The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton
"Mother, is it Groton Manor there?" cried Elizabeth, grabbing Anne's arm. Anne looked towards the four high chimneys twisted like barley sugar, saw the many gables, the oak beams of the half-timbering stoutly brown amidst the cream plaster walls. "Yes, dear."
"It's large," cried Elizabeth. "And grand, fine as the Lord Mayor of London's Manse!"
"No," Anne shook her head, ever watchful to curb Bess's exaggerations, "but it is a fair manor house." It had been built way back in 1558, the first year of the good old Queen's reign. It was partially constructed with bricks and stones from a little priory which had belonged to Bury St. Edmunds and once flourished here, before King Harry had seen the wickedness of papacy and decreed the Dissolution. Anne's grandfather, Adam Winthrop, had been a wealthy Suffolk clothier at Lavenham but he had by no means confined his talents to the country since he had risen to be Master of the Clothworkers' Guild in London. And like many another he had felt the need to celebrate his successes by joining the gentry. This was easily accomplished by means of a coat of arms awarded by the Royal College of Heralds and a manor grant bought from the King. The Winthrops were henceforth esquires and Lords of Groton Manor. To this position Anne had been born, and had not escaped pangs when she exchanged it for that of a London apothecary's wife, and had gone to live in a cramped town house above the shop in the Old Bailey. But Thomas Fones had been handsome enough eleven years ago, and he was well educated and prosperous; moreover, the eldest of three daughters must not be laggard in accepting her father's arrangement for any suitable marriage.
They entered the drive between two stone gateposts bearing the Winthrop arms. The carter's whip flicked the hone, Thomas Fones's mare whinnied greeting towards the stables and jumped forward, nearly unseating him. At once a half-dozen dogs rushed towards them barking furiously, the great front door swung open, and two boys tumbled through, calling welcome.
"Lord, Lord, what a hurly-burly!" cried Elizabeth with satisfaction.
"Bess!" said her mother nervously. "You MUST guard your tongue, we've taught you not to take the name of God in vain, and especially not here. Your grandmother and your Uncle John would be angry."
Bess, waving with abandon to her cousins, scarcely heeded the rebuke, though one part of it penetrated. She was afraid of Uncle John, who had stayed with them in London and once given her a severe lecture on her sins.
At her mother's nod of permission she jumped off the wagon and ran towards the boys. Jack rushed to meet her and the cousins exchanged a hearty kiss. She would have kissed Harry-too but he ducked and said, "Let me be, your face is dirty—hug him instead"—and thrust a woolly ball of mastiff puppy at her. Elizabeth willingly complied. Harry was always teasing, his two visits to London had taught her that, and she preferred kissing the puppy. She loved Jack better anyway, he was merry and kind and always seemed to like her. They went into the huge firelit hall to be greeted by the rest of the family and there was a lot more kissing; an irksome interlude for Elizabeth and a terrifying ordeal for Martha, who clung to her mother and choked back tears.
Kisses of welcome and departure were ritual. The men kissed each other gravely on the cheek, the women were nearly as ceremonious, the Winthrops each said solemnly as they kissed, "God be praised for your safe journey here," to which Anne and Thomas Fones replied, "God be praised that we find you all in health."
"Except Forth and Mary," said Mistress Winthrop, the grandmother. "They are sorely ill with the measles, but will no doubt mend in God's own time. Anne, cleanse yourself and your children, you have your old room, then descend for prayers before we sup."
"Yes, Mother," said Anne Fones, curtseying, and the years she had been away melted to nothing. Her mother was as erect, assured and sharp-eyed as ever. Her pointed chin rested upon a ruff so starched and glossy white that it dazzled. Her cap and apron were edged with the finest pillow lace. Her gown of dove-gray silk rustled as it always had from the brisk motions of her body. In her father too there was little change, thought Anne, deeply comforted. Adam was stouter perhaps, his cheeks and nose redder from the tiny broken veins, his vigorous curls grayer, but as he stood by the fire, legs wide-spread, warming his back and beaming at her, he looked as he always had—the contented English squire and patriarch.
Anne's two sisters were present too. Jane Gostlin with her new husband had driven over from their home for the welcoming, and sixteen-year-old Lucy; but having greeted them, Anne lost no time in obeying her mother, which meant retrieving Elizabeth who had already run out to the entrancing dog- and horse-filled courtyard with the boys. As Anne passed again through the hall with the mutinous Elizabeth in tow, she asked of Mistress Winthrop the question which had been fretting her.
"Where is Brother John, my mother? Does he not mean to greet us too?"
Mistress Winthrop frowned down at Elizabeth. "You are too lax with that child, Anne, I can see she wants chastisement." The old woman added in a lower voice, "John is in his closet, wrestling with his soul and the weakness of the flesh. He fasts much and groans and prays. He has been thus since the affliction God sent him in December."
Anne nodded slowly, then motioned Elizabeth to pick up a candle. With Sam in her arms, she led her two little daughters upstairs. Elizabeth, carefully holding the lighted candle, said nothing as they went down a dark twisting passage to another wing and entered a richly furnished bedroom, where a little maid in a mobcap was poking at the fire. The child even, with unusual restraint, waited until the maid had gone, and Anne had put the sleeping baby on the great four-poster bed, before saying, "Why does Uncle John groan and pray, Mother? What affliction did God send him?"
Anne did not answer, while she poured hot water from the copper kettle the maid had left by the fire and began to wash Martha's pallid face.
At last she said, "Your Uncle John's young wife died in childbed, Bess, last winter."
Elizabeth frowned. "I thought my cousins' mother went to heaven long ago."
"That was the first one," said Anne, startled as she often was when her feather-brained child showed awareness of mature concerns. "The mother of young John and Harry and Forth and Mary died two years back, not"—she added in spite of herself—"so very long ago."
Two wives dead, Anne thought—Mary and Thomasine, and John himself just twenty-nine. Soon there will be another wife, no matter how much he is groaning and praying now. How soon? And when my own time comes—she looked at her two little girls and the baby on the bed. How soon will Thomas find a new mother for these? She shut her eyes, then walked to the window. Martha curled up on the brocaded counterpane with the baby and fell instantly asleep. But Elizabeth followed her mother and pressed in beside her at the leaded casement. "There's the moon," said the child softly. "It looks nearer than in London. I can see the man in it with his lantern and his dog."
"Can you, Bess?" Anne put her arm around Elizabeth. "So could I, once, and from this very window."
"Sing the 'Man in the Moon,' Mother—sing it, I pray you."
Anne smiled and sang in a low breathy voice:
"The man in the moon came down too soon and
asked the way to Norwich,
He went by the south and burnt his mouth
with eating of cold pease porridge."
Elizabeth gurgled. "Such a silly man, but perhaps on the moon—" She stopped because her mother had gone into a paroxysm of coughing. Elizabeth was not disturbed, Mother always coughed a lot, but she did hope it would not wake Martha or the baby; it was seldom she had her mother all to herself. The younger children did not wake, but Elizabeth's moment passed anyway, for Thomas Fones flung open the door saying, "Come, come wife, what's keeping you, your family waits below." His scraggy eyebrows drew together and he added with a blend of irritation and concern, "Where's the hoarhound potion I made you for that cough, why don't you take it?"
Anne sank onto the bed and motioned towards the traveling coffer. Thomas took out a flask, poured some drops into a cup and gave it to her. "There's damp in this house
"The country may do you good, Thomas," said Anne faintly, "and it does give me pleasure—to be here once more..."
"Well," he said with an anxious smile, not devoid of tenderness, "since we are here—but hurry. The Winthrops do not like to be kept waiting, especially your brother, John. He has come down and will lead the evening prayers."
Is Father afraid of Uncle John too? thought Elizabeth startled.
The Winthrop family were gathered in the low-ceilinged parlor next the Hall. It was a room they used for the normal routine of living, and it was beautiful; richly paneled with linen-fold, and a great fire crackling beneath the carved plaster mantel. Elizabeth, kneeling beside her mother and father, and trying hard to keep awake, stared around the room while Uncle John's voice went on and on. He had been intoning a psalm when the Fones family crept in. He had turned his long haggard face towards them and given them a grave bow, and paused until they were kneeling on the bright Turkey rug with the others, and then he had continued. He was dressed in mourning black for his wife, of course, with a small prickly-looking ruff around his neck. His wavy hair fell down to the ruff; it was the color of a chestnut, so were his mustache and small pointed beard. His eyes were light and not really unkind, Elizabeth thought, but they didn't look as though there'd ever be a twinkle in them; though Grandfather's did, and Jack's. Her own gaze blurred, while Uncle John's voice droned on. She began to nod and felt her mother's hand give a warning shake.
Elizabeth blushed, anxious not to show herself a sleepy baby before Jack and Harry who knelt perfectly still on the other side of the room near the servants. But there were never long prayers and psalms like this at home. They had to be endured only in church on Sundays, and there in London at their parish church of St. Sepulchre's the service was all read out of the prayer book. You knew when it would end.
Elizabeth's knees began to throb, her empty stomach growled. All at once her nose tickled unmercifully. She made no effort to restrain the result—a vociferous and lusty sneeze. This pleasing sensation repeated itself at once and more loudly. Young Lucy Winthrop knelt in front of Elizabeth and the sneeze sprayed her bare neck. She turned and glared at her niece, while Uncle John stopped in the middle of an "And furthermore, Dear Lord, we beseech..." to rest his somber gaze on Elizabeth.
"No child is too young to observe proper decorum and reverence in the Presence of the Lord," he said and shifted his eyes towards Harry who had dissolved into hiccupping giggles. "Henry, you will leave the room—Anne and Thomas, you must take measures as to the conduct of your own child."
"Oh, well-a-day, my son," interrupted Adam Winthrop suddenly from his chair of privilege by the fire. "Be not so harsh, a sneeze or two is no great matter, and in the truth though you pray eloquently—'pie et eloquenter orabis'—" The old man paused, suddenly smiling, to savor the little Latin tag. "None the less, to everything there is a season and a time for every purpose. Now our visitors are weary, and it is the time for food."
Elizabeth looked at her grandfather with gratitude, marveling that even he dared rebuke his awesome son, who had flushed, and drawn his breath in. She was the more amazed that after a moment her Uncle John answered humbly, "Aye, sir—you are right. The devil ever lures me by new guises, and it may be now by unworthy pride in my own eloquence." He bowed his head and clasping his hands again added, "We will now say all together—'Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thine only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. AMEN."
The ordeal was over; Elizabeth escaped further scolding, though when they did go to the supper table she was too tired to enjoy the custards for which she had longed. The candles danced before Elizabeth's heavy eyes. In her heart was a confused rebellion, but even through this and her weariness, her natural optimism remained. Though the joys of Groton Manor were dampened tonight by a disapproving atmosphere to which she was unaccustomed, and by the boredom of those interminable prayers, surely everything would be all right tomorrow. She would be very, very good, and besides there was always Jack. She looked at him where he sat across the table—a stocky dark boy of eleven, quietly munching his rabbit pasty, silent as children were expected to be. Still, from the alert cock to his head you could tell he was listening to the conversation between his father and grandfather. Jack did not talk much but he always knew what was going on around him. He proved it now, as he felt Elizabeth's stare. He met her eyes across the table, smiled and gave her a small heartening wink.
Elizabeth's optimism was justified by reason of two unexpected circumstances, and the ensuing summer weeks flowed along happily. The children romped together in pasture and farmyard, they raced on shaggy ponies, they sailed chips amidst protesting ducks on the pond, they wandered the nearby woods and stuffed themselves with wild strawberries. They explored all the fascinating features of the Manor lands; the mill with its big slowly turning sails, the little heath where Harry had once found some Roman coins, the ruins of a castle haunted by a headless lady in gray. The miller's children said so, and that you could hear the lady moaning on nights of the new moon. Elizabeth was eager to creep out of the Manor House and try to hear the moans, but Jack said no. It would not be a seemly thing to do.
It was not only because his elders trusted Jack to care for the younger children that they all had so much freedom in those early summer weeks of 1617, but that the day after the Foneses' arrival John Winthrop had been summoned to London on business connected with his first wife's estate, and he took Thomas Fones back with him, to the apothecary's flattered relief. And as it happened, the morning after the departure of the two men, Mistress Winthrop slipped on the stairs and went to bed with a cracked ankle. Groton, freed from the pious restraint of mother and son and the atmosphere of discontented ill health diffused by Thomas, burst forth into gaiety. Prayers were short and sometimes forgotten, a good deal more wine than usual was consumed. After supper, of nights, Adam would take out his recorder and, tootling merrily, urge all the young people to sing the jolly catches and rounds of his Elizabethan boyhood. One day he sent word to the village that he would require musicians. He summoned Betts the thatcher who played the fiddle, and told him to bring others with him, a piper and a drummer at least. Groton Manor would have dancing that night. At dinner Adam added an extra flagon of stout to his usual cups of wine, his brown eyes sparkled as bright as his grandsons', his cheeks and nose turned mulberry, his white curls quivered, his barrel body shook with joviality as it strained the seams of his old-fashioned bottle-green doublet. The doublet had slashed red sleeves, and was trimmed with ribbons.
"Aye, daughter," he said to Anne in response to her startled look when he appeared in this gay garment. "A pox on long faces and I'll not wear mourning today. 'Tis over a half-year gone since John's poor wife died, God rest her soul—and what's more, daughter, we must celebrate today our King Jamie's birthday, like all loyal Englishmen."
Anne smiled, looking at her father with affection. This was the way life used to be at Groton in her girlhood. "Yes," she said, "I remember how merrily we did celebrate Queen Bess's birthday long ago—and May Day and Christmastide so blithely—though Thiomas does not hold with that ... I cannot think it wrong."
"Nor I, my dear," said the old squire. "'Tis your mother and brother John who have come to think so here, but I'll stick to the old customs long as I live."
"Father—Father!" cried Lucy Winthrop, stamping hard on the treadle of her spinning wheel. "You would not still have us follow Papist superstitions, I hope!" Lucy was a thin brown girl of sixteen, stoop-shouldered and high-nosed. She was her mother's pet, and knew it, and she had listened with pressed lips to the conversation between her father and sister.
They were sitting in the small paneled parlor, Anne and her father ensconced in the grea
Martha had been told to sort wool near her Aunt Lucy, who sat on the window seat spinning. Elizabeth had been presented with a canvas sampler, needle and silk and commanded to embroider her name and then the alphabet upon it—an occupation she detested. The silk snarled, and broke when she yanked at it, the needle pricked her fingers, the E.L.I.Z. were lumpy little botches. She had almost completely managed to avoid working on the sampler, by crouching over it so that her long dark curls made a shield, and by the further duplicity of hiding the result from inquirers, saying she was going to surprise them with her remarkable progress later. That there would inevitably be a day of exposure did not bother her, something would take care of it, the sampler would get finished—maybe even by Puck, she thought—if she put bread and cream out for him in the kitchen. There were several hobgoblins that did good deeds in the night.