Forged in the Fire Read Online Free

authorities may begin to restrict travel. Already they say towns outside the city grow nervous of receiving Londoners. Leave while thou can. Go to thy sweetheart.”
    He smiled. And indeed he looked much recovered, and I knew his health need not hold me back.
    I walked through the shop, passing the children, who were curled up together with a chapbook of Robin Hood. They sat on the floor in one of the bays between tall shelves of books, and Agnes paused shyly in her reading as I went by, then continued.
“‘By my faith,’ quoth bold Robin, ‘here cometh a merry fellow…’”
    I went to the desk where I kept records, and entered my delivery and the payment in a ledger. Agnes and Stephen watched me, glancing up from the book. They were quiet children, never troublesome; soft-spoken like their parents and able to amuse themselves. The family and Dorcas lived above the shop, but James and Cecily liked to allow the children downstairs, where, they said, they would gain a sense of right livelihood from the earliest age.
    The children, I guessed, simply enjoyed all the places to hide and whisper. The shop was large and rambling, with many hundreds of books, pamphlets, and writings of Friends, and deliveries and orders coming all the time from Belgium and France, as well as English towns and cities. Nearly half the space was given over to stationery: quills, ink, notebooks and printed forms – a much greater selection than I had ever seen in Mary Faulkner’s shop in Hemsbury. James kept books of almost every kind – not plays, since he disapproved of the theatre, but poetry and music as well as theological and historical writings.
    Back at work, I put the sight of the beaked man out of my mind, but next morning I talked to Nat.
    â€œIt seems cowardly to leave early.”
    From near by we heard the bells of Gregory’s steeple-house tolling, and counted six for a woman, and then the years of her life: twenty – my own age. Was it plague, I wondered? And now that I thought of it, I heard other passing bells, many more than usual, further away, from all around the city.
    Nat was at the washbowl, a mirror propped up, shaving. He had cut his long curly hair and paid Meg Corder to wash and iron some shirts for the journey. I had bought a new shirt to be married in. We had little else to do before we left. I felt a strong desire to leave at once. And yet we were committed to travelling with our friends.
    â€œI spoke to Joseph Leighton,” Nat said, rubbing his face dry, and wincing at a cut. “He says we need not wait for them.”
    â€œCan they not leave earlier than the twenty-sixth?”
    â€œNo. Their affairs prevent it.”
    The Leighton brothers were elderly men, frail from prolonged imprisonment, yet alight with the spirit. They had felt called to visit Friends in prison in North Wales. For us to travel with them would be beneficial to all. We would have their company and the hire of horses, and would probably eat better and sleep more comfortably than if we travelled alone; and they would have our youth and strength should need arise.
    Nat voiced my thoughts. “It would be churlish not to wait for them.”
    I agreed. “Yes. For the sake of a week…”
    And yet I wanted nothing more than to leave the stricken city. And we were ready; our employers would give us leave; we had nothing to hold us back, except our promise. To my shame, I felt irritation with the old men; what affairs could they possibly have that would take so long to set in order?
    During the days that followed, the sense of crisis in the city grew apace. Everyone was leaving who could. We saw carts loaded with families and their possessions rumbling through the streets towards the city gates. A house was enclosed in Creed Lane, where we lived, making Nat and I feel, for the first time, afraid for our lives. Meanwhile the Leighton brothers calmly hired horses, received messages and