As Meat Loves Salt

‘To hear you talk,’ I said to Godfrey, ‘a perfect man were a carpet, soiled by others and then beaten for it.’

‘And hearing you,’ he returned, ‘it is clear you have had some unwholesome reading lately. Take care the Master does not catch you

‘How should that happen unless I left it lying in a wine jug?’

‘Jacob,’ said Izzy. ‘Get on with your work.’

Such impudent abuses as these Roches put on us, grew out of that slavery known as The Norman Yoke. That is to say, the forefathers of these worthless men, being murderers, ravishers, pirates and suchlike, were rewarded by William the Bastard for helping him mount and ride the English people, and they have stayed in the saddle ever after. The life of the English was at first liberty, until these pillaging Barons brought in My Lord This and My Lady That, shackling the native people and setting them to work the fields which were their own sweet birthright. Now, not content with their castles and parks, the oppressors were lately begun to enclose the open land, snatching even that away from the rest of us. Roche, this family were called, and is that not a Frenchy name?

Though Caro thought our Mistress not bad, I had noted how little My Lady, as well as her menfolk, had trusted us since the war began. When they thought we were listening their talk was all of wickedness and its punishment. The King has Divine Right on his side, one would say, and another, New Model, forsooth. New noddle, more like, and there would be loud laughter. Then Sir Bastard might put in his groatsworth, how the rebels were half fed (for they thought it no shame to rejoice in such hunger), half drilled, half witted, so that the victory could go only one way.

But we heard things from time to time, for all that the Roches kept mum or even spoke in French before our faces – indeed, so stupid was Mervyn that he had been known to do so before Mounseer Daskin, the cook, who could speak better French than any Roche had spoken since 1066 – and we took heart. Servants came to visit along with their masters, and whatever their sympathies they brought news from other parts of the country. We were on our guard, however, in speaking with these, for there were those who made report of their fellows.

‘It is said Tom Cornish is an intelligencer,’ Izzy told me one day. This Cornish had once been a servingman, and was now risen in the world – too high for any honest means. He farmed land on the far side of Champains, and his name was a byword throughout the country for a dedication to the Royalist cause bordering on that religious madness called enthusiasm, and commonly supposed only to afflict those on the Parliamentary side.

‘You recall the servants who were whipped?’ Izzy went on.

I nodded. Not a year before, two men from Champains had been tried for being in possession of pamphlets against the King.

‘Well,’ Izzy went on, ‘it was Cornish brought them to the pillory.’

‘Impossible,’ I answered. ‘Say rather Mister Biggin.’

Biggin was the master of the accused men, and had made no move to defend them.

‘Him also. But the one they cried out against was Cornish,’ Izzy insisted. ‘Gentle Christians both. More shame to Biggin, that he let them suffer.’

‘You forget they had a serious fault,’ said I.

‘Fault?’

‘Choosing their own reading. But Izzy, Cornish does not live at Champains. How would he know of it?’

‘’Tis said, he fees servants. Most likely, some who come here.’

It was not like Izzy to suspect a man without cause. I noted his words carefully, and I guess he spoke to the rest, for we were all of us exceedingly discreet.

Our masters were less so. Sir John, when in his cups, left his private letters lying about, and his son was alike careless. Mercurius Aulicus, the Royalist newsletter, appeared in the house from time to time; lately, we had noted with growing excitement, it was finding less and less cause to exult. Naseby-Fight, in June, had been followed by Langport, not a month later, and the half drilled half fed had triumphed in both. ‘The Divine Right,’ jeered Zeb, ‘seems sadly lacking in Divine Might.’

Izzy pointed out that the soldiers on both sides were much of a muchness, for though the Cavaliers prided themselves on their fighting spirit and high mettle, they had the same peasants and masterless men to drill as their opposites.

‘Besides, Sir Thomas Fairfax is a gentleman,’ he added, ‘and this Cromwell a coming fellow.’

Not that we were reduced solely to Mercurius Aulicus. Godfrey was right, I had found me some reading and was very much taken therewith, considering it not at all unwholesome.

It was begun a few months before, by chance. Peter went to visit his aunt who worked at Champains, and there met Mister Pratt, one of the servants, and had some talk with him.

‘Eight o’clock behind the stables,’ Peter whispered to me that night. I went there after the evening meal, along with my brothers.

Peter held out a sheaf of papers. ‘Here, lads, can you read these?’

Izzy took them and bent his head to the first one. ‘Of Kingly Power and Its Putting Down. Where had you these?’

I snatched at another. ‘Of True Brotherhood – printed in London, look.’

‘Will it do?’ asked Peter. ‘And will you read it me?’

‘We shall all of us read it,’ Izzy promised.

These writings became, in time, our principal diversion. After the first lot, they were brought after dark by ‘Pratt’s boy’, that same Christopher Walshe who later lay in the laundry, naked under a sheet.

It was our pleasure on warm evenings sometimes to take our work outside, behind the stables where Godfrey never went, Zeb and Peter drinking off a pipe of tobacco as part of the treat. There we would read the pamphlets. Printed mostly in London, they spoke of the Rising of Christ and the establishment of the New Jerusalem whereby England would become a beacon to all nations.

‘A prophecy, listen.’ Zeb’s eyes shone. ‘The war is to end with the utter annihilation of Charles the Great Tyrant and the Papist serpent – that’s Henrietta Maria.’

‘I know without your telling,’ I said.

‘Measures are to be taken afterwards. In the day of triumph, er, O yes here ‘tis – The rich to be cast down and the poor exalted. Every man that has borne a sword for freedom to have a cottage and four acres, and to live free—’

We all sighed.

‘There shall be no landless younger brothers, forced by the laws to turn to war for their fortunes, and no younger brothers in another sense neither, that is, no class of persons obliged to serve others merely to live.’

‘A noble project,’ said Peter.

At that time these writings were the closest any of us came to the great doings elsewhere, for at Beaurepair things went on much as they always had, save that the Master and Mistress were by turns triumphant and cast down. We had escaped the curse of pillage and its more respectable but scarce less dreaded brother, free quarter: no soldiers were as yet come near us. Sir John was too fond of his comfort to equip and lead a force as some of the neighbours had done, so he neglected to apply for a commission and his men were kept at home, to pour his drink.

In the reading of our pamphlets we servants were, for an hour or so, a little commonwealth. Though Peter and Patience could not read, the rest of us took turns aloud so that all might hear and understand the same matter at the same moment, and then fall to discussing it. Izzy had taught Caro her letters and she did her part very prettily, her low voice breathing a tenderness into every word she spoke. I would sit with my arm round her, warming to that voice and to the serious expression of her dark eyes as she, perhaps the least convinced of us all, denounced the Worship of Mammon.

‘So, Caro, the Golden Calf must be melted?’ Zeb teased her one time.

‘So the writer says,’ my love answered.

‘And the Roches levelled with the rest of us?’ he pressed. ‘What say you to that?’

Caro returned stubbornly, ‘I say they are different one from another. The Mistress—’

‘The Mistress favours you, that’s certain,’ put in Patience, whose coarse skin was flushed from too much beer at supper.

‘And not unjustly,’ I said. ‘But what is favour,’ I asked Caro, ‘that you should take it from her hand? Why are not you rich, and doing favours to her? Surely God did not make you to pomade her hair.’

‘She deals kindly with me nonetheless,’ Caro retorted. ‘God will weigh us one by one at judgement, and she is clean different to Sir Bastard.’

‘That may be,’ I allowed, ‘but she trusts us no more than he does. Besides, we cannot put away one and not the other.’

‘If Mammon be pulled down,’ Izzy warned, ‘we must take care the true God be put in his place and not our own wanton desires – the God of simpleness, of truth in our speech and in our doings, the God of a brotherly bearing—’

He paused, and I saw his difficulty. We Cullens were the only brothers present, and Zeb and myself were constantly at one another’s throats.