Mrs. Cook

by Marele Day

  ‘And then,’ said Mrs Wilson, ‘when they are at home, they are under your feet all the time.’ She snipped at her thread with a dainty pair of scissors.

  Elizabeth smiled. It did suddenly seem crowded when James returned, not only with his presence in the Mile End house but with the relics and curiosities, charts and maps, the very air of excitement he brought with him. Even at home he was often out, catching up with news and writing letters in Will’s coffee house, visiting the Admiralty, the Navy Board, the docks. He was never under her feet enough.

  COOK COTTAGE

  The door opened a crack and Elizabeth saw an eye looking out, a dull watery eye, the centre of a ripple of wrinkles. ‘It’s James,’ her husband announced. ‘And Elizabeth.’ The door opened fully and Elizabeth saw an older, stooped version of her husband. He had not come to meet them when they had alighted from the coach. ‘He is almost eighty,’ James had explained. Nevertheless, he greeted Elizabeth warmly and held her hand in his.

  James Cook senior bid them come in and shuffled after them in his house slippers. ‘Kettle’s on the fire. I’ve got tea.’ Elizabeth heard the roll of the moors in her father-in-law’s voice, and a hint of the Scottish brogue he’d carried with him across the border.

  They walked along a short hallway of red stone floor and whitewashed walls. There was a dark timber wall-stand from which hung tools—a shovel, two pitchforks, a mallet. All cleaned and well-oiled, in as perfect condition as the day they were made. Elizabeth could see here the same pride and care for instruments and tools that James had.

  They entered the main room of the house, where a thin fire licked the bottom of a cast-iron kettle hanging from a hook. ‘Set yourself down, girl,’ James senior said to his daughter-in-law, and patted a place on the bench built into the wall beside the fire. Its twin jutted out from the opposite wall.

  Elizabeth sat down, taking care to tuck her skirts away from the fire, meagre though it was. The room was furnished with an oblong table, chairs, a sideboard with drawers, and a shelved display case, in which were arranged pewter plates. Elizabeth noticed one pewter plate by the fire, with a smear of hard gravy still visible although an attempt had been made at wiping it clean. At the end of the room were two tiny bedchambers, with a single bed in each. In one of the chambers Elizabeth could see a framed embroidery sampler but it was too far away for her to read the text.

  ‘How are you, Father?’ James asked.

  ‘Father is it? Too big to call me Da, are yer?’ said the old man.

  Elizabeth felt anxiety knot in her chest. It’s nothing, she told herself, just that father and son haven’t seen each other for a long time, not since the Seven Year War, not since she and James married.

  Elizabeth shivered. She wanted to put a few more lumps on the fire, but it was not her place to do so. James senior didn’t seem to feel the cold. His woollen jacket must have provided enough warmth, even though there were buttons missing and his shirt poked out in those places.

  ‘How are yer wee bairns?’ At times his accent thickened so much Elizabeth could hardly understand him.

  ‘Not so wee any more,’ answered James. ‘Jamie’s just turned eight and Nat’s not far behind.’

  ‘Are yer hungry? Would yer like oatcakes? It were James’s favourite when he were a lad.’

  James looked away. It was less a question of oatcakes having been his favourite than that was all there was.

  Elizabeth didn’t want the old man going to any trouble. ‘We’ve had breakfast,’ she said. ‘But we’d welcome a cup of tea, wouldn’t we, James?’

  The tea things were ready by the fire. It was as if in all the house, James senior had reduced his living to this small area beside the hearth. He picked up a thick cloth, lifted the great kettle off its hook, and started pouring steaming water into the pot. Both Elizabeth and James made a slight forward movement, as if to help, but the old man’s pride stopped them short. James was about to say something, but didn’t. Elizabeth looked at her husband. This was his father’s house but James didn’t appear to feel at home in it.

  ‘I brought these clubs back from New Zealand, to give to Mr Skottowe,’ James said suddenly, taking the items out of his bag. The polished clubs with carved nobs lay there inert, the old man paying them scant attention.

  ‘Mr Skottowe be dead,’ said James senior.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said James quickly. He took the cup of tea offered by his father, a puddle of liquid spilling into the saucer as the old man’s hands shook. ‘We are staying in his house, Commodore Wilson lives there now.’

  ‘Nineteen years I worked for Mr Skottowe,’ the old man said into the air. ‘He gave me this land, and I built this house. For Grace and the children. Our own proper house, built with my own hands.’

  James looked at Elizabeth, then at his father. ‘I’m sorry to have missed him,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘You have a lot to be grateful to Mr Skottowe for,’ the old man said to his son, as if finally noticing he was there.

  ‘Yes, Da,’ said James.

  ‘He paid for your schooling, gave you a start.’ The old man leant towards Elizabeth. ‘It were my doing as well,’ he said. He took a slurp of tea, wiping his chin on his sleeve afterwards. ‘The hiring fair at Stokesley.’

  Elizabeth of course knew of the hiring fairs, not particularly the one at Stokesley, but in the season, through Michaelmas to Martinmas at the end of the year, hiring fairs were held all over the country. Elizabeth loved fairs, but there was something about seeing farmhands and dairymaids, shepherds and grooms, all lined up, which reminded her of a slave market.

  Those looking for work would come in their best clothes—for some reason Elizabeth always felt touched by the effort they’d made—and each wearing the badge of their occupation—the milkmaids a tuft of cow hair, the shepherds with their crook, maids with mops. Then the masters or, more often than not, someone sent by them, would trawl along the lines, looking them up and down—the fresh-faced young ones, and the older hands, who looked out anxiously from weather-beaten faces, hoping that they would be picked out again, hoping for another year’s work, that the man would overlook the bent back and prefer experience to youthful strength.

  ‘It was Mr Skottowe himself who chose me,’ James senior told Elizabeth. ‘I had the boys by my side, letting him know that he was getting not only myself but strong workers in them.’ He took another slurp of tea, with no spillage this time. ‘James was eight year old,’ he said, glancing at his son, ‘but a big strong boy who was never afraid of a day’s work. Curious too, he was, always asking questions.’

  James shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘What sort of questions?’

  ‘About the stars, about why the leaves came off the trees in the autumn.’ Elizabeth remembered her own questions to Mama and Mr Blackburn. ‘Perhaps you can tell me, son,’ said James senior, ‘now that you have circumnavigated the globe. In all your travels, did you find out why leaves come off the trees in autumn?’

  ‘It might please Elizabeth to look over the house, to see what a good job you made of it,’ said James, veering away.

  ‘Aye, we did a good job of it. The first and only house that was ours. Built with my own hands,’ he repeated, holding out big gnarled hands, displaying them like tools. When the old man saw how they trembled, he brought them down and gripped the bench he was sitting on to still them. ‘You show Elizabeth. The stairs are a trouble to my legs.’

  Upstairs the house seemed to be made of ice. It was so cold that when Elizabeth touched the white walls she felt her fingers sticking to them. Everything was neat and tidy, but covered in dust. Cobwebs were visible in the corners. It had been a long time since anyone had been up here. Directly at the top of the stairs was a tiny bedchamber, with a narrow bed and a wooden trunk beside it. A small window let in a square of the dark grey day.

  ‘I used to sleep in here when I came to visit.’

  ‘Such a tiny bed,’ Elizabeth commented.

 
; ‘Aye,’ said James, ‘but no smaller than a bunk in a ship’s cabin.’

  They came into the main upstairs room which appeared to be a living room and bedroom combined. There was a dark timber matrimonial bed, a round table and three chairs, all with a film of dust.

  James picked up a carding brush which was lying beside a square spinning frame. ‘My mother used this,’ he said softly. ‘She did the spinning. Margaret and Christiana too, even when they were little girls. This is the same brush, the same frame.’

  Elizabeth came and gently placed her hand on James’s arm. She remembered that day full of promise beneath the Fairlop oak, when he’d said, one day perhaps you’ll see the house. She had no idea then how far from this house James would travel. How far he would now have to travel back to it.

  ‘With me and my father, Margaret and Christiana are the only two that survive. John, my older brother, lived to be twenty-two. All the others, Jane, William and the two Marys, died as little bairns. Jane was the same age as our Eliza.’ He gazed at something in the corner on the other side of the bed. It was a baby’s cot, shaped like a boat with a little roof at the head. Its sad emptiness brought tears to Elizabeth’s eyes, for the babies who had occupied such a place and gone to early graves.

  Elizabeth and James went to the window and looked out at the barren winter landscape. Even in the midst of life there was death. Elizabeth had first heard the saying in church, then read it with Frances in the Book of Common Prayer. And she had lived it with her babies, when her own heart, her whole being, shattered like ice under a hammer. Yet it must be. And the sadness must be. That is what it was to be in the ebb and flow of life.

  From the upstairs window they could see Roseberry Topping, its mound offering itself to the sky like a breast, with a darker aureole at its point.

  ‘Many’s the time I climbed the Topping,’ said James, his voice brightening. ‘All of us boys did. We raced to see who could get there first. I liked to go up alone too. Stand at the top, breathless from climbing, turning my face to the four winds. You could practically see the whole of Yorkshire from up there.’

  ‘And the sea,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Yes,’ said James. ‘And the sea.’

  On the Sunday they went to church. After prayers, after the reading and the singing, with the musicians playing in the back of the church, accompanied by the cooing pigeons who had taken refuge in the rafters, James, Elizabeth and James senior walked in the grounds of All Saints, along the path past the tombstones sticking up like teeth, till they found the one that marked the final resting place of Grace Cook, James’s mother.

  It had been icy cold in the stone church, and despite kneeling on a hassock, Elizabeth had felt the cold snaking its way into her bones. She had watched as her father-in-law struggled to kneel down, taking a grip so firm on the back of the pew in front of him that the candles spluttered in their holders. She kept her hands together in prayer and resisted her urge to help him.

  They stood by the grave, flecks of snow silently falling from the sky onto their shoulders. ‘Grace Cook, died 15 February, 1765, aged 63 years’.

  It was the old man who spoke first, and then it was so quietly that Elizabeth couldn’t be sure whether he was addressing them or the Almighty. ‘When I came across the border,’ he said, ‘all those years ago, a keen young man, as keen as young James here, to try my fortune in a new place, my mother blessed me. “God send you grace,” she said, holding my hands.’ He paused for a moment, oblivious to the snow settling onto his hat like frozen tears. ‘I did not know that the Almighty would send me Grace in the form of that beautiful young girl, and she graced my life till the day she died.’

  The three of them bowed their heads before Grace, before the memory of her, and when Elizabeth finally looked up, her father-in-law was staring into the distance, his cheeks wet. Elizabeth could not tell whether they were tears or melting snow.

  He made a noise in his throat, and looked in the direction of Ayton Hall just beyond the row of yew trees. ‘I suppose you’ll be going back to the big house now,’ he addressed James and Elizabeth.

  ‘We will see you home first, Da,’ said James.

  ‘You go on back to Mr Skottowe’s,’ said James senior. ‘I can find my own way home.’

  When James took a horse and rode across the moors to the coast, Elizabeth walked through the village, past the Postgate school where James had his schooling, until she found herself once again standing in front of the doorway of the two-storey brick and timber house. On the lintel above was engraved ‘1755’ and the initials ‘G’ and ‘J’. Grace and James. A thick mat of ivy adorned one wall. In the tangle of the garden Elizabeth identified medicinal herbs, onions that had gone to seed, a few meagre rosebushes. She could see the work that had been put into it once upon a time, but now it appeared as if the garden had been left to its own devices. No doubt it had been Grace’s domain.

  She invited herself in to sit by the thin fire with her father-in-law, and told him of Jamie and Nat, what big strong boys they had become. She could see the resemblance between James the grandfather, James the father and James the son, three links in a chain of being that stretched back for years and that would, God willing, stretch far into the future, after their individual lives were done.

  The boys’ grandfather nodded and smiled. Elizabeth placed another lump of coal on the fire.

  ‘It were very small, the clay biggin at Marton,’ said her father-in-law. ‘Young James would be outside as much as he could, in all weathers. There were a big tree outside the cottage, and barely could the bairn walk than he was climbing it. He’s climbed a long way now, hasn’t he?’

  Elizabeth smiled. While she nodded and encouraged his stories, she found herself with the little dustpan and broom, sweeping up the dust from the fire. Then she polished the table. He didn’t seem to mind. ‘ ’Tis a long time since this house has felt a woman’s touch,’ he said, watching her. He spoke of Grace, the mother-in-law Elizabeth never knew, and the sisters, Margaret and Christiana, whom she’d never met. But most of all he talked of James. ‘My boy has made his mark on the world, hasn’t he?’ he said.

  ‘That he has,’ answered Elizabeth.

  ‘Our boy’s done well, Grace,’ said James.

  James returned, hair streaming and cheeks ruddy from the horse-ride. Standing by the fire, rubbing his hands together, he told the Wilsons of the agreeable time he’d spent with the Walkers.

  That night in their room, he turned to Elizabeth and said: ‘I saw Mrs Prowd too. You remember, the Walkers’ housekeeper who first gave me a little table and a candle to study by.’ Elizabeth remembered. ‘John had obviously instructed his servants in the etiquette of greeting a circumnavigator. They were all polished as new pennies, soberly dressed in Quaker black. But Mrs Prowd, ah dear old Mrs Prowd, stooped and shorter than I remember, she broke rank and I was the apprentice boy once again. She came forward, threw her arms around me and said: “Oh honey, James! How glad I is to see thee!” And I declare, Elizabeth, there was a tear in my eye at the sight of her.’

  Elizabeth let her husband enjoy his memories, then asked: ‘Did you speak to Margaret?’

  James nodded. Now it was his turn to be quiet.

  ‘Are you worried he won’t take to it?’

  ‘He’s a proud man.’

  ‘He’s proud of you too.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ murmured James. ‘He travelled, came across the border seeking a better life. I followed his example, but I fear I’ve gone too far for him. He’d be happier if I’d become a shopkeeper in Staithes, or kept up the Whitby–London run on the colliers, not sailed to the South Seas in one of them.’

  Although it was already New Year by the time James returned from the coast, they celebrated Hogmanay with James’s father, bringing food and Scotch whiskey. The old man was as animated as they had seen him, and though a sober man, proposed almost as many toasts as Mr Blackburn had in the old days. James stoked the fire up, and while his father sai
d it was wasteful, he clearly enjoyed the warmth of the blaze and of their company. It seemed the right moment to bring up the subject of the old man’s future.

  James and Elizabeth had already discussed the matter. Elizabeth had said she did not mind bringing him back to Mile End, caring for him. ‘The journey alone would probably kill him,’ James had said. Now, having made the journey from London to Yorkshire, Elizabeth knew full well what he meant. ‘Far better that he go to Redcar and live with Margaret and her husband.’

  ‘What do you think, Da?’ James said after he had put the idea forward.

  The old man stirred sugar into his tea, circling round and round, long after the sugar was dissolved. ‘With Margaret and Mr Fleck?’ he said. He slowly nodded his head. ‘You have all gone from here, there is no-one left. I can bring my tools. Chop wood for them.’

  ‘And more,’ said James, seeing the path his father wanted to take. ‘There’ll be lobster pots to mend for James Fleck.’ He was going to add that the sea air would be good for him, but instead continued in the way of service. ‘Plenty of other jobs as well. Three bairns already and no doubt more on the way, they could do with an extra set of strong hands.’ And so it was agreed.

  Elizabeth watched her husband writing to Captain William Hammond, from whom the Navy Board had purchased the two colliers destined for the second voyage.

  Ayton, 3 January, 1772

  Dear Sir,

  I am sorry to acquaint you that it is now out of my power to meet you at Whitby nor will it be convenient to return by way of Hull as I had resolved upon but three days ago. Mrs Cook being but a bad traveller I was prevailed upon to lay that route aside on account of the reported bad state of the road and therefore took horse on Tuesday morning and road over to Whitby and returned yesterday. Your friends at that place expect to see you every day. There is only myself to blame for not having the pleasure of meeting you there. I am informed from Lieut. Cooper that the Admiralty have altered the names of the ships from Drake to Resolution and Raleigh to Adventure, which in my opinion are much properer than the former. I set out for London tomorrow morning, shall only stop a day or two at York.