Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [441]
“Well?”
“Not a man I’d cross,” Edward confessed.
It was during this time that one minor but significant change took place in the Forest—Shockley affairs.
There were so many sides to the new business that Forest suggested to Shockley one day:
“We need a new pair of hands – someone to watch over the weavers, day to day.”
To this Shockley readily agreed and both men decided to look out for such a man.
Shockley was surprised however when, two weeks after he had mentioned it to her, Katherine said to him with a smile:
“I think I have your man for you.”
“Who is that?”
“My brother John.” And she explained.
The proposition she put to him had considerable merit. The boy was only nineteen, but he had spent all his life close to his father’s business and there was little about making cloth he did not know. He was eager to work for Shockley, it seemed, because there had been some friction between him and his father recently.
He was a pleasant, open-faced young man with slightly reddish hair. His pale eyes at first seemed a little ingenuous, but it was soon clear that in the workshop where he oversaw every detail of the spinning and weaving process, quietly but ruthlessly, he missed nothing. He spoke little, even when he was with his sister.
Forest approved of him.
Since he chose to lodge separately from his sister and brother-in-law, and as there was no available place for him on Forest’s estate, he took the lodgings in the tenement in Culver Street that had been vacated by Nellie Godfrey.
He was quiet, but he was a Catholic. Abigail – whom Shockley often saw when he dropped by to see the young man – tolerated his presence in silence, but she was prepared to admit:
“At least there are no more harlots here.”
Abigail was often at the house at Fisherton. She had found a young woman to suckle the baby, but all the other duties of keeping the little cottage and feeding Robert Mason’s family fell to her. Often Peter would walk the mile from Culver Street to Fisherton and eat with them before returning contentedly to his workshop in Culver Street, and Shockley guessed that the simple fellow was glad enough not to be on his way to Geneva. He often looked in upon the cutler in his workshop and never heard a word of complaint about his lot except once when he secretly confided:
“I miss Nellie, though.”
For Abigail Mason, the two years that followed Queen Mary’s accession were an increasingly difficult time. She had no doubt that she had done right in staying: that at least was some comfort. But the Catholic conditions were hard to bear. She avoided attending mass. This might have brought her into trouble with the authorities; but since it was known that she was looking after two households, and since no one was ever sure whether she was at Fisherton or in Salisbury, her absence could be conveniently overlooked.
And besides, she was quiet.
“I would speak out,” she told Shockley one day at Culver Street. “But there are our cousin Peter’s children to look after as well as ourselves . . .” and she quietly spread her hands. “I pray each day for deliverance,” she added.
She was ceaselessly at work. The dark rings under her eyes seemed to grow darker so that sometimes she looked gaunt and hollow-eyed. “She’s like a deathshead,” Shockley sometimes thought. But she went about her business, silent and indefatigable, and when once John Moody offered to let Peter join his own meal at Culver Street one day, she quietly but firmly refused.
“You would not eat with Catholics?” she asked Peter, and her husband, after pausing for a moment agreed that no, he supposed he would not.
In the spring of 1554, Abigail Mason herself observed a subtle change in her own behaviour for which she reproved herself. The trouble was Peter.
It was not easy to bear his indifference to her suffering: not that he meant any harm – far from it. Indeed, he was so eager, always, to please her. He would bring little gifts for Robert’s children; he would greet her sometimes with little posies of flowers when she returned tired in the evenings. Yet always, in his