At the Sign of the Star (2 page)

I had her for eight years, but I wish I had had her longer, or at least more often while she lived. I know not why she died—how God gained by it, I mean. I do not know, either, why I am the only one of her children who lived. I often ponder it.

To my father I said only, “Yes, sir.”

“Are you happy, then, chopping turnips in the kitchen?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, still determined that he would not send me to school.

“You are my heir, Margaret,” he said. “Someday all my books will be yours, and my copyrights, and my other interests as well. With such a dowry you need not trouble yourself about marrying an old man nor a sour one. You may choose someone in the trade, if you like, and be a partner to him as your mother was to me. But you must first fit yourself to be mistress of the household you will one day govern. You must go to school.”

He turned and left. I raised my knife and began chopping once more, carefully, for even then I was a careful girl. When I finished, the turnip was in tatters.

“La, Meg, what are you doing?” Mary scolded, and cuffed me with a floury hand.

“I have remembered something I must tell my father,” I said, and put the knife down upon the table.

I found him in the shop, which was not open. “Please, Papa, you must not send me to school,” I said. “For how can I there learn the trade? I must help in the shop, like Robert.”

In the end I won him over. He said he would find someone to teach me at home, and from time to time he did, but my teachers were not very suitable and did not stay long. From one I learned to cast accounts, and from another to make plague-water to ward off infection.

But in the main I worked, helping my father at our shop where it stood in Little Britain, a street crowded with booksellers. As I worked I listened to the great men who gathered there as soot gathers on a chimney piece. Perhaps, as I once heard my father say, our shillings came more from sermons and Latin grammars than from poetry and plays. But being the friend and publisher of John Dryden, the greatest of London's great literary men, played no small part in making my father an important man. As I grew I saw much of plump, rosy Mr. Dryden. At first I cared only that he was kindly, and free with a playful jest, but later I began to hear him when he defended the plays of Shakespeare or the rhymed couplet. Still later I read his plays, both the comedies and the tragedies, and some of his verses. And when Hester worried over my education I told her that it did not matter, for I was learning all I needed to know from my father, and the company he kept, and from the books we sold at the sign of the Star.

3

At breakfast, Hester and I told my father of the comet, and he was almost angry.

“How would you know a comet?” he asked. “Are you an astrologer now? You must be mistaken.”

“You'll see soon enough, when all London is talking of it,” I said, angry in my turn. I set my tankard down with a thump, and a few drops spilled onto the wooden trencher that held my bread and butter. “Then you will admit I'm right about something, at last.”

“Stop talking nonsense, Daughter. A comet's a larger matter than whether a child is right or wrong about something. What can it mean?” He went on, almost to himself. “Does it mean the year is not auspicious?”

“Not auspicious for what?” I asked, but he ignored me, and I thought his face looked worried in the flicker of the tallow candles. The parlor had a large window, but it was westward looking and the weak dawn light had not yet reached it.

“What do the almanacs say?” Hester asked as she handed round the oatcake. I believe she hoped to distract us both.

“Andrews's almanac,
News from the Stars,
says there is an unusually long transit of Mars through Cancer this year,” I answered. “With
many
animosities in April.”

“Andrews means there will be conflicts between nations,” my father said.

“
And
storms.
And
losses to pirates.”

“How is it that you find the time to read through every book and broadside upon our shelves?” he asked.

“Cold beef?” Hester offered.

“I suppose if it is worth printing it is worth reading,” I said.

“I doubt it's worth printing. Next year I'll not undertake it.”

This was indeed unlike him. I stared at him as though by doing so I could divine the excess of choler or phlegm that had caused his strange humor, but all I saw was my father: long of face, square of chin, pink of cheek—exactly like myself. His gray hair was awry. He never put on his wig until after breakfast.

At last I ventured to say, “But, Father, you must publish an almanac! We sell so many!”

“Oh, that is the measure of worth, is it?”

“If you like Barker's better…”

“Barker is a charlatan,” my father said, scowling.

“Why, you yourself have consulted him often,” I said in surprise.

“Once
too
often,” he replied. “I will know better another time.”

“On what matter—” I began, but he said sharply, “'Tis none of your affair.”

Everyone who came into the shop that day spoke of the comet, and Father soon forgot he'd doubted me, and began to brag instead that I'd seen it. I pretended not to hear him, but smiled to myself as I helped as usual at the counter. It was a good day. The shop windows faced east into Little Britain Street, and the day was fine; the dust motes circled in the morning light and gave me a feeling of well-being. My father, too, regained his good spirits and was more like himself. He was brightly dressed in blue trousers and yellow waistcoat, and wore a wig of black curls not unlike the King's. He smiled broadly at everyone who came in, and remembered their names, and asked after their ailing mothers, and when he spoke of the comet he winked at me.

There was plenty of trade. Old Mr. Grove who lived next door came in for a copy of Foxe's
Book of Martyrs.
He was grave and alarmed, and said he prayed he would not live to see the calamity that was coming. A gallant came in with a laughing young lady on his arm: they wanted to buy Mr. Dryden's
Secret Love.
They spoke eagerly of the comet and what it might portend, as though their lives were dull and needed a flood or plague to liven them up. Then came Paul Winter, with the same tear in his scarlet waistcoat as yesterday and the day before. He could not afford to buy a book, much less pay to have it bound, but he paid us something so that he might read a book a little at a time while standing in the shop.

“Hullo, Meg,” he said to me as I handed him the loose pages of
Paradise Lost.
He had been reading it for over a month now. “I suppose you slept through the heavenly commotion last night.”

“Not a bit,” I answered.

“What! Up past midnight! I was in bed myself.”

“Pity upon you, sir, for leading such a dull life,” I answered him, and he laughed.

“But truly, did you see it?” he asked.

“Truly, I saw it. I knew what it was, too.”

“Did you! You're an uncommon girl. Pray, what did it look like?”

He was not teasing now, but his face was earnest and excited, and I felt flattered, as though the attention were for me. I described the comet as best I could, and when I was done he pointed his roll of pages at me and said, “You do not know your luck.”

Then he took his book over to the window by the street, where the light fell upon the closely printed sheets.

I thought about what he said and knew he was wrong. I
did
know my luck, and rejoiced in it. Not because I had seen the comet—I was glad enough to have seen it, for it made good conversation, but nothing more than that. Better luck was to be the sole child of a man with the freedom of the Stationers' Company, which regulated all the publishing, printing, bookselling, and bookbinding in London. Better luck was to be heir to such a man, to his volumes and his copyrights—and his china plates, for that matter. I would not live my life like other women, bound to dreary husbands and household duties. Instead, I would marry into the trade and be a bookseller like my father. I would be sought after by authors, would dine with great playwrights, and someday, at my father's side, I would drink my coffee with the Town wits at Will's Coffee House in Bow Street.

That was my plan.

4

There were dozens of different almanacs, of course, but we sold only two, the two we published ourselves. One was
News from the Stars,
done by Andrews. The other was Barker's, and one afternoon, when the shop grew quiet, I took up this almanac and began to study it, thinking to find a clue to my father's strange ways. My father himself had gone on an errand to the Stationers' Company, leaving his chief apprentice, Robert, in charge of the shop, with me to help. Robert was twenty. He was short and moonfaced, with an eye that wandered. He was earnest and worked hard and did not run off to play football with the other apprentices. He never forgot the instructions my father gave him, and he recorded in my father's ledgers every farthing got or spent. But he read only for duty, not for pleasure, and he never ventured an idea about what sort of book might sell well. My father said he had no imagination and would never be a bookseller.

The day was cloudy and chill, and we kept the coal fire burning as we worked. There was no trade, so Robert took a rag and wiped the soot from the counters and boxes and stacks of books. He would rather do that than read. As for me, I settled myself on a stool near the window with Barker's almanac and made myself acquainted with it.

There was a table of the moons, a tide table, a description of the highways in England and Wales, and a list of fairs. None of these was helpful. The prognostications, however, seemed more promising. “In the month of April, bad news will be received from across the sea, and there is a chance of loss,” I read. I pondered this for some moments, thinking of my father's correspondence and who might write to him from France or Flanders. But nothing occurred to me. I read on: “Storms may occur in the late part of April.” I did not care about storms. “A man of the nobility, or one who is eminent in the arts, will depart this world, or will labor under discomfort.” This alarmed me for a moment, but at last I decided that my father was not “eminent in the arts,” being at bottom a merchant.

I scanned through the months. Sun in Aries, transit of Mars through Gemini, conjunction of Saturn and Mars … religious controversies anticipated … a martial undertaking … discord between nations … many people will be choleric and ill-tempered this month. That, indeed, might apply to my father. Nothing else was of use. I put the almanac carefully in its place—it sold for three pence, after all—and decided that the only reasonable course before me was to consult Anthony Barker, astrologer, himself.

Mr. Barker was my father's age, a friendly, untidy man who answered the most casual questions with a thoughtful air. It was three weeks before I could meet with him, for my time was not my own. May Day passed, and the milkmaids and sweeps paraded through the streets, and others went into the fields to gather the May dew. But I did not. I was busy thinking how I would pay Mr. Barker, for I had none but household money to spend. Fortune was with me, however, for a few days later I was sent to buy a length of muslin. I made such a good bargain that there was something to spare, and I looked on it as mine. And so at last I was able to send the boy Godfrey with a note for Mr. Barker explaining my need, and to meet him at his home near St. Clement's one morning while my father thought I was out buying Bristol soap.

I liked going out into the smoky, noisy streets of London. Overhead the carved and painted shop signs swung and banged in the wind, and apprentices yelled at all who passed to enter their masters' shops and buy there. A tinker beat upon a brass kettle with a stick, crying, “Have you a frying pan to mend?” A peddler hollered, “Flounders! Who'll buy my flounders?” and I smelled the strong stink of raw fish. Another peddler cried that he had lily-white vinegar to sell. I kept my step quick and my eyes upturned, that I might not have garbage or slops thrown onto me from the windows above as I walked.

The din grew worse as a coach came by; its wheels rattled on the cobblestones. I looked up at it and saw an African in the box. He was dressed in fine livery but was barefoot and wore an iron collar around his neck; I knew it had engraved upon it the name of the nobleman who was his owner. I wondered whether the comet had blazed in the land where he was born, and whether his people knew how to read the stars.

Mr. Barker's home was fine though not grand. It was in the new Dutch style, all brick and pillars, and stood near the Flying Horse inn. The maidservant let me in, and led me to the small parlor, where Mr. Barker sat before a grate of burning coals. I hoped I would see Mr. Barker's collection, for he was famous for gathering rocks and bones and beetles. But the parlor was much like our own, with white walls hung with looking glasses, and a red piece of turkey work upon a table.

I told him what I wanted, but at first he did not take me seriously. “You are too young to need my services,” he said, smiling. “I guess that your question is matrimonial, and my advice is simple. Leave all that to your father.”

“Indeed, sir, marriage is not on my mind,” I answered him. “I seek instead to know how the stars influence my father.”

At this he lost his smile, and told me roughly to be gone, or he would tell my father.

“Stay, Mr. Barker. Why is not my need as great as any who come to you for help? Is any fate so uncertain as a child's? I am only looking for a signpost, that I may know how best to ride the currents of my fortune.” This last was rather cleverly said, if I may say so, for it was exactly what he wrote at the start of his almanac.

He looked at me a moment as though trying not to laugh, and at last he smiled. “I cannot cast your father's nativity for you,” he said. “'Twould be improper. But I will tell you a little of your own fate, if you like.”