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Is Father afraid of Uncle John too? thought Elizabeth, startled.

The Winthrop family were gathered in the low ceilinged parlour next the Hall. It was a room they used for the normal routine of living, and it was beautiful; richly panelled with linen-fold, and a great fire crackling beneath the carved plaster mantel. Elizabeth, kneeling beside her mother and father, and trying hard to keep awake, stared around the room while Uncle John’s voice went on and on. He had been intoning a psalm when the Fones family crept in. He had turned his long haggard face towards them and given them a grave bow, and paused until they were kneeling on the bright Turkey rug with the others, and then he had continued. He was dressed in mourning black for his wife, of course, with a small prickly-looking ruff around his neck. His wavy hair fell down to the ruff; it was the colour of a chestnut, so were his moustache and small pointed beard. His eyes were light and not really unkind, Elizabeth thought, but they didn’t look as though there’d ever be a twinkle in them; though Grandfather’s did, and Jack’s, Her own gaze blurred, while Uncle John’s voice droned on. She began to nod and felt her mother’s hand give a warning shake.

Elizabeth blushed, anxious not to show herself a sleepy baby before Jack and Harry, who knelt perfectly still on the other side of the room near the servants. But there were never long prayers and psalms like this at home. They had to be endured only in church on Sundays, and there in London at their parish church of St Sepulchre’s the service was all read out of the prayer book. You knew when it would end.

Elizabeth’s knees began to throb, her empty stomach growled. All at once her nose tickled unmercifully. She made no effort to restrain the result - a vociferous and lusty sneeze. This pleasing sensation repeated itself at once and more loudly. Young Lucy Winthrop knelt in front of Elizabeth and the sneeze sprayed her bare back. She turned and glared at her niece, while Uncle John stopped in the middle of an “And furthermore, Dear Lord, we beseech . . .” to rest his sombre gaze on Elizabeth.

“No child is too young to observe proper decorum and reverence in the Presence of the Lord,” he said and shifted his eyes towards Harry who had dissolved into hiccuping giggles. “Henry, you will leave the room - Anne and Thomas, you must take measures as to the conduct of your own child.”

“Oh, well-a-day, my son,” interrupted Adam Winthrop suddenly from his chair of privilege by the fire. “Be not so harsh, a sneeze or two is no great matter, and in the truth though you pray eloquently  - ‘pie et eloquenter orabis’ - “ The old man paused, suddenly smiling, to savour the little Latin tag. “None the less, to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose. Now our visitors are weary, and it is the time for food.”

Elizabeth looked at her grandfather with gratitude, marvelling that even
he
dared rebuke his awesome son, who had flushed, and drawn his breath in. She was the more amazed that after a moment her Uncle John answered humbly, “Aye, sir - you are right The devil ever lures me by new guises, and it may be now by unworthy pride in my own eloquence.” He bowed his head and clasping his hands again added, “We will now say all together - ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thine only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

The ordeal was over; Elizabeth escaped further scolding, though when they did go to the supper table she was too tired to enjoy the custards for which she had longed. The candles danced before Elizabeth’s heavy eyes. In her heart was a confused rebellion, but even through this and her weariness, her natural optimism remained. Though the joys of Groton Manor were dampened tonight by a disapproving atmosphere to which she was unaccustomed, and by the boredom of those interminable prayers, surely everything would be all right tomorrow. She would be very, very good, and besides there was always Jack. She looked at him where he sat across the table - a stocky dark boy of eleven, quietly munching his rabbit pasty, silent as children were expected to be. Still, from the alert cock to his head you could tell he was listening to the conversation between his father and grandfather. Jack did not talk much, but he always knew what was going on around him. He proved it now, as he felt Elizabeth’s stare. He met her eyes across the table, smiled and gave her a small heartening wink.

Elizabeth’s optimism was justified by reason of two unexpected circumstances, and the ensuing summer weeks flowed along happily. The children romped together in pasture and farmyard, they raced on shaggy ponies, they sailed chips amidst protesting ducks on the pond, they wandered the nearby woods and stuffed themselves with wild strawberries. They explored all the fascinating features of the Manor lands; the mill with its big slowly turning sails, the little heath where Harry had once found some Roman coins, the ruins of a castle haunted by a headless lady in grey. The miller’s children said so, and that you could hear the lady moaning on nights of the new moon. Elizabeth was eager to creep out of the Manor House and try to hear the moans, but Jack said no. It would not be a seemly thing to do.

It was not only because his elders trusted Jack to care for the younger children that they all had so much freedom in those early summer weeks of 1617, but that the day after the Foneses’ arrival John Winthrop had been summoned to London on business connected with his first wife’s estate, and he took Thomas Fones back with him, to the apothecary’s flattered relief. And as it happened, the morning after the departure of the two men, Mistress Winthrop slipped on the stairs and went to bed with a cracked ankle. Groton, freed from the pious restraint of mother and son and the atmosphere of discontented ill-health diffused by Thomas, burst forth into gaiety. Prayers were short and sometimes forgotten, a good deal more wine than usual was consumed. After supper, of nights, Adam would take out his recorder and, tootling merrily, urge all the young people to sing the jolly catches and rounds of his Elizabethan boyhood. One day he sent word to the village that he would require musicians. He summoned Betts the thatcher who played the fiddle, and told him to bring others with him, a piper and a drummer at least. Groton Manor would have dancing that night. At dinner Adam added an extra flagon of stout to his usual cups of wine, his brown eyes sparkled as bright as his grandsons’, his cheeks and nose turned mulberry, his white curls quivered, his barrel body shook with joviality as it strained the seams of his old-fashioned bottle-green doublet. The doublet had slashed red sleeves, and was trimmed with ribbons.

“Aye, daughter,” he said to Anne in response to her startled look when he appeared in this gay garment. “A pox on long faces and I’ll not wear mourning today.
^!
Tis over a half-year gone since John’s poor wife died, God rest her soul - and what’s more, daughter, we must celebrate today our King Jamie’s birthday, like all loyal Englishmen.”

Anne smiled, looking at her father with affection. This was the way life used to be at Groton in her girlhood. “Yes,” she said, “I remember how merrily we did celebrate Queen Bess’s birthday long ago - and May Day and Christmastide so blithely - though Thomas does not hold with that ... I cannot think it wrong.”

“Nor I, my dear,” said the old squire. “ ‘Tis your mother and brother John who have come to think so here, but I’ll stick to the old customs long
as
I live.”

“Father - Father!” cried Lucy Winthrop, stamping hard on the treadle of her spinning wheel. “You would not still have us follow Papist superstitions, I hope!” Lucy was a thin brown girl of sixteen, stoop-shouldered and high-nosed. She was her mother’s pet, and knew it, and she had listened with pressed lips to the conversation between her father and sister.

They were sitting in the small panelled parlour, Anne and her father ensconced in the great court chairs on either side of a small crackling fire, for though it was June 19 a chill east wind blew from the sea that linked their Suffolk coast with Holland, The boys had ridden off, as usual in summer, for two hours of Latin tutoring with Mr. Nicholson, the rector. The youngest Winthrops, Forth and Mary, had recovered from the measles and were with their grandmother in the great bedchamber upstairs, reciting the alphabet to her from their hornbooks. Though Mistress Winthrop was still in great pain from her ankle, she yet managed to supervise the education of the motherless young Winthrops. The Fones children already knew their hornbooks, indeed Elizabeth read and wrote quite well, but the grandmother had allotted tasks to the Fones girls too, since -Anne seemed to have no ability for systematic discipline.

Martha had been told to sort wool near her Aunt Lucy, who sat

on the window seat spinning. Elizabeth had been presented with a canvas sampler, needle, and silk and commanded to embroider her name and then the alphabet upon it - an occupation she detested. The silk snarled, and broke when she yanked at it, the needle pricked her fingers, the E.L.I.Z. were lumpy little botches. She had almost completely managed to avoid working on the sampler, by crouching over it so that her long dark curls made a shield, and by the further duplicity of hiding the result from inquirers, saying she was going to surprise them with her remarkable progress later. That there would inevitably be a day of exposure did not bother her, something would take care of it, the sampler would get finished - maybe even by Puck, she thought - if she put bread and cream out for him in the kitchen. There were several hobgoblins that did good deeds in the night.

Elizabeth was often puzzled by her elders’ remarks and she now lifted her head from the sampler and addressed her grandfather. “Why are Papists so wicked, sir? Our King’s mother was a Papist, was she not? The ‘fair and feckless Marie - Queen o’ Scots,’” said Elizabeth, quoting a phrase she had heard used in London.

“Damme, if little pitchers haven’t big ears!” Adam chuckled, and tapped the warm bowl of his clay pipe against his knee. “The Papists are wicked, my dear, because our good Queen, for whom ye’re named, said they were, ‘tis net to be questioned . . . forbye I can remember how it was when I was a wee lad in the time o’ Bloody Mary - the screams and the agonies, and the burning of us Protestants. ‘Twas dreadful I”

Elizabeth considered this with interest. Uncle John owned a Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
and she with all the other- children had pored over the shivery woodcuts of tortures and burnings. So there were Papists who were bad, and Protestants like her family who were good, only, thought Elizabeth frowning, there seemed to be two kinds of Protestant. There was a kind who had candies and a cross like in the Boxford church and who bowed at the name of Jesus and who kept Saint’s Days and Christmas, as Grandfather did and Mother too. But then there was another kind who hated all those things. Uncle John and Grandmother and Aunt Lucy seemed to be that kind. They had a name that also began with P. “Puh, Puh, Puh - “ chanted Elizabeth experimentally under her breath, “Puh, Puh, Papist, Puh, Puh, Protestant, Puh, Puh, Puritan. ...”

“What’s that you’re saying, you naughty child!” cried Lucy, scowling at the culprit. “Anne, did you hear what she said?”

Anne sighed, and eased to the other arm the heavy baby who had finished suckling. “Bess is forever making up little songs, it does no harm.”

“That word she used, ‘Puritan’,” snapped Lucy. “What do you mean by it, Elizabeth?”

The child stared at her aunt, startled at this vehemence. “Old Giles, the Thetford tinker, last week when he was here at the Manor, he was laughing with the maids, and I heard him say .. .” Elizabeth paused, then went on in a deep voice that passably imitated a thick Norfolk accent, “ ‘The Winthrops has altered o’ late, that they have  Turned Puritan hear, leastwise
young
squire has, there’s a mort o’ them canting, psalm-whining Puritans about these parts nowadays!’ “

“Bess!” cried Anne, shocked. “You mustn’t listen to or repeat things you don’t understand!” She bit her lips, wondering suddenly if she herself quite understood. “Puritan” was an insulting epithet, never used kindly, and yet was that not precisely what John and so many others in the eastern counties were trying to do? “Purify” their beloved church of its more venal bishops and of the Roman idolatries, so as to rely only on the Word of God for all their worship - as put forth in the Bible, and in no other place.

Lucy twitched her shoulders and returned to her spinning. “You see,” she said, “what comes of letting children roam about unhindered, to learn foul words . . . and if you will permit me, Father,” she glanced at Adam, who was watching his two daughters quizzically, “my conscience bids me say that all this wine-bibbing, and talk of dancing and romping much disturbs my mother on her bed of pain, and will certainly displease my brother when he returns home.”

“Indeed,” said Adam, puffing Virginia tobacco smoke through his nostrils. He crossed his plump black velvet thighs. “Well, my conscience bids
me
say, miss - that I am still master here at Groton, that I understand my son quite as well as you do, and that no chit of sixteen has leave to censure her elders!”

Lucy flushed crimson, Elizabeth’s eyes sparkled, but Martha, frightened as always by any sort of adult anger, let fall the piles of wool and ran to hide her face on her mother’s lap.

Anne smoothed the silky brown head. What a fuss about nothing, she thought; surely it is the Will of God that we should all be happy, and knew at once what a foolish spineless thought that was. John, and Mr. Nicholson, the Groton rector, said that was not the Will of God at all. He wanted them to mortify the flesh, and earn salvation. If I were not so weary, Anne thought, I could worry more about my own and the babies’ souls. And the new one . . . dear God, don’t let it die - or me - when it is born . . .

Adam held his revelry that night in honour of the King, and it was to be - by reason of a guest who came to Groton - an occasion which affected ail their lives. The old squire had sent his under-groom with invitations to several of the neighbouring big houses, and was particularly gratified by the unexpected acceptance of Lord and Lady deVere who were temporarily in residence at their country seat near Hadleigh and were kin to the Earl of Oxford. No one so exalted had ever honoured Groton Manor before. Even Mistress Winthrop was pleased when she heard of this, and made arrangements to have herself carried downstairs. Although Lord deVere was a worldly peer, and spent much time at court where it was well known that matters of strict decorum and religious reform were not as important as they should be, still he was a Baron, and it was impossible not to feel flattered by his graciousness. True, Adam was a generation removed from the Suffolk clothier who had become first squire of Groton Manor, yet Mistress Winthrop herself could claim no aristocratic tinge at all. She had been plain Anne Brown of Edwardstone, a yeoman’s daughter. She ordered her best dress of black brocaded velvet to be brought from its chest and pressed, and by six o’clock she was downstairs and installed in the Great Hall with her injured ankle propped on a footstool. She wore her four gold rings, and even carried a small painted fan that had some French writing on it,
“U amour se trouve aux fleurs, dans la beauti de ses coeurs.”