At the Sign of the Star (7 page)

My father and stepmother supped together that night, while I ate with Joan in the small parlor. She was livelier at suppertime than at bedtime, and asked me many questions about the shop, and the famous men who came there. She told me about
The Rival Queens,
which was a play she had seen the King's Company perform at Drury Lane, and asked me if I had ever seen a play, but I had not. I gave her short answers, but she did not seem to mind. Then, as she began to tell me about beating Susannah at piquet, I cut into her talk with a question.

“How long have you been in service, Joan?”

“Twenty years this winter, it will be. I was fourteen when I took my first place.”

“Why did you not marry?”

“I hadn't the fortune for it.”

“And how is it—being in service?”

“Why, fine enough, if you've a good place. This one suits me, but it won't last long, I can tell.”

“Why won't it?”

“When the babies come, your mother won't be wanting to be a woman of fashion anymore. It'll be nurses she wants, not lady's maids.”

“I would not like to be in service,” I said.

“Well, you've no need to be, I'm sure,” Joan said in a comforting way, and helped herself to more tart.

I dreamed that night of Mr. Barker, the astrologer. We were on the Thames together in a little boat, and a storm was upon us. “That'll be two shillings,” said the waterman who sat at the oars, but the boat began to spin and spin. “You must turn it
into the wind!
” Mr. Barker shouted, but the waterman did nothing. “I am speaking to you!” he shouted, and I saw that he meant me. “How can I turn it into the wind, when I am not at the oars?” I shouted back. Then I woke.

All that day I thought about how I might steer my boat into the wind, and when night fell, and my father and stepmother sat reading by the fire, I went to my father and stood before him.

“Sir, I would like to be apprenticed.”

He took a moment to look up, as he always did, dragging his eyes from the page with an effort. Then he made me repeat what I had said, not having heard it. But Susannah had heard it. Her face was watchful as a rabbit's as she waited.

“Apprenticed?” he repeated, once he understood what I had said. “What can you mean, Margaret?”

“I would like you to sign articles, that I might be apprenticed. Another bookseller would be best, but anyone in a trade would do. A goldsmith. A cookshop. It doesn't matter. The money you get for my services will help with the wet nurses.”

“I will not use a wet nurse,” Susannah said quietly.

My father looked at her, then back at me. “Neither of you makes any sense. What nonsense is this, Meg? You need not serve an apprenticeship. You are to marry.”

“No one will have me, now I have no fortune.”

“You will have a suitable dowry.”

“Shall I? Then why is your wife training me to be a servant in a fine home?”

“That is not what I said,” Susannah said, but her face reddened as though with guilt.

“You will have a suitable dowry,” my father said in a louder voice. “And if my wife has told you anything different, she is mistaken.” He stood, holding his sheaf of pages carefully so as not to crease them. “And you
shall
have a wet nurse,” he said more quietly to Susannah. Then he left the room.

“I will
not,
” she said fiercely when he was gone. Then she looked up at me. “Why are you so cruel to me? Is it such a terrible thing to have a mother again?”

I could almost have pitied her, if she had not sent Hester away. But she had. “I will not study with you anymore,” I said.

“I thank God for it,” she replied, and buried her face in her hands.

The next day I spent all day in the shop, and she did not. I was not happy, but I was satisfied.

AN ANTIDOTE AGAINST MELANCHOLY

1

Robert liked my stepmother. I accused him of it one afternoon when the two of us had the shop together. My father and Susannah had gone to the Drydens' in Longacre to dine, and had not yet come back. Trade, which had been brisk for a little, had now died down. I tried to read, but the light was dim and gray, and besides, I was too out-of-sorts to stay interested in anything. I slapped my pages on the counter and went to stand in the open door of the shop. In the street, two of the Mr. Turners were talking together in a lively way. Robert said nothing. He was forever saying nothing, and it irritated me.

“I do not see why you fawn over my father's wife so,” I said as I turned to him.

He did not look up from his ledger. He was recording the titles we had sold that day, and the shillings we had taken in. At last he said, “Because I am civil does not mean that I fawn. You ought to be civil yourself, you would get on better.”

“You admire her.”

He did not answer.

“Admit that you admire her,” I demanded, advancing to his stool.

“There is no reason I should not admire her,” he said, but did not stop his work.

It was as impossible to get conversation from him as it was to get honey from a pig, or ham from a bee. Conversation was not in his nature. But it was in mine, and there were some days I felt I would perish from keeping silent so much. I missed Hester even more than I had done when she first left, for then I spent my strength battling with Susannah. Now there was no ear for my wit, and none for my insults, either.

Just as I had this thought, my father and his wife came in from the street. They were talking to one another as they entered, and did not stop, as though they had not had chances enough to hear one another's words.

“I was shocked at Master Staley's jest,” Susannah said as she cast back her hood. “He does not even try to hide that he is a Catholic.”

“He will get himself into trouble one day,” my father replied, shaking his head. He handed his walking stick to Robert, who left off writing to take it.

Susannah turned to me. “Good day, Meg. We have had a lively time of it at Mr. Dryden's. We must tell you all about it. Was there much trade?”

“Robert has the list,” I said, and turned my back upon her.

There was a pause during which no one spoke. Then Susannah said, “You see?” and went through the door that led into the rest of the house.

*   *   *

My father was known as a pleasant man, who greeted all with a smile and avoided strong opinions as though they were strong drink. Some folk thrive on disaster, but my father throve on peace, plenty, and contentment. He liked a good dinner, and a good jest, and he wanted his wife and daughter to be pleasant together before the fire of an evening. But this he did not have.

The next day after dinner, my father said he had errands to do, and bade me roughly to come with him. Though I was eager enough to go with him, it angered me that he spoke so rough, when once he smiled so often. So I said only, “Yes, sir,” without raising my eyes, and went for my cloak and hood.

It was early October, and the Michaelmas term was newly begun. The sun shone upon us as we left Little Britain, and the air was mild, with no chill. I turned to look at the wooden sign above our shop as we left it. On it was carved the shape of a five-pointed star. It had hung there long; I did not remember another. My father always said it was a lucky star. But I remembered talking with Hester about the comet, about whether the disasters it foretold were meant for us or for others. And I thought to myself that what is luck to one is not always luck to another.

We walked first through small streets, lanes where we had to kick the hens from our path, and then down larger ones, where our boot heels slipped into the wheel ruts of the coaches. I wondered where we were bound, but knew better than to ask. We passed a man selling turnips, and a woman selling lace. They both called out to us, and the woman called me pretty, which I am not, except that I have fine hair—long and brown, with red lights in it when the firelight glows—so Hester told me. But I could find no pleasure in sunshine nor in compliments.

We stretched our legs mightily that day. First my father bade me wait outside an apothecary's shop while he spoke to a man within. Then we went to the New Exchange, where we wandered through the arcade, looking at porcelain in one booth and hats in another. Before we left he bought me a ribbon and himself some gloves. Next we went to the printer, and he carried away the pages of a pamphlet against Catholics. At Lincoln's Inn Fields we paused a little, while we heard a woman sing a ballad about her man in the Fleet Prison, but she did not sing how he got there. At last we stopped by Will's. At the doorway I could see my father did not know whether to leave me outside or bring me within, but at last he made a motion to me. I followed him hastily through the door, lest he should change his mind, for I had heard often of Will's in Bow Street. It was said throughout the Town that all the cleverest wits sat before the fire there and traded jests. Mr. Dryden went there, and the Earl of Rochester, and the playwright Wycherley, and Aphra Behn. None of them was there the afternoon that I entered with my father, but I did not care.

Inside there was a great din. The tables were crowded with men drinking and smoking, arguing so vehemently that their wig curls danced, or shouting with loud laughter. Their voices vied with one another; they thumped their tankards on the tables or pounded their spoons upon their plates to make a point. The fire made the room too hot and the air too smoky, and the smells of pipe tobacco and coffee filled my nostrils. I pulled at my cloak to let the air in while my father bent over a man at the nearest table and shouted a question at him.

My father was looking for a man named Brown, who was to write for him a book on geometry for seamen. He did not find him, but not finding him took twenty minutes while he exchanged pleasantries with a man named Greene, who had written a bad play that no one would publish, and twenty more while he spoke with a physician named White, who would not write his recipes into a book for my father, no matter what he was promised. I thought twice of things I might say, but held my tongue between my teeth instead, lest my father should send me back to the street. But for near an hour I was happy again, awake, alive, loving London and books and talk. At last, however, my father turned and left, and I, like seaweed, trailed in his wake, remembering my cares and letting them show on my face.

“There, that's the book trade for you,” he said when we were outside once more.

“Not for me,” I said in a mutter. I intended that he should not hear me, but I half hoped that he would.

He did, and did not like what he heard.

“If this life becomes you so ill, you needn't live it,” he said.

I stared at him, wondering if he meant I should take my own life.

“I am sick to death of this unhappiness at my hearth,” he went on. “If you are so miserable, go to where you'll be less so. Hester and her family would be glad enough of your help in the country. Perhaps it would be the best place for you.”

He had begun to walk again, quickly, heading back toward the sign of the Star. I could not keep up with him, but scrambled after him. I heard his words but could scarcely credit them; they were like an axe that shatters the frozen river in winter, and sends glimmering shards flying everywhere, and reveals the dark, cold, angry water beneath.

“You are sending me away?” I asked at last, running to catch him up.

He stopped and looked down at me, and then looked over my head again, at the timbered shop behind. “If you cannot get along with your mother, aye, then you must go away. If you will make your peace with her, and wear a smile again and keep a friendly tongue in your head instead of a sour one, then you may stay. You are a help to me, Margaret, when you choose to be.”

Angry words swelled in me but I dared not speak them. I do not know what showed in my face: it may have been anger, or it may have been fear, or it may simply have been the horrible hurt it gave me that my father wanted to send me away.

“You need not decide now, Meg. Think of it for a few days, nay, a week, even two, and tell me your choice then. It is not an easy choice. I offer it for your sake, that you need not be unhappy.”

I did not believe him. I did not answer him. I walked by his side through London, toward the sign of the Star, where all my fortunes had come undone.

2

At first there was only the shock of being told by my own father that I would be sent away if I did not mend my ways. It was not a thing I ever thought to hear from him. So many feelings warred within me, I knew not which was true. But I suppose they were all true.

I felt a terrible anger at my stepmother's power, and at my father's injustice.

I felt a deep grief that my father, the man who once gave me his pipe to hold while I sat upon his knee, could now live so easily without me.

I felt an anxiety that was almost like terror at the thought of seeing London no more, of hearing no longer the clamor of the streets and the chatter of the shop.

And I felt a yearning for Hester, who was perhaps the only person in the world who loved me. I imagined walking home with her from the village church, laughing about the curate's bald head. And I thought: perhaps that is the fate I will choose. Then my eye would light upon a book of essays or a printed sermon and I would think: no, I can't. I can't.

Because I knew not how to choose, I became cautious in my speech and manner, that I might keep all doors open. I began to school myself in cheerful habits, in smiling when I felt like scowling, in asking civil questions when I cared nothing for the answers.

The first time I asked my stepmother how she slept I thought she would drop the mug she drank from. Indeed, it did bobble in her hands, and drops of ale fell upon her skirt. She wiped at them with a hand while she stared at me. “I slept well, thank you,” she said at last. “And you?”