Take Courage

by Phyllis Bentley

  As it chanced, the midwife was some time in coming, but I did not trouble myself over the delay, for I had made it up in my mind that I should have a very long and painful labour. When at last she came and laid her hands on me, she exclaimed and said the birth was near at hand; but I did not believe her, I did not believe that any such good fortune would visit me. To please her, however, I lay down, though smiling sardonically.

  I lay down totally without hope, my only prayer that my child should be still-born. But the Lord is full of compassion and mercy, and His ways are very wonderful, past the understanding of man. I had a swift and easy labour, and the child when washed was the fairest and handsomest babe I had ever seen; a golden downy head, a smooth pink cheek, a fair white skin and clear grey eyes—a lively lovely boy, in look favouring both my father and Francis. As the saying goes of children, he brought his own love with him; as soon as I saw him my spirit rose and I had a good heart again and suckled him joyously, while Thomas and Sam hardly set eyes on him before they doted on the child, marvelling at his tiny fingers and neatly curling toes, and delighting to wait on him. He was a fine healthy child, sleeping and taking nourishment just as he should; I named him Christopher, and had the godly minister over from Pudsey to christen him.

  It was fanciful, no doubt, but from the moment of Christopher’s birth I thought things took a better turn for me. The oppression of the Royalists was not now quite so bitter, for the most of the Earl’s army had drawn away to York, leaving only garrisons in Bradford and Halifax; Bradford still groaned under the billeting of the soldiers, but there were not so many of them, and their captains made some pretence of paying for what they took, and when they made forced loans, at least they wrote out a paper to say they took the money on the public faith, which gave the lender some hope, if but a slight one, of repayment. We were like insects living in grass crushed by a heavy tread; our light and all our happy ways of life were taken from us, but we still made shift to live. Then one day Isaac Baume came to see me. I hardly knew him at first; he came hobbling stiffly up the lane, leaning heavily on a rough thorn stick and dragging one leg behind him—none of us had a horse left, within many miles. His large face, once so square and red, was white and flabby, his clothes hung loose on his thinned frame. He panted from his walk, sank down on the mounting-block by the door and struck himself several times on the chest before he could find breath to speak. I offered him the choice of a sup of milk or cold water, which was all I had to offer, and he accepted the water and seemed glad of it, drinking heartily. At length he was sufficiently recovered to broach the business he had come upon, which was to ask whether the Royalists had left any looms at The Breck unbroken. I told him: yes, all three; whereupon his face brightened wonderfully; they were not Yorkshiremen who had sacked his house, he said, and so they cared little for looms and had smashed his up for firewood. He had a few pounds of wool, he went on, because when he hid in the lead-house his apprentice had thrown in a sackful for him to lie on; the rest the Royalists had stolen.

  “All the wool we had, hung on the church steeple in the siege,” I told him, and I own I spoke with pride.

  “I know that, missis,” said Baume. “That’s t’reason I came—I thought I owed it to John Thorpe to——”

  He broke off abruptly and seemed unable to resume, chewing his lips in silence so long that at last I asked him impatiently what plan he had in mind.

  “There is your brother,” began Baume.

  “He is in prison,” I answered with a pang.

  “I mean your elder brother, Will, d’you see,” said Baume: “The one who married your husband’s sister, and lives over Adel way. How are things going with him, think you?”

  I told him the truth, that we had not heard from Will since before the siege.

  “Your brother has a stipend, and his wife what she inherited under Thomas Thorpe’s will,” said Baume shrewdly. “Doubtless they too have suffered from these thieving Cavaliers, but there was no siege and sack, at Leeds. Could they not thoil the price of a few pounds of yarn, as a loan?”

  “Why, perhaps,” I said, hesitating. “But there is none here to weave, and I cannot pay a weaver.”

  “I will weave it, on your looms, and we will share the price,” offered Baume gruffly.

  “But who will buy?” I asked in doubt.

  “The Royalists,” said Baume. “Every fresh man they enlist needs a scarlet coat.”

  “I do not wish to clothe the King’s men,” said I stiffly.

  “Why not?” said Baume. “If they pay an honest price? Take t’money from the Earl of Newcastle wi’ one hand, and pass it on to Black Tom wi’ t’other. We’ll sell t’cloth to merchants in the white—let them dye it scarlet if they’ve a mind. What do you say, Mrs. Thorpe?”

  “I will write to my brother,” I said, for indeed my heart leaped at the prospect of money coming to The Breck again to buy food and clothes and comfort for the children: “If you will pay for the letter to go by the carrier—and,” I added on an impulse, “if you will teach my Sam your trade.”

  “He’s young yet, missis,” grumbled Baume.

  “He’s well grown for his age, and very shrewd,” I countered. “Sam!” I called, for he was in the laithe. “Here, Sam!”

  Sam came trotting up, steadily and without fuss, like his father.

  “Dost want to be a weaver, lad?” shouted Isaac Baume.

  “Yes,” said Sam shortly.

  He made no further observations, but stood looking at Baume as if awaiting orders to begin.

  “He knows his mind, any road,” said Baume, smiling—I think perhaps for the first time since the siege. “Well—write the letter, Mrs. Thorpe, if it please you; I know you have some skill with the pen.”

  It was so long since I had heard of Will, and so much had happened in the meantime, that he seemed a stranger to me, and I had quite a difficulty in writing in sisterly fashion. I felt, too, some guilt that I had not told him of John’s flight and David’s imprisonment, but then, neither had he told us any of his news, I reflected.

  Either my plain statement of our case, or Will’s family duty, or both, had their effect, however; for a few days after my letter went, Will came up to the door of The Breck on a stout grey nag, with Eliza riding pillion. Eliza looked so neat and smart, in a good strong brown cloak and high-crowned hat, that I hesitated to go out to her, for we were almost in rags. And when I did go out, the meeting was painful; Eliza was fussy and consequential, and seemed to think she had conferred an unheard-of favour in riding as far as her brother’s house, while Will wore a very solemn glum frown and had a way of poking his head forward, which with his pursed lips made him appear very pompous.

  Eliza exclaimed in horror at the empty interior of The Breck; she kept asking for articles of furniture or tableware which had been there in her childhood, and though I explained many times to her that the house had been sacked, she seemed to regard their absence as somehow my fault, as if I had secretly sold them. Will, too, began a long tale of their troubles at Adel which I could scarce listen to patiently, since their greatest distress concerned an officer billeted on them and the rudeness of Dr. Hitch, who was making difficulties with Will about the new services. It seemed that Parliament had made a solemn league and covenant with the Scots, and established Presbyterianism in England, and forbidden the use of the Prayer-Book, and commanded in its place another form of services, called the Directory. I had heard nothing of all this, for I had no money for diurnals and no time for gossip, and to hear them talking of it, when my children were starving and ragged and the Parliament’s forces beaten and John in hiding, amazed me; I could hardly credit it. I seemed to have forgotten the right words to use in such discussions. But as the minutes passed, I began to see that all this talk, though true enough, was in reality a mere pretence to hide their distress and uneasiness; I saw Will glance at me sideways very compassionately, and Eliza’s lip quivered as she looked at her brother’s children. Then it came out that Eliza’s
rents, like John’s, in these troubled times could not be collected, and Dr. Hitch would not change from the Prayer-Book and was threatening to discharge Will, who was scrupulous to keep to the Directory, and had not paid him for months, so that Will and Eliza were living on their savings—the horse they had come on was hired and the hire was a great matter to them, which was why they had not come before; their state only seemed good compared with ours.

  “Nevertheless, Penninah,” said Will gravely: “You shall have the loan.”

  I now looked at them more carefully, and saw that Eliza’s swarthy face was pinched and chilled, and her dark hair threaded with grey, like mine; while Will’s brown too was plentifully sprinkled with grey, and his poking head and pursed lips were really marks of long-continued perplexity. I showed them Christopher, not without an inward tremor but it had to be done; Will, poking his head forward and nodding very portentously, said he was like our father, while Eliza asked if John had heard of the birth of the child. I told her I knew not where John was. I daresay my voice expressed some of the trouble I felt, for Eliza laid her hand on my arm, and said:

  “But you are rich in your children, Penninah.”

  Then I reminded myself that Will and Eliza had had no children since that first ailing little girl who died, and I thought, yes I am blessed in my children, and a warm rush of feeling filled my heart, and I felt strong and able to fend for all three. I began quickly to talk to Eliza of John, thinking that to hear of her brother would cheer her as to hear of mine cheered me. It was a moving story, I found, that I had to tell, and they listened with gaping mouth and wide eyes; I spoke of the sieges of Bradford, the death of Francis, the battle of Adwalton, the retreat of Sir Thomas and the Royalists’ sack of the town. Will seemed very sorry to hear about Francis; he wagged his head and said in his solemn ministerial tones:

  “He was ever a scapegrace and ignorant of the ways of God, but there was much natural grace in him.”

  Then I spoke of David, and Will’s face clouded; he said he would make enquiries in the Royalist prisons, of which there were plenty in Leeds.

  They had brought the gold I asked for, and Will laid it very solemnly in my hands, and said he and Eliza gave it me in trust for Mr. Thorpe’s grandchildren. It was just a manner of speech, but I shrank from it all the same, sending a quick protective thought to my little Christopher. I asked Will to say a prayer over the child, and for all of us, before he left, and this he did; his invocation was somewhat long and ponderous, so that Sam fidgeted, but still it had a dignity and sincerity, and I was glad of it.

  Thomas and Sam were a trifle subdued in the presence of their aunt and uncle, and we were all very merry together when Will and Eliza had gone. But for all that, their visit had been an immense relief, a lightening of my burden; it was as if they had opened a window in a gloomy and narrow house, so that I could see, no longer only my own troubles, but a distant open view. I had felt a mere starved defeated drudge, as well as a miserable sinner; now I remembered that I was Penninah Clarkson, and that though Bradford might be sacked, the cause of freedom was not lost.

  Indeed—from the moment of my little Chris’s birth, as I liked to think—the cause, as well as my own affairs, had taken a turn. Lord Fairfax and Sir Thomas having got into Hull, that being the only place in the county safe for them, the Royalists laid siege to it; but the inhabitants opened the river sluices and, the land round the estuary there being very flat, flooded the countryside. The chances of this mortal life are very strange; for because he was beaten at Bradford and had to go to Hull, and because the leaguer of the Royalists, and the flooding of the country, made fodder in Hull very scarce, Sir Thomas took ship with some horse across the Humber and went to fight with the men of the Eastern Counties in Lincolnshire, and there he fought at the side of Oliver Cromwell, and once those two men met, the cause of the Parliament took such a turn, in the military way, that it never looked back again.

  I had no money for diurnals at that time, so I did not know these things fully, but now that Isaac Baume and I were in a sense partners, I heard more news. For we carried out his plan just as he made it; we bought wool, and his children (who were both girls) and mine combed it, and Mrs. Baume and I saw to the spinning, and Isaac Baume wove it into cloth and took it to market, and came back with money and gossip. As we had no horse or donkey, he was obliged to carry the piece on his shoulder, and this for a wounded man with a lame leg was hard. But he managed to do it, he being a man somewhat despondent in speech but very stubborn in act, and he took Sam both to market and into the loom-chamber with him and taught him, and the child learned fast. There was little or no schooling going on in Bradford at present, Mr. Worrall having gone off to fight and the school revenues being all at sixes and sevens, so I let Sam leave his book and learn the cloth trade. But I taught Thomas myself, for I remembered what David had said about shielding the lamp of learning that it might be ready to shine out on a better day. When we had sold a piece or two and I had some precious silver coins as my share of what was above the price of the next lot of wool, I bought back some of David’s books in the public market for a few pence, and when it was noised abroad what I was after, some of the garrison soldiers came one by one sheepishly up the lane and offered me our own books, tattered and dirty, for the price of a glass of ale. Thomas and I made merry over the gaps in the books caused by the missing pages; I remember in the Latin Accidence the page containing neuter nouns of the third declension was torn in half, and for a long time we were in great perplexity as to how to make their cases. But Thomas kept a record of all such nouns that he found in his reading book, and presently made out the whole declension thus, writing it down in a fair neat hand, and we were proud of it.

  Thomas, too, kept the accounts for the wool and the cloth, for he was good at figuring, like his father. We could not, however, give the oats and hay into his charge, for when someone came begging with a piteous tale, his eyes grew very large and sad and his mouth quivered and before we knew what was happening he gave our precious oats away for nothing. I could not scold him, for indeed I wished to do the same and steeled my heart with great difficulty, but we could not be over-generous if we were to live at all, so I put Sam to the task instead. Sam, although such a child, had a cheerful business-like manner which somehow sorted out the truly destitute from those who were trying to cozen; he reminded me very much of his grandfather Thorpe at these times, and also when I saw him so earnestly and carefully balancing the scales.

  It was a hard, cold winter; and a hard, toilsome life. I did all the work of the house, keeping it clean—and when two healthy boys and a baby dwell in a house this is not inconsiderable; and I did the cooking, not that we had much to cook, and I patched and turned the boys’ clothes and my own and knitted their stockings. At first I sat hours at the spinning-wheel, too, for we could not afford to pay for others doing the work, but as soon as we rose out of absolute penury, I put this out to be done by Sarah, who was glad enough to earn. There were the hens to feed, and the cow to milk, and the wood to chop; the boys and I shared these tasks, and very gallantly they played their part. There was my little Christopher to tend and nourish. There was Thomas to teach—and, what was pleasant but a little disconcerting, he learned so fast that I was hard put to it to keep ahead of him; I often sat up late at night, my eyes dropping with sleep—the fire out to save wood, the wind howling about the house, the cold rain beating on the windows—learning from the book enough to impart to my eldest son next day.

  Yes, it was a hard, toilsome life; but it brought me one great boon, namely that I had no time to feel or think. Sometimes when the wintry dusk was falling, I had a moment of idleness because I could no longer see to work yet it was wasteful to light the candle, and then I stood open the door and wrapped a shawl round me and looked out, my hair blowing in the wind; and watching the rain driving in wild gusts across the hills, and listening to the wind’s stormy roar, I fell into a melancholy mood, and thought of the tragic happenings of my li
fe, of my father and Francis cold in Bradford graveyard, of David rotting in some fever-stricken gaol, of John—ah, where was John? In flight across the moors, or fighting in some desperate ambush? How was he living? How was he feeling? What were his thoughts of me? Had he died, perhaps, unreconciled? Whenever I reached this point of my meditations a deep sigh escaped my lips, and I bowed my head, and I should doubtless have wept, tormenting myself, but there came always an imperious cry from Christopher, or Sam rushed in, wet and hungry, from market, or Thomas gently put in my hand an exercise he had written, and so my laments had to wait till I had performed my duties, and so I never came round to them at all.

  Yes, it was a long hard winter and a long hard life—every day seemed as long as a year in what I did, yet far too short for all I had to do. But every week we made one piece of white cloth, and every week we sold it and bought more wool—when I thought of what a small thing one piece seemed to Mr. Thorpe and John and even to my father, and what a great thing it was to us, I smiled sadly; but what of that? The one piece sold, and I hoarded my share of the price so that when the time came I could have the oats field ploughed and planted, and we should have meal for the next winter again. The boys and I toiled day and night, and we looked like beggars from a poor-house rather than Thorpes of Little Holroyd, but what of that? I kept them to their manners and made Thomas read to us from the Holy Book morning and night, so their minds were not unfurnished nor were their spirits impoverished. Yes, it was a long hard winter and a hard toilsome life—but we lived, and the winter passed.