The Penny Heart (6 page)

Coaxed by Anne’s warmth and good humour, she and I grew to be dear friends. Though her homely face recalled a mournful spaniel, by the time she was fifteen, Anne was courted by Mr Greenbeck, curate of St Stephen’s, who had dealings with her father’s grocery shop. Once her betrothal was known, the Greenbecks were at once expelled from our gatherings, for Anglicans were reviled as peddlers of miracles and hocus-pocus. But Anne cared not a jot, so long as Mr Greenbeck would still take her.

As for John Francis, he soon grew too big for us, his petticoat companions. For many years we were strangers, until one warm summer’s day he came upon me as I sketched out on the moors. Having just walked five miles across country, my old friend took a rest beside me on the grassy bank where my paints and paper were spread. The air was scented with wild flowers, the valley dropped green and lush below us to a glittering stream where cattle lazily drank. My former mischievous playfellow had grown into a well-made country lad, with red cheeks brightening his round face, and clear and intelligent blue-grey eyes. His accent was that of the country folk about Greaves: flat and coarse, but his confiding humour made me laugh. I shared my basket of Mother’s biscuits, lovers’ knots, aromatic with aniseed and sticky apricot. We talked all afternoon, of his family’s farm and his desire to leave the small minds of Greaves, of the modern world and its astonishing progress, and of how the young might make the world a better place.

It grew late, and the first low stars glittered above us in the inky blue sky. We strolled home, falling comfortably into step. When we said our farewells by my gate, I welcomed his gentle touch on my arm and his suggestion that we meet again.

I began to see John Francis almost every day, putting to use my long practice in subterfuge. When necessary, we communicated by exchanging letters in an empty bird’s nest in the branches of our garden’s lilac tree. Only Anne noticed the change in me. When I confided in her, she agreed to keep my secret only with the greatest reluctance.

‘John Francis is a good sort of fellow, but is he not rather humble for you, Grace?’ We were sauntering through the town, scrutinising him from under our bonnet brims. John Francis was larking about with his brothers, tossing his cap in the air for his new puppy to catch. The sight of him brought a smile to my face. He was certainly not as stiff and old-mannish as Jacob Greenbeck.

‘You are only fifteen, Grace, and rather young even for that age.’ Anne was cultivating a voice I fancied was how she thought the wife of a curate should speak. ‘And when the time comes, you can make a better match than him.’

I paid no heed to Anne, just as I avoided Mother’s weary questions about where I disappeared all day. I craved freedom; to walk out of doors, to meet John and speak unguardedly, to hold hands, and finally to kiss sweetly, wrapped in each other’s arms. We both knew it was wrong to succumb to sin, and we withstood the worst of the Devil’s temptations. Yet what did Anne and Jacob know of the fever of such pleasure? If they longed for each other as we did, how could they forever delay their marriage?

One black day Father ordered me into his study and stood over me, crimson-faced, a vein like a worm burrowing at his temple.

‘What is this?’ he roared. In his hand was a pencil portrait of John Francis, carelessly left beneath my bed. ‘Well?’

‘It is a picture, Father.’

‘That Rawdon lad. Think you have an admirer, do you?’ he mocked, in the voice of a stupid girl. ‘I’ll not have it! My daughter will not be thrown away on a Rawdon. He’s got a sniff of your prospects, that is all.’

I stared mutely at the rug. It was the first time I had heard of my ‘prospects’, but knew better than to make a sound.

‘You drew it?’

I nodded, brimming with tears.

‘Pitiful.’ He crumpled up the portrait in a ball and threw it in the corner. In anger, he pushed his huge flat hand against my shoulder. I stumbled backwards against the wall.

At his growl of dismissal I ran up to my mother, who lay resting in her room with the curtains drawn, suffering from that mysterious affliction I fancied prevented her from bearing Father’s long-awaited son.

‘What does he mean – my prospects?’ I whispered.

She passed a bony hand across her eyes. ‘No pray, not all that, Grace. It will only agitate him. For my sake not a word, my dear.’

Yet one small matter did cheer me: for all his scorn, my father had recognised John Francis at once, so my portraiture was not so pitiful.

I know now that my father was frustrated in his occupation. If he had been born in different circumstances, he may have been a remarkable artist. From observing him, I grew to love the Schools of Florence, the Flemish Masters, and our fine English painters. His idol was the Italian engraver, Piranesi, and one evening, having just returned from the tavern, he beckoned me to look inside a vast leather binder. At first I saw only black cross-hatchings, then gradually pieced together gigantic dungeons strung with hanging stairways, coiling chains, and grotesque lightless lamps.

‘The famed
Carceri
,’ he murmured. ‘The prisons of the mind that men try to impose upon us. A trap for our dreams. If we can only break out, child, the light is all about us.’

I stared at the monstrous vision – more ghastly even than Beelzebub’s Castle in
The Pilgrim’s Progress
– of men dwarfed like ants on colossal stairs, of figures chained to walls beside spoke-wheeled apparatus. I backed away, but Father grasped my arm and said through beer-sour breath, ‘It is not a real prison. It is a fancy, a
capriccio
is the proper word.’ I took a step back to him and looked again. ‘A great artist has the courage to reveal the soul’s suffering. Not etch catch-penny advertisements, debasing everything he learned.’

‘The prisons of the mind,’ I repeated softly, and thought my father had spoken some great truth, but what it was I didn’t yet understand.

Later I recalled his words, and those dungeons of forgotten captives. Sometimes, what we believe is trapped in the metal mirror can quicken and jump out from the frame; our dreams can bite back as savagely as any mythical Hydra. At times it is wise to feel fear.

*

By winter-time John Francis and I were sworn sweethearts, exchanging locks of hair, twisting together his fair strands with my darker brown. From John I learned our neighbours mistook my timid earnestness for pride, and envied my father’s wealth. Our talk turned to how men and women might live better lives, with dignity as man and wife. I suppose it was mostly youthful fervour, for we believed the world would soon be ours to inherit. Now I judge those innocent hours the happiest of my youth. But always there was the shadow circling above us, of discovery, and retribution at my father’s hand. These were the extent of my worries when I turned sixteen. All such innocence ended on the night of May the 5th, 1786.

We were woken by a great hammering at the door long after midnight. Through the wall I heard the commands of strange men, and my father’s voice, at first angry, then high-pitched with alarm. He was arrested and taken to Lancaster jail, which made me at once recall the ink-black prints of the
Carceri
. There were no machines of torture at Lancaster, but it was wet and cold and crowded, and my father was thrown in a lock-up with scores of other wretches. By eavesdropping, I heard that Father had at last performed his act of courage. A riot had erupted in a nearby town, the poor whipped up by hunger to riot for bread. The signal for revolt had been the raising of a halfpenny loaf upon a stick, streaked with ochre and knotted with black crêpe, and the emblem: ‘Here Be Bleeding Famine Drest in Mourning Black’. Though the corn merchants were forced to lower their price, the leaders were arrested. Inflamed by their execution, Father printed a hundred penny pamphlets on the dangerous subject of Liberty. All Englishmen must rise at once, he proclaimed, to overthrow King and parliament.

Poor Mother took to her bed and would not leave it, turning her face to the wall and refusing all food. Shame killed her faster than starvation. I was alone with her, holding her weightless hand as her spirit slipped gratefully from this world to the next. I kissed her dry lips, and, not knowing what else to do, cut a long tress of her thin grey hair. Later, I wove those strands into a crucifix, using bobbins and weights, as a lace-maker braids yarn. Set in silver like an amulet, that cross was most precious to me, keeping my mother’s presence close.

Father was imprisoned for only ten weeks before a magistrate acquitted him. But in that short time, ruin struck us down like a tempest. When Father came home with a ragged beard and incurious eyes, he was a broken puppet of his former self. He had lost his printer’s licence, and so ceased his trade. Thanks only to a number of stealthy arrangements: to sell the business to another printer, and to come to an agreement with a local landlord, were we saved from being turned out of Palatine House.

Yet more ill fortune was to come. Where we might have looked to neighbours, they shied away from us in whispering groups, and then a band of Brabantist Elders came to our door. I listened from the hallway to a voice I recognised as John Francis’s father

‘To riot is not our way, as you well know, Moore. Nor must the law be broken. Our duty is to wait for signs, and pray,’

I knew from the stiffening of my father’s broad back that he was roused. ‘Aye, and rake over your dusty dreams like broody hens! Aye, and wait for your God to dole out bread to starving men. How long do you wait – until they drop in their graves? You may well look shamed. You would expel me, is that it? Have you not heard Tom Paine say, were we not corrupted by governments, then man might be friends with man? You would expel me for that, would you, brother?’

I thought his defence well spoken, and admired him for one entire afternoon. Then, at supper time, he returned from the Bush tavern, staggering up the path, blinking and purplish from a surfeit of drink. Unfortunately, John Francis appeared from the back of the house at that self-same moment. My father was sharp-eyed when drunk, and caught him in his bloodshot gaze.

‘Still tryin’ to sponge off my daughter, Rawdon?’ Next, he glared at me. ‘It’s not you he wants, it’s your prospects,’ he shouted. I turned to go inside, but he hailed me. ‘Listen, you! Listen when I speak, you cloth-headed child.’

‘Please go,’ I muttered to John Francis. Affronted, he looked from me to my father and back.

‘No, Grace. Go into the house. I’ll deal with him.’

Father began to roar then, swinging his inky knuckles. ‘If I can’t have it, no one will,’ he cried incomprehensibly. I cringed away, longing for the stone flags beneath my feet to open up and swallow me. Father landed a clumsy blow on John Francis’s arm, but the lad backed nimbly away. ‘Mr Moore, sir. I don’t know what you are rambling on about,’ he protested.

I watched, too frightened to stop Father, for fear of him striking me in turn. He edged penitently towards John Francis, then suddenly lashed out with his fist at his face. His opponent was too agile to take the full force, but received a pink graze to his cheek.

‘I am sorry, Grace.’ John Francis raised himself to his full height and eyed my father with determination. He then strode up to Father and landed a powerful blow to his jaw that sent him toppling to the ground. My once proud father lay crumpled in the dirt. I buried my face in my hands, praying that this scene was a nightmare and that I might soon wake and find myself in bed.

*

I did not wake up from that lamentable dream, only lived on with my father at Palatine House. Soon afterwards, John Francis left me a letter, tucked inside our bird’s nest hiding place:

My Dearest Grace,

Your father will not allow me within sight of your home and has made violent threats to my person. Worse, my own family have learned of our connection and are fixed on removing me from you and from Greaves. I am to take up a position with my uncle in Bristol; but he is a man of sympathy and I hope to persuade him of the rightness of my actions.

Grace, I cannot abandon you. Will you come with me? Naturally we must marry at once and then bide our time, but I am hopeful all will turn out well.

If you can find it in your heart to come away with me, leave a candle burning in your window at ten o’clock tonight. I shall fetch the trap and meet you at the top of the lane.

Your loving sweetheart,