I Coriander eBook Page 4

  Then she let the truth of it out, all her words tumbling and stumbling over one another.

  ‘I wish I could say that she had been saved by the Lord’s providence, but strange rumours have reached us about your household, and my good husband asked me to come to say that he believes it is fairy lore and sorcery that has healed the child. We are God-fearing people and want no part of the Devil’s work.’

  ‘Come, mistress, what is this?’ said my mother.

  Mistress Gearing put her hands up in front of her. My mother could contain herself no longer and burst out laughing as Mistress Gearing ran out of the garden gate and up the street.

  My father did not think it funny.

  ‘Thomas,’ said my mother, ‘she must be a very silly woman.’

  ‘She did not want me because she thought I had been made better by the fairies,’ I piped up.

  ‘What nonsense,’ said my mother.

  My father’s face was grave.

  ‘It is no laughing matter, Eleanor my love.’

  ‘Thomas, do not look so solemn. Do you not think the woman a fool?’

  ‘I think you must be more careful, Eleanor. Please, for my sake and Coriander’s.’

  His voice made me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘The old world has been washed away and a new order of fools is here. Have a care, my love. They bring with them an unforgiving Lord.’

  6

  The Pearl Necklace

  I was nine summers old when my happy, carefree world was torn apart and turned upside down.

  It happened one cold wintry morning in January. I had been sitting in my mother’s bedchamber looking out of the window and up into the heavy sky. All it had to do was snow and then I would be able to go sledging with Edmund Bedwell. He was now twelve years old and his brother thirteen. Their father had married Mistress Patience some three years back and they had a new baby brother as round and plump as a sweet plum pudding. Now both the boys were studying at St Paul’s School and I was most envious of them. I could read and write well, too, and had a hunger for knowledge.

  Edmund told me grandly that learning Latin and Greek was too hard for the feeble mind of a girl.

  ‘What about good Queen Elizabeth?’ I said, putting my hands on my hips and trying to look very grown-up. ‘She was taught all those subjects and more besides.’

  ‘That is quite different,’ said Edmund. ‘She was a princess, not just an ordinary girl like you.’

  ‘That matters not. It shows that girls can do as well as boys,’ I said firmly.

  ‘You will be a merchant’s wife and have a large house to run,’ said Edmund. ‘Better to be taught housewifery. Then at least you will be useful to your husband, as Mistress Patience is to my father. Let the men worry about the Latin and Greek.’

  Sometimes Edmund annoyed me much.

  ‘Do you think,’ I asked my mother, as I wrote my name on the frozen windowpane, ‘that girls have feeble minds?’

  ‘Did Edmund Bedwell tell you that?’ she laughed.

  I nodded.

  ‘You have a very bright and lively mind, and long may it be so. Master Edmund Bedwell is a nincompoop. Now, tell me, my pretty, what necklace shall I wear today?’

  ‘That is easy,’ I said, ‘the rose pink pearls.’

  She smiled. ‘A good choice.’ She held them up to the light and looked at them. ‘This was the first present your father ever gave me. Come, tie me a pretty bow.’ She handed me the necklace.

  ‘Why are the pearls cloudy when they are not on your neck and clear when they are?’ I asked.

  ‘The heat from my skin warms them up and they become clear,’ said my mother, brushing back my hair from my face. ‘You have, without doubt, the tightest show of red ringlets I have ever seen.’

  ‘I wish I had hair like yours,’ I said.

  ‘Save your wishes. You are going to be a beauty one day, my sweet Coriander.’

  Danes came clattering into the room with a tray of hot chocolate and a plate of sweetmeats.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Danes, putting the jugs and china bowls out on the table, ‘but Mistress Mullins is downstairs and wishes to speak to you on a personal matter and Mistress Potter is here again with her old problem. Lord, will that woman never be satisfied?’

  ‘Now, now,’ said my mother, smiling. ‘Let us be kind. Tell them I shall not be long.’

  I sat down and poured the chocolate for my mother and me. Danes took the tray and went away.

  My mother shivered as she closed the door. ‘It is cold in here. Is the window open?’

  I got up and at that moment something dark and feathery flew hard against the glass, shattering it. My mother was still standing by the mirror. Suddenly she made a gasping sound, and I turned round to see her put a hand out to steady herself. What happened next was like a dream. The pearls round her neck broke free and poured down with a hard tip-tap like rain-drops, bouncing up only to hit the wooden floorboards again. Then my mother’s eyelids fluttered and closed as she began to sink, her skirts billowing beneath her like the sails of a ship. The pins that held her hair in place came loose as she went down. She landed with a deadening thud as her head hit the unforgiving floor, her arms stretched out, her hair a golden sea of waves. I tried to catch her, knocking the hot chocolate off the table, the china bowls breaking, spilling their dark creamy content so that it spread across the floor, bleeding into my mother’s dress.

  A cry, a terrible cry broke the silence. It seemed to be coming from me. I saw the door fly open and watched in horror as Danes and two servants did acrobatics in the air, tripping and tumbling over the pearls like high wire walkers, dancing for balance.

  My father rushed into the room. He too slipped, then regained his footing, his face ashen white. He lifted my mother on to the bed and loosened her clothes. While I stood watching, the pearls rolled noisily across the floor under the furniture and out of sight. I knelt down and collected as many as I could. All I could think was that as long as they did not cloud over everything would be all right.

  For four days my mother lay still and without words, veiled in a deep sleep. None of her own remedies made her any better. Finally, much against Danes’s advice, my father sent for the doctor.

  Doctor Turnbull had been skulking outside like a river rat, knowing that in the end my father would give in. I had never liked this man. He was dirty, with long greasy hair, and he smelt of sickness. He brought with him two skinny, sulky apprentices weighed down with jars of leeches and other instruments of torture. He tut-tutted at all the potions Danes was using and ordered that the room be heated to pull the fever out. Then he set his black leeches loose on my mother’s fair skin to bleed her, and he would allow nothing to be given to her except what he prescribed.

  Danes was banned from the room and Doctor Turnbull took delight in whispering to my father that she had made his patient worse.

  My father, red-eyed and pale with worry, said nothing.

  ‘Send him away, sir,’ Danes pleaded. ‘Please, for the love of Eleanor, send him away.’

  ‘No, I cannot, not if there is the smallest chance she could be saved.’

  ‘Please,’ begged Danes.

  It was not to be. The doctor stayed.

  Mistress Patience came to sit with my mother, as did Master Bedwell. A steady stream of friends and neighbours came to pay their respects.

  My mother got worse. She looked as pale as the sheets, and still the doctor insisted he could cure her. His last resort was to cut my mother’s hair off and put two dead pigeons at her feet.

  ‘What have you done, you buffoon?’ my father cried in horror when he saw her.

  ‘I had occasion,’ said Doctor Turnbull, seeing my father’s ferocious face, ‘to bring down the fever of a lady by this very treatment.’

  ‘You are a fool, and this,’ said my father, pointing to the dead pigeons, ‘is no better, sir, than witchcraft. Nay, worse, for it is done in the name of medicine.’

  ‘I have never been so i
nsulted in all my life,’ said the doctor.

  ‘More’s the damn pity,’ said my father, and he ordered the doctor and his apprentices out of the house.

  However, as the doctor left, death came creeping in. The pigeons were removed and Danes made my mother as comfortable as she could. That night the room was lit with a single candle and at some time I must have been carried back to my own bed, for I was woken in the early hours of the morning by the roar of a wild animal. My heart leapt with fright and I could make no sense of where the noise was coming from, except that it seemed to be inside the house. I rushed out of bed and into my mother’s bedchamber. My father was howling as if his soul was breaking. Danes gathered me up in her arms.

  ‘Your mother is dead, my little sparrow,’ she said.

  And so the first part of my tale is told, and with it a candle goes out.

  PART TWO

  7

  The Shadow

  Six bells ring out to let the parish know that a woman has died, followed by a bell that tolls once for every year of her life. Thirty-three bells rang out for my mother.

  My father ordered all the windows of our house to be opened so that her spirit could find its way home. A mournful wind came whistling in, wailing its woe into every room, blowing out all the candles and bringing with it drizzling fog that hung about the house long after the windows had been closed again.

  Danes washed and perfumed my mother as lovingly as if she were in an enchanted sleep, dressing her in a plain white shift and covering her shorn head. She looked so still and beautiful, her skin as white as candle wax, her hands folded together holding a winter rose from her garden. Black crape was hung round the bed and at the windows. All the paintings and mirrors were turned to the wall. Mourning clothes and cloaks were ordered from Master Thankless and mourning rings were bought. She lay in the great oak bed for three days, my father at her side, weeping inconsolably and saying over and over that she must be left there, she was just sleeping, she still might wake.

  It was as if my world had fallen down, as if the house had lost its walls. I woke up in the morning, I went to bed at night as if I were someone else, someone without thought or feeling.

  On the day of the funeral my father was almost wild with grief. His apprentice Sam dressed him and helped him down to our barge as if he were an old man unsteady on his feet. No coffin had been ordered; my father would not hear of it. He wanted my mother’s body to go back into the earth and replenish it. She would have wished it.

  It was then that the whispers and rumours grew louder, for it was thought most shocking that my mother was not to be buried in a churchyard. This confirmed the neighbours’ worst fears, that she had been a stranger, with airs and graces that did not belong in this world.

  It was dusk by the time we set off, and stillness was over the water. The sky was a bluish black and flakes of snow were falling. No one accompanied us. No priest, no mourners, just me, my father and Danes, the four bargemen and two servants. My mother’s body was placed on the barge wrapped in a white winding sheet. Silently we made our way upriver, the ripple of the water and the rhythm of the oars the only song that was sung. Past Whitehall, out of the city into the countryside, back to the meadows she had loved.

  In the gloom it bore no resemblance to the place we had visited so long ago. Here I had danced with my mother under a canopy of leaves, the grass full of wild flowers. And there, where she was to be buried, her grave a raw wound in the earth, was the spot where we had kept our food baskets cool from the midday sun.

  We each held a torch, a light against the gathering darkness, the white of my mother’s shroud the only thing that could be seen clearly.

  ‘We are but shadows that have a short time dancing in the light,’ said my father, tears running down his face. ‘There never was one as lovely as thee. Go free, my love, and one day we may be together again. Amen.’

  He threw a rose down into the grave.

  ‘We live to die, we die to live eternally.’

  As he said these words, I heard a loud cawing sound and looked up to see a raven perched high in the oak tree above us, its shape outlined dark against the night sky, its cry shattering the stillness like breaking glass. My father took hold of my hand and pulled me closer to him so that I was hidden by his mourning cloak.

  By now it had started to snow heavily. Two gravediggers covered the grave until the earth lay flat and even. We stood there frozen with the cold. Only when the meadow had turned white and the grave was lost in the new snow did we make our way back to the barge. I shivered as I heard the raven’s haunting cry bidding us farewell.

  The barge made its way back downriver on the outgoing tide. Black water. Black barge. My mother had taken with her all the colours of the rainbow.

  It was as if that day we buried not only my mother but a part of my father as well, for the man who now sat in his room refusing to eat looked nothing like the strong and powerful father I knew. His face was gaunt; he had cut off all his long hair so that it stuck out in tufts. He did not shave and seemed hardly aware of anyone’s presence.

  The house was now mine to roam. I could do what I liked, but all I wanted was for my mother to be there. Joan, the cook, having no food to prepare, sat in silence at the kitchen table. The servants were hardly to be seen. It was as if the whole house was cast under a spell. Danes seemed as bewildered by my mother’s death as my father.

  Two cold and dreadful months passed. The black crape was still draped in every room. The sheets on the great oak bed were still unchanged and every day my father placed another winter rose on her pillow. He would allow no one to touch her dresses or her jewels.

  I was beginning to think that this melancholy state would go on for ever when one evening Master Bedwell came to see my father.

  I had been sitting with him in the living chamber, both of us staring silently into the fire. I was telling myself a story about a princess and a dragon. My father, lost in his thoughts, was jolted back into the present by a servant announcing Master Bedwell’s arrival.

  ‘I am not in,’ said my father. ‘I will see no one.’

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ said Master Bedwell, brushing the servant aside. ‘This cannot go on.’

  ‘There is nothing to say,’ said my father, turning back to look into the fire.

  ‘There is a great deal that must be said. I would like to talk to you in private,’ said Master Bedwell.

  I got up to leave, but my father took hold of my hand and sat me down beside him.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘I have come on an important matter,’ said Master Bedwell, looking at me uncertainly.

  ‘You may speak freely,’ said my father.

  Master Bedwell started to walk back and forth in front of the fire and then addressed himself to the flames, where most of our thoughts seemed to be that evening.

  ‘You have enemies and there is much talk.’

  ‘There has always been talk,’ said my father angrily. ‘I know people say Eleanor was a cunning woman, even a sorceress. Men cling like drowning sailors to the hope of a life everlasting and a forgiving Lord. Then, if that fails to bring them comfort, there are always magicians, sorcerers, witches and fairies to blame for their misfortune. Blame everyone and everything but do not blame yourself. What fools are men!’ My father’s laugh was hollow.

  ‘Cannot you see that we are living in dangerous times?’ said Master Bedwell, opening his arms wide. ‘Gossip flies. All this could be taken away from you tomorrow and you would be left with nothing.’

  ‘What more can anyone take from me?’ said my father, his head bent down. ‘Everywhere I go I carry my hell with me.’

  ‘I know, and I am greatly sorry for it, but I am talking of worldly matters. A word in the wrong ear could be catastrophic for you. Oliver Cromwell is confiscating the wealth of those who supported the Royalist cause, and you have never made any bones about the fact that you think the King should never have been beheaded. And now there is t
his bad business at Worcester.’

  I knew about Worcester from Danes. She had told me that Oliver Cromwell had defeated the newly crowned King of Scotland, Charles II, there. The King himself, with a price on his head, had escaped to France.

  ‘What are you suggesting I should do?’ said my father.

  ‘Marry again. Marry a good Puritan woman.’

  ‘What! Eleanor is barely cold in her grave,’ said my father.

  ‘Nobody can replace Eleanor. I know that. But you could find a woman with whom you could rub along and who with her piety would stifle gossip. It would allow you to keep your wealth and your home. I have connections in Bristol who could help you.’

  ‘This is folly!’ cried my father, getting up and striding over to the window. ‘I am not a Puritan! I have no sympathy with their cause.’ He pushed his hands angrily through his hair and turned to face Master Bedwell. ‘Do you really believe that they would take this all away?’ he asked.

  ‘Without hesitation, my dear friend. You have heard what befell Master Needham. He has been made bankrupt. He too was a self-made man with no connections in Parliament, no relatives to help him, no link with the Puritans. We are in the midst of a terrible storm and I fear that it can only get worse,’ said Master Bedwell. ‘For pity’s sake, think before you lose everything.’

  That night I went to bed feeling uneasy. I woke to find that the window in my room had blown open and the rain was pouring in. I had to battle to close it and still the window rattled like a skeleton shaking its bones. Lightning flashed and I felt sure that I could see demons and alligators crawling across the walls. My heart pounded as I pulled the covers over my head. I wished my mother were there to make everything all right.

  I could not get back to sleep, so I got out of bed and went on to the landing. Looking down, I could see my father’s study door open and warm light shining into the cold, gloomy hall. Holding my breath, I tiptoed down the stairs, hoping with every creaking step that he would come and rescue me.