The Winthrop Woman

by Anya Seton

  John Winthrop cleared his throat, and held up his hand. "We are gathered here in sorrow this morning, for the performance of a distasteful duty. It is one from which I shrink, and I pray the Dear Lord to strengthen me." His voice faltered a moment. It was true that only a clear sense of duty upheld him, and the necessity for correcting wickedness within his own family. John could be angry under direct provocation, his temper was hot, but the deliberate infliction of pain on a girl child distressed him. More over, this interruption to his morning's plans was extremely inconvenient. He had been engaged in writing a decisive love letter to Margaret Tyndal for which the Essex carrier was waiting, he was also due by noon at the Manor Court next the church where his services were required as magistrate. But the salvation of a child through whom ran Winthrop blood must take precedence over all other matters. "Elizabeth," he said leaning on the lectern and looking sadly at the huddled little bunch on the stool. "Raise your head and tell us the deadly sins of which you have been guilty."

  Elizabeth swallowed hard. There was an enormous choking lump in her throat, but a numbness had come on her, and a bewilderment. She couldn't seem to remember exactly what had happened this morning, it had gone misty like a dream. She stared at her uncle and said nothing. There was a long silence.

  "Very well, since you wish to add obduracy to the rest," said John at last. "I will enumerate for you. You have been disobedient and slothful, first, then you have been mired in deceit and lies. This is wicked enough, but when your deceit was exposed, you most horribly blasphemed against God, you fled from just retribution, and on top of all this—you turned thief! Do you understand that, Elizabeth? Were you older and of the lower classes you would have been put in the stocks, and a letter T branded with a blazing iron on your face."

  The child gasped. "I only ate one," she said. "I didn't mean to take them."

  John sighed. "I'm glad to see some glimmer of repentance, but you must be brought to the full of it. Listen to God's express word." He bent his head and began to read from Ecclesiasticus. "He that loveth his son causeth him oft to feel the rod, that he may hare joy of him in the end." He read on, intoning each verse, "An horse not broken becometh headstrong ... Cocker thy child and he shall make thee afraid ... Give him no liberty in his youth ... wink not at his follies ... bow down his neck while he is young, and beat him on the sides while he is a child lest he wax stubborn and disobedient ... and so bring sorrow to thine heart."

  Elizabeth heard nothing, and nothing of the long prayer that followed. I won't cry out, she thought, I won't, no matter what he does, not in front of Jack. But she hadn't guessed where her uncle was going to beat her.

  "Now, Elizabeth, you have heard the word of God and our prayer to him. Lift your skirts and bend yourself over this bench." John drew a limber hazel stick from behind the lectern.

  "No!" cried the child. "I can't!" She would have run to her mother, but John seized her and held her pinioned. "It is meet and just that you be shamed. Come, come Elizabeth—is it necessary to bind you?" He yanked up her gown to expose the small naked buttocks and turned her over the bench. The child suddenly went limp. "There will be one stroke for each of your sins," said John and slowly raised his arm. The hazel stick swished in the silent room. A fine scarlet line appeared across the pink skin. Anne Fones made a choked sound, and jumping up, quitted the hall, while Martha ran with her. Jack turned his head and looked out the window. Six times the hazel whip flashed through the air and snapped on the flesh. Elizabeth made no sound, no one in the circle made a sound until the last stroke. Then Adam leaned forward and said in a low voice, "I fear the little maid has swooned."

  John lifted the child's head. "Not quite," he said. "Bring wine and a feather. She must finish the chastisement properly that her soul will profit by her correction."

  They wet the child's lips with wine. Lucy burned the feather beneath Elizabeth's nose until she sneezed, and opened her eyes to become conscious of a fierce smarting pain. "Is it over?" she whispered.

  "Yes, child," said John gently enough. "Except one thing. You must now kneel and kiss the rod which has saved you from damnation." He held out the reddened hazel switch. She obeyed mindlessly and brushed her mouth across the stick, but when John said, "Now affirm to us your full contrition and repentance, your determination never again to offend our most loving God," Elizabeth clapped her hands to her mouth, sweat broke out on her forehead, and leaning over she began to vomit on the rushes.

  "Let her be, my son," said Adam. "She'll carry scars from your hazel wand. She'll repent better now if ye do not force her."

  "'Tis not what the Bible says, Father," answered John frowning. "She must now bear witness to a broken and a contrite heart. This foolish retching is surely but the Devil's doing."

  "And I say let her be!" thundered Adam, suddenly angry. "You've become overhard and canting of late years. Before God I liked the old ways best when there was more talk of love and merriment and less of the Devil and groanings of sin."

  The men looked at each other. They had forgotten Elizabeth. A seldom realized conflict had flared between them. The old man rose and walked over to the lectern, beneath his bushy gray brows his eyes snapped. "Since ye hanker so to quote Scripture, ye might mind ye of the Fifth Commandment!"

  John's skin darkened and a tremor ran through him. He moistened his lips and spoke with difficulty. "Aye, my father, I do. I wish in nothing to offend you, it is but my zeal to..."

  "Zeal, forsooth! Ye've plenty of that!" cried Adam. It cost him something to combat his son whom he deeply admired, and truth to say was sometimes a bit in awe of. The old man reached down and lifted up Elizabeth. "There, there, poppet," he said stroking her curls. "Ye'll be good now, I vow, and ye'll never forget your correction."

  Elizabeth looked up at him dully. "I'll never forget it," she whispered, and only her grandfather thought that there was something strange, and woefully unchildlike in her manner.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IT SNOWED softly on Christmas Eve in the year of our Lord 1628, which was the fourth year of King Charles the First's reign, and on Christmas morning a fleece as white and soft as a Cotswold lamb lay over London town. It hid the wooden gables and the red roof tiles, it hid the piles of filth dumped into the narrow cobbled streets. It muffled the rumble of carts, the clop-clop of hooves, the acrid cries of the street venders, but the church bells clanged out clear as ever above the stilled city. And while Elizabeth in the Fones apothecary shop impatiently pounded snail shells in a mortar, she heard rowdy singing directly outside the shop door on Old Bailey Street.

  "Is it mummers?" she cried, throwing her pestle down on the counter top and rushing to the twinkling-paned, bow-fronted window. It was a group of mummers, disguised merrymakers, standing under the swinging apothecary sign of three fawns painted gold, in apt allusion to the Fones name.

  "Lewd roisterers! I must bid them begone!" said Richard Fitch the apprentice sourly, in the nasal twang of Lincolnshire. "They'll disturb the master." He raised his eyes to the smoky dark-beamed ceiling. Thomas Fones lay above in his chamber, suffering from a violent attack of rheumatics. "Mummers are a bawdy godless crew," went on Richard, pulling down the corners of his mouth as he peered through the window beside Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth paid no attention to him. She was laughing at the cavortings on the snowy street. There was a boy dressed as a hobbyhorse, and a "green man" with bits of ivy and holly stuck all over him, and another in a shaggy skin who lumbered and shuffled like a dancing bear on a leash held by the Lord of Misrule—a striped jester with cap and bells. "God rest ye merry—" bawled the mummers, "God rest ye merry, all good folk. Let nothing you dismay, for Christ our Saviour is born to us this Christmas Day."

  "'Tis wanton, God has naught to do wi' merriment," said Richard Fitch drawing back. "Roman blasphemies. They're all drunk too and in broad daylight—that one," he pointed with his thumb, "mumming as a bear—'tis Sim Perkins, 'prentice to Mr, Thurlby, the grocer in Ludgate, what a beating he'll
get when's master cotches him!" Richard nodded with satisfaction. He was a thin pimply boy of twenty who had nearly served his time with Thomas Fones, and would soon set up for apothecary on his own. He was much given to psalm singing, and the reading of his Geneva Bible, and his behavior was so impeccable that in the five years he had been here, he had never been beaten once. "Come, mistress," he said to Elizabeth, as he returned to the tobacco leaves he had been grading and chopping, "you'd best get on wi' your task or the mithridate'll never be ready in time for her Ladyship of Carlisle."

  "Oh Dickon!" cried Elizabeth. "This is Christmas Day! Most London folk don't work today!"

  "'Tis not the Sabbath—'tis a Thursday," said Richard sternly. "The Bible says naught anywhere about Christ masses—that's the Pope's doing. The Scripture commandment says, 'Six days shalt thou labor and do all—'"

  "I know what it says—" cut in Elizabeth, "but even King Charles himself keeps Christmas, and there'll be a royal masque today at Whitehall."

  The apprentice sniffed. "The King has a Papist queen to his bed, and women be like serpents to sting poison in a man unawares."

  "Oh fiddle-faddle!" snapped Elizabeth, returning to the counter and picking up the pestle. "How would you know? I'll vow you've never had a woman in your bed, be she serpent, dove, or even Bankside harlot." She peered at the battered calfskin book which contained her father's secret prescription for the famous mithridate remedy. Many apothecaries made "mithridates" of their own concocting, but this one was particularly efficacious. It contained forty ingredients: herbs like rue, and more exotic materials, powdered snails, dried mummy, fresh-water pearls, and a piece of lung from a hanged felon.

  Elizabeth read her father's cramped Latin with ease and duly added a dram of camphor to the mixture in a beaker.

  The apprentice had reddened at her accurate taunt, and he now watched her from the corners of his eyes with resentment and unwilling admiration. A provoking lass, she was, and considered by most men to be a beauty, for all that her nose was something long, her cleft chin too square, and her profusion of curly hair, black as a wicked Spaniard's. There was a bursting carnal femaleness about her, though she was but eighteen; it showed in the full mouth and small square teeth, the vivid red of her round cheeks, the heavy-lidded hazel eyes, the creamy column of her neck above the white fichu—and more. Richard Fitch glanced lower at the firm outline of her breasts, the supple waist, the shape of thigh not quite concealed by the thin wool folds of her maroon skirt, and he remembered a shameful dream he had had of her last night. Satan sent these lewd thoughts ... He turned angrily to sweep the pile of minced tobacco into a box as Mistress Priscilla Fones waddled into the shop from the inside passage. "Oh dear, oh dear," said Elizabeth's stepmother unhappily. "Bess, have you made up the mithridate yet for my Lady Carlisle, and I'm sure I wish her ladyship would pay her bill before we send her more of these chargeable drugs—your father is quite distracted—and 'tis the first time he ever failed to mix the potion himself, he says you must bring the bottle upstairs for his inspection as soon as you've finished ... and did you steep the betony with Ach—Ach—"

  "Achilles millefolium," said Elizabeth smiling. "I did. Is my father worse then?" She looked at her stepmother with mild affection and some amusement. Priscilla Fones was fat and good-tempered and ineffectual. Life constantly presented her with discomforts she had no notion how to ease except by a flow of gently fretful speech. She had however done her best to rear her three stepchildren, Elizabeth, Martha and Samuel; and to recover from her own frequent miscarriages and the birth of her little Mary, now eight, who ailed as mysteriously and continuously as did her father, Thomas.

  "I don't know," said Priscilla vaguely. "It's still his gout, I believe, but of course there's so much sickness about—another case of plague near Newgate, I hear ... and then all this worry about your Uncle Winthrop, though Mistress Margaret—thanks be to God that she came up here from Suffolk to nurse him—when I saw her yesterday she felt the ague was lessening ... if it is the ague; your father's been wondering if your uncle had maybe one of the purulent fevers ... Oh, Richard—" said Priscilla suddenly turning to the apprentice, "I'd forgot. You're to go at once to the conduit and fetch us another barrel of cooking water ... the conduit on the Chepe, mind you, your master feels 'tis the purest at present."

  "Aye, mistress." The apprentice began to stack the long brown tobacco leaves on a shelf.

  "Is this the tobacco Mr. Harry sent from Barbadoes?" asked Priscilla, her harried mind lighting on a new topic.

  "No fear, ma'm," answered Richard scornfully, "That was foul stuff, that was, stinking and full o' stalks. Master he wouldn't touch it, not for our quality trade. We sent it to the grocers."

  "Oh yes, I remember now," said Priscilla to Elizabeth. "I fear Harry's a wild young man, costing so much money to set him up as a planter on that island wherever it is, and I know your Uncle Winthrop has near beggared himself paying Harry's debts, and the tobacco he sends no good at all ... he was a most handsome lad though when he passed through London two years agone..."

  "Was he?" said Elizabeth, stirring her mixture in the thick glass beaker. Two years ago when she had last seen Harry she had hardly noticed him at all, because his brother Jack had also been in London practicing law at the Inner Temple, and her every thought had been for Jack; praying for their meetings, planning what she would say to him, and then too shy to say it when the time came. And Jack had treated her like a little girl, oh most kindly—gently teasing her, as he did Martha—but no more than that ... until last summer ... three nights before he sailed for Constantinople. Her fingers tightened on the wooden spoon, and she heard again Priscilla's voice which had not ceased.

  "...and then young John is so different in other ways too, such a credit to the Winthrops, he did so well those years at the University in Ireland and then fighting for Rochelle with the poor Duke of Buckingham ... what a fearful thing it must have been for Jack to hear of the Duke's wicked assassination, after serving under him that is, though there were many who were glad the Duke was murdered—if Jack has heard way off there among the heathen Turks..."

  "You know Jack has heard," said Elizabeth sharply. "That my Uncle John and Aunt Margaret have several letters from him." But I have none, she thought, though he promised. And in Jack's letters to his family there had been no mention of her except the formal "remember me to all my cousins."

  "The mithridate is finished, I think," said Elizabeth. "I'll take it up to Father."

  "Send Martha down to tend shop, or I'll stay here until Richard gets back, or perhaps one of the maids—but they're so busy in the kitchen ... oh dear ... I wish we could afford another servant, two is little enough for a family like this, but these London wenches want so much in wages now, and the times so unsettled ... one never knows just..."

  Elizabeth quietly escaped, but as she reached the narrow stairs which led to the great bedchamber, depression seized her, and a stifling sensation, so that on impulse she put the little flask of mithridate on a bench in the passage, seized a cloak left there on a peg by one of the maids, and went out into the garden. On the hidden paths the snow crunched beneath her soft leather soles. The orderly herb plots were obliterated now, though here and there in sheltered spots, snowdrops pushed green spikes through the whiteness. Little icicles dripped from the trellis of the rose arbor, and from bare branches of fruit trees; but it was of last June that she thought. Of the summer dusk when she and Jack had stood here together by the old old wall. London Wall. The Fones home halfway up Old Bailey Street was immediately outside the ancient fortification built by the Romans, and their half acre of garden was backed by it. London had long since grown beyond the Wall, it had crept in this westerly direction across the Fleet and along the Strand nearly to the King's Palace at Whitehall. The Wall had no meaning now, in places it was crumbling, one could no longer easily circle the old City along its broad top. Ivy grew all over the Wall and it showed the mellow pathos of desuetude and ruin. Elizabeth h
ad been born almost in its shadow and was fond of it. She had gone to it instinctively on the June night when she had last seen young John Winthrop.

  He had come to say farewell to his Fones relatives, having suddenly decided to embark on an extended tour of the Adriatic and the Levant. At supper he had entertained them in his own vivid way with tales of the wonders he expected to see on his travels, the water streets of Venice where people had black and gold boats tethered at their doors instead of horses—the ferocious Sultan of Turkey with his seraglio of a thousand wives.

  "Oh, Cousin Jack, what marvels!" little Martha had breathed. "And will you not see dragons and mermaids too?"

  "Very likely. Shall I bring you back one to play with?" Jack had said with the twinkle in his dark eyes. For all that she was past sixteen, Martha was still so small and ingenuous that they all treated her as a child. But the old easy relationship between Jack and Elizabeth had vanished. On this evening there had been a new constraint. When they rose from supper she announced that she must see to the herbs, and he followed her to the garden.