I was a terrible chatterbox, but I enjoyed myself, and sometimes Tom would look up from his bench and say, “How can I work with you jabbering on so? Your uncle will scorch me if this stitching isn’t done within the hour.” But not a minute later, as I watched his long clever fingers at their work, he would mutter, “So what happened next?”
I think I must have loved Tom Bradley a little, for one day I asked him to step behind a rack of wall hangings and there I kissed him full on the mouth. Tom had pock scars from childhood—just a few—and you could never call him handsome, but his smile was so pleasant and he had a pretty mouth. He was shy at first, for he feared my uncle coming upon us, but soon he was enjoying our innocent little games behind those tapestries. Then he said that I was the strangest little creature ever he had known, but that he wouldn’t trade me for another.
At the end of the workday, Uncle Jack and I walked down the long hill from Woodstock to Worsley and I would get him talking about all manner of things. Away from his wife and the worries of his trade, he answered my questions about his family and how Mam came into his life. He had been the first-born, a healthy son for his mother and father, but then ill fortune struck their household as child after child died before reaching the second year. He said his parents felt cursed until Mam was born. By then my uncle was ten or eleven and he told me how he marvelled at his baby sister, at the tiny perfection of her hands and feet. Even then he vowed he would protect her as best he could.
“Your mother, Aerlene,” he said, “was a little miracle for my parents and me.”
On those early evening walks I asked him too how he came to meet Aunt Sarah, and he told me that he was apprenticed to a mercer in Burford, and he saw her one day with her sister at church. They sat across from him and he used to steal glances, as did many other young men, for the sisters were much sought after.
He told me that the greatest pleasure of his week was going to service on Sunday mornings for a glimpse of Sarah. Sometimes he worried that God would punish him for these thoughts, which strayed far from the preacher’s text. I wondered about that. How do you keep an impure thought from straying into your mind when you are looking at someone you desire? I myself already had “impure thoughts” of Tom Bradley, imagining him undressing me in a forest glade. But I never asked my uncle such a question because he would have said only that those playbooks were corrupting me.
To hear Uncle Jack speak with such feeling about my aunt was instructive, since youth often has difficulty in imagining passions that might once have burned in their elders. I thought my aunt still a handsome woman, though a lifetime of frowning and reproach had pinched her features into a disagreeable wryness. Yet once she had been desirable enough to capture hearts, and this was worth remembering. These walks home with my uncle were a great pleasure at the end of the day, and they continued through the late summer of that year and into autumn and on to winter, when we had to pull our cloaks about us against the northerly wind that often struck the brow of the hill leading down to our village.
Then one evening towards the end of that winter, the walks abruptly ended. The day itself had been peculiar from the beginning, because when I first arrived Tom Bradley wasn’t there, though a few minutes later I heard his voice at the front of the shop. No customers had yet arrived and he was talking to my uncle, and I could also hear a woman’s voice. When Tom came into the back, he wouldn’t look at me but went straight to his bench and tied on his apron. My “good morning” was greeted only with a murmur as he fell to his sewing. All week he had been talking with exuberance of the Lenten preacher who was giving sermons each night at St. Mary’s Church. He told me these sermons were so good that one could not help but rejoice in the Lord. I was not much interested in such things, but always I kept that to myself and listened. Until that morning, when he arrived so silent and morose. Nor did he say anything the whole day, and even my jests, which usually met with laughter, were turned aside with a shake of the head. There was scarcely any point in thinking of kisses.
I thought about him all day and was doubtless still wondering on the walk home with my uncle. He too was so quiet that I was moved finally to ask, “Is there something the matter, Uncle? You seem in an ill humour.”
We were nearly to the village and he stopped. “Yes, Aerlene,” he said, “something is the matter and I must ask you not to return to the shop from this day forward.”
“And why is that, Uncle?” I asked.
“I spoke this morning to Tom Bradley and his mother,” he said. “Tom is a good lad and he has been attending the Lenten preacher’s services at St. Mary’s this week, and so was moved to tell his mother of what’s been going on between you and him in the back of the shop.”
“But it is nothing, Uncle,” I said. “Only kisses.”
“Only kisses,” he said scornfully. “And where do kisses lead if not to embraces and then to other matters? Your mother’s troubles began with kisses.”
“What Tom and I were about was innocent enough,” I said.
“That’s not for you to judge, child. Your lovemaking was on my premises. I could dismiss that boy from his trade for this.”
“Don’t do that, Uncle, please,” I said. “It was all my doing.”
“So Tom said, but one cannot act without the other, and as he is older, he should not have taken advantage. It would appear that you are both at fault.” He began to walk on, and I hurried after him. “I will keep him on for his mother’s sake,” said my uncle, “but you must not set foot in the shop again, Aerlene. You must stay at home now and learn household matters from your aunt. You will be fourteen this summer, and she has hopes of placing you in service.”
Next day my aunt summoned me to the parlour and we sat by the window from where I could look out at the garden and the stone bench where Mam and I had spent so many afternoons together. It is difficult so many years later to convey the intensity of the dislike that poisoned the very air between Aunt Sarah and me when we found ourselves alone together. When Mam was alive, her more compliant temperament had acted as a buffer. But now I was alone and, it seems, growing more obstinate with each passing day. I admit it freely now; all those years of enduring my aunt’s hostility and righteousness had scored my spirit with a rage that I could barely suppress, and this translated into numbing silences in her presence, or brief, sarcastic answers to her questions.
That day in my aunt’s parlour, six and fifty years ago—I can see only its dim outline now, but I can imagine how we might have sounded. A late winter morning and I was probably staring out the window, annoyed at no longer being in the shop at that time of day, disappointed by Tom Bradley’s disloyalty, pretending perhaps that I was in love and had been betrayed.
“Your uncle has told me about the boy in the shop.”
“Yes?”
“What have you to say for yourself?”
“Very little.”
“I have been wondering for some time now if your mother ever spoke to you about the changes that take place when you approach a certain age.”
“Yes, she did.”
“And what did she tell you?”
“That one day about my fourteenth year I should expect cramping in my parts and a flow of blood once a month.”
“Yes. Well …”
“Mam told me to keep a supply of cloths on hand to clean myself. I must change them each day.”
“I am glad to hear that you were told such things. And do you realize what all this means?”
“It means that if I lie with a man I could bear a child. But I didn’t lie with Tom Bradley, and anyway my courses have not yet begun. Mam told me everything about this. You do not have to speak of it.”
“And you do not have to be so insolent, Aerlene. Whatever you may think, your mother set a poor example for you in her habits, and everyone in this village and as far as Woodstock can see where those habits got her.”
“Yes. They got her me, a bastard in your house, where neither of us was made welcome.
Not by you, at least.”
“Your uncle and I took you both in out of Christian charity. We have fed and clothed and housed you all these years. We have always had your best interests at heart.”
“My gratitude knows no bounds, Aunt.”
“You are a sarcastic, impudent and ungrateful girl and deserve far worse than you have had.”
“Thank you, Aunt.”
My aunt left the room while I remained staring out the window at the stone bench. It must have been something like that.
Upon hearing of this conversation and doubtless others like it over the following weeks, my uncle finally took me aside and told me I was taxing his patience.
“You are too full of scorn and ridicule, Aerlene, and that is unbecoming in anyone but especially so in the young. You need reminding of what Scripture says about obedience.”
I expected this, for Puritans always had a ready verse to illustrate their point. In this case a quotation from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians: Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
And he continued, “In the absence of your poor mother, your aunt and I are in loco parentis, which is to say we are in her place and therefore deserving of the respect and obedience you would afford her were she here. It is God’s word, Aerlene, and you must subscribe or risk damnation.”
To please him I said I was well rebuked and would endeavour to amend my ways. Yet in my heart, I wondered if it were possible to change so.
Still, I tried. At least looking back from this distance I believe I tried.
Within a fortnight, however, this concern for my manners was left behind in the wake of a letter that briefly transformed Aunt Sarah into a state of excitement bordering by times on agreeableness. The letter was from her sister in London asking if she and her daughter might visit us for a few weeks in the summer to refresh themselves in the countryside. Aunt Sarah, who hadn’t seen Eliza since her wedding seventeen years before, was only too delighted to have them, and was soon occupied with planning for the visit, reminding me that her sister would expect proper accommodation. She had married well; her husband was a Frenchman, but a God-fearing man nonetheless with a prosperous milliner’s shop in Cheapside. I knew Philip Boyer’s shop was not in Cheapside but on Threadneedle Street, though I didn’t let on. From Mam’s story I knew a great deal more about the Boyers than did my aunt, and I liked having this knowledge and not sharing it with anyone, not even Uncle Jack.
There was much to do and my aunt soon learned that I could work well on my own, and so I settled into cleaning the house from bedroom to pantry: washing and airing bedclothes, polishing pewter and glassware, dusting tables and chairs and chests. In those final days before their arrival, I scrubbed the flagstones and spread fresh rushes across the floors so that the house smelled as clean and sweet as ever it had. My aunt favoured me with a muted “Well done, Aerlene,” adding that my labour spoke well for itself and a future life in service. She was already looking for a position on my behalf. Service was not an ambition I was eager for, but I supposed I deserved no better and would be living in someone else’s house by the end of the summer. Meanwhile I was curious and excited too about having these visitors from London.
On the June morning of their arrival, I was weeding the garden when I heard voices and the neighing of a horse. When I went around to the front, Eliza Boyer had dismounted and the two sisters were weeping into each other’s arms. A maidservant stood by a pony and held the reins of a packhorse laden with saddlebags. Where was Uncle Jack all this time? It must have been a weekday and he was at the shop. The visitors had spent the night at an inn in Oxford after two long days on the road and Eliza Boyer was complaining of the coarse language of the carriers, the many beggars underfoot and the heat and dust. All this while my eyes were fixed on her daughter, who was still on her horse. I was disappointed at how pretty she was, with her fair skin protected from the sun by a broad hat, which she had removed to shake out her long reddish blonde hair.
She too was regarding me, for both of us had our stories about the other. This young beauty was once the squalling brat who could be appeased by no one but her father; this girl had once pinched and pulled Mam’s cheeks and nose at will. I was the base-born offspring of the woman who had once lived with them.
Small wonder, then, that with these inquiring looks exchanged, we decided on the instant to dislike each other.
CHAPTER 15
MY SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY, AND this evening a small gathering with gifts: a fine, bone-handled enlarging glass from Mr. Thwaites to increase my ease in reading; from Charlotte, a new book, which she handed to me, whispering, “The first has scarcely a dozen pages left unfilled”; a handsomely engraved pewter mug for my ale from Mr. Walter; from Mrs. Sproule, a woollen shawl knitted by her granddaughter; and from Emily, a brooch that likely will not last a wearing, for it is poorly made, bought no doubt from a peddler at her mother’s door. Still, it is the thought that matters, and besides, the girl has little money. I was grateful to them all.
There was cake and wine and ale, and everything might have been well had I not been suffering all day with the stone; a fiendish pain had me pacing my room from first light until late afternoon, when it abated somewhat, allowing me to pass water. I kept this to myself as best I could and mostly listened to the talk at the table, which was on the harvest that will begin this week. Mr. Walter is hopeful of a good return and said with a laugh that this hot, dry weather is a benefit but will greatly deplete his store of ale, because the workers in this heat soon grow a thirst. Listening to him I thought of how the seasons swiftly pass, folding into one another with barely our noticing. Another harvest, and then the planting of winter wheat and the apples and medlars brought into the cellar. Soon Advent will be upon us, and then Christmas and another winter. And surely I am close to having used up my share of seasons. What then? Heaven? Hell? Nothing?
Mr. Thwaites was in Oxford this week and heard talk of how Cromwell is quite ill and Parliament worried with no successor named and Prince Charlie waiting in France with an army. That made me wonder if our Great Protector was also considering his share of seasons here on earth. I have heard that for all the blood on his hands, he is a pious fellow and so must be readying himself for what’s next.
This led me to reflect as I have from time to time on how my father faced his end. When he died, I was twenty-seven, and I knew nothing of his passing until five or six years later, when in Oxford at a performance of King Lear—at a courtyard inn in Cornmarket Street—I overheard two gentlemen speaking well of my father and lamenting his death years before up in Stratford. In the last years of his life, my father had lived only forty miles away, and travelling from London he must have passed through our village on his way northward. Yet oddly enough, not once had I thought of him doing so; always I pictured him in London.
In the play I saw that Saturday afternoon, the old King laments the final separation from his beloved daughter with the terrible words
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
And what of the Prince, who leaves this world with only four plain words? The rest is silence.
Was this what my father believed? Or were these only words spoken by characters—words that did not express at all what he thought of what comes after?
As he was leaving this evening, Mr. Thwaites took my hand and said what a great thing it was to reach the biblical three score years and ten, adding, “And you may reach further yet in years, Miss Ward.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but does the psalmist not end that particular verse with the words ‘and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength, labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.’ But exactly where we fly, the psalmist doesn’t say.”
The rector laughed. “Why to God, of course, Miss Ward. Fear not, for in good time you shall go to your Heavenl
y Father who awaits you.”
Still, I wonder.
CHAPTER 16
IN MY BEDROOM ON that first day, Marion Boyer pointed to the girl and said, “Her name is Margaret Brown and she is my maidservant.” The poor creature was as plain as her name. “If you wish,” said Marion, “I can instruct her to do your bidding as well, and if you find her work unsuitable you may beat her, but you must first ask my permission.”
“Why would I beat her?” I asked.
“Because,” said Marion, “she is a dull, forgetful girl who wants beating a good deal of the time.”
I looked at Margaret Brown, who was placing clothes in a chest which I had opened for her, and I told Marion that I didn’t think I would need a servant. I was used to looking after myself.
She smiled. “I thought as much. I am going down to see Mother now.”
After she left, I asked the girl how long she had been working for the Boyer family. She looked at me as if she wasn’t sure how to answer. “Some time, Miss,” she said finally, but I could scarcely hear her. She was as timid as a spring hare and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
I asked her how she came to be employed.
“Please, Miss,” she said. “My mam brought me to the family when I was fourteen.”
I was surprised, for she looked no more than twelve. “And how old are you now?” I asked.
“I am sixteen, Miss,” she said.
I was not used to sharing a bed, and for the first week Marion and I said little to each other. Margaret Brown slept in the truckle bed where I used to lie during Mam’s illness. Near the end of that first week, however, Marion and her mother had an argument. I heard them in the downstairs hall and that night Marion lay beside me rigid with anger. Margaret Brown had gone to sleep and I could hear her shallow breathing in the summer night.
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