Forged in the Fire (3 page)

“It is to protect him when he visits those sick with the plague,” James had explained. “The beak is filled with purifying herbs.”

He was old enough to remember such sights – terrifying to a child – from the last great outbreak of plague in London, forty years ago.

Dorcas, the Martells' young maidservant, had set vases of rue and rosemary around the shop to freshen the air, and there were bowls of vinegar on the counter for customers to drop the coins into. But otherwise all seemed reassuringly normal. Cecily, James's wife, was serving in the stationery section, and from the back of the shop I could hear a child's voice: their eldest, six-year-old Agnes, reading a story to her brother.

I said, “Thou hast more need than I to leave – with thy wife and children.”

“We have nowhere else to go. All Cecily's people live in the city, and I have only a brother in Aldgate. We shall stay here, and trust in God's mercy. Cecily is of the same mind.”

Cecily was James's second wife, much younger than he, and the mother of his young family. They were serious, sober people with a great love of books and learning. They had taken me on when I first arrived in London and given me work in their business – which thrived because James was known for his knowledge and honest dealing.

“I promised I would stay till the twenty-sixth,” I said.

“Thou need not concern thyself. It is a matter of days only, and I am well enough now. But the authorities may begin to restrict travel. Already they say towns outside the city grow nervous of receiving Londoners. Leave while thou can. Go to thy sweetheart.”

He smiled. And indeed he looked much recovered, and I knew his health need not hold me back.

I walked through the shop, passing the children, who were curled up together with a chapbook of Robin Hood. They sat on the floor in one of the bays between tall shelves of books, and Agnes paused shyly in her reading as I went by, then continued.
“‘By my faith,' quoth bold Robin, ‘here cometh a merry fellow…'”

I went to the desk where I kept records, and entered my delivery and the payment in a ledger. Agnes and Stephen watched me, glancing up from the book. They were quiet children, never troublesome; soft-spoken like their parents and able to amuse themselves. The family and Dorcas lived above the shop, but James and Cecily liked to allow the children downstairs, where, they said, they would gain a sense of right livelihood from the earliest age.

The children, I guessed, simply enjoyed all the places to hide and whisper. The shop was large and rambling, with many hundreds of books, pamphlets, and writings of Friends, and deliveries and orders coming all the time from Belgium and France, as well as English towns and cities. Nearly half the space was given over to stationery: quills, ink, notebooks and printed forms – a much greater selection than I had ever seen in Mary Faulkner's shop in Hemsbury. James kept books of almost every kind – not plays, since he disapproved of the theatre, but poetry and music as well as theological and historical writings.

Back at work, I put the sight of the beaked man out of my mind, but next morning I talked to Nat.

“It seems cowardly to leave early.”

From near by we heard the bells of Gregory's steeple-house tolling, and counted six for a woman, and then the years of her life: twenty – my own age. Was it plague, I wondered? And now that I thought of it, I heard other passing bells, many more than usual, further away, from all around the city.

Nat was at the washbowl, a mirror propped up, shaving. He had cut his long curly hair and paid Meg Corder to wash and iron some shirts for the journey. I had bought a new shirt to be married in. We had little else to do before we left. I felt a strong desire to leave at once. And yet we were committed to travelling with our friends.

“I spoke to Joseph Leighton,” Nat said, rubbing his face dry, and wincing at a cut. “He says we need not wait for them.”

“Can they not leave earlier than the twenty-sixth?”

“No. Their affairs prevent it.”

The Leighton brothers were elderly men, frail from prolonged imprisonment, yet alight with the spirit. They had felt called to visit Friends in prison in North Wales. For us to travel with them would be beneficial to all. We would have their company and the hire of horses, and would probably eat better and sleep more comfortably than if we travelled alone; and they would have our youth and strength should need arise.

Nat voiced my thoughts. “It would be churlish not to wait for them.”

I agreed. “Yes. For the sake of a week…”

And yet I wanted nothing more than to leave the stricken city. And we were ready; our employers would give us leave; we had nothing to hold us back, except our promise. To my shame, I felt irritation with the old men; what affairs could they possibly have that would take so long to set in order?

During the days that followed, the sense of crisis in the city grew apace. Everyone was leaving who could. We saw carts loaded with families and their possessions rumbling through the streets towards the city gates. A house was enclosed in Creed Lane, where we lived, making Nat and I feel, for the first time, afraid for our lives. Meanwhile the Leighton brothers calmly hired horses, received messages and parcels from Friends to be delivered along the way, and arranged with us to leave early in the morning on the twenty-sixth of the month.

But a few days before we were due to leave, we saw a new notice being posted at the conduit. It said that from now on travel out of the city would be permitted only if the traveller was in possession of a Certificate of Health; this to be obtained from the minister and churchwardens of his parish, and signed and sealed by a Justice of the Peace.

The news must have flown around the city. Nat and I went at once with the Leightons to see what could be done, and joined a long queue of desperate people. We soon discovered that few certificates were being granted and that it helped if you were known to the minister. All dissidents – Presbyterians, Baptists and the like – were given short shrift; but Friends in particular, who refused to pay church tithes, had no chance. We came away, after many hours, empty-handed.

“We will try again,” said Joseph Leighton, “another day.”

So we waited; and tried again, but without success. Money might have moved matters along, but we would not offer bribes. We were accused, as Quakers, of consorting with felons, and gathering in large and unlawful numbers in close rooms where the pestilence might breed. And perhaps the churchwardens were right, for on first-day we learned that a family from our meeting, the Ansons, had the sickness, and had voluntarily enclosed themselves. All of us must have been aware, though we did not speak of it, that only last week we had been in the same room as Matthias Anson, breathing the same air. Two of the older women, Jane Catlin and Ann Hale, said they would go in and take care of the Ansons until the end, whether that was recovery or death. Then we were silent and prayed for them.

Few of our meeting were able to leave; and of those who could, many would not, feeling it to be desertion – that they should stay and help those who suffered, and trust in God. I had no such scruples. All I wanted now was to reach Shropshire, to reach Susanna. I could not help regretting how far I was now from my father's power and protection. A man of his standing would have had me out of the city without delay.

The twenty-sixth of June – the day we should have left – came and went. Another Friend, related to a magistrate, made an attempt on our behalf to gain certificates, but perhaps the news of the Ansons' sickness made us suspect; again we were refused. The Leighton brothers accepted the change to their plans, and abandoned them for the time being. Their desire to leave London was less urgent than ours. Nat, too, was philosophical, though disappointed. But I railed against fate, and felt desperate. It was like being in prison again. I imagined storybook escapes: a counterfeit certificate; or hiding under the goods in a carrier's cart.

On fourth-day in the first week of July, all Londoners were commanded to attend church and pray for God's mercy and a release from the pestilence; markets, shops and taverns were to close. James Martell closed the shop, and we joined Friends as usual at Meeting. The authorities did not molest us. It was a quiet day that gave me hope.

Indeed, all this time, I hoped against reason that the plague would abate, the emergency come to an end, and then Nat and I could be on our way to Shropshire. But then the King and court left the city for the safety of Isleworth; and about the same time, an order went out that all cats and dogs were to be killed, for fear they should carry the contagion from house to house. It was when I saw men going about the streets clubbing to death every cat or dog in sight that I realized we were on the brink of a calamity which had only just begun.

And so, at last, I took Nat's advice to write a letter to Susanna and attempt to send it by post before that too should fail.

“How can I not fear?” I demanded of Judith. I had run to her in my distress. “The plague is in the city, in their street, in their meeting. Oh, Judith, I am so afraid he will die and I will never see him again!”

Judith put her arms around me and begged me not to despair. As she tried to comfort me, I was reminded of how helpless I had felt in the face of her own overwhelming grief when her first child died. But Will was not dead. I had lost nothing yet, except the chance to be married this summer – as Judith reminded me.

“The plague will go when the hot weather is over,” she said, “and then he will come, and all will be well. Truly, Su, it will.”

We were in the parlour of Judith's small house in Castle Street. It reminded me of my parents' house, with the curtained bed and oak storage chest in the parlour, and a hall and kitchen off. Judith had been shelling peas, and the sweet smell of opened pea pods scented the room. Benjamin was asleep in his cradle.

I wiped my eyes, ashamed of my weakness. “I did so long to be married.”

Mary had shown less patience with me than Judith. She'd told me sharply to be busy about my work and to thank God I had heard no bad news as yet. What concerned her more was news from London of Friends dying in Newgate jail, and of some who awaited transportation to the West Indies. There was much talk in our meetings now of the changes which had come in last year to the Quaker Act, which made meeting for worship punishable by transportation for a third offence, and which did away with the necessity for a jury. Our Friends were writing pamphlets; and reports of the injustices meted out to Friends around the country were printed in Mary's shop. Some of these reports came from the meeting that Will and Nat attended, at the Bull and Mouth tavern in Aldersgate. I knew this meeting to be large and active and a thorn in the flesh of the authorities, who made regular swoops upon it, throwing many Friends into jail. Will and Nat, and their employers, had all been imprisoned for several months at the end of last year. I'd had no letters then from Will himself, and heard news of him only from his employer's wife, Cecily Martell.

I kept all my letters in the chest in my room above the shop – for I still lived with Mary Faulkner, though I no longer shared her bedchamber as a servant. My room was next to Mary's, and had formerly been Nat's when he was her apprentice. It was small, and simply furnished, with a bed, chest, chair and wash-stand; but I felt proud to be a working woman with a room of my own. I hung my two spare gowns on pegs on the wall and kept everything else – my linen, stockings, books, letters and money – in the chest. The clothes were stored with herbs between the layers, so that whenever I took out Will's letters – as I did often – they smelled of rosemary and lavender.

Next time I went home to my parents I was enfolded in their sympathy and that of Eaton Bellamy Meeting. Friends told me to have faith, not to despair, but to accept God's will; and I tried to do that. As the weeks went by I worked hard, printing and delivering, inking the type, checking proofs, serving in the shop – even setting up the type if Simon Race was busy. I also instructed the boy, Antony – nine years old, and an orphan, one of the parish poor, as Nat had been when Mary took him on.

But no amount of work could make me forget; I longed for a letter, some proof that Will was alive. When he was in prison I had still had news of him, but now there was nothing. Nothing from Will, or Nat, or even Cecily Martell. I began to fear that they were all dead. The news was unreliable. There were fewer travellers now to bring it, and people were uneasy about receiving news-sheets from London. But rumour told of a city from which King and court had gone; where half the shops were shut; where kites and crows circled above graveyards heaped high with burials, and bodies were no longer carried on pallets but collected by the load in carts.

At the beginning of August, Judith and Daniel prepared to leave for Bristol to begin their journey to the New World. I was about to lose my closest friend, and my spirits sank still lower. The last meeting they attended was held in Samuel Minton's workroom, with the leather cuttings cleared away, the tables stacked, and extra benches brought in. The meeting, though large, was not disturbed by the sheriff's men – for which we were thankful. Of late our meetings had been less often disrupted. Robert Danson, that sheriff who had been so forward in persecuting us, had been struck down by God last year with an apoplexy and had died. His replacement was a man who saw that the townsfolk were for the most part willing to tolerate Dissenters, and therefore acted only when provoked. But in London, we heard, persecution continued.