Marrying the Mistress

‘What, on horseback? In this snow?’

‘Usually on foot, ma’am.’

Jamie jumped up and down at the end of my hand. ‘Oh, can I go too? I go on foot with Uncaburl?’

‘Nay, little ’un,’ said one of the men, replacing his woollen hood, ‘tha’d be mistekken fer a rabbit.’

‘Would I, Mama?’ said Jamie, looking worried.

I lifted him into my arms. ‘No, sweetheart. Your ears are much too short to be mistaken for a rabbit. But the snow is too deep. Now we must say thank you to the men and let them go. It’s starting to snow again.’

I sent my thanks to ‘Uncaburl’, thinking how ironic it was that food was more available to him out in the country than it was to me here in the town. Winterson’s revolutionary farming methods would see him through any crisis. According to Linas, Abbots Mere had never produced so much since his brother took it over. In truth, I had started to worry about what my own family would suffer if the freeze continued much longer, living several miles from York and completely cut off from supplies.

Perhaps I exaggerate. No, they were not completely cut off, only in the sense that they were invisible to all intents and purposes, living in hiding in a deserted village between York and our old home town of Bridlington on the east coast. There, the North Sea hurls itself at the cliffs in easily provoked anger.

For several years, my perceptive partner, Prue Sanders, withheld all questions about my family and why I was cut adrift from them. When the time was ripe, she knew I would take her into my confidence. So it was after I had borne Jamie and gone into partnership with her, extending the shop to twice its size, that I felt she was owed some kind of explanation as to why a woman like me had had to look for work as a lowly seamstress in York.

She was not the kind of woman to express astonishment; it was as if she had already guessed parts of the story, reversals of fortune being no new thing in those uncertain war years. When I told her my father had been mayor of Bridlington, she simply nodded and carried on pinning a gathered skirt on to a bodice. ‘Mm…m. Wealthy?’ she mumbled, without looking up.

‘He was a merchant. A ship owner, and Customs Collector.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the kind of voice that expects the Customs Collector to be up to some shady business, as a matter of course. ‘Smuggling, was he?’

Her assumption was correct, of course, for every villager along the North Sea coastline had a hand in the ‘Free Trade’, and few could afford not to be involved in the carrying, the hiding, the converting of boats, the warning systems, not to mention the putting-up of money to buy the goods from northern France and Flanders. The new French aristocracy led European fashions, and all things French were much in demand, imports that were taxed so highly by the English government that smuggling became a kind of protest against the unaffordable import duties.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He got caught. Informed on by a so-called friend.’

‘Nothing new there, then,’ she said, pinning. ‘Good rewards.’

‘Yes, it was the Customs Controller who shopped him for half the value of the contraband and five hundred pounds extra. Father wouldn’t accept the man’s offer to marry me, so that was how he took his revenge.’

‘And did you want him?’

‘Lord, no, Prue. I was fourteen and he was thirty-something.’

‘So your father was arrested. He’d not be found guilty by a local jury. They never are.’ She was so matter of fact. So dispassionate.

‘No, but he used a firearm, Prue.’

The pinning stopped as she straightened up to look at me. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s serious. That’s a hanging offence. Confiscation of property. The works. Is that how you came to be…?’

I remembered those weeks when the world turned upside down for our family, how my father was dragged off by the local militia to the gaol at York. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More or less. But his friends from Brid rescued him and hustled him away to Foss Beck Common. My mother and the rest of us joined him there, but he died soon after.’

‘Foss Beck?’ Prue said, taking the last pin from between her lips. ‘Is that where they are? I always thought…’

‘Yes, I know you did. I’m sorry I deceived you, but it’s not a story to boast of, is it? It’s easier to call Brid home than a deserted village. Linas doesn’t know about what happened. No one does.’

‘Aye…lass!’ she said, sitting down at last. It was unusual for her hands to be idle. ‘Dear, oh dear! You lost your father too? And your home?’

‘He was wounded, but he kept it quiet. It seems so absurd that, only weeks earlier, he could have afforded the best attention in England. My mother has never quite recovered from the shock of it all, so it fell to me and my two brothers to survive on what we could find. We have a French relative who lives with us too, and he’s been very good. We have a few servants to help out, and friends from Brid brought us food and bedding and tools. Even hens and goats. We managed.’

‘I didn’t think any of the houses at Foss Beck were still habitable.’

‘The manor house has been half-ruined for centuries since the plague killed everyone off, but we manage to live in half of it.’

‘And there’s no chance of returning to Brid?’

‘My brothers were nine and eleven, and I was fourteen when we went into hiding, old enough to be arrested as substitutes for my father’s crimes. It’s a risk we daren’t take, Prue. Not even after all these years.’

‘So that’s when you came looking for work in York. I see.’

‘While I still looked half-respectable. Sewing was one of the things I could do to earn money. You must have seen in me something you could use.’

‘Yes. Your skills, and the fabrics you brought in each month.’ Picking up a bobbin of tacking-cotton, she pulled off a length and snipped it with her teeth. ‘I’ve never asked where it came from, Helene, and I don’t intend to ask now. If I don’t know, I can’t tell any lies, can I? Where did I put my needle?’

‘On your wrist.’ She wore a piece of padded velvet like a pincushion around her wrist. With Pierre, our French émigré relative acting as a go-between, and me not asking any questions about the source of his merchandise, everything he obtained for us was passed straight into the dressmaking business, the only one in York at that time to sell fabrics and designs too. The money from the bales of muslins and lace made it a lucrative trade that allowed me to supplement the poor wage I had earned and to take money and goods back to my family. Had it not been for Pierre and his French connections, we would certainly have starved. Prue must have known how the precious goods were obtained, and our customers must have guessed. My only thought was how to keep myself and my family alive.

‘Yes…well,’ she went on, threading her needle in one quick move and rolling a knot between finger and thumb, ‘you’ve been a godsend to me, Helene love. Not just the fabrics, though I’ll not deny they’ve done a lot to help things along. Your business ability, for one thing. Your looks, for another. Your style. Your knowledge of French too. And I know how hard it’s been for you, though I don’t know what your ma would say about how hard you’ve had to work. Does she know?’

‘That I’ve had to sell myself?’

‘Mmm,’ she said, rippling the needle through the gathers.

‘No, Prue. She doesn’t. The boys do, and Pierre. But beggars cannot be choosers, can they?’

‘No, love. You’ve had to grow up rather fast, haven’t you? But it’s not made you bitter, has it?’ The needle delved and pulled up, finding its own rhythm.

‘Yes, it has,’ I said.

The needle stopped in mid-air as she looked up at me. ‘Then don’t let it,’ she said. ‘Regretting is a waste of time. What’s done is done. You have a man, and a child, and a partnership in this, and youth, beauty, and more common sense than most women of your age. So, you’ve got responsibilities.’ The needle began again. ‘Well, most of us have, one way or another. Nothing stays the same, Helene. Believe me.’

‘I do believe you,’ I whispered.

Things would not stay the same. For one thing, I was determined that my infant would not suffer the same deprivations I’d suffered. Little did I know then how his future would pass out of my hands with such finality, nor did I fully appreciate the wisdom of Prue’s advice about my bitterness.

Lowering Jamie to the ground, I took him by the hand and led him back to the warm kitchen where the piles of food were being sorted by cook’s eager hands. He stroked the hare’s soft fur and spoke into its huge reproachful eyes. ‘Sorry, hare,’ he whispered. I showed him the intricate pattern of the pheasant’s feathers and the long banded tail that I would save for the millinery girls. ‘I want to see Uncaburl,’ said Jamie, sadly.

‘Yes, love. But you saw Uncle Burl only last week, and the snow is very deep. I don’t think our horses would like it.’

He barely understood. ‘We could go to see Nana Damzell, then?’

Damzell Follethorpe was my mother, who had not seen him for over a month and Jamie now able to talk so well, I dared not take the risk, with Winterson being a Justice of the Peace and Jamie so willing to chatter about all he knew. ‘Soon, darling,’ I said.

‘She’d like some of this, wouldn’t she, Mama?’

‘Yes, love, she certainly would.’ The same thought had passed through my mind too, but I could not see how to get it there.

Mrs Neape, my cook, understandably not wishing to see the supplies dwindle so soon, had the answer. ‘Don’t you worry, young man,’ she said. ‘This lot will stay frozen solid down in the cellar for weeks. Then you can take some of it to Bridlington to your Nana Damzell.’