No Shame, No Fear (2 page)

“Quakers!” said the merchant. I turned to him and saw a spasm of contempt cross his face. “They breed like maggots in these villages.”

The merchant was not an acquaintance of mine. We were simply fellow travellers, having both left an inn outside Brentbridge that morning with our servants to take the road to Hemsbury. I was going home after three years’ study with a tutor in Oxford. I was glad of the merchant’s company for safety’s sake, but that was all. Now, however, I was obliged to listen as he began talking of a Quaker he knew through his business.

“Dismal, canting fellow. Won’t drink your health. Won’t attend the company’s yearly feast because he says the food should be given to the poor. There’s no good fellowship to be had with folk of that sort.”

He glanced over his shoulder and added, “Pretty wench, though, back there.” He winked at me, and I disliked him the more.

As we rode on past fields full of new green growth, I thought of the Quakers holding their meeting in the barn. They would sit, I supposed, on benches or bales of hay. I knew they would have no minister. They would sit in silence together until one of them felt moved to speak. And anyone might speak: man or woman, rich or poor. I found it shocking to think of a woman like that girl’s mother getting up and playing parson. And yet I was drawn to the silence, the simplicity. It was something I had been thinking about, from time to time, ever since an encounter in Oxford two years ago.

It was a market day in summer, a Saturday, and I was out with some other boys. I was fifteen, and had attached myself to the fringes of a group of boisterous older youths. We had been drinking, and now we mingled with the university students, who were swaggering about town and talking loudly.

I heard a disturbance, and saw that two women had climbed up onto barrels in the marketplace and were preaching to the crowd. They were ordinary-looking women, dressed in sturdy workaday clothes, but not ragged or poor. One was in her twenties, the other older. I couldn’t hear properly what they said, nor was I much interested; I heard them speak of God, and the light, and then they must have said something that enraged the university men, who began to shout abuse.

Someone threw a handful of horse dung, which struck the older woman in the face, causing the crowd to howl with delight. I felt a prickle of excitement. Mud and rotten vegetables began to fly, and then the mob seized both women. They punched and beat them, and we joined in, shouting, laughing and cheering on the attackers. I was excited, and a little drunk, but not so much that I didn’t feel a sense of shame at my behaviour. I’d seen fights often enough, but these women were unarmed and unprotected and would not fight, except with words. I knew I should have no part in this, but I was caught by the power of the mob.

At last the constables appeared. By this time the students had dragged the younger woman to a midden and thrown her into it. The constables drove the youths back and arrested the women.

They came pushing a path through the crowd, close to where I was standing. The young woman was bedraggled, covered in stinking mess, her face cut and her hair falling down. Her arms were forced behind her back, and the constables pushed her along so that she stumbled repeatedly over the cobbles. The market women looked at her with contempt. “Loud-mouthed jade,” I heard one of them say. “Her husband should beat her – keep her under control.”

I felt the wrong that was being done to the young woman, and yet at the same time I was afraid of her and of whatever inner strength upheld her. Was she mad? Certainly she looked it in her dishevelled state, as she turned to glare into the jeering crowd.

And then her eyes fixed on me. For an instant, before the constable pushed her onwards, the piercing, bloodshot eyes stared straight into mine. I quailed. I thought she would curse or spit at me. But she did neither. “Take heed,” she said, “of the light within.”

Then she was jerked away.

Later I heard that the women were Quakers; that next day they harangued the professors at the university and were arrested again and publicly flogged and sent out of town. I saw nothing of this, but the woman’s words stayed with me: “Take heed of the light within.”

Why had she spoken? Why to me? Did she see something in me that I had not recognized in myself?

These thoughts returned to me now as the countryside around us grew increasingly familiar and I began to think of home. On either side the fields rose high, nibbled smooth by sheep and broken by outcrops of rock. It was a different landscape to Oxfordshire: harsh and wild, with a big sky. My spirits rose as I recognized the shapes of familiar hills and saw, in the distance, the walls of Hemsbury.

Ned, my father’s servant, was riding just behind me. I looked back, and smiled. “Soon be home.”

The town was quiet, this being Sunday, and our horses’ hooves rang on the cobbles. My father’s house is on the corner of High Street and Butcher’s Row, in the centre of town, with shops on either side. Ned and I dismounted and walked through the gateway that leads to the courtyard; he took my horse from me and led the two of them towards the stables.

I saw the door of the house open. My sister darted out, yellow skirts caught up in one hand, her face bright. Beside her came our little dog, Milly, barking and wagging her tail.

“Anne!” I called.

She scooped up the dog and hugged me with the animal in her arms. Milly squirmed and licked my chin. Anne giggled. “She’s missed you.”

“And have you?”

She put on a teasing face. “Sometimes.”

Now my father was at the door. I took off my hat and bowed to him.

“Will!” He came forward and threw his arms around me. “You are taller. You’ve outstripped me!”

It was true; and I’d always thought him tall. I noticed, too, that he was greyer, and a little stooped. It made me feel protective, and as I returned his hug I thought: I must fulfil all his hopes; I must not disappoint him.

Susanna

I
could not settle in Meeting. Sometimes everyone enters into the silence and is still and centred. Then the meeting is full gathered, and I have felt its power. More often I feel it gathering around me but have to struggle with my own wandering mind.

That day my mind was all astir. I thought about finding work, who we might ask, what they might say. And there was something else. When I closed my eyes I saw the face of the young man we had met on the road. It was wrong, I knew, to think of such things in Meeting. I tried to clear my mind. I opened my eyes and focused on the reddened, chapped hands of Martha Streetley as they lay clasped on her apron. The apron was made of unbleached linen, and I studied its weave, noting the pleasing unevenness, the changes of colour from beige to greenish to brown, the crumpling where she had wiped her hands on it. But that only led me on to thinking of my father, and the loss of his loom, and so back to thoughts of leaving home.

After the meeting we found that most people already knew of our trouble. Gervase Prior, who farms sixty acres at Stanton, said he would try to buy the loom and bed and give them back to us. John Davies had brought a cockerel with him to replace ours. Alice Randall offered a spare bed if needed – “A frame and posts only, but thou could make hangings for it, Bess.”

My mother was in tears at their goodness, but I know she would do the same. We all help one another and pray for each other. When John Davies was moved to stand up during Meeting and speak of “our friend Robert Thorn who lies in prison at Brentbridge”, I felt the power of the Lord and the love of Friends upholding us.

“Susanna wants to go to Hemsbury to work,” my mother said – and at once there was discussion. I found all eyes turned on me and felt hot and nervous. Isaac and Deb and I were the only children of Eaton Bellamy Meeting; we’d often wished for less adult attention and more young company.

Hemsbury Meeting will be bigger, I thought; there will be more young ones.

And then someone said, “Mary Faulkner might take her on,” and I looked up, eager to hear more.

“Mary is a Friend of Truth,” Gervase Prior told us, “a good woman, though she has a proud, high spirit. She runs a bookshop and stationer’s in Hemsbury, and there is a printer’s workshop attached. Printing was her husband’s trade and she has taken it over.”

It seemed that Mary had had a maidservant who had been unsuitable; she might be looking for another girl. Martha Streetley was going to Hemsbury and would make enquiries.

So it was to happen, as I had wished. I felt excited and a little fearful. I wondered why the previous maid had been unsuitable, and whether I would be any better. And books? I was a country girl, a dairymaid. I had not seen many books. Like most people, my parents owned only a Bible and the
Book of Martyrs
. These I had learned to read, but I did not read as well as Isaac, who had spent time at school.

“I should like to see the books,” said Isaac, as we walked home. “At school the master used to read to us sometimes from a book of fables. There were pictures of animals, and folk fighting and dancing.”

“There is much idleness in books,” my mother said. “Susanna must be guided by Mary Faulkner on what to read, if she goes there.”

Isaac and I exchanged a smile behind her back. Our mother was a great enemy of idleness, by which she meant not only a waste of time but temptation to sin. Fighting, we knew, was a sin. Our father would never take up arms to fight. And dancing, too, often led to sin, or so we were told; it was not something we had ever learned to do. There had not been so much of it when we were little, in Oliver Cromwell’s time. Maypoles, tree and well dressing, even Christmas, had been banned by the Puritan Parliament in those years. But in 1660, when I was thirteen, we had a king again, and everything changed. On May Day that year a great maypole was raised in the village, and a bonfire lit, and folk danced till late into the summer night. Isaac and I went down to the green to watch. The sky darkened to deep blue, and the sparks from the bonfire flew up, and the fiddlers played tunes that made my feet want to dance. Suddenly people joined hands in one big circle, men and women and children all together. A woman with beer on her breath seized my hand and Isaac’s and drew us in.

“Everyone must dance this one,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. It’s easy.”

And we danced, Isaac and I. Most people were drunk by then, and it didn’t matter that the steps were strange to us at first. Soon I began to feel the rhythm of the dance and the joy of being part of the great circle. It broke up in laughter and clapping, and Isaac and I slipped away and ran home, full of guilty pleasure.

“We must go to Brentbridge,” my mother said now, “and ask thy father’s blessing on this venture of thine, Susanna.”

“Yes,” I said, but I felt a shiver of unwillingness. I hated prison visits.

We went on fifth-day.

It’s a day’s walk there and back; too far for Deb, so Isaac was left at home to mind her, and my mother and I went alone.

It was damp weather, with squalls of rain in the wind, and the road was muddy and full of ruts. We kicked up mud as we walked and the backs of our skirts were soon spattered with it. When we could, we cut across fields. The way took us not far from Eaton Bellamy, and I thought again of the young man in the fine black hat, and wondered whether he’d been bound for Hemsbury, and whether he lived there. I could not tell from his accent, for he spoke like a scholar. He’d be at ease around Mary Faulkner’s books, I thought.

“Art thou dreaming, Su?” my mother asked, and I gave a guilty start and said, “’Tisn’t far now, surely?”

“Four miles or so.”

She strode easily, carrying a pack over her shoulders. I had another. We had brought food – bread, cheese and home-baked pies – and a clean linen shirt, a collar, stockings and a blanket. Also some money, for prisoners must pay the jailer for food and beer and all their needs.

My mother had spent years like this, visiting prisons, or shut within them herself. I looked at her: small and strong, with a square chin and wide-set blue eyes. Her hair was still dark, for she is some ten years younger than my father.

Does she ever feel fear as I do? I wondered. Does her faith always uphold her?

Brentbridge Castle is a ruin, blown up in the Civil War sixteen years ago. Only the tower remains now, leaning at a dangerous angle. The prison is close by, in a place that was once a barracks.

As soon as we drew near I began to be afraid. In the yard stood a stocks and a whipping post. The yard was churned with mud and the rain beat down heavily. My mother led me to the entrance and spoke through a grille to a man who let us in and barred the door behind us.

The stench of the prison rose up.

I think this smell is not only filth – blood and excrement and decay – but is the smell of fear, of generations of people abandoned without hope of release. It never fails to terrify me.

The jailer – a mean-faced fellow in a greasy jacket – looked through our packs and found no concealed weapons. He led us down steps to a lower level. On the way we passed doors with grilles in them, and through one I saw a man sitting, unshaven and pale, with a book open on a table beside him. These were the cells for those who could afford to pay the jailer. They had chairs and beds.

The basement level was cold and slippery underfoot. We heard a clamour of voices. The jailer let us in, and I became aware of a crowd of people before the door slammed behind us and the stench overcame all other sensation.

I tried not to breathe, fearing sickness. As well as prisoners, there were visitors in the room: a woman with a little boy and a screaming baby that she dandled on one arm; an old woman who rounded on the jailer and began to screech at him about her son’s condition. Among this noisy throng I saw my father. The tears came up, choking me, and spilled down my face. I ran and threw my arms around him.

“Susanna,” he said. His stubbly chin scratched my face as he kissed me, and I had to fight an urge to pull away because he smelled different: a prison smell; unhealthy. “Bless thee, child. And thee, wife.” He reached out to my mother.