by Ann Turnbull
“I shall look for work,” said Isaac.
But he was only a lad, not above twelve. He couldn’t earn much. I thought of the apprenticeship I had been offered. What wouldn’t any of these children give for such a chance? But the answer came: not their souls. They would refuse it, as I intended to do. Their parents had already given up much more.
“Well, the Quaker meetings will founder,” my father said with satisfaction as we entered the warehouse on seventh-day. “No one will dare gather, with sickness in the town.”
“We will gather,” I said. “The children will meet as usual.” I spoke confidently, though I guessed he was right and we would be a small group and no trouble to the authorities.
“You will not go.”
“I will. I must.”
I was conscious that here, in the warehouse, was the heart of my father’s life. All around us bales of wool were stacked, tangible evidence of his wealth and status. These bales would cushion me, if I let them; they would provide the eight hundred pounds for my bond; set me up in a wealthy trade; form my inheritance in due course.
“I saw Nick Barron yesterday,” he said. “I told him you accepted his offer.”
“What?” Shock and outrage took the breath from me for an instant. “But – but I don’t… I am writing…” I pictured the crumpled attempts flung into the fireplace, the difficult letter still unwritten. “Thou had no right!”
He ignored this; ignored, too, my use of “thou”, which usually provoked him to anger. “You will thank me in due time. Barron was much pleased, he said, and will proceed with the paperwork.”
“I cannot be taken on against my will!”
My father seemed unaware of the enormity of what he had done. “You will have a month to see how you like the work,” he said, “as is usual. I don’t doubt you will fall into the way of it very well. And the sooner it’s settled, the better.”
“Father,” I said. My breath came fast. “Thou cannot direct my life. I will choose my own master. And my own religion.”
We heard a door open elsewhere in the building, and voices. Richard and the other men were arriving for work.
My father put a hand on my shoulder. “A month in London, and you’ll find you see things quite differently. New interests, new company, all the life of the city. You’ll shake off these ideas. And the girl… I know how it is when passion strikes. You can think of nothing else; you must have her. But it will pass, believe me. In London, you’ll forget her.”
And he drew me away to join the others, quite unaware of my feelings.
I shall refuse to sign, I thought. No: I could not allow matters to reach that point before protesting; it would embarrass everyone. I must write, explain. But to write that letter, now, would be harder than ever; and speed was necessary. I’ll tell him, I decided, face to face.
A chance came during the day, when I was sent out on an errand. Nicholas Barron’s house is in St Peter’s Street – Peter’s Street, as the Quakers call it – a substantial house, much like our own, and no doubt with a family like ours who concern themselves with dowries and inheritances, and who dress in fine clothes and dance and sing and play music, and don’t worry too much about religion. An excellent connection, as my father had said, and one I would have welcomed only a few months ago.
A maid answered my knock and went to find her master. I waited in the hall, which was oak-panelled and smelled of beeswax and lavender. There was a lion-legged chair, polished to a dark sheen. The maid had asked me to sit, but I was too nervous.
Nicholas Barron came smiling, though with an air of busyness. “Will! Your father has told me…” And, to the maid: “Bess! Fetch some beer.”
“No!” I said. “I won’t delay thee. My father acted without my knowledge – or consent.” I saw his face change. “I am sorry, sir.” The formal “sir” came out without my thinking.
“You do not agree to the bond?”
“I cannot make the promise thou ask for, and I will not enter into a bond I may feel obliged to break.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry to lose you. And yet I confess I was in a way disappointed when your father spoke to me. I thought he had persuaded you; that you had conformed. And I was surprised at that. What will you do?”
His abrupt question took me by surprise. “I – I don’t know. Leave home. Find work.”
“In London, where the streets are paved with gold?”
“Perhaps.” I felt I was being mocked.
“You know, without an apprenticeship you will find it difficult to get work – except of a menial kind.”
“I have friends who may help.”
“Dissenter friends?”
“Yes.”
He gave a little shake of his head. “There is something joyless, humourless, about those people. Don’t become like them. Be merry!”
I smiled. “I will try.”
“Your father is angry, no doubt, and disappointed. Well, I shall tell him he should be proud to have a son who stands by his beliefs.”
“Thank you.”
He turned to go, then stopped and said, “If you should find yourself in London and in need … my business is at New Bear Quay, near the Custom House. Remember.”
And he left me.
I did not tell my father that day about my conversation with Nicholas Barron. My father had not, after all, troubled to tell me of his negotiations on my behalf, so why should I do him the courtesy? So I reasoned. The truth was, I feared his anger.
But the next day – first-day – I was forced to tell him.
I arrived home at noon to find my stepmother and Anne back from church and settled in the drawing room, sewing. Their faces told me I was in trouble. When my father appeared, my stepmother rose to leave and took Anne with her. My sister left unwillingly, with a backward glance of sympathy at me.
“You have been to the Quaker meeting, I suppose?” my father began.
“Yes.”
“Do you intend to get yourself arrested even before the bond is signed?”
“There will be no bond,” I said. And I told him what I had done.
He stared, and I saw amazement in his eyes. He had not believed I could refuse such an offer.
“You turned it down? It is settled?”
“Yes. All is clear now.”
He rallied then, and his bullying manner returned. “And how do you intend to live?”
“I shall find work.”
“What work? You have no trade. Your dissenting friends are all shoemakers and tailors and the like. They work with their hands. They have skills. Society needs them – for their work, at least. You are fitted for nothing but idleness.”
“Thou speak as if I wasted a fortune on gaming and drink!”
“I’d rather you did! Rather than this – this overthrowing of all religion and respect. It would be easier to understand…” He paused, and stared. “What’s that mess on your coat?”
“Horse turds. Some boys set about us.”
He made a sound of disgust. Nothing distressed him like damage to good cloth. He turned to me, almost pleading. “You’ll end in prison. And you don’t understand what it’s like: the filth, the cruelty. People die in prison, Will. They die of fever, of poisoned air and water, from being fettered and beaten. More die in prison, I’d guess, than are ever strung up for public execution. They’ll throw you in with the very dregs of society: thieves, whores, pimps – murderers, even. How do you think I’d feel if you were rotting in some jail? Or sent on a prison ship to Jamaica? If you won’t care for yourself, think what it would do to your sister, to your stepmother, to know you were in such straits.”
“I know it will hurt thee—” I began, but got no further, for he exploded in sudden fury.
“Do not ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ me! I will not endure it!”
“A generation or so back, everyone spoke like this,” I said.
“But they don’t now. Now it is damnably rude, a sign of an upstart who will not de
fer to his betters. You will find no work if you ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ people, unless it be with the dissenting sort.” He paced the room in exasperation. “I had looked to see you apprenticed, then setting up in your own business, successful. Married, in due course…”
I said, unwisely – but he made me unwise – “I will marry. With Susanna.”
His face darkened. “That—”
“Don’t call her any foul name,” I warned. “I won’t hear it.”
“I will call her no right wife for you! What are her people? Village artisans? A weaver, you said?”
“Yes, and not to be despised. There would be no cloth merchants without weavers.”
“I don’t despise them. They have their place in society. As we have ours. But how could I call such a man kinsman? How could you bring a girl like that here, to this house, to be sister to Anne? You’d do the lass no favour. She would be lost, out of her place.”
I remembered the night of the midsummer dinner, how I had thought: Anne would love this, but I could not imagine Susanna here at all. He was right. I belonged here, but Susanna did not. So my future must lie elsewhere.
Susanna
There came a day – more than a week after Nat had left prison – when we knew he would live. The fever had passed, the rash gone, and the demons no longer tormented him. Although weak and exhausted, he took food, and by the evening insisted on leaving his bed. He came down to sit by the kitchen fire – for he felt the cold, even though it was summer – and talked, and played with the cats, and even joked with us as he used to.
Mary, who’s not one to fuss, fussed. She sent me upstairs for a warmer coat; she made a posset, and stoked up the fire instead of letting it die down as we usually did of an evening.
Later, when Nat was gone back up to bed – breathless on the stairs, but steady – we both gave thanks to God. Mary sat in silence for a long time with her eyes closed, and I did not disturb her.
Next day we swept and fumigated, opened the curtains, threw out dusty herbs and brought in fresh ones to sweeten the air.
Mary opened up the shop and print room and sent me to Castle Street to ask Simon Race to come to work. She’d been writing a pamphlet about the trial and the conditions in prison and planned to get it printed and on the streets.
I came back along the High Street, called on the Mintons and gave them our news.
“God be thanked!” said Hester, and she scooped me up into a great hug. She knew the danger we had been in. “Thou’ll be staying there now, with thy mistress back, but the little one” – she nodded at Deb, who was riding past on a hobby-horse in pursuit of Joe, and hadn’t even noticed me – “she can stay as long as she likes. Isaac, too.”
I could not call on Will, though I passed his father’s house. But when I returned to the print works Mary said, “Will was here.”
“Oh! I missed him?”
She saw my dismay and smiled in sympathy, and for a moment I thought she too would hug me; but she only patted my arm. “I told him to come this evening,” she said.
William
I went straight to the printer’s that evening, telling Joan not to hold back supper for me. Mary was shutting up shop when I arrived. She led me through to the living quarters at the back, where Susanna was stirring a pot on the fire and Nat was seated near by with a cat on his lap.
“Nat!” I said. “I thank God to see thee recovered!”
In truth he looked so wan and thin that I was shocked. His cheeks were pale and his eyes seemed to have sunk. If the fever could do this to a young healthy man, I thought, no wonder that people were dying.
I turned to Susanna, and she looked up, rosy-faced from the fire.
“Susanna.”
I longed to hold her, to tell her how much I’d missed her, and I saw the same longing in her eyes.
“Sit down, Will,” Mary said. “Thou’ll stay for supper?”
“Yes. I thank thee.” I sat on the bench next to Nat, and we all exchanged news. Mary was concerned at my decision not to go with Nicholas Barron. “That was a hard choice for thee,” she said, “and distressing for thy father, who thought to do well by thee.”
“But I feel I was right.”
“This Nicholas Barron sounds a good man,” said Susanna, “and understanding.”
“He is. But my father…” I sighed.
“Thou should honour thy father,” said Mary.
“I do. Truly. And I love him. There used to be so much love between us. But now he will not listen to me.”
“It can break hearts,” said Mary, “when families are split. And our people are often blamed for it.”
“Is there news of Friends in prison?” I asked.
“Yes. We heard last night from the Stonegate. The fever is gone from there. Judith is well. Dan Kite has been beaten, but both grow strong in the spirit. At the Castlegate there is still much sickness and no one can visit.”
She handed me a piece of paper with wording for a pamphlet on it, written in black ink. “What dost thou think? Susanna and Nat approve.”
“Concerning the PERSECUTION OF THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF GOD CALLED QUAKERS…” it began, and went on to describe the attacks on the meetings, the beatings and unjust imprisonment, the overcrowding in the jails.
“It is all true,” I said.
“Simon has set the text up ready. Tomorrow I must try to find a man to operate the press. John is still in prison and determined to suffer for the truth.”
“I could do it!” I said. Here, at last, seemed an opportunity. I could work in Mary’s print room.
But Mary looked at me and shook her head, smiling. “I mean a man, not a youth. A big man, strong. The press requires it. I thought to hire someone from Bridewell: a vagrant, perhaps.”
I felt rebuffed. First my father, now Mary, thought me unemployable. “Let me try, at least,” I said.
“Try now,” she said, and opened the print-room door.
The press dominated the room. The huge screw at its working centre was operated by pulling a lever. I’d seen John haul on this, using both hands.
Mary brought the tray of type set up by Simon and placed it ready. “First we must ink the type.” She indicated the daubers and poured ink onto a flat plate.
I inked the daubers. These were not so much heavy as difficult to manage. With one in each hand I dabbed awkwardly and was slow.
“Thou need set up a rhythm,” said Mary. And she took them from me and daubed quickly, her wrists surprisingly strong – right-left, right-left – till the type was covered in ink.
“Then the paper goes here, and is held under the frisket.” She slid it into place and turned the handle that moved the bed of the press into position. “Now try the bar.”
I used both hands and pulled. It was heavy, but the screw turned and the weight came down.
When we moved the bed back, Mary pulled out the result: a perfect page.
“Concerning the PERSECUTION…” It looked at once more impressive in print.
“Well? I did it!”
“Then do another.”
We printed another page, and a third. Nat came in from the kitchen to watch.
By the fifteenth page I was tired, and by the twentieth my neck and shoulders ached and the strain must have shown in my face.
“Could thou run off sixty?” Mary asked, a glint of laughter in her eyes. “A hundred? Five hundred?”
I smiled and shook my head. “Find thyself a vagrant.”
Nat came to my defence. “He’d build up strength in no time. And the daubing: practice is all it needs.”
I looked at the tray of print, set in mirror image so that it must be read from right to left and with the letters facing backwards. It looked like some strange foreign script. There were large initial letters to be incorporated, too, and spacer blocks. And all must be checked for errors.
“To learn all these tasks would be useful,” I said.
Mary looked at the two of us in amusement.
; “Dost thou seek to be my new apprentice, Will? Nat will be leaving me soon.”
I turned to Nat. “To London?”
“Yes. I’ve been given names – Friends, printers – who will help me find work. I want to be away before summer’s end.”
Mary cuffed him lightly on the cheek. “He’ll walk to London that can scarce walk upstairs without puffing! But we’ll get thee well, boy. Come and eat.”
After supper Nat went to bed, being still tired from his illness. Mary then found something in the print room to busy her. I knew she was giving me time with Susanna.
We came together, arms tight around each other.
“I’ve missed thee,” she said. “It’s been so long – more than a week!”
“Shall I give thee a kiss for each day?”
“One for each hour!”
We laughed at first, and then our kisses grew more eager.
“We won’t be separated again,” I promised. “We shall marry.” I took her by the hands. “Tell me how Friends marry. There is no priest, so how is it done?”
“We – the couple must bring their wish to be married to the meeting…”
“And?”
“And declare, each in turn, that they will take the other. Each one promises to be – with God’s help – a loving and faithful partner until death shall separate them. And so the meeting is witness.”
“No one marries them? No elder? No justice of the peace?”
“It is the work of the Lord.”
“Then no one can stop us? We can be wed?”
“If it be God’s will. Yes.”
Mary rattled the door of the print room before she opened it. When she came in we were standing hand in hand and something of our intent must have shown in our faces, for she looked at us sharply and said, “What’s afoot?”
Susanna said, “Will and I wish to be married.”
She stared. “Married?”
“Soon,” I said.
Mary looked from me to Susanna and back to me. “Susanna is my servant,” she said, “and has agreed to stay with me for one year. She is but fifteen years old. And thy age, William?”
“Seventeen.”