happened most inconveniently when she was moulding the decorations for a Simnel cake.
'There I was, mopping up my waters with a pudding cloth. I knocked the pestle and the ground almonds right off the table — my hands were so oily from the paste, I could not open the door to call for the maid. Now I feel queasy if I ever look at marzipan balls — '
And how was the cake?' young Gideon would ask gravely.
'Not one of my best. I had quite forgot the zest of orange.'
'And it had squashed balls!' Gideon would mouth at his brother, making this not just obscene but personal. In reply Lambert rarely did worse than throwing a cushion at his head.
They ate well. Generations of Jukes had done so, ever since their first member of the Grocers' Company set up a home and business just off Cheapside. The certainty of good dinners in the Jukes home had attracted Bevan Bevan, Parthenope's uncle, who dined frequently with them while making irritating claims that he had organised their marriage. John rejected any idea that he owed his wife to anyone else. Most Jukes men assumed they could win any woman they liked simply by expressing an interest. Historically, they were right.
John groaned every time Bevan visited, but Bevan had promised to be a patron to Gideon. Bevan's will would generally be mentioned about the time in a meal when Parthenope served a quaking pudding or an almond tart. For over a decade, as his great-uncle gorged on the spiced Jukes cuisine, it was expected that Bevan would leave Gideon an inheritance. A bachelor for fifty years, he had had no other heir. Then with no warning he married Elizabeth Keevil, a printer's widow. From the moment they entered the marriage bed — or, as the Jukes always reckoned, from a couple of months beforehand — Bevan began prolifically fathering children of his own.
'Let him dine at his own table from now on!' snarled John, through a mouthful of 'Extraordinary Good Cake'. 'A little more ginger next time…?'
'I think not!' retorted Parthenope, tight-lipped. The set of her jaw was just like Gideon's.
Bevan politely kept away, especially after strong words passed between him and Parthenope. But once Gideon started to resist his father's plans, it was Bevan Bevan who added a fuse to the gunpowder by suddenly offering to pay for an apprenticeship with a printer his wife knew. John and Parthenope saw this as the ultimate treachery.
Robert Allibone, the printer, genuinely needed assistance with his business. Gideon was proposed to him by Bevan as a bright, honest boy who was keen to learn and would stay to a task. No mention was made of his troubled behaviour.
Bevan's intervention caused uproar. Gideon, of course, found it exciting to be at the centre of the quarrel. Parthenope had already spoiled two batches of buttered apple pudding, and John accidentally set fire to the house- of-easement in their yard while gloomily taking too many pipes of tobacco as he brooded. The half-built house-of- easement had never been in use, because it was a long-term project of the kind that remains a project. Nonetheless, John had been able to sit in the roofless structure enjoying quiet philosophy and flaunting at their neighbours, none of whom had one, the fact that the Jukes were constructing their own dunny. Now they must continue to throw their slops into the street and to have their nightsoil collected by sinister men with carts who tramped foul substances into the hall floorboards. John Jukes, who was only allowed to smoke out of doors, had to sit on an old molasses barrel, grimly contemplating the burnt ruin as he blamed Bevan for seducing Gideon to an alien trade.
Gideon complained rudely: 'It is the loss of the project that matters to you most!'
'You are an ill-mannered boy,' was his father's mild reply. 'Yet you are mine, dear child, and I must bear my disappointment.'
When Parthenope noticed that John's mole-coloured britches had been irretrievably singed in the blaze, another tempest started, during which Gideon stormed out of the house close to tears. That was when he ran into Richard Overton, a casual acquaintance with a yen for causing trouble, who told him that bit-parts were being offered in a court masque.
This was a fine way to offend everyone. The Jukes saw the devil in theatricals, and royal entertainments were the most perverted. As respectable traders, they solidly opposed the debauchery and idleness of courtiers; like many Londoners, they were even starting to oppose the King himself. These were the years when King Charles struggled to rule without a Parliament. His methods of financing himself grew ever more contentious. People in business viewed his ploys as interference. Even at thirteen, Gideon knew this. Royal monopolies were the sorest point. Whereas once patents had been granted only for new inventions, now all kinds of commodities were licensed only to royal favourites, who charged exorbitant prices and grabbed huge profits. Selling salt and soap had always been the prerogative of the grocers, so that rankled; beer was a staple and so was coal for Londoners. The City had also been outraged by Ship Money, the King's hard-hitting tax for the navy, not least because this tax was devised to finance a war about bishops, a war they disapproved of. John Jukes declaimed the cry of one Richard Chambers who had been imprisoned and fined for his part in a protest strike: 'Merchants are nowhere in the world so screwed and wrung as in England'..
'Screwed and wrung!' had chanted the Jukes sons, who had an ear for a catch-phrase.
The family also held Independent views in religion. They belonged to one of the puritan churches that lurked down every side street of the City parishes; Gideon was of course taken there every Sunday. John contributed to the fee of a radical weekly lecturer who was frequently in trouble with the Bishop of London for his unorthodox preaching. The Jukes believed in freedom of conscience and freedom of worship. People who never bowed the knee in church were sceptical of a civil ruler who expected his subjects to kneel to him. 'If God does not require ceremony, why should a king?' They feared that Charles Stuart, encouraged by his French wife, was trying to impose Catholic rituals upon them, and they hated it. They homed in on Queen Henrietta Maria as an object of hate because she loved theatre and masques. Theatres, every Londoner was certain (because it was true), were haunts of prostitutes and rakes.
So if there was one thing Gideon could do to upset his family, it was listening to Richard Overton and volunteering to take part in a masque — a masque, moreover, which the lawyers from the Inns of Court were to present to the King and Queen.
He had never acted before. Nevertheless, he came cheap, so he secured a very minor part as one of three dotterels, small quiet birds of the plover family. He was young and naive enough to be embarrassed when his two acting companions, slightly older boys, made jokes that among dotterels it was the female bird who engaged in displays while the male tended the nest.
Gideon's own sense of humour was more political; he was smiling satirically over the masque's title, which was The Triumph of Peace.
Rehearsals were brisk. During them, Gideon soon realised that he was a player in a work of numbing obsequiousness. The Triumph of Peace had been written by the popular poet James Shirley. It relied on spectacle rather than a fine script. All anybody wanted from it was flattery for the King, with gasps of delight at the rich costumes and at the complex engineering of the stage machinery.
The best talent in London contributed. The music was by the King's favourite composer William Lawes, his brother Henry Lawes, and Simon Ives, who excelled at glees and part-songs. The indoor stage sets were by the tireless Inigo Jones, architect, painter and emblematic publicist of the Stuart monarchy. The pageant's enormous cost included payment to a French costume-maker, brought out of retirement to stitch bird costumes, plus the cost of many sacks of feathers, acquired by this Frenchwoman at inflated prices from the canny feather-suppliers with whom she had long been in league.
For Gideon and his two companions she had produced padded suits sewn with hundreds of grey, white and russet feathers, costumes which had to be kept pulled up tight under the crotch, to make their legs look as long and thin as possible. The suits were held on by braces over the shoulders and were topped with heavy heads that had to be applied very carefully, or they ended up askew. In his feathered costume, Gideon had a fine, bright-chestnut padded belly marked with a distinctive white bar across his upper chest like a mayoral chain and prominent white eye stripes, joining on the back of the neck; after his headpiece was fixed, he could dip and raise its narrow beak, though at risk of breaking it.
Once inside, visibility was almost nil. He felt hot and claustrophobic, and the bird's head crushed down on his own with disconcerting pressure. Gideon began to experience regrets, but it was too late to back out.
