No Shame, No Fear by Ann Turnbull Page B

several friends, both male and female.”
    Abruptly he sat upright; the smile was gone. “Then break with them, Will. I order it. Those people are no right companions for you. They threaten Church and state; they pay no tithes; they refuse to take the oath of allegiance. They are a danger to the constitution and to the very fabric of society. I forbid you to associate with them.”
    I had never defied him before. It took all my courage to reply. “I find them to be good Christians, sir, who seek the will of God in silence.”
    “Do you argue with me, boy?” His face flushed red, and I was reminded of times when I was a child and he had beaten me for some fault. He might do so still, if I disobeyed him.
    “I have been drawn to them for some years,” I said. “In Oxford I heard two women speak—”
    “Women!” He almost spat the word. “So we are to have women preach to us now?”
    “They say – the Quakers say – that we need no hired priests to intervene between ourselves and God; that the light is in everyone.”
    He made a sound of contempt. “So every fishwife, every pox-ridden whore, is to look into her heart and receive the truth and broadcast it? It’s a recipe for chaos, Will. They must be rooted out, and this new law will do it.”
    “Father, I believe—”
    He sprang up then, slamming back his chair. “I care not what you believe! I am an alderman of this town, and you are my son. You will not visit those people again.”
    I became aware that my stepmother and Anne had stopped talking in the parlour next door, and that Meriel was hovering in the doorway, uncertain whether to come in and clear the table.
    “Come in, Meriel,” my father said. “I must go back to the shop. And you’ll come with me, Will; I’ll find you work to do.”
    I went down the stairs ahead of him, glanced back, and saw him talking to my stepmother, reassuring her.
    He kept me all afternoon in the shop and warehouse. I was not much needed there, but was able to see how Richard kept accounts and dealt with customers. It was useful to me and I would not have resented it, except that I knew my father wanted me under his eye.
    That evening, at supper, he was as good-humoured as usual. I realized that he considered the matter closed; he had told me what to do and expected me to obey.
    I could not, but neither could I find the courage at that moment to confront him again; so I went out, thinking to find Susanna, and he watched me put on my hat and said nothing.
    I went first to the Mintons’, but Judith told me Susanna was still at Faulkner’s, so I made my way there.
    It was a warm evening, and the air would have been mild and sweet had it not been for the rank smell from the channel in the middle of the road, which is always worse in such weather. In order to calm myself and clear my thoughts, I took the long way to Broad Street and walked along the town walls. A rosy sunset lit the fields and woods below, but the trees were knots of shadow. I saw a man – a vagrant, probably – settling with his pack in the lee of a hedge, and envied him his freedom.
    No one answered my knock at the printer’s, so I found a way round the backs of the houses, and came upon Nat and Susanna in the yard. He was washing something in a bucket, while she leaned against the door frame and chatted with him.
    They looked so easy together that I felt a stab of jealousy. He lives here, I thought, sleeps in the next room, works with her, prays with her.
    Then Susanna looked up and saw me. Her face brightened, she smiled, and I knew I had no cause for fear.
    I opened the gate and went in. Nat, I found, was cleaning the ink daubers in a bucket of urine.
    He grinned as I stepped back from the smell. “Got to be done. Every night, after a day’s use.”
    He had taken off the leather covers and put them to soak in the urine – “That softens them” – and was clearing the horsehair stuffing of lumps.
    He nodded towards the house. “John’s still