Women of Courage (131 page)

At least while Charles II had been King, Adam thought, there had been some sort of balance. But the coronation of his openly Catholic brother James presented a terrible threat to all such dissenting communities, for whom the pomp and surplices of the Church of England were unbearable. Simon’s scorn for the Anglican church only reflected the spirit of the community from which he came. The new vicar of Colyton, William Salter, was only a young man in his early twenties. Since his appointment a few months ago, the dissenting preacher, Israel Fuller, had begun holding informal meetings and Bible readings in the village churchyard itself, as a deliberate challenge to the young vicar’s authority. So far the vicar had done nothing, for Israel was a formidable man, with a terrifying insight into the weaknesses of others and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the scriptures. But some conflict would come soon, and the thought of it was unwelcome to Adam.

God knew, he did not wish for strife; he had enough trouble in his own family. He paused in his stride, letting his horses snatch a mouthful of grass until Simon came up with him. Adam’s voice, when he spoke, was dry, quiet, reasonable.

“Nonetheless, Simon, it is for those of your age especially to remember how easy it is to make a show of one’s anger to no purpose, other than inflaming the rage of authorities. Think how little was achieved by our brethren in Taunton against the mayor, despite all their furious protestations. Without a proper organization ....”

“So you would have us turn the other cheek, and bid them strike again!” Simon glared at his father scornfully. “But father , how much longer ...”

“If such forbearance was good enough for the Son of God, then surely it may suffice for a son of mine!” Adam stared his son down, closer than he realised to being in the grip of rage himself. “If plain insolence is to be the result of my taking you with me to learn your trade, I shall be forced to conclude that you are still a child, not fit to be abroad in the world of men!”

“I ... I’m sorry, father. I did not mean ...” Simon looked down, abashed, with a muttered apology; but not before Adam had seen that momentary spark in his son’s eyes that he knew every father must see sometime - the spark of the growing man who will not be rebuked any more, but must decide what he does for himself. And though this time Simon gave ground, the moment of defiance shocked his father, so that the rebuke came harsher, without forgiveness.

“I know full well what you meant, Simon, and I have heard enough of it for one afternoon! Now let us finish the rest of our journey in peace, so that we at least reach home with a semblance of Christian harmony.”

Simon said nothing, and fell behind obediently. But as Adam trudged silently ahead, leading his string of weary horses the last dusty mile to the town, he felt his son’s defiant eyes boring into his back, and knew that the incident was not over. Though he held himself straight and vigorous as ever, he felt a weakness tremble through his limbs that was nothing to do with weariness, and an apprehension that grew with every step he took nearer home.

For Adam Carter had suffered most of his life from two secret fears, which had etched deep lines into his soul as well as his face. And the more the present talk of strife and rebellion grew, the more likely his fears were to be discovered.

The first fear was, that he was a coward.

Twenty years ago, he had been in Taunton for the fair with his younger brother Roger. They had fallen in with a recruiting sergeant come to enrol soldiers for Cromwell’s war against the Dutch. Adam, drunk with the ale the man had bought, had taken the shilling and given his name, glorying in the thought of adventure. But that night, as the beer wore off, he had been visited by horrible nightmares of himself crawling slowly home across Holland, legless and bleeding from the stumps like a Civil War cripple he had once seen in Lyme. He had woken, sweating, such a pitiable wreck that his brother Roger, who shared his room, had agreed to answer to Adam’s name and go instead. Yet Roger, unlike Adam, was betrothed to be married. So Adam had stayed at home, feeling like an imposter, and tried guiltily to comfort his brother’s betrothed, Ruth, with tales of the glory that would come to her when Roger returned home a hero.

And then the news had come back that Roger had died of an infected wound.

Ever since then Adam had despised himself for a coward. Whenever he heard older men speaking of the great deeds of the men of Taunton and Lyme in the Civil War, or of Cromwell’s fights against the Spaniards and Irish, he sat silent, wondering if he himself would have dared to fight at all. Sometimes he looked at his father’s old musket, and tried to imagine using it; but usually his hands began to sweat and he found himself praying for peace instead - peace at any price. But often - increasingly often now - he felt that such prayers were not heard; or worse than that, were heard and despised by God.

This was his second fear, that had grown from the first, and which obsessed him more and more. Adam feared that he might be damned. The Calvinist doctrine of the Presbyterians was clear and uncompromising on this: there were the Elect, who would be saved and sit on the right hand of the Lord, and the damned, who would burn in Hell. It was assumed that the Elect could be seen by their open worship of the true religion, and the godly prosperity the Lord would help them achieve in worldly affairs; but these were only appearances, and if one was damned in spite of them, nothing could be done. The damned were predestined to Hell.

It was not a fear that one could share or discuss. He worshipped regularly, led his family in prayer and Bible-reading, prospered in his worldly affairs - no-one would suspect the lonely desolation in his heart. And yet at times that desolation would have swamped him entirely had it not been for one private vow he had made - to himself, since God would not hear him - which was, that whatever happened to him, his family should never suffer by it. He was still a Christian, though damned. He did not see how they could hold up their heads in the tight little religious community of Colyton, if their father should proclaim his damnation by turning to drink or dissipation, or in any way neglecting to perform the duties of a godly Puritan husband and father.

So he carried on, prospering steadily and earning the respect of his neighbours - even of Ruth, his brother Roger’s former betrothed, who had married his friend, John Spragg. Sometimes Adam forgot his fears for days, even weeks on end. It was easy in times of peace. But recently, the talk of war and rebellion had returned, worse than ever; nearly every week there was a new rumour, like the one they had heard today. Then his fear of cowardice returned. If a war came, he would be despised, and would despise himself, if he feared to fight alongside his friends. He thought about it nearly every day. And always there was that disrespectful, challenging spark in his son’s eyes, peering into his very soul ...

Once or twice, in the last few months, he had caught himself being unusually irritable with Ann or Simon, and seen his wife looking at him strangely. He had explained himself by saying that the children were going through a particularly difficult time, which was true enough; but afterwards he had sat alone in his chair by the fire, wondering if he were breaking his vow, and showing his despair. Or if, perhaps, he was losing control of himself because God had lost interest in him.

One of the horses stopped, and snorted angrily as a dog came running up onto the road from under the bridge of the river Coly. It stood there in the dust, shaking its fur until the water sprayed off it making a fan in the evening sunlight like the tail of a peacock. Then it came up to Adam, enthusiastically wagging its tail. Two little boys came noisily out of the stream after it.

“Good day, Mr Carter! Sorry ‘bout Methuselah! Come here, Methuselah, you stupid beast! You’m scarin’ they ‘orses!” One boy grabbed the dog by its collar and lugged it protestingly aside. Adam calmed the horse, and smiled, grateful for the interruption to his thoughts.

“What you been doing down there, boys? Swimming?”

“No; fishing, s’posed to be. But there’s not much chance of catching anything with a dog like this around. He tries to jump in and bite ‘em!”

“‘Tis useless taking a dog fishing,” agreed Adam. “You should send him after rabbits.”

“We did, afore,” said the other boy. “Up over Colyton Hill, yonder. Seed your daughter Ann, Mr Carter, with young lord Pole from Shute House. Proper fine horse he were riding. Didn’t get no coneys though.”

“My Ann? With Robert Pole? What were they doing?”

“Just talking, Mr Carter, nothing more. We didn’t see ‘em long. Hey! Come back here, you stupid cur!” The dog dashed off under the bridge, and the boys ran after it, laughing and trying to push each other into the water.

Adam stood for a moment, thinking, while Simon came up to him with the other horses.

“That devil Pole talking to Ann? What would he be wanting with her?”

“Talking to a pretty girl, I expect. No more’n that.” Adam’s voice was quiet, almost sleepy after the sharp bitterness of his son’s, betraying none of the anxiety of his thoughts.

“Then he can talk to other girls than Ann, can’t he? Didn’t I say he’d be treating us in Colyton like he did them in Farway, next? When’s he going to raid
our
house? She should have spit in his eye!”

“She probably doesn’t know that story yet, Simon, no more than we know what she said. Why don’t you keep your temper till we find out?”

Once more he frowned at the thin, intense face of the boy, and then pulled the lead horse’s head out of the grass and tramped forward over the bridge, leaving Simon to follow him.

Adam felt even less calm inside than before. The thought of Ann talking to Robert Pole fitted disturbingly well into the puzzle that he and his wife Mary had been trying to solve over the last few weeks. It was not only Simon’s growing defiance that was threatening to disturb that ‘semblance of Christian harmony’ which he and his wife tried so hard to preserve. Always volatile, Ann’s moods recently had changed from hour to hour like a March day - now snow, now wind, now sun - reflecting some turmoil in her emotions that her parents could not fathom. At one moment as distant as a stranger, the next she was as embarrassingly close as a foundling, needing more love and attention than the two-year-old Oliver. And then there was the outward vanity of this new interest in clothes, and curling her hair. Adam was a kind, easy-going man compared to most, who had never lifted a hand to his wife and rarely flogged his children, but more than once in the last few weeks he had debated whether it were not his duty to beat this vanity out of his daughter before it put undue temptation in some devil’s way.

He had not done so in part because he was afraid to show his own irritability. And also Mary, his wife, playing on his own softness for Ann, had talked him out of it. If she was not worried, Adam had thought, there was still some hope. For Mary Carter was a Puritan of the best kind, who judged people not from scripture or outward show, but from her own earthy common sense.

Adam smiled at the thought of returning home to her. A tall, apple-faced woman, she always wore the same plain brown woollen dress, long white apron and coif, which was all she thought any woman needed to cover her. Mary Carter did not regard fine clothes as evil, in the way many Puritan women did who could feel their secret attractions; she simply thought of them as something that was fine for other people but irrelevant for herself. And so when Ann had begun looking in the mirror, curling her rich, auburn hair, and altering dresses this way and that, Mary Carter had minded much less than her husband had expected; and since he left it all in her hands, it had continued unchecked.

But now, if there were more to Ann being seen with Robert Pole than merely a chance meeting on the road, it clearly had to be stopped. Quite apart from the story he and Simon had heard about Robert Pole in Taunton, there was only one reason Adam could think of why a great lord’s son would want to get to know a poor carrier’s daughter, and that was not an honourable one. He felt the sweat of the day cold on his body at the thought.

He knew he should not pre-judge her. Perhaps it had been only a chance meeting, perhaps the recent flightiness of her emotions had been caused by nothing more than Tom Goodchild’s proposal of marriage. ‘Yes, that must be it,’ Adam muttered to himself, as he and Simon unloaded the horses in the stables behind his house. ‘Lord, let it be so.’

Though he believed God seldom heard him, Adam found himself praying silently in his mind, as he did more and more often these days. He turned the horses out to grass in the meadow behind the house, and watched as the weary pack-beasts suddenly found the energy to flick their heels and run a little before turning to eat their hay.

The sun dropped slowly behind the woods on the hills to the west, casting the valley into shadow. He felt no answer to his prayer.

3

A
DAM CAME into the great kitchen where the family cooked and ate and spent most of their time. He kissed his wife and greeted his younger daughters, Rachel and Sarah. Little Oliver ambled up to him with a sticky wooden spoon in his mouth, and Adam picked him up, smiling. As he carefully guided the honey-covered spoon away from his hair, he watched Ann cautiously, anxious to gauge her mood before he said anything. But she seemed sunny and blithe enough as she came over to kiss him, if a little withdrawn, and Adam relaxed with Oliver into one of the two straight-backed wooden armchairs by the wall, enjoying the smell of the fresh mackerel sizzling over the embers of the great cooking fireplace, and watching Mary cut the bread on the huge trestle table that dominated the room.

They had the windows open to let out some of the heat from the fire. The sounds of cooking, the crackle and spit of fat in the pan, mingled with the loud evensong of a thrush in the back garden, perched on the top branches of an apple tree where the sunlight still bathed him in gold. It was darker in the kitchen than outside, though still too early to light the tallow dips, and the soft gloom was restful to eyes that had all day been crinkled against the sun.