As Meat Loves Salt. Maria McCann

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      Izzy took them and bent his head to the first one. ‘Of Kingly Power and Its Putting Down. Where had you these?’

      I snatched at another. ‘Of True Brotherhood – printed in London, look.’

      ‘Will it do?’ asked Peter. ‘And will you read it me?’

      ‘We shall all of us read it,’ Izzy promised.

      These writings became, in time, our principal diversion. After the first lot, they were brought after dark by ‘Pratt’s boy’, that same Christopher Walshe who later lay in the laundry, naked under a sheet.

      It was our pleasure on warm evenings sometimes to take our work outside, behind the stables where Godfrey never went, Zeb and Peter drinking off a pipe of tobacco as part of the treat. There we would read the pamphlets. Printed mostly in London, they spoke of the Rising of Christ and the establishment of the New Jerusalem whereby England would become a beacon to all nations.

      ‘A prophecy, listen.’ Zeb’s eyes shone. ‘The war is to end with the utter annihilation of Charles the Great Tyrant and the Papist serpent – that’s Henrietta Maria.’

      ‘I know without your telling,’ I said.

      ‘Measures are to be taken afterwards. In the day of triumph, er, O yes here ‘tis – The rich to be cast down and the poor exalted. Every man that has borne a sword for freedom to have a cottage and four acres, and to live free—’

      We all sighed.

      ‘There shall be no landless younger brothers, forced by the laws to turn to war for their fortunes, and no younger brothers in another sense neither, that is, no class of persons obliged to serve others merely to live.’

      ‘A noble project,’ said Peter.

      At that time these writings were the closest any of us came to the great doings elsewhere, for at Beaurepair things went on much as they always had, save that the Master and Mistress were by turns triumphant and cast down. We had escaped the curse of pillage and its more respectable but scarce less dreaded brother, free quarter: no soldiers were as yet come near us. Sir John was too fond of his comfort to equip and lead a force as some of the neighbours had done, so he neglected to apply for a commission and his men were kept at home, to pour his drink.

      In the reading of our pamphlets we servants were, for an hour or so, a little commonwealth. Though Peter and Patience could not read, the rest of us took turns aloud so that all might hear and understand the same matter at the same moment, and then fall to discussing it. Izzy had taught Caro her letters and she did her part very prettily, her low voice breathing a tenderness into every word she spoke. I would sit with my arm round her, warming to that voice and to the serious expression of her dark eyes as she, perhaps the least convinced of us all, denounced the Worship of Mammon.

      ‘So, Caro, the Golden Calf must be melted?’ Zeb teased her one time.

      ‘So the writer says,’ my love answered.

      ‘And the Roches levelled with the rest of us?’ he pressed. ‘What say you to that?’

      Caro returned stubbornly, ‘I say they are different one from another. The Mistress—’

      ‘The Mistress favours you, that’s certain,’ put in Patience, whose coarse skin was flushed from too much beer at supper.

      ‘And not unjustly,’ I said. ‘But what is favour,’ I asked Caro, ‘that you should take it from her hand? Why are not you rich, and doing favours to her? Surely God did not make you to pomade her hair.’

      ‘She deals kindly with me nonetheless,’ Caro retorted. ‘God will weigh us one by one at judgement, and she is clean different to Sir Bastard.’

      ‘That may be,’ I allowed, ‘but she trusts us no more than he does. Besides, we cannot put away one and not the other.’

      ‘If Mammon be pulled down,’ Izzy warned, ‘we must take care the true God be put in his place and not our own wanton desires – the God of simpleness, of truth in our speech and in our doings, the God of a brotherly bearing—’

      He paused, and I saw his difficulty. We Cullens were the only brothers present, and Zeb and myself were constantly at one another’s throats.

      

      The night before Patience ran off, we spoke long on a pamphlet circulated by some persons who farmed land together. Young Walshe had but just brought it, and having some time free he stopped on for the talk – ‘Mister Pratt knows where I am,’ said he – and sat himself down between Zeb and Peter to get a share of their pipe. I thought him overfamiliar, even unseemly, passing his arm around Zeb’s waist, but Zeb liked him well and on that night he sat with his arm round Walshe’s shoulders, and laughed when the lad’s attempts to smoke ended in coughing, though it was he that paid for the tobacco. Patience lolled against Zeb on the other side, and a man would be hard put to it to say which fawned on my brother more, herself or the boy.

      Our debate was not strictly out of the pamphlet, but grew out of something beside. The writers freely said of themselves that they shared goods and chattels, but it was rumoured of them that they had also their women in common and considered Christian marriage no better than slavery.

      ‘Does “women in common” mean that the woman can refuse no man?’ asked Patience, looking round at the men present. Except when she gazed on Zeb, her dismay was so evident that for a moment the talk was lost in laughter, not least at her sudden assumption of chastity. I laughed along with the rest, thinking meanwhile that she had nothing to fear from me. I took none of Zeb’s delight in women who fell over backwards if you so much as blew on them. In Caro I had settled on a virgin, and one whom I would not take to my bed until we had been betrothed.

      ‘Does it mean that men are held in common too?’ jested Izzy. ‘It seems to me that if no woman is bound to no man there can be no duty of obedience, and so a woman may as well court a man as a man a woman. So may the man refuse?’

      Peter considered. ‘Obliged to lie down with all the women!’

      ‘For the sake of the community,’ said Zeb with relish.

      ‘But whose would the children be?’ asked my darling.

      Zeb answered her, ‘The mother’s who had them.’

      ‘Fie, fie!’ I said. ‘The rights of a father cast away! Whoredom, pure and simple.’

      ‘Look here,’ urged Walshe. ‘It is set down, To be bound one to the other, is savagery.’

      There was a pause. Everyone, Walshe included, knew I was soon to be espoused to Caro.

      ‘Am I then a savage?’ I asked.

      ‘Jacob, it was not Chris that said it,’ replied Patience. ‘He put their case only.’

      The rest looked at me.

      ‘Am I—’

      ‘There would be incest,’ put in Izzy, laying his hand on my shoulder. ‘Jacob is right. Brother and sister, all unknowing.’

      ‘That happens now,’ said СКАЧАТЬ