“When I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by the bustle of it all; I was used to business in your uncle’s shop in Woodstock, but here were more gentry and they were buying finer goods, all manner of fancy apparel and wares, not only hats and bonnets, but ruffs and ribbons and gloves, fans and even cutlery—items of all sorts favoured by those with means. As I was to learn, Philip Boyer was not only an expert hatter, but a great importer of goods from Antwerp and Milan, where he had lived for several years learning his trade. I was to learn also that he had customers at court, both ladies and gentlemen, and a contract for boys’ caps at the Merchant Taylors’ School. In his warehouse at the back of the premises were two apprentices and two maids busy at lacework and hat making. But on that first afternoon, I stood alone just inside the entrance with my bag, watching the servers at the counter and the customers, who were fingering gloves and fans or trying on hats and laughing with their husbands or paramours. Such beautifully dressed women! And the men handsome too, unafraid to show their legs in hose of violet or crimson. I can only imagine what a penny I looked standing there in my plain country clothes with my hair not as it might have been because of the weather earlier that day.
“A woman behind the counter was frowning at me, and I knew at once that this was Sarah’s sister, Eliza, as she had similar features, though she was younger by several years; I judged her not much older than myself. She had once been pretty and still was to a degree, but her beauty was marred somewhat by her scornful expression. So, I thought, another Sarah with a temperament soured by piety, for Jack had told me that the Boyers were devout in their own way. Eliza was serving a lady but looking over at me from time to time, her head, I imagined, filling quickly with judgments, and none of them in my favour. I am certain that with those unfriendly eyes she saw only a bedraggled creature with damp clothes and hair and a simple bag. But I vowed yet again that I would do whatever was asked of me, because this shop and this woman and her French husband were all that stood between me and the street beyond the unshuttered windows, where all who passed were strangers.
“When she had finished with the customer, Eliza came over and said, ‘You must be John Ward’s sister, the widow. Come along with me now—you look a proper sight, I have to say.’ And with that, she turned and I followed her through the shop to the back, where I could see the long room with the apprentices at work and the lace maids and beyond them piles of trade stuff. We went up the stairs to the third floor and a small room, where I was at once informed of my duties. I had assumed that with my years in Jack’s shop, I would be serving customers, but Eliza Boyer told me that I would be looking after her child, who was then nearly a year in age and only recently weaned. I was replacing a girl who had got herself with child and was turned out, and in Eliza’s telling me this, I caught a hint of warning. So I was to be a nursemaid then, and I must have looked disappointed, for Eliza gave me her bitter smile. ‘Unhappy, are you? Thinking you are above such work?’
“I was quick to say that I thought no such thing, adding, ‘It was just that with all my years in Jack’s shop I thought perhaps—’
“But she interrupted me. ‘You are not in Woodstock now, girl. Your duties lie with our child. That and nothing more. And you will take your meals with the other servants.’ So that was that, and fairly put, I suppose. I had been told my place in the household and I need expect nothing more. Whatever Sarah had said in her letter, she had poisoned her sister’s opinion of me, and I had to live with that.
“As I would soon discover, the child, Marion, was a cranky, obstinate little creature who could not be pleased or made to smile by anyone but her father, to whom I was introduced later that day, since he had been occupied earlier with a visit to the wharfs, where he was expecting the arrival of goods from abroad. Philip Boyer was small in stature, but not unhandsome with his fine dark eyes, delicate features and a small beard. He was a precise man who I sensed immediately admired female beauty. I could see his appraising look of me in those eyes and I have to confess I felt a wavering pleasure in it, though I wondered if all this might prove troublesome. Would I awaken one night to find him standing by my bed, and what then? But I soon learned that Boyer was not interested in amorous adventuring; the only female for him at that time was his infant daughter, upon whom he doted and who returned his intense affection with smiles. Not even her mother could contain the child’s rage when a distemper was upon her. Yet once in her father’s arms, she lay quiet and serene. The rest of Boyer’s time was spent in the warehouse instructing and admonishing his apprentices and overseeing the work of the lace maids. Now and again, he made an appearance in the shop to deal with an important customer, a servant from the court, perhaps, requesting samples for display to his lord or lady. Boyer would then arrange for a showing on a day assigned and take his satchel of bonnets to court or to one of the great houses along Holborn.
“As for his child, Marion, she liked me no better than she did anyone else except her father: most nights I walked with her in my arms to encourage sleep, taking the blows from those tiny fists as she struggled in my arms. Her wailing sometimes brought her mother to the doorway of my room in her nightdress, demanding to know what I was doing to her daughter. But no sweet or syrup could soothe the child and I was often beside myself with worry that the Boyers would discharge me for incompetence.”
Apart from looking after the child in those early days, Mam’s only recreation was going with the Boyers to St. Anthony’s, the church most favoured by those of French descent. After a few weeks, Mam was allowed Sunday afternoons to herself and so began to explore her surroundings, venturing beyond Threadneedle Street, growing each time more accustomed to the muddle and scurry of life in London, just as I myself would some years later. As Mam talked about those early days, I imagined her walking in some bewilderment on Sunday afternoons among so many strangers, holding close within the fear of losing her way in the narrow streets and lanes, for even now, many years later, I can remember such apprehensions: recall how it felt to be among rough people, men and women alike who would cut a purse or pinch your backside, run a hand across your bubs or even grab your quim in a throng. You had to be watchful around the brawling apprentices and idlers who seemed ever bent on making trouble for honest folk. To Mam it must have appeared as it did to me fifteen years later—that the entire world was on sale in the streets of London, and that nobody cared for anything but taking advantage for profit. During my first weeks there I often wondered how my father ever wrote a line of poetry amid the city’s clamour. I could only imagine that he worked on his plays in the dead of night. Oddly enough, it was a question I forgot to ask him when we met.
Mam told me how in those first weeks she accustomed herself to the signs of taverns and shops, recognized the churches and conduits as signposts to familiar streets, sharpening her wits and elbows in the crowds, giving back as good as she got, growing bolder with custom and pushing aside those who got too familiar, for Mam then was still a strong young woman. Before long, as she told me, she came, if not to love, at least to wonder at and by times enjoy the variety of life in the crowded, dirty old city.
CHAPTER 7
THIS AFTERNOON THE SOUND of something heavy falling below stairs, and then Emily shouting, a dreadful racket which I surmised came from the kitchen. Making my careful way down the stairs I hoped that Mrs. Sproule had not dropped dead on the flagstones. When I reached the kitchen, she was indeed on the flagstones, though very much alive on hands and knees, mopping and muttering about clumsiness amid the broken crockery and pickled cucumbers that littered the floor. With arms folded across her chest, Emily looked on with an expression suggesting that old women make too much fuss over a broken crock of pickles. The air was pungent with the smell of spices and vinegar.
“The last of the lot,” Mrs. Sproule kept repeating as she squeezed the rag into a dish of soiled pickle juice. “Mr. Walter will not be happy. You know, Miss Ward, how he likes his pickled cucumbers with his bacon. There was enough in tha
t crock to last until the summer garden. What will he say now?”
Nothing much, I thought. Mr. Walter may like his cucumbers and bacon, and may even mildly wonder at the absence of the pickles, but such is his unassailable incuriosity about household matters that likely it will never be mentioned. At the moment he is more concerned with getting his fields in order with the weather warm and fair at last. Still I had to appear concerned, and after a fashion, I was. Emily, it seems, in reaching for something on a shelf, had contrived to knock over the jar. I wondered how the girl had managed to tip such a heavy vessel: it must not have been securely placed on the shelf, and that would have been Mrs. Sproule’s responsibility. I foresaw a squabble and had no stomach for overseeing it. Emily is clumsy and Mrs. Sproule forgetful, as am I. However, Mrs. Sproule was clattering on about Emily’s mind being forever elsewhere when going about her duties and feeling little or no contrition when things went awry. For her part, Emily claimed that the pickle jar had been in her way, and the jar ill placed on the shelf to begin with. When she reached for something behind it, she said, the jar toppled. She very nearly received a hurt on her foot. Right there on her ankle. See that. And of course Emily pointed it out to us. Nothing is ever her fault, and so it followed that we need expect no apologies. I told her to get on with other things and said to Mrs. Sproule that I would make her some tea. Mrs. Sproule was in tears because the girl had been saucy to her. “I shouldn’t have to put up with that after all my years of service in this house, Miss Ward.” And so on. And she was quite right, and I assured her on that score and then made the tea.
Later I spoke to Emily in the hallway, where she was sulking as she polished the large mirror near the front door, reminding her yet again to watch her manners, to remember her station in the household and to concentrate on the work at hand. Charlotte had gone walking with Mr. Thwaites, so thankfully she wasn’t there to hear me, for she hates the slightest hint of disorder in the household. While I was talking, Emily wore an air of grievance, as though she longed for someone to knock on the door and rescue her from this tiresome business. At one point, the damnable girl actually shrugged as I spoke. Perhaps she senses that my heart is no longer in all this.
To calm myself, I went upstairs and sat in the nursery, which is just as it always was, for Charlotte, who loves this room more than any other, wants it to remain as it was in her childhood. I am glad enough that she has insisted on this, because the nursery settles me when my mind is astir. In one corner is the old rocking horse, which was ridden by all the children in their turns, but mostly by Nicky, who would almost tip it over in his exuberance. It saddens me yet to think of a musket ball striking him dead as he sat astride a real horse, his beloved chestnut stallion, at Naseby. The storybooks once read to the children are still here by the window seat, where they listened on rainy afternoons. At other times, I dressed them in cast-off clothes and they performed plays I had composed from stories.
Sometimes we enacted shortened versions of my father’s plays, for by then I had bought what was available of his works in print at a stationer’s in Oxford. I never, of course, revealed the author’s relationship to me; such an admission would have been far too outlandish for the children to believe, and would have occasioned some awkward conversations with their parents. I was content enough to introduce them to my father’s work. Nicky enjoyed the histories and especially Henry V; the older girls liked the comedies. As for Mr. Walter, his nature inclined him to regard the everyday world as more important than the realm of the imagination. Yet stolid and dutiful child that he was, he could be persuaded to play a minor part in our entertainments, a Sir Walter Blunt or a Salisbury. Just to please me. His sisters enjoyed indulging their younger brother in his fondness for heroic roles, so Catherine might play Mowbray to Nicky’s Bolingbroke, or Mary as Edmund suffer the insulting remarks of Nicky’s Edgar:
And from the extremest upward of thy head
To the descent and dust below thy foot,
A most toad-spotted traitor. Say thou “No,”
This sword, this arm, and my best spirits are bent
To prove upon thy heart, whereto I speak,
Thou liest.
He was not yet twelve years, his clear, treble voice declaiming my father’s words in this nursery.
That year on Christmas Eve, the children and I performed a pageant in the hall before their parents and servants and neighbours with brief scenes from various plays. The last piece of all was Nicky’s delivery of King Henry’s Saint Crispin’s Day speech to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt. Even the old squire, a man not given much to fancy, had tears in his eyes as he listened.
When the girls left for America, Nicky was fifteen and out of sorts with play-acting. This nursery fell silent until Charlotte entered our lives and grew old enough to ask for stories and other enchantments.
One day not long ago, she asked if I remembered frightening her with a scene from one of the plays about the kings of England. That day she had been reading yet again a letter from one of her sisters in America, in which either Catherine or Mary was recalling her childhood in Easton House and the plays and stories I had told them. Charlotte said how she wished she had known her sisters, how she regretted growing up without them, how pleasant it might have been to have older sisters in the house. It saddened her to think how alone she often felt. I told her that she had at least been spared the bullying of older sisters, and anyway, I said, I myself grew up alone and didn’t mind much. “You had Mr. Walter,” I said, “and still have, for that matter. And you had Nicky too for a dozen years or so.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “Nicky was a wonderful brother to me. As a little girl, I do remember him so well. Still, it would have been agreeable to have sisters in the house. Even had they bullied me.”
She brightened. “But I had you, dear Linny. The stories you told and the scenes you enacted of all those kings. You once had me stuff a pillow under your shawl and then you drew the curtains by the window and had me sit in the darkened room while you left. You told me to hide because the King, who was a wicked man, was coming to get me. Then a moment later you returned. Was that Henry the Fourth or Richard the Fourth? You clomped about the darkened room with that pillow strapped to your back beneath the shawl and said you were going to kill the children.”
“Charlotte,” I said, “there was never a Richard the Fourth on the throne of England. That particular dramatization was of Richard the Third. Old Crookback, so-called for his deformation.”
She’d scarcely heard me, so caught up was she in her reminiscence. “You came into that room and began to search everywhere. Behind the rocking horse. By the bookshelf. Clomping around like a mad thing. You were looking for the two children …”
“Yes, Charlotte. Rightful heirs to the kingdom. The hunchback was going to kill them and claim the throne.”
“You terrified me. When you opened the cupboard door next to where I was peeking out from behind the curtain, I shrieked.” Charlotte laughed at the memory. “I think I must have wet myself.”
“Indeed you did,” I said, “through and through. I had to change your underthings.”
“Oh, Linny,” she said, “that was such a long time ago.”
“For you, perhaps,” I said, “though not for me. Twenty years.”
“Yes, I must have been only three or four.”
I told her I had invented that scene, as Richard didn’t kill the children himself but hired assassins.
I lightened the darkness of some of the plays because, like my mother, Charlotte could not abide sorrowful endings: so in the old King’s tale of woe, the hangman’s knot is imperfect and Cordelia survives. “Look, look,” cries Lear, “she lives.” And so she did, at least in the nursery of Easton House before the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. The same happy fate awaits the voluptuous Cleopatra, when Charmian plucks the asp from the Queen’s breast with news that Antony is still alive, and the famous lovers are reunited. Desdemona awakens to embrace and forgive O
thello. I could not bring myself to tamper with Hamlet’s story, even for a child’s amusement, and so I kept it to myself. Perhaps even to this day, Charlotte believes these great tragedies ended happily.
I was still in the nursery with these memories when I heard voices below stairs in the hallway. Charlotte and Mr. Thwaites had returned from their walk, and standing at the top of the stairs out of sight, I heard Charlotte tell Mrs. Sproule that the rector would be staying for supper. I retreated at once to my room to allow the cook time, as I expected her to be flustered by this news. Old people grow accustomed to routine and dislike unexpected requests, and so I would soon get an earful. I allowed a few minutes and then went down. Passing the closed door to the library, I could hear Mr. Thwaites saying something to make Charlotte laugh. In the kitchen, Mrs. Sproule was busying herself but grumbling too.
“Such a day, Miss Ward. First, that girl’s clumsiness and impertinence, and now the rector for supper on scarcely any notice. What next, I ask you?”
I told her I had little idea what was next—death perhaps at one fell stroke—but we must cope as best we can. Charlotte then came into the kitchen, her colour high, for she was happy and excited to have Simon Thwaites in the house. And this I thought was a herald of things to come, and good for her and all of us. Charlotte apologized again for the late notice, but she and the rector had walked farther than they had expected and the poor man had talked of an appetite. Mrs. Sproule, however, was not to fuss. Bread and butter and cold meat would do. Charlotte had asked Emily to light a fire in the hall—and would I fetch a glass of wine for Mr. Thwaites? I would indeed, I said, and one for her as well, I hoped.
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