Forged in the Fire Read Online Free Page B

nothing from me for a while. The authorities may restrict the post – and even if they do not, I may hesitate to write to thee for fear the carrier should be infected. Take care to steam any letters from London over boiling vinegar; we are assured it is a preventive…
    â€œHow can I not fear?” I demanded of Judith. I had run to her in my distress. “The plague is in the city, in their street, in their meeting. Oh, Judith, I am so afraid he will die and I will never see him again!”
    Judith put her arms around me and begged me not to despair. As she tried to comfort me, I was reminded of how helpless I had felt in the face of her own overwhelming grief when her first child died. But Will was not dead. I had lost nothing yet, except the chance to be married this summer – as Judith reminded me.
    â€œThe plague will go when the hot weather is over,” she said, “and then he will come, and all will be well. Truly, Su, it will.”
    We were in the parlour of Judith’s small house in Castle Street. It reminded me of my parents’ house, with the curtained bed and oak storage chest in the parlour, and a hall and kitchen off. Judith had been shelling peas, and the sweet smell of opened pea pods scented the room. Benjamin was asleep in his cradle.
    I wiped my eyes, ashamed of my weakness. “I did so long to be married.”
    Mary had shown less patience with me than Judith. She’d told me sharply to be busy about my work and to thank God I had heard no bad news as yet. What concerned her more was news from London of Friends dying in Newgate jail, and of some who awaited transportation to the West Indies. There was much talk in our meetings now of the changes which had come in last year to the Quaker Act, which made meeting for worship punishable by transportation for a third offence, and which did away with the necessity for a jury. Our Friends were writing pamphlets; and reports of the injustices meted out to Friends around the country were printed in Mary’s shop. Some of these reports came from the meeting that Will and Nat attended, at the Bull and Mouth tavern in Aldersgate. I knew this meeting to be large and active and a thorn in the flesh of the authorities, who made regular swoops upon it, throwing many Friends into jail. Will and Nat, and their employers, had all been imprisoned for several months at the end of last year. I’d had no letters then from Will himself, and heard news of him only from his employer’s wife, Cecily Martell.
    I kept all my letters in the chest in my room above the shop – for I still lived with Mary Faulkner, though I no longer shared her bedchamber as a servant. My room was next to Mary’s, and had formerly been Nat’s when he was her apprentice. It was small, and simply furnished, with a bed, chest, chair and wash-stand; but I felt proud to be a working woman with a room of my own. I hung my two spare gowns on pegs on the wall and kept everything else – my linen, stockings, books, letters and money – in the chest. The clothes were stored with herbs between the layers, so that whenever I took out Will’s letters – as I did often – they smelled of rosemary and lavender.
    Next time I went home to my parents I was enfolded in their sympathy and that of Eaton Bellamy Meeting. Friends told me to have faith, not to despair, but to accept God’s will; and I tried to do that. As the weeks went by I worked hard, printing and delivering, inking the type, checking proofs, serving in the shop – even setting up the type if Simon Race was busy. I also instructed the boy, Antony – nine years old, and an orphan, one of the parish poor, as Nat had been when Mary took him on.
    But no amount of work could make me forget; I longed for a letter, some proof that Will was alive. When he was in prison I had still had news of him, but now there was nothing. Nothing from Will, or Nat, or even