and her relatives. 'Why are Bevan and Elizabeth parading this puss about?' The hint came too late for Gideon.
A few days later Bevan turned up 'by chance' in Basinghall Street. Immediately his uncle broached marriage, Gideon threw himself at the idea. Already committed, he consulted Robert Allibone, who saw the case was hopeless so merely replied that he did not know the girl.
Because the match had been engineered by Bevan Bevan, Gideon's parents opposed it on principle, but their opposition spurred him on.
'He will never change,' wept his mother.
'He will never learn!' raved John.
Gideon would learn, and perhaps even change, though not yet.
Gideon Jukes and Lacy Keevil were married in early May, 1643. It was a large family wedding and differed little from such celebrations in peacetime. The bride was dainty and subdued. The groom felt racked with nerves. Killjoys grumbled into their handkerchiefs that the couple were making a mistake; the young fools should have waited until the war ended. Others retaliated that at a wedding in wartime, guests ought to make a special effort to be cheerful.
Despite the deprivations in trade, everyone flaunted finery. Money was available. Gideon had a new ash- coloured jacket with a subdued sheen, over full knee-britches, all fastened with gold buttons — several dozen of them in the suit. Lacy wore carnation taffeta which, as her Aunt Elizabeth said rather loudly, she filled extremely well. On the traditional walk to and from church, they were both sweetly excited and beaming with happiness. It was impossible to wish them anything but joy and long life together. That did not stop thin smiles among disparagers.
The feast took place at a neutral venue, chosen because neither family could agree who should host. It was the Talbot Inn, a large coaching inn in Talbot Court off Gracechurch Street, within smell of the Thames.
As the wedding party in their lustrous tissues went into the courtyard where long, laden tables waited, Gideon suddenly felt alien. The feast was for him, yet he observed the elegant procession as if he were no part of it.
Standing back in a gateway while guests chose their seats, his brother met an acquaintance, a younger man than Lambert, perhaps only a couple of years older than Gideon. Lambert introduced him: 'Edward Sexby son of Marcus Sexby, gent — absolutely sharp and straight, and valiant for our cause. He was apprenticed to Edward Price, of the Grocers' Fraternity' That was all the accreditation a man could need with the Jukes; Lambert in his jovial way invited Sexby to the wedding feast.
'It is not his party!' whispered Lacy crossly, the sweet new bride suddenly furious.
'Dear heart — your first quarrel with your in-laws!' Gideon was mildly pleased at how it smacked of domesticity. Lacy returned a cold stare, calculating that her new husband might be trickier to manage than the Bevans had promised her.
A buzz of rancour rose, as two very different families, intent on despising one another, took up positions over succulent chicken, pigeons and legs of roasted pork. The Jukes brooded over Bevan Bevan's past sins and his relatives' fecklessness, bitterly noting poor manners and shamelessly expensive gloves. The Bevans decried the sermon and the wedding breakfast, which the Jukes had provided. The Jukes led a large, loud contingent of cousins, friends, stockmen and errand boys, maids past and present, past maids' children, and present maids' sisters who were hopeful of becoming maids future. They also brought two tiny, extremely ancient ladies, hook-shouldered Aunt Susan and Good Mother Perslowe, who were no relation at all, but always attended family parties. By contrast, the Bevans and Keevils seemed oddly light on guests. Lacy's parents were absent, though presumably Elizabeth had invited them, and the journey from Eltham, at less than ten miles, should not have been prohibitive.
Parthenope Jukes seated herself in state at the head of the table squashed alongside Elizabeth Bevan (nee Keevil), a large-boned, low-bosomed, florid-faced woman whose significance Gideon had missed when his great- uncle married her. He now understood: all tradesmen's widows in the City of London were well-to-do, for they inherited one-third of their husband's effects automatically, another third if they were childless as Elizabeth had been in her first marriage, and perhaps the final third too if they had persuaded their man to leave them everything. Beyond that, printers' widows had a special position: exceptionally, a print business passed from deceased husband to widow, together with prized membership of the Stationers' Company. When the late printer Keevil was carried off by illness, he left Elizabeth with attractive assets. Bevan had always 'lived on his wits' — or lived off his relatives' as John Jukes redefined it.
'Bevan must have employed fantastic footwork to displace her journeyman!' Gideon sneered to Robert Allibone. It was more or less traditional that a printer's widow continued the business through her husbands' apprentices — generally remarrying one of the journeymen. They had the right to be affronted if she chose elsewhere.
Allibone smiled wryly. 'Ah! You did not know that I served my time with Abraham Keevil?' Gideon swallowed, thinking he had committed some faux pas, but his friend gently ended his suffering: 'Oh, the dame had her eye on me, but I was always set on Margery!'
The matriarchs had drawn up battle lines, using fashion for weapons. Elizabeth Keevil made much of the fact that her olive-green satin had been bought at the Royal Exchange. Parthenope scoffed at the Exchange galleries as dangerously newfangled, while she cruelly noticed how the low-cut gown's pearl-bedecked elbow-sleeves hung so far off Elizabeth's shoulders they gripped her fleshy arms like a straitjacket, hampering her use of cutlery. Wielding her own fork daintily, Parthenope gazed on her family's resplendent outfits; in theory religious Independents shunned ornament, but a wedding was a matter of status and a wedding where they loathed the bride's family called for even more dash. Parthenope herself was in dark old-gold damask that had used up a year's profits from imported peppers. Anne wore a white petticoat, embroidered with maroon flowers and foliage, under a scalloped- edge gown that she had pinned back for easier movement; alone of the women she had put on a coif beneath her hat, which modestly hid most of her hair. Lambert and his father had let themselves be buttoned into their best black silks; John had become frail recently, but Lambert was as solid as a slab of slate.
Parthenope and Anne had acquired their finery not at the Exchange but in the traditional city way: knocking on doors to request special arrangements. This procedure for favours could be a fiction. When pleading gentlewomen called to negotiate bargains in grocery, Lambert would either charge the normal price or underweigh the goods. 'Putting a thumb on the scale is a usual grocers' trick!' Elizabeth whispered to the bride, managing to suggest that Lacy's marriage would be continually marred by such treacherous wiles.
Perhaps using the pennies he had saved, Lambert had hired two sackbut-players. The men were far from virtuosos; their primitive trombones were soon dreaded by everyone.
As the meal progressed, Bevan began talking politics. Covert signals failed to silence him. 'There is always an uncle who must cause trouble!' hissed Parthenope under cover of handing a vegetable tureen to Anne.
Gideon and Lacy had not exchanged wedding rings. Bevan denounced this as religious extremism, then latched onto Anne Jukes as a target. He referred scathingly to her foray into Westminster with the female petitioners. 'Shall we be seeing your wife as a she-preacher next, Lambert?' Lambert, moving around the company like a large benevolent lord, calmly raised a tankard to his great-uncle, oblivious of insult. Anne pretended not to hear, until Bevan's next jibe: 'I hear that rebel wives in the City are donating their jewels to Parliament's war chest!'
'I am glad to know,' snapped Anne. She was forthright and fearless, which offended Bevan all the more. 'They shall have my wedding ring tomorrow. Lambert and I need no pagan symbols.' In an undertone, she scoffed to her mother-in-law, 'He is not even drunk.'
'Not yet!'
Fortunately Elizabeth Bevan missed this, since she was frazzled at the separate table where her children were being fed. She purloined the bride to help her control them. In the decade of her marriage to Bevan, Elizabeth had been constantly pregnant. Although it had not stopped her parading bare breasts and forearms today like a decadent royal maid-of-honour, under her stays she was big-bellied again at nearly forty. There were five surviving offspring, all squealers and snivellers; Arthur, aged seven, was a particularly repugnant child.
Anne Jukes felt obliged to leave her food and assist. Childless throughout her own marriage, Anne knew herself to be an object of both pity and disapproval, as if the situation was her fault. The long wedding sermon, with its emphasis on marriage for procreation, had been torture. Now other people's insolent children would be dumped on her.
'Why thank you, my dear!' Elizabeth simpered. 'Do not let naughty Arthur throw syllabub on your good gown.
