Women of Courage

by Tim Vicary

  She laughed with him, tempted to let the moment pass.

  “Thank ‘ee, my lord, I’m sure. But Rob, ‘tis true, really. Don’t you ever think of it? You’re far too good for me.”

  “I told you ...”

  “Listen, Rob.” The pain in her voice stopped him. “I think - I do believe what you said just now, but ...”

  “But you don’t feel the same.”

  “No! No; ‘tis no matter how I feel, Rob. It isn’t that at all. It’s - it’s what we are that matters, not what we feel. And what we are is going to keep us apart.”

  “What we are is Adam and maiden, man and woman. I don’t see how that should keep us apart - it never did before. Or should I pluck you an apple, first?”

  He bent to kiss her again, but she gave him a brief peck on the lips, and pushed him back.

  “What you are, sir, is Robert Pole, captain in Lord Oxford’s Horse, second son of Sir Courtenay Pole, Lord of Shute Manor and landlord of half this valley. And what I am is plain Ann Carter, eldest daughter of Adam Carter, cloth merchant of Colyton village. No more.”

  “So? I am only Sir Courtenay’s second son, not the first. I shall never be Lord of Shute Manor - my brother will. All I shall inherit is a small house in Chelsea, enough to maintain four or five servants, and my regimental pay. There is no such great gulf as you imagine.”

  “Is there not, Rob?” She paused for a moment, watching his face, to see if he knew how absurd he sounded. But he did not, and so she continued, to hurt him. “Even so, there is another difference. I ... am soon to be betrothed - to Tom Goodchild.”

  “Tom Goodchild! Has he been with you?” Robert flushed, and stood up angrily. “Why, I’ll thrash the cur! I’ll kick him round the village with his own shoes, or stick a rapier in him, like the duke of Monmouth did to the watchman at Whetstone Park, for coming between him and a girl! I’ll ...”

  “No, Rob, no! You mustn’t touch him - you shan’t go near him! You don’t mean it, do you? Promise me!”

  “Betrothed! You betrothed to some poor clod of a shoemaker? A fine fool you make me look! When did this happen?”

  “It hasn’t happened, Rob. I’m not betrothed. It’s just that our families have been agreed for some time - if we’re willing, that is.”

  “If you’re willing! And are you?”

  She looked at him sadly. His pride was hurt so much by this silly thing that was no threat to him at all. In another situation she would have been amused. In this dreamtime of the last few weeks, she had learnt much of his world, but he had learnt nothing at all of hers.

  “That’s not the point, Rob. It’s a matter of who we are. Listen. You would like to - to love me as Adam loved Eve, wouldn’t you? Here, now, this afternoon?”

  “That was my idea. At the least it would be a better way to pass the time than talking of shoemakers.”

  “And, Rob, I’d rather have you for my Adam than any shoemaker. But what would happen afterwards?”

  “Why, nothing. We’d ride home again and ...”

  “And we’d meet again and couple again, and then one day you’d tire of your country maid, and ride back to London to tell stories of me to your regiment.”

  “I wouldn’t tire of you, Annie. It’s not fair to say it.” He knelt down beside her again, his voice low and earnest; it broke her heart to disbelieve him.

  “You would if I were with child.”

  She paused. For once he had no answer to fill the silence.

  “What would you do, Rob, if I were with child?” It was the one question Ann had to know the answer to, in the end; and there was only one magic, impossible answer that could stop her falling, hopelessly, out of her dream and down to the ordinary earth of village life.

  “I would take you to London with me. You could not stay here, of course - I would set you up in a house there, with a maid of your own. I could introduce you to some women I know there, and I could show you the city. We could have a fine time.” The answer came quickly, eagerly. She was surprised at his confidence, at the fact that he had thought of the possibility at all.

  It was not the answer she needed.

  “Until you found someone else to marry.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she stopped him. “Rob, I should be a fallen woman - a whore, a painted harlot, abandoned in London. Fallen from grace into a sink of iniquity, as the Reverend Fuller would say. How would you feel about me when you had found a pretty little wife to be Lady Pole in your house in Chelsea; would you think of poor Ann wandering the streets of London with a brace of children, looking for a new lover because she dare not return home to be the disgrace of her family? My father and mother would die of shame! Have you thought of them at all? You have never even met them!”

  “Annie, stop! What is this strange fantasy?” He was shocked, amazed at her response. He put his hand on her shoulder to calm her; she did not push it off, nor did she respond to it. It lay there uneasy, unwelcome, like the sudden silence between them.

  “Annie, you are speaking of a life you do not know. I should not abandon you in London, to be a whore! London is no sink of iniquity, as your Puritan preachers say. You would not be despised for being my mistress. Life is not simple and closed there, as it is here. There are ... bad things, of course, terrible things, but there are so many ways for a man to live, and think - and for a woman, too! Why, there are many women who live openly as men’s mistresses, and are more honoured than despised for it, as they would be here. And the actresses, as I told you, are like queens almost, with a dozen men paying court to them on bended knee after each performance! Nell Gwynne, indeed, was nearer the old king than the real queen was!”

  He paused. His words had not cheered her. Her pale green eyes stared at him bleakly, her rich auburn hair swinging forward loosely around her face. To Ann it no longer felt exciting to have it loose, but only naked, shameful. The wind drifted a wisp of it irritatingly across her lips.

  “And what should I do, Rob, when you went to pay court to these actresses?”

  “Why should I do that? I should have a hard enough time of it, to keep you to myself. As I told you before, there are no women in London to compare with you, for me. I’d fight the first man who said otherwise, or send him to you to beg pardon, on bended knee! Charles Riley did the same, to a fellow who slighted his girl last Christmas, and her beauty is only a matter of patches and powder; she would look like a ghost beside you!” He laughed at the memory.

  “You wouldn’t need to fight them, if it were true,” she murmured. “And should I not upset Charles Riley’s girl, anyway, if she is to be thought of as queen?”

  “Oh, we could come to some arrangement; he could agree to call her a princess only, perhaps?” Robert laughed, delighted at the picture he was conjuring up. “You should have such a fine time, Ann, so much better than the way you live now. We could go to the theatre thrice a week, to see all the plays and dances; and have our friends round at night, to sing and talk and play. And you should have a proper singing master, to train your voice with the best of them. In the summer, as now, we could make up a party to hire a boat and row up the river, singing and playing music - ‘tis lovely in the long evenings, the sound is so clear, in the dusk, and sometimes fellows sing with you as you pass under the bridges. Do you remember the fellow I told you of, with the new fast ship that he calls a yacht, after the one King Charles modelled on the Dutch vessel? We might get him to take us aboard on a race down the Thames, or even across to Holland - you should see what a ship can really do!”

  He paused, and she smiled sadly, thinking of how she loved him when his freckled face lit up with this eager, boyish enthusiasm; and how completely he had missed the point.

  “And to have all this, what should I do?”

  He stroked her cheek, marvelling at what the faint smile did to her smooth skin.

  “Leave your shoemaker, at least.” He leant forward to kiss her, and for a moment she responded, exhausted by the effort of trying to point
out problems she herself did not want to think about to a person who did not notice them. Then she pushed him slowly away.

  “I know the type of fellows you mean,” he went on. “They pick up a girl for a week or two, and then send her packing back to her mother when they dislike the tone of her voice, or see a spot on her neck that disgusts them. I am no such heartless philanderer, Ann. If you were my mistress in London, I should honour you as such.”

  “Oh, Rob.” She shook her head, her eyes filled with tears. What should she do with such a proposal, that offered everything, except what all proposals should offer, marriage? She did not know what to say. It was as though to him it was so obvious that marriage for the second son of a Tory landlord would be a business transaction with someone of his own class, that it was quite unnecessary to mention it when talking to her. Perhaps she should feel insulted; but how could she, when he seemed so sincere? But then – of all the girls who believed their lovers to be sincere, how many had been betrayed?

  “Rob, I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure ...”

  “Then say nothing. We’ve had enough serious talk for one afternoon, and I needn’t return to London for two weeks yet. We will meet again, and talk further. And I can’t send you home too serious to your mother, or she will think you have lost your heart to a lobster in Beer, and forbid all fishing trips in future, for fear your children will be born shellbacked like the king’s pikemen, with great claws to maul the enemy!”

  She laughed; she could not help it, though the joke was about children, the one thing she could not avoid, if she went with him. But he put his arm round her, and she laughed much longer than the poor joke warranted; for she was laughing with relief that the dream, from which she had thought she had fallen, had not ended after all.

  She had tried to return to the real world, but it would not have her; she had confronted him with all the real and sensible objections, and still the absurd, deliciously tantalising idea that she might be his mistress and go to London was faintly, ridiculously possible.

  One day, very soon, she would have to decide. But today she had tried, and failed, and so, oddly, was still free.

  She had reached a moment in her life when she was young and beautiful; every step away from this moment was likely to lead to a trap of some sort, to complications, ugliness and compromise. And so she laughed, until Robert was not sure whether she was laughing or crying, and lifted her head to see; and was overwhelmed with such a mixture of kisses and tears that he was more puzzled than before.

  In his confusion he managed to frown and smile at once in the way that so endeared him to her. He held her close, at once loving her more and understanding her less than ever.

  2

  THEY WALKED their horses to the end of the ridge, and then Robert mounted and rode down the western side of it, out of sight of Colyton. As he rode away a couple of boys from the town ran out of the woods with their dog. Ann flushed because they might have seen her and Robert together; but they said nothing, and ran off down the hill towards the road.

  Ann stayed a moment longer, admiring the view before descending into the valley. She breathed deeply, savouring the salt sea breeze which caressed her face and lifted her long, loose hair from her shoulders. Then, reluctantly, she began to wind it up and put on her bonnet before climbing into the saddle. The sun was low in the sky behind her, and as she fiddled with the pin she could see the long shadows of herself and her pony stretching homeward on the grass before them. Below her, the smoke of the cooking fires drifted over the roofs of Colyton. She felt how small and insignificant the little town looked from up here, and yet how large and all-enveloping it seemed when she was in it.

  She wondered if it was tact or fear that had prompted Robert to return to Shute by the long, circuitous route to the north and west, instead of riding directly through the town. Whichever it was she was glad of it, for he was not popular there, and it would have been hard to disclaim meeting him had she returned by the same road. And from that, gossip might spread like a plague.

  For although she thought of Colyton as a town, it was like a village in the way that its 1500-odd inhabitants knew the intimate details of each other’s lives from the cradle to the grave. A secret such as hers, once out, would be common knowledge in a day, muttered busily over back fences by wrinkled, toothless grandmothers, whispered in hushed delight among a shocked flurry of girls around the pump. Only she, and her parents, might not know folk knew, until the knock on the door by the stern hand of the preacher.

  Up here, in the clean air of the country, she felt safe. For the eyes of Colyton looked inwards, with a town’s blindness to the world outside. Most of the inhabitants of the little houses clustered around the striking eminence of their church quite literally could not see any more from their windows than their neighbours’ houses across the way; but their indifference to the country spread further than that. Though there were farms on the outskirts, and a miller and a butcher and blacksmith and common labourers, most of the folk of the little town did work that brought the country to them, not them to the country. They bought their raw materials, leather and wool, from the country; but it was in their own homes and shops that they made it into goods for sale. The town was peopled by craftsmen. There were tanners, saddlers, glovemakers, shoemakers – all the variety of leatherworkers who transformed the skin of cows, goats and pigs into jackets, harness, gloves and footwear all kinds, from the supple leather thighboots that Robert wore for riding, to the ordinary everyday shoes of the working poor. There were woolworkers too, transforming the wool as it came into the town from the smooth hills around the valley, in all the complex operations that took it from the sheep’s back to the man’s – the outworkers who combed and carded the fleeces, and spun them into thread on the hundreds of spinning wheels around the town; the weavers who worked the thread at the great looms in their own homes; the fullers who pressed and cleansed the cloth between the great rollers of their fulling mills by the river; the dyers who dyed it and chopped it into rolls to sell to the tailors, who cut it and stitched it to fit their customers’ backs.

  At the beginning and end of this process came the merchants, like Adam Carter, Ann’s father. He was only a small merchant; to the grander men of the great cloth trading towns of Exeter and Taunton he was no more than an errand-boy, the humble carrier his name implied. But he was necessary too, a vital cog in the great machine of the commonwealth. Throughout the year cloth was carried on the backs of his old, long-suffering pack-horses to the tailors and merchants of the larger towns of the West; and he would return with bales of wool from the outlying farms, or luxury ironware and other items not made in Colyton. He earned his profit by the exercise of his own legs, and the good name he had among those who knew him.

  Thus he saw more people and places than men who spent all their lives in one town. Strong Puritan though he was, he knew that opinions were not everywhere the same.

  From where she watched, Ann might have seen the tiny figures of her father and brother and their line of pack-horses returning along the road from Honiton, had they not been obscured by a line of trees. But this would not have worried her. Even if she had known the two little boys and their dog had entered the river at the ford by Heathayne Farm, and were splashing downstream towards the bridge which Adam would have to cross, she would not have worried overmuch. Boys of that age were more interested in fishing and fighting than talk, and her father had usually more on his mind than the chatter of children. So, after a deep breath and a last look over the wide, saucer-shaped valley towards the sea, she nudged her pony easily down the slope towards the town.

  Adam and Simon had been away for three days, and were glad to be nearing home. They trudged steadily down the dusty road from the north, each leading two horses heavily laden with bales of wool. Every few minutes they had to pull the animals’ heads away from the rich grass which they longed to crop in the middle of the road, and the tall cow parsley and foxgloves at the roadside.

&nbs
p; It was easy to see that they were father and son. They shared the same lean, spare frame, straight short hair and restless hazel eyes, and a solemn, earnest look that their faces habitually relaxed into in repose. Adam’s face was deeply lined and wrinkled by the weather, and as he walked he held himself straight, as short men often do, giving the impression of a man whose strength was only gained by constant physical exertion.

  Simon was still very much a boy beside his father, for all his seventeen years. He was slightly built, hardly taller than his sister, with little suggestion yet of the hard, sinewy strength of his father. Ann had inherited the stronger, athletic build of her mother’s family, so that for most of their childhood she had been able to dominate her younger brother physically. As he grew older he had come to resent this intensely, as though it were a slight on his manhood; and so, in contrast to her relaxed, sometimes mocking manner, he had been forced to seek his own personality in a stubborn, religious earnestness quite alien to the rest of the family.

  It was this fanaticism of Simon’s that was occupying Adam’s mind now. In Taunton they had heard of yet another raid by rich Anglicans on a dissenting family’s house, and for much of the afternoon they had been discussing this news. Simon was still bitter about it.

  “It is a mockery, to think of sitting in church with such men, after what we have heard now,” he insisted, his young, slightly nasal voice pitched high to carry to his father as he trudged a dozen paces ahead.

  For many years it had been compulsory for everyone to attend services in the church of England, and take communion there once a month, whatever they thought of the vicar’s doctrines. The young vicar of Colyton, William Salter, was a loyal Anglican disliked by nearly all his puritan congregation. After the compulsory service each Sunday, most of them trooped away to meet for true worship in Israel Fuller’s secret conventicle in the hills.