London in Chains (7 page)

Crossing London Bridge was slow, and by the time she arrived at her uncle's house it was dark. She knocked on the door, out of breath from having hurried the last part of the way.

The others were already at supper, eating by the light of a single tallow candle, but her uncle smiled and told Susan to fetch another bowl of soup. Lucy slid into place at the table. Mr Browne's pamphlet, which she'd slipped into her apron pocket, caught against her leg, and she straightened it carefully.

‘You should have been home before dark!' Agnes said disapprovingly. ‘No decent young woman should be on the street this time of night.'

‘I had to wait to cross the bridge,' explained Lucy.

‘Don't you talk back to me, girl!'

‘I beg your pardon, Aunt.'

Susan brought the soup, and Lucy began to eat it, uncomfortable under her aunt's glare.

‘Did he pay you?' Agnes asked suddenly.

‘Aye, Aunt Agnes.' Lucy dug the two pennies out from under the pamphlet and set them down on the table. ‘Here are my wages.'

Agnes snatched both coins, examined them a moment, then slipped them in her own pocket with a sniff of contempt.

Thomas frowned at her, cast an uneasy glance at Cousin Geoffrey, who was pretending not to notice, then frowned at Agnes again. ‘I did not give you leave to take those,' he pointed out at last.

‘It's money for the girl's keep!' snapped Aunt Agnes, turning the glare on him.

‘We didn't ask her
father
to provide for her keep when we offered to take her!'

‘Indeed!' replied Agnes vehemently. ‘
You
wouldn't ask, lest he learn you were not the great man he took you for! But you promised
me
that the girl would help me in the house, and now you've sent her to work for your trouble-making friends! You owe—'

‘Her keep doesn't even
cost
tuppence!' interrupted Thomas, his voice rising. ‘Will's providing her dinner, and, as for bed and linen, we'd have to supply Susan whether Lucy were here or not! You lazy slut, give that money back!'

‘It's my money!' exclaimed Agnes, going red in the face and clutching her pocket.

‘Scolding shrew!' cried Thomas, jumping to his feet. ‘Give it here!'

Lucy cringed and called, ‘Please, Uncle!'

Thomas paused, casting a puzzled look at her. He was defending her, and she protested?

She wasn't sure what to say to him. He was within his rights to beat his wife for such open defiance; indeed, it was what was expected of him. She didn't want to see or hear it, that was all. She remembered cowering at the table while her father beat her mother; remembered her mother's sobs and her own helpless desperation. Her parents' quarrels had been rare and all the more disturbing for it.

She found she knew exactly how it would end: Agnes, red-faced and crying, yielding up the coins; Thomas, flushed with anger and guilt, taking them and perhaps handing them to Lucy. It would set a pattern: Thomas defending his niece, Agnes hating her. The quarrel would fill the house like a noxious vapour, poisoning all of them.

‘Don't let me be the cause of a quarrel, please!' she said desperately. ‘I'm sure I'd rather my aunt kept the money than we quarrelled about it!'

Agnes glared at Lucy as though she'd struck her. Lucy swallowed and met her furious eyes directly. It was not that she didn't want the money: she did. If freedom cost tuppence a day, though, she couldn't complain, and if it purchased peace as well, it was a bargain.

‘You crawling lick-spittle hypocrite!' Agnes exclaimed furiously. She dug the coins out of her pocket and threw them at Lucy, then stamped out, bursting into tears as she went.

Lucy picked the two pennies off the floor, her hands shaking, then set them down on the table in front of her uncle. ‘Give them to my aunt, please! Give them to her with soft words, so she won't be angry with me!'

‘You're a good, sweet girl,' said Thomas, picking them up and offering them back to her. ‘You keep them.'

She shook her head: no amount of money was worth filling the house with poison. ‘Perhaps . . . perhaps you could give my aunt
some
of the money, sir?' she asked. She remembered her excuse for putting herself forward and added, ‘I only took the work, sir, because I wanted not to be a burden on you and my aunt, and I fear my being here
is
a burden to her. It's only fair that you should give her something extra for the housekeeping.'

Thomas thought about it, then nodded. ‘Very well. I'll give her these, but I'll tell her that tomorrow you'll keep half of what you earn.'

‘Thank you, Uncle,' she said in relief.

She hoped it would be enough. She could imagine Thomas being magnanimous and superior as he gave Agnes the money, and that would only fuel Agnes's resentment. She hoped, though, that it would still be enough to keep the peace.

After supper Thomas and Geoffrey sat down in the parlour to smoke a pipe and talk about Cousin Geoffrey's day at Westminster. Lucy hesitated, wondering if she could take a candle upstairs to study the pamphlet Mr Browne had given her, or whether that would be regarded as a waste of a candle. She decided to give Agnes no cause to complain and crept into the parlour to look at the pamphlet there.

‘What's that?' asked Thomas.

‘A pamphlet, Uncle, that Mr Browne gave me to study, so that I could see how to put pamphlets together.'

Thomas nodded and turned back to Cousin Geoffrey's account of the laziness and greed of parliamentary clerks. Lucy turned the pamphlet in her hands, taking careful note of how the pages had been trimmed and the spine glued. The title letters stood out black in the flickering candlelight:
An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny
, and then, in smaller letters,
shot from the prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever.

She mouthed the words silently, as she had when confronted with particularly challenging words in the Bible –
Melchizedek
, for example, or
recompense
. What, she wondered, did ‘prerogative' mean? She glanced up at Uncle Thomas, found him still listening to Geoffrey, and decided not to ask. She was not altogether sure, but she felt that Geoffrey wouldn't like the pamphlet and that drawing attention to it would cause awkwardness between him and Uncle Thomas. She read over the title again and this time grasped that the author was calling the House of Lords ‘usurpers and tyrants'.

She was shocked. The government of England had always consisted of King, Lords and Commons, and no one had gone into the war to
change
that. It was true that the Commons and many of the Lords had risen up against the king, but now that the war was over everyone expected King Charles to be restored to his throne, this time with defined limits to his power. Both sides of the conflict had claimed to be defending ancient and traditional rights.

Maybe, she thought, the author – this man John Lilburne? – was referring to the Lords who'd supported the king during the war.
Then
it would make sense to call them tyrants. She looked at the bottom of the page for a date, and found it.

Only last year! The year the king surrendered and the Royalist Lords fled to the Continent, or else submitted to Parliament. Lucy came reluctantly to the conclusion that the author really did mean the present House of Lords. Troubled, she read the title again, this time continuing on:

She felt a moment of relief: so the author
wasn't
Uncle Thomas's friend. The name
Overton
was familiar, though, and after a moment she remembered why: it was a Mary Overton who'd been dragged through the street to Bridewell with her baby screaming in her arms.

For stitching
this
pamphlet? Her husband or father's pamphlet? Lucy felt a surge of indignation: why did women and children always suffer for the misdeeds of their menfolk? She was not entirely sure that the pamphlet
was
a misdeed, but she could certainly understand why the House of Lords thought it was.

Natural and national rights.
There was a concept she'd never encountered before. What on earth was a
natural
right?

She thought again about levelling hedges: her father and her brothers had broken down the lord's new enclosure because it fenced off common land where village cows had been accustomed to graze for time out of mind. The lord said it was his, that he had a
legal right
to enclose it, and apparently the law courts agreed with him. If he had a
legal
right, then maybe what the villagers had was a
natural
one.

Lucy's heart gave a sudden fierce leap of agreement. She put the pamphlet away, disturbed by her own reaction. She did not want to agree with Richard Overton: she could see that his ideas were trouble. All she wanted, she repeated to herself, was honest work and an honest independence. She curtsied to her uncle and went upstairs to bed.

Three

All the printed sheets of
A New-found Stratagem
had been turned into pamphlets by Friday afternoon. When the last copy was finished, Lucy went to inform Mr Browne with a flutter in her stomach. She'd believed that her place would be more than temporary, but it struck her now that this had never been discussed, let alone promised. Her two and a half days of work might be all she could hope for, and, while Aunt Agnes had grudgingly agreed that two-thirds of Lucy's earnings would pay for her keep, the truce between them was at best an uneasy one.

Lucy set her teeth and told herself that as long as she had other work
sometimes
she would manage to keep her independence. Agnes couldn't rely on Lucy as a serving-maid if she was going to be off earning money even occasionally,, and surely she'd done well enough that Browne would hire her again the next time he needed a pamphlet stitched?

She needn't have worried. ‘Well done!' Browne told her warmly. ‘Now we can start typesetting the next one!'

‘The
next
one, sir?' asked Lucy, scarcely daring to believe it.

Browne glanced about, then picked up his cash-box and showed her a stack of paper beneath it. The pages were covered with large, scrawled, uneven letters.

‘Freeborn John's latest,' Browne told her, with a proud smile. ‘
The Resolved Man's Resolution
. His wife gave it to me only yesterday.' He looked at her speculatively and went on, ‘You've nimble fingers, girl, and quick wits. I've no doubt you can learn typesetting as easily as you learned to stitch a pamphlet.'

Lucy goggled wordlessly.
Typesetting?
It was a skill so exotic to Leicestershire that he might as well have said, ‘You can as easily learn to fly'.

‘It's nothing but setting out the letters you see on a page,' Browne told her cheerfully. ‘I'll do most of it, but any help would speed the matter, and the more you learn, the more you'll be of help.' He considered a moment, then went to the door of his shop and looked judiciously at the sun. ‘Too late to start now,' he concluded. ‘Tomorrow morning, then.'

Lucy walked slowly back to Southwark. It was a grey, damp day, and cold for April, but she had glorious sunshine in her heart. She had been worried that she would lose her job, and instead . . .
typesetting!
However casually it had been offered, she was sure this was an opportunity she must seize eagerly. Typesetting wasn't like sewing or cooking, a woman's skill, domestic and cheap. Men learned it: it was real work.

It would be dangerous. She'd known that, though, and she was already convinced that the risk was worth it. What was fascinating and disturbing was the
nature
of this sedition. She was beginning to grasp it now, and it was either no sedition at all or the worst ever.

Treachery and sedition had always been as common as poverty and injustice, but until the war they'd meant conspiracies of nobles trying to overthrow the king and replace him with somebody else. Now, though, the king had already been overthrown, Parliament wanted to restore him on its own terms, and here was a group of men –
ordinary
men, not nobles! – who wanted to change not the king but the
terms
. They wanted to replace not one man or even one Parliament but the whole system of government. She'd never heard of anything like it. This man Lilburne seemed to be their leader, but Lucy had the distinct sense that it was the
ideas
these people had that really identified them and set them apart.

She thought of the arguments in
An Arrow Against All Tyrants
, which she'd now read through – twice.

It was a far cry from the preaching she'd grown up with: that God ordained the ranks of men in their several degrees, from lord to beggar, and that to rebel against that order was rebel against Him. It took her breath away.

Well, she was involved in it now, by her own free choice; and she
still
preferred it to sinking tamely into the role of poor relation. Besides . . .