London - Edward Rutherfurd [370]
He discovered something else, too. “I didn’t marry a woman,” he would wryly say. “I married a congregation.” It was not just the prayer meetings, though she went to those; but it seemed that there was an entire network of similar-minded people stretching across all the city wards and far beyond. It was almost like a huge guild to which she could turn for help. It came into play most strikingly on the one occasion when they quarrelled.
It was over the eldest boy. Though brought up to help in the boatyards, he showed no desire to follow his father’s trade. The slow work with his hands made him restless, and he announced that he wanted to go to sea as a fisherman. Dogget, knowing that the boatyard was a solid little business, expected Martha to support him; but after a day of prayer, she stated: “You should let him go. Our work is worship,” she reminded him. “So if a man hates his work, how can he worship God?”
“He should obey his father,” Dogget protested.
“God is his father,” she gently corrected. “Not you.”
He was so furious, he did not speak to her for days.
Yet a week later, he found himself with Martha at Billingsgate, being ushered into the large, red-bearded presence of no less a personage than the head of the Barnikel family, one of the most prominent men in the Fishmongers Company, who told him: “Found a good berth for your boy. Know the ship’s master well.” And before Dogget could stammer a reply: “Glad to help. Your wife’s good name goes before her.”
Now, as the sky grew lighter, those same words seemed to echo in his brain. His wife’s good name. But for that accursed good name, none of this would have happened. Yet what could he do? The wherry was coming to take them. And across the water, moored in the stream just below Wapping, he could see the trap into which he was being led.
That stout, three-masted ship called the Mayflower.
By noon, they had passed the Medway.
The Mayflower was a good little ship: a London vessel, a hundred and eighty tons, a quarter owned by Captain Jones who sailed her – another sign that she was sound. Frequently chartered by London merchants, she had spent much of her time shipping wine in the Mediterranean. Seaworthy, well stocked and with ample space, she was fully prepared to carry her passengers to the New World.
Martha had been approached in the past by agents of the Virginia Company, asking if she and her family would like to settle there. But that was nothing: so had half London. And she had gently pointed out to the men who approached her that there was little point in crossing the Atlantic only to find King James’s Church when she got to the other side. But this was different. When she had heard about the little Puritan group who planned to found their own community, not in Virginia, but in the wilderness of America’s northern seaboard, she had been fascinated. And try as she might to overcome it, she could not help it: she had felt the pain of envy in her heart. She even mentioned her longing to Dogget. But he had only laughed.
Until help had come from an unexpected quarter. The eldest boy, arriving home from a fishing trip, calmly announced: “Father, there’s a new venture going far north of Virginia, to the Massachusetts colony. It’s organized by the Merchant Adventurers. We could do well there. Barnikel the Fishmonger thinks so too.” And when his father asked him why, he replied with a single word: “Cod.”
This, of course, made the whole venture possible. King James, enquiring how the settlers meant to live, and being told they meant to fish, had wryly remarked; “Like the Apostles,” but he too knew that the settlement lay near some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. “It’s a risk of course,” the boy conceded. “But you build boats and I fish.” But even so, Dogget had not been enthusiastic.
The mysterious offer came the following day. Though Dogget suspected otherwise, Martha had done nothing to invite it. She was as much in the dark as he, though it was clear that the offer must come from a person,