a cow has one.”
She poured a small measure into a bucket of warm mash and encouraged the cow to take a little. Bess sniffed, then licked, then took a few reluctant mouthfuls.
Elspeth nodded. “Again, in a little while. Small help, often.”
She then looked around the barnyard and saw the ditch by the fence where spring runoff collected. Growing near it was a plant with broad leaves—plantain again, stubborn and faithful.
Elspeth knelt and gathered a handful. “This,” she said, showing Silas, “you call a weed. Yet you will bless it today if it does its duty.”
She bruised the leaves and mixed them with a little salt and warm water, making a crude poultice, and instructed Silas to place it along a small swelling she found near the cow’s flank—an area that felt hot beneath the hide.
“Do not expect theatre,” she warned. “Expect patience.”
Silas swallowed. “And if patience fails?”
“Then we do what we must,” Elspeth said. “But we begin with sense.”
By late afternoon, the cow passed wind—loudly, unmistakably, with the shamelessness of a creature that has no use for embarrassment. Silas startled, then began to laugh, half mad with relief.
Elspeth allowed herself a smile. “There,” she said. “Sometimes the Lord’s mercy arrives in unpoetic fashion.”
They continued the warm mash with mint and fennel through the evening, and by morning Bess ate with more intention. Her eyes brightened. She turned her head to nuzzle Silas’s sleeve, as if to remind him that gratitude could come from four legs as easily as two.
Silas met Elspeth at the gate later with a small crock of cream and two eggs—no grand payment, but the kind that meant more than coin.
“I misjudged you,” he said quietly. “When folk talk.”
Elspeth took the crock and looked at him steadily. “Folk will always talk. The question is whether you listen to them, or to the evidence of your own eyes.”
He nodded, cheeks reddening.
As he left, Elspeth glanced back at her garden. Mint and thyme and plantain—nothing rare, nothing glamorous, nothing fit for a gentleman’s book.
Yet in the hands of someone who watched carefully, measured modestly, and respected the limits of what green things could do, they were enough to keep a family steady for another season.
And on Cape Cod, in any century, that was no small thing.