Women of Courage (133 page)

“Too young? Nonsense, girl! Why, your mother and I were having the banns read when she was younger than you! She was scarce your age when you were born!”

“What’s this, Adam? Talk of our wedding? That’s a good many years past, now.”

They both looked up to see Mary Carter come in from the stair door. She sat down on a bench by the table, smoothed her crumpled apron over her skirts, and looked at them expectantly, a soft smile crinkling her round rosy face in the firelight. Ann realized it was nearly dark outside now.

“You remember I told you Tom Goodchild had spoken for Ann, Mary, to be betrothed to her. But the silly maid says she’s too young!”

“I’ve not refused him, mother,” Ann said hurriedly. “Only asked him for time to think.”

“Poor lad. I should have thought you’d have had time to think already – all these years going round with him and playing together.”

“But … that was just play and friendliness, mother. I know you were married at my age, but I do feel young, somehow, to have my own house and care for a husband and children. Did you not feel so?”

“‘Twas all I ever wanted, girl.” Her mother’s voice was puzzled. “Of course, we had some hard times, especially when you were in the cradle and I was carrying Simon, but so do all young mothers. ‘Tis only part of growing up.”

“But if you don’t feel you are ready for it?”

“Now, Ann, this is some strange Pride to be striven against,” Adam said firmly. The ritual of confession to a Catholic priest had long been abolished, but the rigorous purging of sin from other men’s souls had been taken over and strengthened by the Puritans. Adam knew it was his duty to care for his daughter’s soul as well as for her body, whatever the state of his own might be.

“Do you feel yourself different, or better than other women, in some way? Or is it that Tom Goodchild is no longer good enough for you?”

“No, father, of course it’s not that, but …”

“You can cook well enough, can’t you, and sew and spin and wash clothes? You know how to keep house and care for babies. And it’s not as though Tom were a man from another town, who would take you away from your friends and family. You have known and loved him since you were babes together. So how can it not be Pride, when the Lord favours you with an offer from such a man as this? A godly man, prosperous, well thought of by all? Answer me that!”

“I didn’t say I had refused him, father. It’s just that … I know he’s a good man, as you say, and I couldn’t hope for better – but I’m not sure if I’m ready to love him as a wife. I don’t think I’m better than he is – I think perhaps I’m much worse.”

Again the modest look, the innocent eyes appealing, then downcast; but the distress was real enough.

“Let the girl be, Adam. Ann, my dear, listen. That is what betrothal is for - to get used to the idea. As I understand it, he hasn’t asked you to marry him tomorrow, has he?”

“No, mother.”

“Then say to him that you’ll be his betrothed, but do not wish to marry for a few weeks, perhaps a month or so. That’s how we were, weren’t we, Adam? And I do understand a little of how you feel - ‘tis a bit of a fearsome business even when you long for it as I did, to take on a man and house and children all at once, when a few months before you had nothing. But if you let the idea grow with you for a time, then you may find you’re more ready for it, when the time do come.”

“Perhaps, mother. But what if you’re not? If you’ve given your word and then don’t like the idea after all?”

“That’s why you must think a little before giving it. But I’d be sad to think it would come to that, with you and Tom Goodchild.”

“And you can’t keep him waiting too long for an answer,” said Adam. “I’d thought to ask his family around to sup with us soon. ‘Twould be a fine thing to be able to celebrate a betrothal at the same time.”

“Yes, father. I … I must think a little more about it. If I may go to bed now, I’ll think of it there.” She rose quietly, kissed her parents goodnight, and went upstairs to the bedroom she shared with her two young sisters, who were already asleep.

Adam and Mary watched her go, and then looked at each other, troubled, in the firelight.

4

A
NN UNDRESSED slowly in the moonlight, and slipped into bed beside Rachel, quietly so as not to wake her. Then she lay for a long while awake, listening to the steady breathing of Rachel beside her, and the occasional soft grunts and gasps of little Sarah as she fought the bedding in the truckle bed in the other side of the room. Sarah had always been a restless sleeper, and Ann was glad she did not have to share a bed with her. She watched the infinitesimally slow progress of the moonlight across the beams and plaster of the walls and the floor, and listened to the hoot of owls from the church tower, and the occasional scurry of mice behind the wainscot.

What had she decided? What
should
she decide? All evening she had held her feelings about Robert safe and secret inside her; and now that she brought them out to examine she found it hard to disentangle them from other feelings, equally confused.

She had lied to her father - would she be damned for that? For a moment she saw in her mind’s eye a vision of Hell - a flaming lake of burning fire on which the figures of the damned struggled and smouldered endlessly, like flies on their backs in water. Within this was her own private horror, in which she and the other damned were chained helplessly to burning rocks, while the demons in the shape of huge sharp-jawed snakes slithered around, nibbling off a nose here and a breast there, and poking their infected snouts into the bowels and brains of people who could never die or escape, but only suffer, screaming silently forever.

A cold sweat prickled on her skin, and she almost leapt out of bed and ran next door into her parents’ room to tell them that she could not bear to go to Hell, that she had lied, and needed their forgiveness. But she forced herself to lie still, her eyes open, until gradually the vision faded, and she could think clearly once more.

She did not think it could happen, really; not at least for a lie such as she had told, a lie to protect something so good and beautiful as her afternoon with Robert. God would not be just, to damn people for as little as that.

Or was it so little, to lie to your parents about being with a man who offered to seduce you - to take you away to live as his concubine in a distant, immoral city? Worse, to dream of actually going away with a man whom she had only spoken to four times in her whole life! They had first met three weeks ago, when her pony had gone lame and he had helped her get the stone out of its foot; and twice since then, secretly, like today. She had not meant to keep the secret of the first meeting from her father, but no-one had asked, and once the secret was begun and the second meeting arranged, it was not easy to reveal.

She saw Robert’s face in her mind, so seemingly sincere and loving, as he asked her to come back to London with him. Did he really love her, as he said? Since she had known him, and begun to lie to her parents about where she had been, she had come to see how easy it was to play a part, to fall in love with your own performance so that you believed something to be true when you said it, which you did not believe in before or after. Was that perhaps Robert’s art, in wooing women? If it was, she both loved and hated him for it - loved him, that he could make a moment true, for its own time; hated him, for his inconstancy.

So she came back to the other, troubling vision, of another Robert that she had never seen — a Robert with a face hard and set and cruel, hammering on someone’s door with a pistol after dark, holding a lantern close to the owner’s face to question him, bursting into a pregnant lady’s room to search it, ignoring all protests. It was hard to believe, yet such stories did not usually come from nowhere, even if they were exaggerated. Did she want to trust herself to a man like that?

Then she thought of Tom. She had known Tom all her life. She remembered how often they had played together; for they had been born in the same week nineteen years ago, in October 1666, the year of the great fire in London. Ann remembered how they had played at mothers and fathers, first with Ann’s dolls, and later with their own younger brothers and sisters, in play houses they had built wherever they could. Her mother had told her how she and Adam had laughed to see their own speech and manners so perfectly aped; and when the younger toddlers got under their feet, talked of sending them to ‘Tom and Ann’s’ as though it were a real neighbour’s house, rather than the straw one that they had built for a day in the stable. Always in these games, Ann had taken the lead, while Tom provided the strength — she remembered how marvellous it had been to have someone so strong to lift things, to do whatever she wanted. She remembered playing horses, running across the fields behind him with a rope around his waist like reins, thinking she was riding the largest and most powerful horse in the world which she could turn in any direction she liked.

At school it had been the same. He had protected her physically, so that she had never needed to fear anyone of her own age, but she had helped him with his schoolwork, which he found hard.

Yet it was this which threatened to separate them. The older they got, the more Ann saw that for Tom, school and books were a chore, to be got through somehow and then forgotten as quickly as possible; whereas for her, they had become a growing source of wonder and delight. She had borrowed them from the schoolteacher and the surgeon, and forever been pestering her father to bring her back something to read from his travels; and they had opened up a hunger in her, for a world beyond her own little country town. But Tom saw little point in reading anything except the Prayer Book and the Bible, and recently, at Ann’s insistence,
Pilgrim’s Progress
; so his vigorous thoughts had been easily channelled down the straight and narrow path by Israel Fuller, who believed, as far as Ann could see, that the Bible held the answer to all possible questions of human conduct, and himself uniquely qualified to interpret it.

She thought of Israel Fuller, preaching fervently as he so often did, his face half covered by the black beard that grew nearly up to his eyes. She feared him, but did not always agree with what he said; but Tom, it seemed to her, almost worshipped the man, as though his words were Holy Writ. It was particularly after Israel’s sermons nowadays that Tom seemed awkward, clumsy towards her, refusing to meet her eyes, mumbling foolish answers that showed he had not really listened to what she had said. Once or twice recently when she had disagreed with Israel’s ideas Tom had seemed suffused with anger, so that his big hands shook, and she felt that he might seize her and break her back like a twig if she did not stop talking.

It had not always been so bad. Tom was naturally proud of his strength; and sometimes it had had a quite different effect on her. One afternoon six months ago, showing off in the innocent, uncomplicated way he loved, Tom had lifted both Ann and the chair on which she was sitting onto the table in his mother’s kitchen with as much ease as though she were a kitten in a basket. She had been so overcome with amazement that when he lifted her down again she had flung her arms, laughing, around his neck; and somehow they had found themselves involved in a clumsy, earnest kiss which had awoken feelings in them which neither had quite known what to do with, at the time, but which afterwards had set Tom’s deep baritone singing his favourite psalms more lustily than for many months past.

They had kissed again, perhaps half a dozen times in all over the past year - the last occasion being when he had asked her to marry him. But lying here quietly in the dark, it was somehow hard to picture the face that she had kissed. She had known Tom so long, she had so many memories of him, that his image was blurred in her mind as she tried to recall it. She could see the big, powerful hands, more like those of a blacksmith than a cobbler, working surprisingly quickly at the neat, precise cutting and stitching of his craft. But when she tried to picture the sturdy handsome face, framed by straight black hair, short-cropped in the old Puritan fashion, smiling up at her from the bench where he sat hunched in his father’s cobbler’s shop, her imagination failed her. She saw him stand up, awkwardly, bending his head under the rafters as he always did; and she tried to remember the slow smile above the strong, big-boned body - a smile which she knew had charmed many mothers in the village to bring their daughters’ shoes to be mended, now that Tom had taken over most of the work from his half-blind father.

But though Ann tried, she could not quite see that smile, could not quite fix it in her mind as she lay in the dark. Was it because it had been clouded, recently, as he looked at her, waiting for her answer to his proposal; or was it because she was confusing it with the smile he had had as a child - putting the boy’s head on the man’s shoulders?

She could remember his words clearly enough, when he had asked her to marry him. He had shyly presented her with a pair of boots he had made for her birthday.

“Do they fit you? Are they comfortable? I made ‘em from the measure I took of your feet three weeks back. But I can change ‘em if they’re not right.”

“They’re fine, Tom, perfect. A touch stiff, perhaps, but that’ll go ...”

“Let me feel.” She had put her foot on a stool and his big hands had felt her feet carefully through the leather. It had always seemed strange to her, that such big hands could do such fine stitching. But it was a moment, she knew, that many village girls secretly enjoyed, having the handsome young cobbler feel their feet and ankles.

“Aye, they feel right.” He had sat back, slightly flushed, and looked up at her. She had taken her leg off the stool and sat opposite him.

“Ann, I ... have thought a lot about ‘ee, while I was making these. It ... can I speak to ‘ee?”

“‘Tis what you’re doing now, isn’t it?” She was often light and flippant with him; his solemn, fumbling nature drove her to it.

“‘Tis that ... as father says, I’m a grown man now, and do most of the work in the shop these days, more’n him, because of his eyes. And ‘tis a good business enough, you can see that.”