Forged in the Fire
Read Forged in the Fire Online
Authors: Ann Turnbull
F
or the hand of Susanna Thorn,
at Mary Faulkner's printing shop in Broad Street,
Hemsbury, in the County of Shropshire.
The third day of June, 1665
.
S
weetheart: I write in haste, and in expectation of being with thee soon after midsummer. I have money enough saved now, and James Martell will shortly give me leave of several weeks so that I may return to Hemsbury and â if thou'rt willing â bring thee back as my wife. Write to me soon, love, and tell me that thou agree. Thou know how much I miss thee. I think of thee every day and long to hold thee in my arms again. Thy parents, thou hast said, are willing for us to marry, and if thou will speak to them and to the elders, we can be married in Eaton Bellamy Meeting as soon as may be arranged. As for my father, I fear there can be no reconciliation. He has never replied to my letters and I am not of a mind to ask his blessing now
.
Make all straight with thy parents and the meeting, love, and with Mary; though I know she will not try to hold thee back. For my part, I cannot leave for a few weeks because my employer is still in poor health. We are both only recently out of prison; the business is in disorder and there is much to be done
.
I shall use what free time I have to look for rooms for us, but will put money on nothing until thou hast seen it and agreed. Londoners live crowded together; there are many places to rent but not all are fitting. Nat and I lost our room in Pell Court when we were last in prison, so our address has changed again. We are now at Thomas Corder's, next to the Blue Boar in Creed Lane. The room is not so comfortable as the other, being cramped and ill-lit, but we have few needs and are both saving our wages: I to come to thee and be married, and Nat to set up in business on his own
.
Nat will travel with me to Shropshire. He is homesick, I believe, and also wishes to see us married and to see Mary again. We plan to leave on the twenty-sixth of the month, and will travel on horseback with London Friends who are bound for Wales
.
The weather here grows hotter by the day. They say there is plague in Holborn and St Giles, but we have none within the city walls. Pray God we shall be spared. Our Friends Robert Osman and Solomon Eccles go about the streets naked, crying repentance, as Dan Kite once did in Hemsbury. There is much talk of the city's evil and of God's wrath; but truly I believe there are many good people here
.
I look forward to being outside the city soon, in the clean air of the countryside, coming closer to thee every day. Till then, love, may God keep thee safe
.
Thy own,
Will Heywood
“M
ary!”
I burst into the print room with the letter in my hand â then stopped, and felt a blush rising as the men's faces turned towards me. My own face must have been alight with my news, for Mary guessed at once.
“He is coming, then?”
I nodded, speechless, so happy I feared I would cry.
“Well now, lass.” John Pardoe gave me a fatherly hug. “Will's a lucky man to have such a loyal sweetheart. And thou'll be wed?”
“Yes. In a few weeks.” I brushed at a tear, then turned to Mary. “We'll marry, he says, then go to London.”
Mary regarded me gravely. My employer is not given to shows of emotion, but I saw that she was glad for me. “I shall miss thee,” she said. “But thou hast earned thy happiness â and served out the time of thy agreement.”
“Will says Nat will come too.”
Everyone â but Mary especially â was pleased at this news. Nat had been Mary's apprentice; she'd come to look on him almost as a son. There was a brief outbreak of talk and reminiscence, but soon Mary called the men back to work, and I left them.
Mary's printworks includes a bookshop and stationer's, and that was where I'd been when the post boy came â unpacking a box of new books from Oxford and listing their titles. I returned to this task; but after a while, there being no customers in the shop, I took out the letter and read it again, several times.
Until now I had been content with my lot, saving my wages and waiting to hear this news from Will. But now, when I knew that soon I would see him again, it was as if a river had burst its banks: my feelings overflowed, and I felt a great surge of longing and impatience. I wanted to leave and fly to him at once â to meet him on the road; to be married immediately; to hold and kiss him again.
I brought his remembered face to mind â and not only his face, but the feel of him: his arms around me, his warmth, his voice, his kisses. I had no portrait of him, nothing but those memories. He would have changed, I knew. He was a scholar when I met him, but for the last three years he'd been working for a bookseller in London. Like me, he'd been in prison for his beliefs â for meeting to worship with Friends â and had become stronger in spirit as a result; I knew that much from his letters. We must both have changed. He'd be twenty now, and I was eighteen. We were still young for marriage, but we had proved we could wait for each other.
Did I appear different too, I wondered? What would he think of me? We'd communicated for so long by letter, and had come to know each other's minds, but in all that time we had met only once, in the autumn of 1663, in Oxford, where there had been a gathering of the Friends of Truth. Will had gone there with his employer, and I had contrived to go too, travelling with Friends from Hemsbury. Will and I had been determined to seize the opportunity to meet, if only for a moment, and in truth it was little more than that, for we were among large groups of people and staying at different inns. We spent no more than an hour together, walking by the river, but it was enough to reaffirm our love for each other, to bind us. That day in Oxford we vowed we would be married in two years' time, when my term of service with Mary ended.
I thought of the marriage of my friends Judith Minton and Daniel Kite, which had taken place soon after Will left for London. They had made their promises to each other at a meeting in the parlour of William Jevons's house, with Friends crowded in, some on benches, younger ones on the floor â all risking arrest, for any gathering of Quakers, as folk call us, is unlawful. My own marriage had seemed a far-away hope then, but now I imagined being with Will legitimately, with no one to hinder us; living with him as his wife, in our own home.
Mary came into the shop, startling me, and I turned guiltily to the box of books.
She smiled. “Thou must go home for first-day, Susanna. Stay a day or two with thy parents, and ask their blessing.”
“I will.”
But today I wanted to see Judith.
I soon found an excuse to go out.
One of the books that had arrived that morning was for our Friend John Callicott, who lives in Cordwainer Row, off the High Street. I could have sent the boy, Antony, with it, but instead I told Mary I'd deliver it myself.
The way there took me past the Heywood family home, on the corner of High Street and Butcher's Row. As always when I passed it, I glanced in through the entrance to the courtyard, where sometimes carts were drawn up and bales of wool loaded or delivered. Last week I'd seen Henry Heywood, Will's father. My breath had quickened, and I'd hurried past. But his back was towards me; he didn't see me, and probably would not have known me if he had. I was nothing to him: merely that “little whore” who'd set out to entrap his son. He could not know of our plans to marry, since he had cut Will off and would accept no letters from him.
Today the courtyard was empty. I passed the long warehouse on the ground floor and hurried on up the High Street.
My delivery done, I went to find Judith. As I'd guessed, she was not at her own home, but with her mother, in the family's glove shop in the High Street. Abigail, her sister, was serving in the shop. She sent me through to the workroom at the back, where Judith and her mother, Elinor, sat stitching gloves and talking â Judith rocking, with one foot, the Minton family cradle in which she had placed her son.
“Susanna!”
They stood up, surprised and pleased to see me in work time. Elinor called to their servant, Hester, to fetch small beer.
“No, I can't stay,” I said. But I bent down to admire the baby. This was Judith's second child. Her first, a girl, had died soon after birth, causing her great grief. Young Benjamin looked well. He was two months old, and tightly swaddled, but his eyes â bright blue like his father's â followed my movements; and I thought I saw a trace of a smile.
“Oh, he does smile!” Judith assured me.
I smiled too. “I am happy for thee,” I said. “And for myself.” I told them my news.
Judith put down her work and embraced me, and Elinor said, “God bless thee, Susanna!” and hurried out to tell Hester and Abigail, leaving us to talk.
“I'm afraid Will might see me differently after those London girls,” I admitted to Judith. “A country lass. I fear things may have changed between us. I don't know him now.”
“But you write to each other. Thou know his heart.”
“Yes.” We wrote constantly, often by return. I had come to live for the post. But it was not enough. I needed to touch him, to hold him, to be sure. And I wondered if he had similar fears; if he regretted our promises.
“It will all be as before when you see each other,” Judith reassured me. And she added, “Dan and I will still be here for your wedding.”
I knew that Dan and Judith planned to sail to America, to Massachusetts, later in the summer.
“We have booked our passage,” said Judith. “We leave for Bristol in August, and sail on the eighteenth.”
There was an expression akin to defiance on her face.
I looked at the child, then at her.
“He is so tiny â so precious to thee,” I said. I wanted to ask how she could think of sailing to America, to undertake such a dangerous journey to an unknown new life, now that she had a child. But that was between her and Daniel.
“It will be easier now than later,” said Judith. “The babe is not weaned, so I shall not have to fear the shipboard food; and he cannot yet crawl and get into danger.”
“And dost thou want to go?”
“My husband wants to go. And I knew he did when I agreed to marry him. I don't doubt I could persuade him to stay here, but I won't. It would diminish him.”
“Thy mother will miss thee â and the babe.”
“Ha! My mother says I have made my bed and must lie in it. She warned me that I would never have an easy life with Daniel. And yet she understands him, I think, and believes that God has called him to this. It's his own mother who is distraught at losing her grandchild. She berates Dan every time she sees him.” Her voice quivered, and she bit her thumbnail. “We shall be so far apart, Su; thou in London and IÂ in America.”
“But we'll write.” I had taught both Judith and Abigail to write a little, passing on the skills I'd learned from Mary.
“Yes,” agreed Judith. “We will. And tell all. All our hopes and prayers. And our babies.”