A husband who values me as his true companion. To bear children but not bury them, nor to die myself while bearing them. Not to despair of how they shall turn out… A garden,' she added suddenly, glancing around. Most of the plants had withered, their few leaves hanging as brown rags. Frost had wreaked instant havoc.
'Well, this is a gloomy autumnal patch!' Lovell commented.
A garden where the autumn die-back would not matter, because I would always see it bloom again next spring.'
Lovell had a sense that the Carlill family had moved about a great deal. He wondered why. However, the young woman did not look particularly hunted. These domestic hopes of hers were pretty conventional. 'There is always the blossom at your orchard in Kent.'
The situation was not as he thought. Juliana smiled again, in her gentle, non-committal way. 'Ah, my father's orchard!'
'So,' probed Lovell. 'Is Edmund Treves to be your life's companion?'
Juliana felt it was improper to give her answer to Edmund's friend. Although she acknowledged that Lovell had authority to hear it, the very fact that Edmund let his sponsor come alone dismayed her. Whatever the reason a man asked for her — and she did not by any means expect it to be love — Juliana wanted direct dealing. Her view of marriage demanded it. 'Edmund Treves has excellent qualities — '
To her surprise, Captain Lovell suddenly interrupted: 'Too young! Too untried, too unworldly, too poorly endowed to match your dowry — ' He had that wrong, thought Juliana almost humorously. 'Altogether too damned milky white. No man for you.' As Lovell saw Juliana recoil at his frankness, his voice rasped. 'Do not make your decision from a sense of obligation, simply because young Treves has offered. You must defend yourself. No one else will. Think on that.'
He sounded like Mr Gadd. Juliana hardly paused. 'You are quite right. I will tell him — '
'I will tell him,' Lovell volunteered. 'I brought him to your door.'
'I would not wish Edmund to be hurt by this, Captain Lovell. I believe he may care for me — '
'He's in love. He'll recover. Edmund', explained Lovell brutally, 'has but one great idea in his head at any time. For the moment he is besotted with his new life as a soldier. However — ' And for once Orlando Lovell favoured Juliana with an open grin, a grin of such enormous sincerity and charm that she felt her first abrupt awareness of him as a man. 'He badly needs your orchard!'
She looked downcast.
'Should you refuse young Treves, we are all left with the other problem,' Lovell mused. Your guardian, Mr Gadd, rightly wishes to procure a husband for you.'
Juliana's gaze slipped across the parterre. She saw the ancient climbing roses, their great stems bent to unseen wires, one with a last brave crimson flower, another with pale buds that would never now open fully since they were browned by frost. A cold breeze was twisting her ringlets and she had hunched her shoulders against the cold. The conversation could not last much longer; she would have to go indoors.
And then she heard Orlando Lovell suggest to her quietly, 'There is an answer. Marry me.'
Chapter Ten — Birmingham: October, 1642
'Why me?' wondered Kinchin Tew.
As the mad parson took hold of her, she felt indignant, resigned, desperate, bewildered. She was a fourteen- year-old girl, just an unattractive scavenger, born among masterless women and men. Kinchin was a nickname: never baptised, never enrolled in school, there were no records of her existence and her real given name was lost.
It was not the first time Mr Whitehall's watery gaze had lighted upon her expectantly. They were both daytime wanderers, so in a small town like Birmingham their paths were bound to cross. Skulking against walls or creeping up backstreets, Kinchin would sometimes startle him; more often, he would loom up from nowhere and cunningly trap her. Then she knew what was in store.
Why me? was a question she posed, yet never answered for herself. To others it would be obvious: she was vulnerable. Her parents and brothers generally left her to herself. She was a starveling, alone on the streets.
Kinchin never invited the man to accost her, but she endured what he did. Mr Whitehall was an adult, and as a churchman he carried authority even if he could no longer practise his calling because of his past. Everyone knew how he behaved to women. Even though Kinchin feared him, it was almost exciting that he chose her. These were the only occasions when she mattered to anyone.
If ever she had the advantage of surprise, she took herself out of his reach, but pride made her walk off unhurriedly as if continuing on some errand. The parson rarely followed if she had an escape route. For him the thrill lay in persuading women to give him kisses freely. Besides, he was sane enough to know that if he attempted pursuit and force, he could be brought before the church court, then the parish would send him back to Bedlam. Kinchin knew that he was recently released from the great London hospital for the insane, where he had been kept for twenty years. Now he had somehow found his way back to Birmingham, where new generations had ripened and Kinchin Tew was here to be preyed upon. Everyone knew his habits. A few women tolerated him. Generally he was thought to be safe, a mild nuisance who could be rebuffed quite easily. Many towns and villages harboured a similar pest, always had done, always would do.
'Ooh — has Mr Whitehall taken to Kinchin?' Her mother's speculative tone had been a shock. Kinchin heard the eager hope that someone of quality wanted something — and might pay for it. At once she saw that her family would never try to save her. Now she was fourteen, she had become useful. They would offer her wherever they could, to do whatever was asked. In their gruelling quest for survival, her parents wanted rewards for nurturing her. Doing whatever was necessary would be her duty. When she now tolerated Mr Whitehall touching and toying with her, she was aware that worse experiences lay ahead.
Life was harsh for the Tews. Kinchin remembered that it had not always been quite this bad. The family had once subsisted inefficiently on commonland at Lozells Heath. They were rag-pickers and tinkers, with harvest work every autumn, if they could be bothered to apply for it and if any farmers would put up with them. For generations they had scratched a living, inhabiting a decrepit hovel where scabby, tousled children snuffled five or six on the floor while their parents and associated adults squabbled over who would sleep in what passed for a bed. If it was winter and they were 'looking after' a cow, the cow took precedence in their shelter. Occasionally a handy Tew would concoct a lean-to byre in which to hide the stolen cow; then the children would have somewhere to skulk, plot, dream and, if the elder boys were obsessively curious that year, engage in mild incestuous activities. Pigs they claimed as their own roamed the scrubby heathland; chickens that answered their call pecked around outside the hovel. The Tews were masterless men. They were constantly at risk of being taken up for idleness, yet most were not completely idle and they all possessed a kind of freedom that was better to them than the bullied lives of servants or apprentices. As freedom went, it was dirty and cold, but for generations the Tews had managed to exist.
Then Sir Thomas Holte enclosed a third of Aston Manor to enlarge his park. The Tews were driven out.
The social gulf between the Tew family and that of 'Black Tom' Holte was vast. They had nothing. He had everything. Though his forebears had a long pedigree in the Midlands, his real social eminence developed with the Stuart kings. On the accession of King James, Holte had been knighted; later he pushed forward to be among the two hundred who paid a thousand pounds each for a baronetcy — a new rank, invented to create funds for the king. His red-handed badge then gave Sir Thomas Holte precedence over all except royalty and the peerage. He built himself a gem of Jacobean architecture, an ostentatious stately home to signify his importance. He sired sixteen well-fed children, by two wives. As lord of the manors of Aston, Duddeston and Nechells, Holte enjoyed an aristocratic idleness that was never made the subject of sermons or by-laws. He flourished, with the minimum of loyal service to the kingdom, while growing ever richer on the proceeds of brutal business methods. He hunted, quarrelled and counted his rents. He bought the extra manors of Lapworth and Bushwood; he acquired Erdington and Pipe. He became a Justice of the Peace for the county of Warwickshire and lay rector of Aston parish. With no opposition, or none that mattered, he then seized for himself the breezy open common. Some of it became his new deer park and the rest he parcelled out in tiny batches to local artisans. Their leases were short enough to keep the men craven, lest by displeasing their landlord they should lose their livelihoods.
