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Jack felt something peculiar stir in his chest as he looked down at the wan, big-eyed child. He had never been embarrassed by the affection between them, he had never thought of it particularly, nor realized that of the many womenfolk of all ages who surrounded him, he was perhaps fondest of this one. He bent suddenly and put his arm around her. “Come, little coz. I’ve always known you brave. D’you remember the day Black Brutus ran away with you? You kept your stirrups and sawed his mouth as well as any horseman in the land.”

Aye, she had mastered Black Brutus that day, nor known fear, only a wild exultation, but that had been very different. “For you want me to, Jack,” she whispered, and taking his stubby callused hand, she stood up slowly.

Elizabeth’s punishment was worse than anything she had imagined, and the whole family was assembled in the Great Hall to witness it. From the moment of her reappearance downstairs with Jack, she had been received with head shakings and cold stern looks. Some of these looks, like her mother’s, were sorrowful too, but even Anne Fones accepted the family verdict that Satan had somehow got possession of her daughter and must be beaten out of her.

“It is for your own sake, Bess,” said Anne sadly. “For the sake of your soul, my poor child. Your Uncle John will conduct your chastisement. He has had more experience than your father in such matters, and also your father has a fit of his ague today.” She steeled herself against the fear in Elizabeth’s eyes, and being now in her fifth month of pregnancy, sank heavily to a seat in the circle of benches and chairs which had been arranged in the Hall. It was her mother’s exhortations which had brought Anne to such cool detached speech, but there was no doubt that her own lax discipline had been culpable, and the list of Elizabeth’s crimes truly appalling. The prolonged deceit and lies about the sampler, not to speak of the laziness involved - these were bad, but the subsequent blasphemy against God, and then theft, were beyond any condoning as childish naughtiness.

John Winthrop stood behind the lectern on which lay Adam’s great new King James Bible open at the thirtieth chapter of Ecclesiasticus. John’s brooding gaze slowly circled the assembled family. His father and mother sat in tall-backed carved chairs, Lucy next to them, Thomas Fones on a cushioned bench, shivering from his ague, rubbing his gouty fingers nervously but grim-mouthed above the sparse beard. Thomas did not lock at his daughter who had disgraced the Foneses, he stared at the thyme-strewed rushes at the base of the high stool where Elizabeth had been perched in the centre of the circle. He heard Anne beside him begin to cry and murmured, “Now, now, wife.” All the children were there
in
the Hall too, and the younger servants, huddled near the kitchen door. So regrettable a circumstance as this would nonetheless yield profit as an example, and prevent others from wrongdoing. Little Martha crouched beside Anne, and stared with horrified eyes at her sister, but John’s own children were ranged at his right, Below the lectern - Jack, Harry, Forth, and Mary, who was but five years old and the only one who did not understand what was taking place.

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. Moreover, 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 lull 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 have 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
m
the silent room, A fine scarlet line appeared across the pink skin. Anne Fones made a choked sound, and jumping up, quitted the hail, 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 net 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 grey 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.

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 vendors, 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 behaviour 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 labour 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 Bank-side 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 - “