She turned to Richard. ‘What must it be like for her in that cold damp cell? We are sending people every day to petition the magistrate, and to take her food and blankets and anything else we can think of that might make her comfortable.’
She paused a moment to look around the room at the assembled people, and then, brushing down her skirts, said, ‘It looks as if we are all gathered.’ She clapped her hands and addressed everyone warmly. ‘Friends, welcome to the Hall. If you would like to prepare yourselves, we will start this evening’s meeting.’
Despite the evening chill, some people went to hang their coats on the hooks next to the door before filing into the two rows of oak benches. There was never a fire lit here, lest the warmth should set folk sleeping. There was a rustling of cloth against smooth wood, then boots scuffing the floorboards, as everyone sat down, followed by the usual few coughs and sighs as everyone settled in their places. The candle flames swayed in the movement of the air, then steadied, casting long shadows under their feet.
Richard glanced at Dorothy. Her broad forehead was relaxed, her lips slightly parted. Her hair, once chestnut, but now greying at the temples, was tucked under a plain linen coif. In her lap her hands lay unmoving on her dark grey skirt, one palm resting on the other. He sat upright and still, glancing around the room, taking in the open faces and lowered eyes. The moon was just visible floating like a half-pearl outside the long casement window. In the dim light the silence deepened until it was broken only by the ebb and flow of breath. Richard felt an excitement as a fullness entered the room. A strange sense of potency. He forced his body to be still, waiting for the inner voice to move him, listening to the subtle sound in his ears, a nearly inaudible hum behind his breath.
There was a slight noise to his left and Dorothy stood. Her cheeks were flushed as she spoke, her hands animated. ‘I feel moved to say to you that perhaps what has happened to our friend Felicia could contain a greater message. That maybe we should seek to change ourselves first, before looking to change others. That we should look deep within at our own shortcomings, and in seeing them allow the Spirit to work in us.’
There were nods and expressions of agreement around the room. No one spoke. They sat silently considering Dorothy’s words and letting their meaning sink in. Often it was like this, that only one, or maybe two people felt moved to speak, and then only a few short words. Richard mulled over his own shortcomings. He wondered if he had been too hasty calling so early at Alice Ibbetson’s house yesterday, and practically accusing her of stealing the orchid from his wood.
He had been fired up by indignation, and should have waited until a more respectable hour. It had been awkward, and may have antagonized her into her stubborn behaviour in town today. But he was quite sure she had taken the flower–he had seen pink paint water in the jar and felt sure she must have been painting the orchid when he called, not that other, most uninspiring green plant. He had been of a mind to search her house there and then. But that would have been tantamount to saying she had stolen it, and her husband was already bristling at his early intrusion, and he looked like a man who did not like surprises of any sort. He knew Mistress Ibbetson was supposed to be an authority on flowers, but it riled him to be treated as an idiot. When he had bumped into her today on Highgate she had been almost arrogant. He cast his mind back further to the empty hole, and the coppers; he frowned, they were obviously intended as an insult.
Someone had been trespassing in his wood last night, despite the fact that Isaac had helped him keep watch on the orchid. There was talk in the village that Old Margaret, the cunning woman, was about, and asking after it. She would be interested in its use for medicine, and he certainly did not want to be party to any sort of witchcraft or sorcery. Dorothy would never forgive him. He was determined to make sure Alice Ibbetson returned the flower to its rightful place, and that it stayed out of Widow Poulter’s hands. It was his duty before God to restore the orchid and deal fairly with the person who had stolen it, and he would do this to the best of his ability. After all, he had fought for the common man to have his own patch of land, to be able to keep his roots, not to be pushed from place to place on some wealthier man’s whim.
Not a day went by when he did not remember the men who had died fighting for a piece of this black soil that lodged in his fingernails each day as he dug his vegetable plot. This rare orchid, with its blood red petals, sprung from that same earth, also deserved to stay where it belonged. No good comes of it, if you interfere with the natural order. He sincerely hoped Alice would return it, as he had suggested.
His thoughts slid back to Alice as if on skates. Her hands had been trembling when he visited her, and he knew she was hiding something. He had seen it in her eyes. He had quite liked the feeling of seeing her flustered. It made her more attractive, more feminine. Was he imagining it, or had she looked a little in disarray? Little tendrils of her copper hair had escaped from her cap. She had blushed scarlet when he said he liked her paintings, and it was becoming to her to have a little colour in her cheeks. When he had seen her before, she always looked so pale and sad. And she had very beautiful hands. He went over the image of her hands smoothing her apron in his mind and a slight sweat broke out on his forehead, the room seemed to have grown warm. He imagined Alice’s hands painting the waxy petals of the orchid. Between his legs, his breeches began to stiffen and bulge.
Suddenly he realized he had been caught up in a train of his own thoughts and he dragged his mind back to his place before God, and the silence in the room. Dorothy was right. There was a battle to be fought, and it was with his own mind. He fought to gain control of himself. He gathered his thoughts, and returned his mind to the company of the good people around him.
After a time he managed to settle back into the companionable quiet. When about an hour had passed and the candles had burnt low, Dorothy leaned over to the person next to her and shook hands. This little ritual was repeated round the room with people reaching out to each other to smile and clasp each other’s hands.
Isaac Fuller, the clerk Richard had been talking to earlier, stood up by the table in the centre. ‘I have one or two items of business for us to attend to, Friends.’ He looked genially round the room. The people craned forward to listen. Richard shuffled. He hoped the business would not be too long.
‘Firstly, this petition, which is going to the king.’ He held up a piece of parchment.
‘Many other groups, Friends like ourselves, have already signed it, and it will go forth from our meeting to other groups. It is our testimony against strife and war. We have all seen to our cost what war between people brings. The paper here is for you all to bear witness to this with your signatures. Those who can’t write may make a mark and I will scribe his name alongside.’
He held up the quill and beckoned. ‘Make sure thou canst stand by thy word. It will be no shame on thee if thou art unable to sign. But I hope that most of us will.’
Already there were men and women standing in the queue. At the mention of the war Richard’s thoughts lurched back to his command in the Roundhead Army. He had a sense of drowning, as if the pictures were filling his lungs, choking him. Fragmented images of galloping horses and mutilated men lying in pools of their own blood swelled in his mind, but strangely distant, as if he was seeing them whilst floating under water. He glimpsed again a white ringlet of hair still attached to its bloodied roots, and saw before him a soldier’s wild laughing mouth, the strings of saliva between his teeth–broken pictures that made his heart pound and his body turn cold. He saw Geoffrey’s eyes, full of horror and disgust, and he saw himself, as if from above, turning away in shame. Richard remembered, and shakily lurched to his feet. One by one they went to the table and signed. When it was his turn, Richard picked up the quill and read the words on the parchment.
‘We, the Society of Friends of Netherbarrow, do hereby testify that we are against all war and strife. We declare that we will not lend our support to any armed force, and
that we will not take up arms or weapons against another for any cause whatsoever. We will seek to bring peace and truth to our dealings with others. We seek that all people might be brought into love and unity with God and with each other. On this Day of our Lord the 3rd September 1660. We state that our word is our truth, with the help of God. Amen.’
He dipped the nib in the stoneware inkpot and rested it a moment on the edge of the pot to drain the excess ink. He took a moment to bring his attention to the act of signing. Resting his left hand on the parchment to hold it flat, he added his name carefully and deliberately. The nib made a scraping sound as he formed the curled capitals ‘R’ and ‘W’ of his name.
As he stood up he moved a little too quickly and his sleeve trailed across the parchment. He glanced down and saw that his name was smudged. He picked up the blotter next to the paper and pressed it down, but his signature still looked ragged below the other neat names. He felt a pang of disappointment; he had spoiled the parchment. He was angry with himself–he should have taken more care. He sat back down heavily on the bench.
Outside the window a drift of cloud eclipsed the moon. An owl screeched in the darkness. The farmer next to Richard, sensing some unknown disturbance in Richard’s demeanour, patted him on the shoulder in reassurance.
When Richard’s mind quietened, he found Isaac saying that George Fox was shortly to be released from Lancaster Gaol, and was to speak on the hill above Lancaster town in three days’ time. A ‘threshing meeting’ was what they called it, where the good grain would be separated from the chaff. Anyone who wished to hear him speak should make their way there. There was great excitement in the company and much talking whilst people arranged to convene and travel together. Richard offered some of the farmhands and the cobbler a ride on his wagon. It looked like it would be a grand day out, with a big crowd of people. The women were already discussing foodstuffs for a shared repast, and neighbours they might invite, who might possibly be ‘convinced’ at the assembly.
Richard had never heard Fox speak. He was supposed to be a man of great charisma, inspired but not a fanatic. Dorothy had been convinced at one of his meetings. Richard had great respect and admiration for Dorothy, who always seemed to be able to see past her own concerns and into a larger view. She was kind, no matter to whom she spoke. All people were equal to Dorothy, rags or royalty. To Richard she seemed the model of self-control and common sense.
Richard had met Dorothy by accident when he was garrisoned with Cromwell’s men on her land. After one of the early skirmishes with the king’s army, he had brought one of the injured young men up to the Hall because it was obvious the soldier was going to die from his wounds. Richard had heard that Lady Swainson was a religious woman, that she was a Puritan, and hoped she would be able to do something with the dying man. The young man was screaming in pain from a wound to the stomach, and was obviously terrified. He was disturbing everyone else, and it seemed politic to take him away from the other young men who were raucous with drink and jubilant at the latest victory. The Puritan ethic of abstinence rarely held when there was something to celebrate. He and a friend had carried the soldier still screaming between them.
Richard had been surprised that Lady Swainson received them without fuss, almost as if she had been expecting them. She received them in the drawing room and had them lay the young man out on the tapestry day bed, despite the fact that the wound was still pouring blood. She calmed the man with her soft voice, talked matter-of-factly to him, telling him that yes, he was about to die, but to be at peace. She did not use any religious language, but spoke plainly. She asked about his family, and how he remembered them, and how he would like to be remembered himself. He quietened, as if he had drunk a draught, though indeed he had not, and began to talk. Richard asked if he should fetch anything. Dorothy turned briefly to him and said, ‘There is no time. But let us pay him the honour of our full attention for his last moments with us. Listen well.’
And she bent over him and listened while he talked about his parents and his home, and how much he would miss them, and of a grievance he should have settled with his mother but for which there had been no time before he enlisted.
Dorothy Swainson did not speak, she just nodded every once in a while, her brown eyes resting all the time on his face, his hand clasped in hers. Richard and his friend listened too. The young man’s voice grew fainter and more broken, until he seemed too tired to speak. When he was still they sat for a long time, just looking peace ably at this man who was so recently alive. And there had been some thing different in this man’s death than any other death Richard had experienced. It was nothing he could put a label to, but rather an atmosphere, a quality of light in the room he would always remember.
After the last unspeakable battle and the atrocities perpetrated in the name of faith, he had remembered that night like a beacon, and finding no enduring peace he had sent word to Dorothy Swainson asking if he might be admitted to the meetings. He was so warmly welcomed that he had purchased nearby Helk Cottage and its little plot of land so he could be close to the meetings at the Hall. He sold his estate, and all his fine possessions, placing the capital at the disposal of his new-found brethren for their alms work. His life had begun anew. People called such folk the Quakers, and laughed that they trembled before God. But Richard preferred the term ‘Society of Friends’, for that was how they seemed to him, in nature as well as in name.
Chapter 7
Alice ate her soup and bread alone in the dining room. Thomas was never in for lunch. The empty chair and the cushion where Flora used to sit stared back at her. The house echoed as she moved in it now, the rooms grown too large and silent. Alice pictured Flora opposite, eating slowly, spooning the food into her mouth with concentration, in her little white lace cap and pintucked apron, her peg doll laid beside her plate. Flora would have loved her painting of the orchid. The watercolour was finished. It had turned out well–working quickly had given the picture a fresh and lively quality.
She had hidden the picture face to the wall behind the others in the summerhouse. The orchid itself she had hidden in an old beehive amongst the ones in the orchard. Wearing her protective veil and gloves she had planted the pot directly into the ground, underneath an empty hive. That way the wooden walls protected it from view, and also from herbivorous animals such as deer or rabbits. The bees were used to her coming and going to collect the honey and ignored her presence. She had left the roof of the hive open so the plant could have sunlight and air. At night, or if Wheeler came back, she could slot the sloping roof back on again. It was a good hiding place. People would not approach other people’s hives for fear of setting a swarm.
After her meal she returned to the summerhouse to finish the commission for Geoffrey’s client, Earl Shipley. She was enjoying the challenge of painting solely in tones of green. She hoped one day, with practice, to be as great a painter as the French woman, Louisa Moillon, whose paintings of fruit and flowers were much in demand and fetched high prices. Geoffrey owned a small panel by her, and it had a quality of stillness she much admired and wanted to emulate. When Alice had shown early talent for painting, her mother had hoped she would paint miniatures and had taken her to see a number of exquisite portraits by Nicholas Hilliard. But except for her sketches of Flora, she found painting people tiresome, and the miniature too constrained. Instead she loved to paint her father’s plant specimens, the flowing beauty of natural forms.
She set out the fern on the table and began to layer in more shadows in the centre of the plant. This time of year there would be an early sunset and she was anxious to make the most of the precious daylight hours–the changing light often meant a piece had to be put aside when the weather was too dull.
She was soon happily engrossed in the lacy texture of the leaves, until the light changed again, and she leaned back in her chair to look out of the window for the passing cloud. The sky was clear. Maybe she was imagining the change in light. But then she caught a glimps
e of something brown–a dark shape, something moving through the greenish glass of the window. She went closer to look out. A face loomed up in front of her, peering in from the outside. She gave a cry of surprise and stepped back. The face continued to stare at her through the glass. Alice recovered her composure and went to the door. Warily, she opened it a crack.
‘Yes, what is it you want?’
‘Mistress Ibbetson?’
‘Yes,’ Alice said, repeating, ‘what do you want?’ The woman was shabbily dressed, her cloak was old and mended, and her collar and cuffs rubbed and grey. Obviously a servant. Two shrewd brown eyes in a round moon face looked out from under the hood.
‘I am Margaret Poulter.’ She paused, looking at Alice inquisitively. ‘Margaret Poulter,’ she said again, smiling a grey-toothed smile, ‘the herbalist.’ She shuffled in and dropped a heavy brown leather bag on the flagstones.
She wasn’t behaving at all like a servant, how odd. The name took a few moments to register. Alice’s mouth went dry, and her stomach turned to liquid as the facts clicked sickeningly into place. This was Margaret the herbalist, the one Wheeler had told her about, who was thought to be something of a witch. This nondescript woman with her grey hair sticking out like a hedgehog was Margaret Poulter. Alice wiped her hands nervously on her skirts. She was not what Alice had imagined at all.
Unsure how to respond, she merely nodded, but her mind was racing. If Margaret Poulter was a witch then it would be best to try to keep calm and not antagonize her. The woman was looking with interest at the portraits of Flora. ‘By, what a bonny lass,’ she said.
The Lady's Slipper Page 6
