I, Coriander (5 page)

When at last I was strong enough there were plans to send me out of London to Highgate with Danes, for the good country air. I was to stay with the sister of my father’s long-dead cousin Master Stoop, who had married a rich man, a Master Gearing. In truth Beth and I were not looking forward to it. I had never been away from home and Highgate was quite a distance.

On the eve of my departure, Mistress Gearing turned up.

She was dressed as plainly as any woman I had seen and I wondered if she was very poor. My clothes and my mother’s had embroidery and fine lace, but Mistress Gearing wore a simple black wool skirt and jacket with a starched white apron and a plain white collar. Her hair was pulled back and hidden under a cap with flaps hanging down that made her look like a startled rabbit. She held a huge nosegay of flowers in which she buried her face and stayed with her back against the garden gate, refusing all requests to come further in.

The whole thing seemed most vexing and I had determined by this time that I was not going to spend a month in the country with a badly dressed rabbit, no matter how good the air might be.

‘Did you come by carriage?’ enquired my mother.

‘Nay,’ replied Mistress Gearing, ‘I walked with purpose and God for company and shall go home the same way, with the Lord’s blessing.’

‘I will not hear of it,’ said my mother. ‘You must be footsore. Why, you are most welcome to stay with us for tonight. My husband has already arranged a carriage to take Coriander and Danes to Highgate tomorrow.’

‘Go on,’ Danes whispered to me, ‘go and greet her. She is probably shy and unused to the ways of the city.’

‘No, no,’ shouted the rabbit as I went up to her. ‘No, keep your distance, I pray!’

‘Mistress Gearing,’ said my mother kindly, ‘there has been some misunderstanding. I would not have dreamt of asking you to have Coriander if I thought she was still sick.’

‘I have heard that the child had a deadly disease,’ said Mistress Gearing, sniffing so hard at the nosegay that she was overcome with a fit of the sneezes.

Then she let the truth of it out, all her words tumbling and stumbling over one another.

‘I wish I could say that she had been saved by the Lord’s providence, but strange rumours have reached us about your household, and my good husband asked me to come to say that he believes it is fairy lore and sorcery that has healed the child. We are God-fearing people and want no part of the Devil’s work.’

‘Come, mistress, what is this?’ said my mother.

Mistress Gearing put her hands up in front of her. My mother could contain herself no longer and burst out laughing as Mistress Gearing ran out of the garden gate and up the street.

M
y father did not think it funny.

‘Thomas,’ said my mother, ‘she must be a very silly woman.’

‘She did not want me because she thought I had been made better by the fairies,’ I piped up.

‘What nonsense,’ said my mother.

My father’s face was grave.

‘It is no laughing matter, Eleanor my love.’

‘Thomas, do not look so solemn. Do you not think the woman a fool?’

‘I think you must be more careful, Eleanor. Please, for my sake and Coriander’s.’

His voice made me feel uncomfortable.

‘The old world has been washed away and a new order of fools is here. Have a care, my love. They bring with them an unforgiving Lord.’

6

The Pearl Necklace

I
was nine summers old when my happy, carefree world was torn apart and turned upside down.

It happened one cold wintry morning in January. I had been sitting in my mother’s bedchamber looking out of the window and up into the heavy sky. All it had to do was snow and then I would be able to go sledging with Edmund Bedwell. He was now twelve years old and his brother thirteen. Their father had married Mistress Patience some three years back and they had a new baby brother as round and plump as a sweet plum pudding. Now both the boys were studying at St Paul’s School and I was most envious of them. I could read and write well, too, and had a hunger for knowledge.

Edmund told me grandly that learning Latin and Greek was too hard for the feeble mind of a girl.

‘What about good Queen Elizabeth?’ I said, putting my hands on my hips and trying to look very grown-up. ‘She was taught all those subjects and more besides.’

‘That is quite different,’ said Edmund. ‘She was a princess, not just an ordinary girl like you.’

‘That matters not. It shows that girls can do as well as boys,’ I said firmly.

‘You will be a merchant’s wife and have a large house to run,’ said Edmund. ‘Better to be taught housewifery. Then at least you will be useful to your husband, as Mistress Patience is to my father. Let the men worry about the Latin and Greek.’

Sometimes Edmund annoyed me much.

‘Do you think,’ I asked my mother, as I wrote my name on the frozen windowpane, ‘that girls have feeble minds?’

‘Did Edmund Bedwell tell you that?’ she laughed.

I nodded.

‘You have a very bright and lively mind, and long may it be so. Master Edmund Bedwell is a nincompoop. Now, tell me, my pretty, what necklace shall I wear today?’

‘That is easy,’ I said, ‘the rose pink pearls.’

She smiled. ‘A good choice.’ She held them up to the light and looked at them. ‘This was the first present your father ever gave me. Come, tie me a pretty bow.’ She handed me the necklace.

‘Why are the pearls cloudy when they are not on your neck and clear when they are?’ I asked.

‘The heat from my skin warms them up and they become clear,’ said my mother, brushing back my hair from my face. ‘You have, without doubt, the tightest show of red ringlets I have ever seen.’

‘I wish I had hair like yours,’ I said.

‘Save your wishes. You are going to be a beauty one day, my sweet Coriander.’

Danes came clattering into the room with a tray of hot chocolate and a plate of sweetmeats.

‘Forgive me,’ said Danes, putting the jugs and china bowls out on the table, ‘but Mistress Mullins is downstairs and wishes to speak to you on a personal matter and Mistress Potter is here again with her old problem. Lord, will that woman never be satisfied?’

‘Now, now,’ said my mother, smiling. ‘Let us be kind. Tell them I shall not be long.’

I sat down and poured the chocolate for my mother and me. Danes took the tray and went away.

My mother shivered as she closed the door. ‘It is cold in here. Is the window open?’

I got up and at that moment something dark and feathery flew hard against the glass, shattering it. My mother was still standing by the mirror. Suddenly she made a gasping sound, and I turned round to see her put a hand out to steady herself. What happened next was like a dream. The pearls round her neck broke free and poured down with a hard tip-tap like rain-drops, bouncing up only to hit the wooden floorboards again. Then my mother’s eyelids fluttered and closed as she began to sink, her skirts billowing beneath her like the sails of a ship. The pins that held her hair in place came loose as she went down. She landed with a deadening thud as her head hit the unforgiving floor, her arms stretched out, her hair a golden sea of waves. I tried to catch her, knocking the hot chocolate off the table, the china bowls breaking, spilling their dark creamy content so that it spread across the floor, bleeding into my mother’s dress.

A cry, a terrible cry broke the silence. It seemed to be coming from me. I saw the door fly open and watched in horror as Danes and two servants did acrobatics in the air, tripping and tumbling over the pearls like high wire walkers, dancing for balance.

My father rushed into the room. He too slipped, then regained his footing, his face ashen white. He lifted my mother on to the bed and loosened her clothes. While I stood watching, the pearls rolled noisily across the floor under the furniture and out of sight. I knelt down and collected as many as I could. All I could think was that as long as they did not cloud over everything would be all right.

For four days my mother lay still and without words, veiled in a deep sleep. None of her own remedies made her any better. Finally, much against Danes’s advice, my father sent for the doctor.

Doctor Turnbull had been skulking outside like a river rat, knowing that in the end my father would give in. I had never liked this man. He was dirty, with long greasy hair, and he smelt of sickness. He brought with him two skinny, sulky apprentices weighed down with jars of leeches and other instruments of torture. He tut-tutted at all the potions Danes was using and ordered that the room be heated to pull the fever out. Then he set his black leeches loose on my mother’s fair skin to bleed her, and he would allow nothing to be given to her except what he prescribed.

Danes was banned from the room and Doctor Turnbull took delight in whispering to my father that she had made his patient worse.

My father, red-eyed and pale with worry, said nothing.

‘Send him away, sir,’ Danes pleaded. ‘Please, for the love of Eleanor, send him away.’

‘No, I cannot, not if there is the smallest chance she could be saved.’

‘Please,’ begged Danes.

It was not to be. The doctor stayed.

Mistress Patience came to sit with my mother, as did Master Bedwell. A steady stream of friends and neighbours came to pay their respects.

My mother got worse. She looked as pale as the sheets, and still the doctor insisted he could cure her. His last resort was to cut my mother’s hair off and put two dead pigeons at her feet.

‘What have you done, you buffoon?’ my father cried in horror when he saw her.

‘I had occasion,’ said Doctor Turnbull, seeing my father’s ferocious face, ‘to bring down the fever of a lady by this very treatment.’

‘You are a fool, and this,’ said my father, pointing to the dead pigeons, ‘is no better, sir, than witchcraft. Nay, worse, for it is done in the name of medicine.’

‘I have never been so insulted in all my life,’ said the doctor.

‘More’s the damn pity,’ said my father, and he ordered the doctor and his apprentices out of the house.

However, as the doctor left, death came creeping in. The pigeons were removed and Danes made my mother as comfortable as she could. That night the room was lit with a single candle and at some time I must have been carried back to my own bed, for I was woken in the early hours of the morning by the roar of a wild animal. My heart leapt with fright and I could make no sense of where the noise was coming from, except that it seemed to be inside the house. I rushed out of bed and into my mother’s bedchamber. My father was howling as if his soul was breaking. Danes gathered me up in her arms.

‘Your mother is dead, my little sparrow,’ she said.

A
nd so the first part of my tale is told, and with it a candle goes out.

PART TWO

7

The Shadow

S
ix bells ring out to let the parish know that a woman has died, followed by a bell that tolls once for every year of her life. Thirty-three bells rang out for my mother.