The Winthrop Woman

by Anya Seton

  Actually Elizabeth was smiling because her uncle was being kind, but she was not thinking of him, or her new betrothed. She was weary, and longing to be home. Before there was any hope of this she must discharge her errand.

  "Aunt—" she said. "I have drugs for my Uncle Winthrop, sent by Father, and wish to inquire how he does today."

  "Better, it seems," said Lucy. "You may go up to the chamber."

  "And come down soon," cried Emmanuel, "that we may drink to you!... Poor brother John, he's had no wine in weeks, he even eschews tobacco, though there is naught so good for the health."

  Elizabeth mounted the graceful flight of stairs, went down a passage past several shut rooms, then tapped at the door of a chamber that overlooked the garden.

  A gentle voice bade her come in, and as she opened the door Margaret Winthrop held her finger to her lips and pointed towards the great curtained bed at the other end of the room.

  Elizabeth curtseyed, and tiptoed towards her aunt who sat by the fire hemming one of her husband's night shirts. "Asleep?" whispered the girl, hoping it were so, for always she found converse with John Winthrop an ordeal.

  "I think so. Sit down, dear. I'm glad of company. I must stay by him, since he'll let nobody else nurse him." Margaret smiled proudly, her soft brown eyes examining the girl.

  Elizabeth seated herself on the cushioned bench near her aunt, savoring the kindly warmth that seemed to flow from the placid face, and the plump little body—far plumper now than when Elizabeth had first seen her on the night of King James's birthday celebration at Groton Manor eleven years ago. Since then Margaret had borne four living children, and despite her husband's ob-duracies, found affectionate contentment in her marriage.

  "How you've changed of late, Bessie," she said with her sweet smile, "become a woman."

  "Jack said that ... last time I saw him ... before he left for the Levant," Elizabeth blurted out, stabbed by painful memory, and knowing that with Margaret one need not be on guard.

  Her aunt studied her quietly. "You've become a most fair woman, Bess. Did Jack also say that?"

  The girl nodded, the rose on her cheekbones deepened. She looked away and said quickly, "Auntie, I am today betrothed to Edward Howes. Jack said that too, that I'd do well to marry Edward."

  Margaret sighed with relief. "Ah, yes, I believe you'll do very well to marry him, dear." She was not accounted a clever woman, she read nothing except her Geneva Bible when John reminded her to, she knew no Latin, her household accounts were always muddled, but she had an intelligent heart. She grasped from the girl's manner a nearly exact view of the situation, and was sorry for Elizabeth, but very glad of the outcome. She knew her John, and how bitter a blow it would have been to him, had his son entangled himself with his little cousin, though she doubted that John had sensed the danger. He neither expected nor received any disquiet from his eldest. It was always Harry whose behavior gave him concern.

  Elizabeth turned sadly away. Had she really been so foolish as to expect that Margaret would give her sympathy; or that she might even, from her knowledge of the beloved stepson she had raised, hint at some hope?

  The girl fumbled in the pocket of her skirt and brought out the flask of medicine. "Father sent this for my uncle," she said.

  As Margaret took it there was a stirring behind the bed curtains, and a muffled voice called, "Who's there, wife?"

  Margaret hurried across the room and drawing the curtains said cheerfully, "Why, it's your niece, dearest—Bess Fones, come to inquire for you."

  John Winthrop was not wholly awake, and his comprehension was dimmed by recent worries as well as by the weeks of fever. His fretful answer was quite audible to Elizabeth. "What has that wretched girl been doing now to plague her father? Some new disobedience, no doubt."

  Elizabeth gasped, while Margaret said, "No, no John! Bess is right here, and has done nothing but obey her father's wishes and betroth herself to Mr. Howes."

  "Oh, well enough, then," said John, still unaware that the girl could hear him. "But let her marry soon, before she brings disgrace upon the Winthrops with her carnality. I've heard that she makes lewd sheep's eyes even at their 'prentice."

  "Dear husband, you talk too harsh!" cried Margaret, and she sent Elizabeth a look of apology, while forming with her lips, "He still wanders a bit."

  The girl had gone very white, her hands were clenched. Her heart pounded and, mixed with fury at the injustice of her uncle's words, was a bleak despair.

  She looked towards the bed where the big-nosed profile above the pillows was something like Jack's as the cruel voice too had been a travesty of his son's. I hate him, hate him—she thought.

  She put back her shoulders, lifted her chin and without another word, walked out of the room.

  Margaret, somewhat troubled, watched her go. Poor child, it was a pity that she should have heard such wounding criticism, but John had not meant to hurt her, and when he saw faults either in himself or others, his need to circumvent evil wherever found made him at times seem harsh. But Margaret knew him in many tender moments; he had given her a devotion and sometimes astonishing passion that she had little expected during their betrothal. Thiey had built together a satisfying married love, for which she thanked God daily in simple gratitude. No doubt Bess would find the same, in time, with Edward Howes, when she had learned to conquer daft desires such as that for Jack Winthrop.

  Margaret instantly forgot Elizabeth as John stirred again. She felt his forehead, and found cool sweat there. "I praise God, love," she cried. "The fever's broken, and sooner than last time. We'll have you on your feet in a day or two!"

  "Aye." He smiled a little and his fingers closed around hers. "I had not wanted to bring you up from Groton, but, my sweet wife, I am so glad you came. I pray that Our Merciful Lord has chastised me enough for my own good and will suffer me to return to my chambers for Hilary Term ... I'm in dire need of the fees."

  He sighed and while Margaret mixed with water the Purple Electuary, he thought glumly of his mounting debts. He had financed young John's trip to the Levant, and Henry's plantation venture in Barbadoes by selling the Essex property left him by his first wife, Mary Forth. But that was insufficient. Henry not only sent abominable tobacco home, as sole return on the venture, but kept demanding money and servants as well. Moreover there was the next son, Forth, to be educated at Cambridge, a dowry to be found for little Mary, and Margaret's sons to be provided for in a few years. I scarcely know how, he thought, tugging unhappily at his small pointed beard and frowning at the brocaded tester above his head.

  Margaret profferred him the pewter mug of mcdicine, and he drank it absently. "I must soon answer that distressing letter from Henry," he said. "The boy's vain overreaching mind will be his downfall. I marvel that he dares to ask me for more money; he knows I have none without sale of our manor lands, and I am already much in debt to my brother Downing."

  "Think not of those things now, love," she said. "The Lord will provide."

  "Sometimes I think the Lord has turned his face from England," John said slowly. "How can it be that He permits the King to so oppress us with false loans and taxes imposed without consent of Parliament! How can it be that He permits popery and Arminianism to seep like plague throughout our land?"

  "Now, dear, pray, don't heat your blood with such thoughts..." coaxed Margaret, and she added timidly, for she knew little of such matters, "Will there not be a Parliament soon that can show the King where he does wrong?"

  "Aye," said John. He struggled up from the pillows, his eyes stared from their hollow sockets at the Bible on his table. "And we must pray that the King will listen ... otherwise there will be a scourge and judgment come upon us from these evil times, a heavy dreadful scourge."

  "But what should we do then?" she asked, a little frightened, for John's voice had risen to its full resonance as it did when he read them a psalm.

  He did not answer at once, and when he did it was as though he were speaking from afar o
ff to himself. "It may be that if the Lord seeth fit, he will provide a shelter and a hiding place for us, as God sent Lot to refuge in the place called Zoar." He shut his eyes and sank back on the pillows.

  She looked at him in dismay. He cannot mean that we should go to Holland like those dreadful Separatists from Nottinghamshire, she thought—he could not mean that. For he had often said that he loved Groton above all earthly places, and that the Lord would sustain them so that they might live on the Manor till death, and then Jack and his children after them. No, she thought, this talk is nothing but speech born of fever. No more than that.

  As the days went by till his complete recovery, and he made no further dark allusions, all uneasy wonder slipped from her mind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ON FEBRUARY 14 Elizabeth awoke to hear a thrush caroling in the garden while warm air seeped through the heavy green brocade curtains which enclosed her with Martha in the girls' carved, four-posted bed. Through every nerve she felt the thrill of coming spring and with it an excited sense of release for which there was no other basis at all. Except that Hilary Term had ended in the courts and John Winthrop had yesterday quit London and returned to his home at Groton. Her hurt fury at his speech on Christmas Day had gradually subsided into the usual dullness of impotent rebellion. He had been pleasant enough the few times she had seen him, and had even offered her a brief apology for the words she had overheard. This apology she knew came partly from Margaret's suggestion, and partly from his own formal sense of justice. He had however indicated to Thomas Fones that he saw no reason whatever to postpone Elizabeth's wedding beyond late April, when he would again come up to London for the Easter Term, and be pleased to attend the marriage ceremony. Thomas had at once agreed.

  But I've still weeks and weeks, Elizabeth thought, I'll not fret today. She pushed the curtains aside and saw pale streaks of dawn through the diamond panes of the garden window. She swung her bare legs over the edge of the bed, and as the thrush trilled again she sang too:

  "Good morrow! 'Tis St. Valentine's Day,

  All in the morning betime

  And the very first lad that I shall see

  In spite of fortune will my true-love be!"

  Martha whose face had been buried in the down pillow, jerked her head up and gave a little moan. "Bess—Hush I pray thee! You know very well your valentine must be Edward, and anyway don't SING!"

  At this unusual peevishness, Elizabeth examined her sister, saw the right cheek swollen, the pain-dark hollows beneath the eyes and said, "Is it the toothache again, Matt?"

  The younger girl nodded, putting her hand to her jaw. "'Tis getting worse, throbs so I scarce can stand it."

  "Best have it out, dear," said Elizabeth gently. "I'll send Dickon for a tooth-puller, I hear there's a good one lives near St. Bart's Hospital."

  "No, I can't! I can't! I'd rather die!" Martha covered her face with her hands and burst into terrified sobs. Elizabeth was silent. She had once herself been through the agony of tooth-pulling; the gagging from the clumsy iron forceps as they fastened on the tortured molar, the grinding splintering shocks of pain as the tooth-puller sweated and jerked with one hand, while forcing his patient's head back with the other. But she had set herself to stand it without screaming, and she had stood it, until the ecstasy of relief, when the tooth-puller waved the bloody tooth in the air and demanded sixpence in payment. But to Martha pain of all kinds meant fear and disintegration so piteous that one had not the heart to force it on her.

  "Well, lie quiet then," said Elizabeth. "I'll bring you some laudanum and ground cloves to put in the hole." She jumped out of bed and pulled her linen night shift off. For the first time since October the air in the room was not chilling, and she opened the garden window and stood naked in front of it, breathing deeply. The air smelt of coal smoke from London's kitchen fires, of low tide from the river and of the night-soil which was even now being dumped from windows into the streets in hope that an ordure cart would come by eventually and remove it. But Elizabeth's nose was used to these city smells, and picked up with joy the unaccustomed ones of rich brown earth steaming in the dew, and of the hyacinths that had opened overnight in the garden. Suddenly she stretched and lifted her arms high above her head. Lowering them slowly she ran her hands over her large firm breasts, her flat stomach, her flanks and hips, rejoicing that her skin was smooth as ivory. She took her wooden comb from the chest, and began to comb the curling strands of dark hair so long and thick that they fell like a cloak and covered her body in all modesty nearly to the knees. She breathed deep again and shut her eyes while rich words chanted in her mind: The hair of thine head is like purple; the king is held in the galleries ... How fair and pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes ... like two young roes that are twins ... O I am my beloved's, and his desire is towards me ... She opened her eyes and stared unseeing at the high gray mass of London Wall, until Martha made a whimpering sound in the bed. Elizabeth shivered and her shoulders sagged. She put down the comb, and took a clean day shift from the chest. Dull shame oppressed her. It was the Church and Christ that those troubling, beautiful words referred to, not man and woman. Uncle John had made that clear when she had heard him read the Song of Solomon at a family service. Later she had looked it up in the Fones Bible and seen that it was so. Though the thrush still warbled in the cherry tree, her exhilaration vanished.

  Elizabeth dressed herself in her maroon serge workaday gown, tied a white fichu around her shoulders and a white apron around her waist. She braided her hair and bound it with a linen kerchief, then she went to the kitchen to get a mug of breakfast beer on the way to fetching Martha's palliatives from the shop.

  She found a scene of confusion and snivelings in the kitchen, where Priscilla was halfheartedly beating Tib, the youngest maidservant, with the small cane reserved for this purpose; though Priscilla's good temper and lethargy prevented her from chastising either her children or servants as often as her gossips did theirs. The cook, who had got her underling into trouble in the first place, was virtuously stirring a potful of eel stew and egging on the punishment. "And a fearful liar she is too, ma'am, said she'd swept the stairs when she 'asn't touched 'em in donkey's age, said she wasn't a-kissing the sweep be'ind t' scullery door, wen I see 'er face wi' me own eyes all smooched wi' soot—"

  "I never! I never!" wailed Tib, sniveling harder, and wriggling expertly so that Priscilla's blows hardly reached her. "Ow, ma'am, ow! You're a-killing me!"

  Priscilla's fat arm dropped, and she sank onto a stool, mopping her face. "Well, see that you be good in future, Tib—go to the stillroom and fetch me some fresh vinegar, I'm quite faint..." As the girl scuttled out of sight, Priscilla said to Elizabeth, "Ah—good morrow, Bess, you're down late, where's Martha?... these wenches ... it wearies me so to wield the cane ... but when I found she'd eaten up a whole crock of butter, and in truth she is of late so greedy, I pray the little slut's not breeding, 'twould be most inconvenient ... Sammy—" she turned to Elizabeth's twelve-year-old brother who was perched on a stool munching toast and scowling into his Latin Grammar, "You'll be late for school again."

  Samuel Fones shut his grammar with a bang and flung it in a bag with the abacus he used for arithmetic. He was dressed in the yellow stockings and blue coat worn by Christ's Hospital scholars, and he had been quite oblivious to Tib's punishment, canings being of daily occurrence at school. Moreover he was at the age when his home interested him little and he lived entirely in those moments when he escaped with his comrades to investigate the London docks, or play football at Smithfield. He gave Elizabeth, of whom he was rather fond, an absent-minded wink; bowed to his stepmother, saying "I gi'e-you-good-day, ma'am, may-God-keep-you-in-health," and pelted out the door.

  I wish I was going to school, or rather I wish I was going out somewhere, thought Elizabeth while she explained to Priscilla about Martha's toothache. She finished her beer and walked along the
passage to the apothecary shop, where her father was already rolling pills on a marble slab by the light of a candle. He had recovered from his last bout of illness, but it seemed to have shrunk him, and the tremor had not left his knotted hands. He greeted Elizabeth, and told her to continue making up the pills when she had attended to Martha. Elizabeth enjoyed much of her work in the apothecary shop, but pill-rolling was dull, and this morning she protested. "Oh, Father, can't Richard do it? I wanted to—"She thought rapidly and amended, "That is, my mother badly needs new needles so that we may sew on my bride sheets, I could just run out to the tailors and buy some..."

  "You know well I won't have you running the streets alone like a beggar wench," snapped her father. "If Edward comes over later, he may take you, and Richard has gone 'cross river to Southwark with the Unicorn's Horn for Mrs. Elwick's babe. If that doesn't bring the little one out of its fits, nothing will."

  Elizabeth sighed and resigned herself. At least the Elwicks paid quite promptly, and for the use of the marvelous Unicorn's Horn—which was a spiraled white bone—one could charge as much as a guinea, so later Thomas might be in a good enough mood to give her a few pence pocket money.

  The morning passed like a hundred other mornings. A few customers sent in their servants with prescriptions to be filled or simple requests for plasters, and physic. Thomas left the shop to Elizabeth and remained in the stillroom behind, while compounding the most complicated of his mixtures, but he emerged twice to greet clients of importance. One was the assistant to the emi nent Dr. William Harvey who lived a few blocks north at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and was famous for his discovery of the blood's circulation. Thomas was flattered that this physician relied on him for many remedies, and eagerly questioned the young assistant about present conditions at the hospital.