So I’d had a chance, at the end, to spend more time with Jamie, to begin some small rearrangements of our life in preparation for the future, to involve myself more with the thriving dressmaking business, to make another buying trip to Manchester and to pay an extended visit to my family without having to account for our absence.
Even so, I felt the gaping hole in my life where my Linas had been for, although we had not been lovers in the true sense for years, we had shared a real need for each other that was not wholly material, but emotional and spiritual as well. We never actually spoke of it: he was not good at speaking of love, and any attempt on my part only embarrassed him. But we were aware of our need for each other, especially so since Jamie’s appearance, and I was not foolish enough to end that prematurely when I knew the end would come soon enough. Had I remained childless, I might have thought differently, but I could not take a gamble when there was the son of a noble house to care for.
The River Ouse that brings boats up to the York warehouses froze all river traffic to a standstill, offering a quicker way to cross without using the bridge or the ferry. Those who could skate had a merry time of it, and Jamie’s nurse and I took him there, astonished by his pluck and persistence.
While Linas was alive, the natural tendency had been for everyone to compare him to the one he called papa, but by three years old his sturdy little frame and bold wilful nature, dark eyes and thick curly hair indicated characteristics that I was able to identify only too easily. Fortunately, my own dark colouring disguised the truth, but then, that must also have been taken into account at the outset, I supposed. It was so clever of them.
The nine seamstresses in the sewing room were loath to return home each evening during the freeze when the conditions at work were so much more comfortable than their own. Remembering how I too had been one of them, fourteen years old with only my clothes to my name, how Prue had sheltered and fed me, I tried to do the same for them, many of whom had worked there longer than me. Oh, she had worked me harder than hard to make it worth her while, being a canny Yorkshire woman, but I had not resented it, nor did the girls appear to resent me moving up the ladder rather faster, so to speak. Now, Prue Sanders and I were partners in the business, having expanded sideways into the house next door to the Assembly Rooms. A perfect situation, if ever there was one.
My own house was placed diagonally across the road, so convenient for us both especially during those exceptionally cold weeks when the ice seemed to creep into our veins. All our stores of potatoes froze solid. Few people could reach the mill for flour, nor could the miller use his wheel, sending up the price of bread accordingly. Fish was locked under the ice and people had to delve earlier than usual into their reserves of dried and pickled foods, feeding cattle with precious hay.
I did better than most in that respect, for as soon as a narrow passage was cut through the drifts, two pack-ponies and men arrived at my kitchen door having trekked from Abbots Mere at their master’s command. Into the kitchen were carried sacks of flour, oats and barley, chickens and geese, a brace each of pheasant and grouse, rabbits and a hare, baskets of apples, pears and plums, butter and cheeses, eggs and half-frozen milk, a half-carcass of lamb, hams, and trout packed in ice, all piled on to the table while cook stood with jaw dropping. I saw this gift as an answer to my refusal to accept a loan. For all our sakes, I was bound to accept this.
Gulping down beakers of mulled ale and wedges of fruit cake, the men would give no more information than, ‘Compliments of Lord Winterson, ma’am. And ye’re to let him know when you want some more. He hunts most days.’
‘What, on horseback? In this snow?’
‘Usually on foot, ma’am.’
Jamie jumped up and down at the end of my hand. ‘Oh, can I go too? I go on foot with Uncaburl?’
‘Nay, little ’un,’ said one of the men, replacing his woollen hood, ‘tha’d be mistekken fer a rabbit.’
‘Would I, Mama?’ said Jamie, looking worried.
I lifted him into my arms. ‘No, sweetheart. Your ears are much too short to be mistaken for a rabbit. But the snow is too deep. Now we must say thank you to the men and let them go. It’s starting to snow again.’
I sent my thanks to ‘Uncaburl’, thinking how ironic it was that food was more available to him out in the country than it was to me here in the town. Winterson’s revolutionary farming methods would see him through any crisis. According to Linas, Abbots Mere had never produced so much since his brother took it over. In truth, I had started to worry about what my own family would suffer if the freeze continued much longer, living several miles from York and completely cut off from supplies.
Perhaps I exaggerate. No, they were not completely cut off, only in the sense that they were invisible to all intents and purposes, living in hiding in a deserted village between York and our old home town of Bridlington on the east coast. There, the North Sea hurls itself at the cliffs in easily provoked anger.
For several years, my perceptive partner, Prue Sanders, withheld all questions about my family and why I was cut adrift from them. When the time was ripe, she knew I would take her into my confidence. So it was after I had borne Jamie and gone into partnership with her, extending the shop to twice its size, that I felt she was owed some kind of explanation as to why a woman like me had had to look for work as a lowly seamstress in York.
She was not the kind of woman to express astonishment; it was as if she had already guessed parts of the story, reversals of fortune being no new thing in those uncertain war years. When I told her my father had been mayor of Bridlington, she simply nodded and carried on pinning a gathered skirt on to a bodice. ‘Mm…m. Wealthy?’ she mumbled, without looking up.
‘He was a merchant. A ship owner, and Customs Collector.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said in the kind of voice that expects the Customs Collector to be up to some shady business, as a matter of course. ‘Smuggling, was he?’
Her assumption was correct, of course, for every villager along the North Sea coastline had a hand in the ‘Free Trade’, and few could afford not to be involved in the carrying, the hiding, the converting of boats, the warning systems, not to mention the putting-up of money to buy the goods from northern France and Flanders. The new French aristocracy led European fashions, and all things French were much in demand, imports that were taxed so highly by the English government that smuggling became a kind of protest against the unaffordable import duties.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He got caught. Informed on by a so-called friend.’
‘Nothing new there, then,’ she said, pinning. ‘Good rewards.’
‘Yes, it was the Customs Controller who shopped him for half the value of the contraband and five hundred pounds extra. Father wouldn’t accept the man’s offer to marry me, so that was how he took his revenge.’
‘And did you want him?’
‘Lord, no, Prue. I was fourteen and he was thirty-something.’
‘So your father was arrested. He’d not be found guilty by a local jury. They never are.’ She was so matter of fact. So dispassionate.
‘No, but he used a firearm, Prue.’
The pinning stopped as she straightened up to look at me. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s serious. That’s a hanging offence. Confiscation of property. The works. Is that how you came to be…?’
I remembered those weeks when the world turned upside down for our family, how my father was dragged off by the local militia to the gaol at York. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘More or less. But