Surprise stopped Nan before she could roar. She considered it, thinking fast, eyes narrowed. ‘Deuce take it, Billy,’ she said, grinning with delight at him, ‘you’ve a-given us the answer, so you have.’
The fight was over as quickly as it had begun and the decision made.
‘Thank God for that,’ Billy said, easing himself out of his chair. ‘Now I can go home to Tilda.’
‘I have a year in which to prove my point,’ John told Harriet later that night. ‘Maybe two. But a year certainly. 1 shall need to travel a great deal, to check upon sales in all the shops that matter, to urge them on and encourage them to refuse, if that is what they wish to do. You know the sort of thing.’
She knew only too well. He would barely be in the house. But she didn’t comment.
‘I must show Mama what a difference there will be,’ he said, his eyes strained with the urgency of it. ‘It is a terrible thing to have to do, but I must prove her wrong. You understand that, don’t you, Harriet?’
‘Yes, John.’ Oh, if only he didn’t take it so seriously. What if he were the one to be proved wrong? She would never have admitted it to him, of course, because that would have been disloyal and unkind, but in her opinion Nan was far more likely to be right than he was. Once a few shops started taking advertisements, sooner or later they all would.
‘I shall start straight away,’ he said.
‘Now John? With the winter coming on?’ Oh surely not.
‘Yes indeed. I cannot allow bad weather to hinder me. This is far too important.’
It was a long, cruel winter but he travelled, even in the worst of the weather, when coaches foundered in snow and horses fell, and passengers ran fevers all about him. He even continued his journey on one occasion when an old man died in the seat beside him. Bad weather always took a heavy toll of old men, he explained to Harriet, and there was work to be done.
It was a danger to babies too. ‘Take care of yourself, my dear,’ Harriet wrote to Annie, ‘and look after Jimmy and Beau and dear little Meg. I will return in the spring.’ For Annie’s fourth baby was due in March, and by then the cold weather must surely be over.
But if anything March was the worst month of the lot. It started badly and got progressively worse. On the fifth day a south-west gale blew into London with such extraordinary violence that it actually stopped the tide on the River Thames.
Naturally enough, Nan took Matilda and Harriet and their children and their nursemaids straight down to London Bridge to see it. It was a most peculiar sight.
The river should have been in flood at one o’clock in the morning but at ten o’clock, when they arrived on the bank, the tide was still ebbing as though it had been bewitched, more than half the riverbed was exposed and there were scores of boats lying aground right in the middle of the Pool of London where they should have been riding at anchor. To the children’s delight, the water disappeared as they watched, and although they were wind-buffeted and cold they were too excited to care. After an hour it was so low that they could see the riverbed even in the middle and two boatmen set off to see if they could wade across. And to cheers and catcalls discovered that they could! It was amazing.
After that all sorts of people strode into the shallows and soon they were picking up treasures from the slime, old plates, chipped cups, ancient boots, coins, combs, even a necklace, held aloft in the air to drip greeny-black mud and rapturously declared to be ‘Pure gold!’
‘Come on!’ Nan said, taking Will and Mattie by the hand. ‘Let’s go see what we can find, eh?’
And despite Matilda’s protestations, off they went with Rosie squealing behind them. It was marvellous fun.
By midday all four of them were spattered in slime from their toes to their waists and Will had found a golden sovereign, no less, and was tense with the excitement of it. But then the wind changed abruptly and the tide suddenly turned and within seconds it was flowing back, and running with such speed and strength that they were in real danger of being knocked over. Matilda yelled a warning, but Nan was already taking action. She scooped up a child under each arm and ran to shore, bent double but determined, with Rosie trailing after her, squealing and yelling and kicking mud in all directions. And not a moment too soon. Within twenty minutes the river was in full and violent flood and the anchored boats were being thrown together like corks, with a most dramatic rending and splintering of wood. Mattie and Will and Rosie were thrilled by it.
Matilda was not. ‘How she imagines we are ever to get these children clean again,’ she complained to Harriet, tucking baby Edward into his shawl and returning him to his nursemaid, ‘I do not know. Look at the state of your Rosie. Why does she encourage her? It’s so childish. Running off into all that filth. Oh I know she’s a great business woman and all that, but really …!’
Harriet made sympathetic noises and then turned her attention to her excited son. Secretly, she’d been watching her mother-in-law with admiration, envying her energy and vitality, and wishing she could share her extraordinary sense of fun. ‘She is the sort of woman I would dearly like to be,’ she wrote in her diary that night, after a full account of the events of the morning. ‘I feel pale and insignificant beside her, as I fear I am.’
The next morning it was time to pack for her journey to Rattlesden.
‘Must we, Mama?’ Will wanted to know.
‘Oh yes, lambkin, indeed we must,’ Harriet said, unfastening the carpetbag. ‘Your Aunt Annie is going to have another baby, and when ladies have babies they are very weak and we have to look after them.’
‘Couldn’t Jimmy and Beau look after her? Then we could stay here an’ paddle in the mud again with Nanna an’ find another sov’reign an’ see some more boats gettin’ smashed.’
‘The very idea,’ Harriet said, lining the bag with clean paper. ‘Do you like seeing boats smashed, you dreadful child?’
She didn’t sound cross or reproving, only affectionate, so he told her the truth, ‘Yes, Mama, very much.’
‘Well,’ she said, packing his nightshirt, ‘I daresay you’ll see a good many things broken in your lifetime. Humanity is uncommon destructive. But for the present we must go to Rattlesden and see your new cousin.’
So although he would much have preferred mud to a baby, to Rattlesden he went. And the baby wasn’t there when they arrived. It appeared three days later and it was very small and uninteresting and spent all its time fast asleep. And Aunt Annie was as fit as a flea; she said so. So it was really rather a sell. The christening was quite fun because they had honey cakes afterwards and the baby, who was called Dorothy, kept its eyes open for once and looked at him. But it would have been much more sensible to stay in London and play in the river.
And then after all that they had to stay on in Rattlesden for another four weeks because Pollyanna was getting married to Mr Jones, the curate, and old Bessie said they’d got to give them ‘a proper send-off.
A proper send-off turned out to be a very big party, with more food than the guests could possibly eat and wine flowing like water and dancing into the small hours, and children allowed to sit up until well after supper time.
Nan and Frederick came up to Bury for the occasion and Annie was flushed with pleasure at the great success of her matchmaking and the obvious happiness of her nursemaid. ‘Although how we shall make out I do not know,’ she said cheerfully to Harriet, as the party chuckled about them. ‘We mustn’t expect her to be at our beck and call all the time, not now she’s a wife. That wouldn’t do at all, would it, my dear?’
‘If I know Pollyanna,’ Harriet said, ‘she’ll not leave your baby unattended, wife or no.’
‘Oh I know it,’ Annie said, smiling lovingly at the bride as she danced by on her new husband’s arm. ‘I know it. We are greatly blessed in our Pollyanna.’
‘I do wish John could have been here,’ Harriet said sadly. She was the only married woman in the rectory that evening who didn’t have her husband to escort her. He’d gone straight ba
ck to London after the ceremony. ‘He works so hard, I rarely see him these days.’
‘Would you like me to speak to him about it?’ Annie offered, smiling her sympathy.
‘Oh no, no, no,’ Harriet said at once. That wouldn’t do at all. It would upset him terribly if he thought she was complaining about him. ‘If there is work to be done, he must do it. I know that. I am being selfish even to speak of it. He will soon be home again.’
‘’Tis my opinion,’ his sister said trenchantly, ‘that he is being uncommon foolish to waste so much of the time he ought to be enjoying with you. Work comes to us every day, but a wedding is a rarity, and we only live once. But I will not speak of it, my dear, since you do not wish it. Ah, here comes my dear James to claim the waltz.’
But it was an unhappiness to Harriet to be so much alone, hide it as she might. In fact if it hadn’t been for Matilda’s cheerful company, she would have been very lonely indeed that year. Nan was hard at work introducing advertisements to one shop after another, and John was equally busy travelling the country in an increasingly vain attempt to prevent her, and Annie was preoccupied with Beau, who was nine years old now and had followed his brother to school at St Edmund’s Grammar in Bury and needed ‘a deal of attention’.
‘I drift from one day to the next without my dear John,’ Harriet told her diary. ‘I need occupation.’
And rather to everybody’s surprise, that summer she found it.
June that year was as hot and humid as March had been cold and stormy. Harriet and Matilda evacuated their families out of the city as soon as the hot spell began, for heat brought fevers, and none of their children was old enough to withstand a city fever. But even in Rattlesden the corn was as dry as bone, Harriet’s roses burned as they bloomed and the trees in the garden could only cast a sticky shade.
Annie kept baby Dot indoors away from the sun and dressed her in silk to keep her cool. And Harriet paid particular care to marketing, searching out the freshest meat she could find, and walking to the farm gate every morning for fresh churned butter and milk straight from the cow, because food turned bad so quickly in the stifling air.
Beau was very impressed with his new life as a scholar. ‘We have such fights, Aunt Harriet,’ he said, blue eyes wide.
Harriet didn’t want to hear about fights. ‘What are you learning?’ she said. ‘What do they teach you?’ She was sitting in the rectory garden with Annie and Matilda, and soon it would be time for tea.
‘Oh history and geography and arithmetic and such,’ Beau said airily. ‘Some boys have to be taught to read; imagine that! Such dunces. Me and Jimmy don’t, of course. I should say not!’
‘Meg’ll have to be taught to read when she goes to school though,’ Jimmy said, watching his sister as she and Will and Matty climbed into their tree-house in the holm oak.
‘Can’t she read?’ Harriet asked Annie.
‘Well no,’ Annie confessed. ‘I haven’t had time to teach her, poor child. Not with a new baby in the house.’
‘I haven’t taught Matty either,’ Matilda confessed. ‘Do you think I ought?’ It hadn’t occured to her that her daughter might need educating.
Harriet had already begun to teach Will his letters, because he was nearly five years old and wanted to learn. Now she looked into the oak tree where he was pulling Matty up by one arm and her pigtails, and a splendid idea came to her. ‘Then I will teach them,’ she said. ‘I will run a little school, out in the garden when it is fine, and at home in my blue parlour when it is wet or cold. I will teach all three of them if you and Matilda are agreeable to it. How would that be?’
‘It would be admirable,’ Annie said at once.
Matilda thought it was an excellent idea too. ‘You could teach Edward as well if you’d a mind to,’ she said. ‘But I suppose as he’s only three he’s a mite too young.’
So Edward was left in the nursery in Bury a little longer, Matty was driven over to Rattlesden each day and, although at first the trio was none too keen to be sitting still when they could have been running in fields, after a day or two teacher and taught began to enjoy themselves. There were rewards to this new life, out in the sun with their slates and pencils. ‘Well done!’ Harriet would call as a new letter was mastered and a new word learned. ‘Well done! We must find a sugar stick for such a clever child.’
‘You have a talent for it, my dear,’ Cousin Thomasina said, when she and Evelina came to visit.
‘I enjoy it,’ Harriet said, looking at the three fair heads bent over their slates. ‘’Tis a real pleasure to see them learning so well. Will and Matty are reading little sentences already, aren’t you my lambkins? And Meg draws such lovely pictures and nearly knows sixteen letters. What a clever girl! I make up little rhymes to help them, you see, and we draw pictures to fit them. Oh, I enjoy it.’ And she held up her latest, a card on which she had written: ‘O is for OAK on which we can climb, P is for PASTRY with jam every time.’ ‘When they can read the letter and the word,’ she explained, ‘they may climb the tree and eat the tart.’
‘I can see why they enjoy your lessons,’ Thomasina said. ‘What shall you do when you reach Z?’
‘Why, I shall have to take them to the Strand, and they shall see a real live zebra in the Exeter ’Change.’
‘There is a menagerie comes to Norwich about this time of year,’ Evelina said, ‘but I believe they only have lions.’
‘Lions would do,’ Will said, looking at his mother hopefully.
‘Well, well,’ she laughed. ‘We will see about lions when we get back to L again.’
Somehow or other they got back to L again a fortnight later, and the next day Harriet and her three excited pupils took the pony-cart to Stowmarket and there caught the morning coach to the Bell in Norwich.
It was a fine August day, slow and warm and rather autumnal, with just sufficient breeze to cleanse the narrow streets and carry away the worst of the summer smells, although down below the castle the air was still rank with the smell of that morning’s beast market. Castle Meadow was thronged with people in holiday mood, a-nod with bonnets and fine cottons, light-hearted in pale toppers and buff trousers and summer jackets and surrounded by street sellers, pie men and apple women, boot-blackers and ballad-mongers, cheap-jacks of every kind. There were three coaches in front of the Bell, two arrived and one ready for the off, and the ostlers in their smeared green aprons were hard at work attending the teams.
‘What’s that?’ Will asked, looking up at the old castle towering above them, square and solid and imposing on its grassy mound.
‘That,’ Harriet told him, ‘is the dungeon, where they lock people up, poor things.’
‘What for?’
‘For being thieves and vagabonds and suchlike.’
‘What’s a wag-a-bond?’
‘Where are the lions?’ Matty said, her round cheeks red with excitement. ‘Aunt Harriet, you promised us to see the lions.’
‘So you shall,’ Harriet said, taking the two girls by the hand and walking them off up the hill. ‘Come along.’
Mr Wombwell’s menagerie was enclosed behind a hastily erected wattle fence on the open ground below the castle that usually served as the horse fair. There was a low gate in the middle of the fence, where Mr Wombwell stood to collect their entrance fees, and as they approached they could hear the strange cries of the beasts.
‘Come on! Come on!’ Matty cried, penny in hand. ‘Run!’
So they ran.
Inside the fence the animals were enclosed in pens, one beside the other, and the smell of them was so strong it made Harriet’s eyes water.
Will said the first animal they came to was a sell, because it was just a sheep and you could see a sheep any day of the week, and where were the lions?
But the next two were deer with slender legs and mournful eyes, which was better, and the pen after that contained an odd looking thing like a brown pig with a long snout caked in mud. Then there were three miserable heaps of black and
white quills that the notice proclaimed to be ‘Porky pines’, and after that, and at last, they came to the lions, two of them in a pen only slightly bigger than that allotted to the porky pines, lying together, panting in the heat, their brown manes tangled and their tawny coats smeared with grime.
‘Aren’t they big!’ Will said, his eyes round with awe.
But Harriet thought how sad they looked and how awful it was that they should be so dirty. They lay in indolent heaps, with their great paws as soft and still as cushions and only their tawny tails flicking from time to time to remove the flies that buzzed and plagued all about them. Such beautiful eyes, she thought, as yellow as honey, and so sad. Almost as if they knew they were prisoners. And she thought of the men locked away in the dungeons underneath her feet and remembered her own imprisonment in that cramped cell in Churchgate Street. ‘I can’t bear to think of anyone being locked up,’ she said. ‘It seems to me the greatest unkindness.’
‘They’re very smelly,’ Meg observed, wrinkling her nose.
Then to Will’s delight, one of the animals rose to his feet, shook his tangled mane and padded to the side of the pen, where he flopped down again just a few inches away from where they were standing.
‘Why he’s close enough to touch,’ he said, enraptured. ‘Could I touch him, Mama?’
Mr Wombwell was beside them in an instant. ‘No you could not,’ he said firmly. ‘That there is Nero and the last little boy what touched our Nero got his head bit clean off.’
Will looked at Nero with increased respect. ‘Clean off?’ he said.
‘Clean off.’
Nero yawned, exposing a vast expanse of pink tongue and formidable yellow teeth, at which Will gazed with admiration. ‘Did he eat it?’ he asked.
‘I think we’ve seen enough for one afternoon,’ Harriet said. ‘Time we were off to the fish market. I promised your Aunt Annie to buy fish for supper.’
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