The Isle Men
The Isle Men
“Sam?” Susanna snuggled closer and listened for signs of restlessness in the black night beyond their bed. Three children slept in this room with Sam and Susanna. All quiet. All asleep.
A gentle arm slipped across her shoulders. “Mmm?”
“I think perhaps I’m pregnant again.”
“Boy this time?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
The arm gave an affectionate squeeze. “I look forward to the house getting finished and children sleeping in their own rooms again. Did you talk to the carpenters today?”
“They tell me repairs will be complete by Christmas.”
“They said the house would be done by All Hallows, too.”
“I believe them this time. They’re as anxious to finish as we are. The isle men are giving them grief for working for us. Sam? Do you suppose those ruffians set the fire?”
“Quite possibly.” He was looking at her through the blackness. “I thought it was the finger of God.”
“Someone mortal had to throw the faggot. Don’t tease me. We promised mutually not to mention that episode, remember?”
He drew in close again. “Think we’ll ever be able to get rid of the burnt smell?”
“I doubt it. I almost wish the place had burned to the ground, except for our books and papers. Then at least we’d start with the smell of fresh wood instead of stale smoke and char.”
“I’ve learned from this,” Sam said. “I think now I can accept better where I’m put; no matter where that might be. God placed me here, so here I am. I had trouble with that simple bit; always wanted to be elsewhere. I believe maybe now I can even put up with your constant, infernal sense of order and routine.”
Christmastide passed, and the house finally stood more or less completed. New-hewn timbers and fresh clay plaster hardly masked the odor of fire that pervaded and remained. Eleven months after the fire, when the baby arrived, that odor still came sneaking out from odd corners of the house now and then to remind her of the horror of that night.
The baby was a boy, and he quickly received a pet name, as had each of the other children. Mary was Molly around the house and Samuel Junior just plain Sammy. Little Susanna was Sukey as Susanna herself had been, and Hetty flowed naturally from Mehetabel. Anne had become Nancy. This one would be John Benjamin Wesley, Susanna’s only child with a middle name, the John and the Benjamin names of babies that had not survived. The world at large could address her new boy properly as John, but to her he was Jackie.
Early the following spring, as Jackie was just beginning to crawl, Sam planted flax over much of the glebe. With uncharacteristic interest in farming, Sam quizzed the neighbors about flax growing. For the first time in years Susanna saw in him a renewal of interest in the rectory itself and its lands. Good. If this flax crop brought them closer to freedom from debt, perhaps Sam would feel less restless, less inclined to go roaming in Lincoln and London.
The summer deteriorated as petty politics again tore the isolated community apart. Susanna was beginning to become impatient with the nonsense. Were they arguing politics on a national level, or considering problems of pan-European import, she might see their zeal. Pettiness, however, irritated her. It was disorderly for no reason. Irrationality, though, did not make the local situation any less dangerous.
With his usual enthusiasm Sam had hired a tutor for Sammy, and with equal enthusiasm he booted the fellow out when the man’s predilection for wine and spirits surfaced. The boy was fourteen now. Susanna had schooled him well in all she knew, and Sam had taught him languages. He was ready to go on, one way or another. The tutoring had fallen through; the other way was school in Westminster.
Susanna committed the boy to God’s care, in whose care he had been all along anyway, made him an extra shirt, and sent him off. Her firstborn was still fresh from the cradle, nowise big enough to go off on his own to London. The thought depressed her for weeks.
With the heat of August, tempers quickened and the flax ripened, pretty much simultaneously. “The fibers are at their best,” Sam announced, “when the seeds are just starting to swell. We must watch for the first pods to begin turning yellow.”
Hetty and Molly, seven and eight now, took it upon themselves to check the flax. Susanna received daily reports. Sam received daily reports, too, on the grumbles and threats of his enemies, the isle men. “And why not? We ourselves are an island of Tories in a restless ocean of Whigs,” he would muse, and shrug it off. Susanna was not so certain the situation was shruggable.
Should Sam scythe his flax down or pull it? Pull it, said the neighbors; more fiber of better quality. When should he pull it? On the morrow, said the neighbors.
That night as Susanna was passing Emilia’s open door she saw a soft yellow glow from the window beyond. She ran to the window. “Sam!” she shrieked. “The glebe!”
From his study downstairs Sam heard. From abed the children heard, for little feet came running together with the big ones.
Susanna jogged downstairs, ran out the garden door, and raced down the carriage lane past the barn.
In the darkness at the far end of the field, down in the corner by the glen, bright orange flame boiled up through clouds of smoke tinted glowing yellow. Here came neighbors from all sides with brooms and blankets. A dozen men and women began beating at the edges of the blaze, anxious that it might spread to their own flax and hay.
A stiff breeze was dragging the fire this way, straight across the flax field. Susanna snatched Emilia’s counterpane off the clothesline and ran out across the field barefoot. The barn, with her cows and pig and chickens—it mustn’t reach the barn!
The flax was nearly four feet tall out here—almost armpit high on Susanna. Weeds and flax stems bound her ankles and caught in her toes, slowing her to a ragged walk. Acrid smoke rolled ahead of the flames. Suddenly she could neither breathe nor see. Blindly, wildly, she flailed with the counterpane at the crackling noise in front of her. She tried to back up and tangled in the unwieldy snarl of stalks. She turned and fled from the smoke.
Men with shoes were trampling a fireline down beyond the blaze. Susanna fell back to the line and began ripping flax stalks away from the fireline, widening it, putting loose dirt between flame and fuel. Over there the fire jumped the line. With much shouting two men stomped a new line.
It was getting darker. Susanna realized gradually that the fire was smaller. Black gaps in the angry yellow wall yawned wider and wider. Here came Clyde Willis with his yoke of oxen dragging a log or beam of some sort. He drove them out along the jagged line where flame ended and green began. Little puddles of light here and there snuffed out beneath his drag.
And then, almost as an afterthought, the world grew quiet; no shouts and cries, no crackling flame, no thrashing and crashing. One of the oxen lowed a request to go home. Silent people stood about in the darkness. It seemed hard to understand, after the wild and frantic fight, that it was over.
They had won, but only barely. Susanna stood less than twenty feet from her barn.
When Susanna woke next morning before dawn, Sam was already gone from bed. She didn’t bother with her hair. She pulled on an old dress and hurried downstairs. Her feet hurt, and no wonder. A dozen cuts and scuffs on them reminded her she had gone running through the field barefoot. She was barefoot now.
She left the house through the garden door. The sky was in its usual state—overcast and murky. She paused by the barn, searching. There stood Sam in the midst of the destruction, his whole body drooping in a dejected slouch. Most of his field had burned flat and black. Stinking curls of smoke still lifted off the smoldering ruin here and there. The plants that had not burned lay trampled and bruised.
Sam watched her come wading through crushed flax. She stumbled in beside him, and he put a brawny arm around her.
“So,” he purred, “we’re no worse off than we were when the field lay fallow.”
“And no better. This was going to ease our debt. It could have helped us greatly.” Her eyes burned—and not from smoke. “The fire in the house might have been an accident, but this can’t possibly be. You know the magistrates won’t look very deeply into the matter; they’re the staunchest of Whigs.”
“‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord. ‘I shall repay.’ Don’t you think about helping Him.”
She snorted. “I wouldn’t mind being His willing tool.”
North wind and harvest together with autumn rain dampened the heat of political acrimony. Susanna looked forward to a quiet winter.
It stayed quiet only until the approach of elections in 1705. Then the isle men and the moderates and the few Tories, Sam among them, had at it anew. As the grass sprouted green, angry voices took up again the arguments muted by the winter. Factions divided so severely that people stood in political clusters around the maypole on May Day.
The second week of May Susanna gave birth to her sixteenth baby. Maybe Mrs. Whipple the health sage was right; twenty-three months separated Jackie’s birth and this child’s, and both the infant and Susanna came through the ordeal well. Susanna would employ an extra nurse for the first few months: for although she was not prostrated she was very weak, but she felt better this time than she had with some. Perhaps the Lord wouldn’t take this baby away so soon.
Elections were scheduled for the thirtieth of the month, and they couldn’t come a moment too soon for Susanna. She was heartily sick of all the fuss. Some of the more voluble isle men even shouted threats at her children playing in the rectory yard.
Tuesday evening the twenty-ninth Sam left for a meeting in Lincoln. Susanna hated to see him go. Still, election day was an extremely sensitive time for a Tory to go walking in this dark Whig forest. With Sam the irritant gone, perhaps the isle men and their ilk would forget about pestering the rectory.
They didn’t. Most of election eve, clear into the wee hours, they gathered outside the rectory close to the bedroom window and made noise. Hideous noise, constant noise—they fired muskets, beat on tin pans and drums, and described loudly and graphically their opinion of people who support a heartless monarch.
Susanna sent the maid out to tell them Sam wasn’t home, but either they didn’t believe her or Susanna, too, was an object of hatred and ridicule.
With every gunshot the baby jerked. Three-year-old Nancy crept, sobbing, into bed with Susanna. In consternation Susanna sent Nancy to Emilia’s bed and asked the new nurse to take the baby to her house for the balance of the night. The poor little thing was a nervous wreck at only three weeks of age. Then Susanna buried herself in goose down and counterpanes and tried to rest.
When did the rascals finally quit? Susanna didn’t know. The only noise-makers outside her window now were the robins, hedge sparrows, and linnets tuning up for their dawn concert. She heard a muffled cry from somewhere downstairs. No matter; let the regular maid handle it. Susanna drifted away again, floating warm and free in that comfortable world between deep sleep and the full awakening of morning.
Someone stood near her bed snuffling. Susanna tried to force herself closer to wakefulness. Her body chided her and refused to arouse itself.
“Mum—?” the maid’s voice cracked.
“Mmph. What?”
“The babe, mum—”
“Can’t you handle it?”
“Please, mum.” The maid sobbed.
Susanna arched around stiffly and pulled her body up. The maid plopped a dead weight in her lap and literally ran from the room.
What did they have wrapped in the baby’s blanket that they would—?
Susanna screamed even though her mind refused to take in what she saw. Her whole being was disjointed, each member acting independently, none of her faculties really admitting that the bundle in her lap was what it was—her baby. Dead.
She screeched out the maid’s name.
The terrified woman hovered in the doorway. “Mum—?” She sobbed again, and her face was wet. “The woman—the nursemaid, mum. Them political freaks last night was so loud so long, mum, that she got over-tired. ‘Tis their fault, mum, and none of hers, that she slept too hard. She laid on the baby she says, mum, had it in her bed with her as y’d do with a newborn, and she laid on it and snuffed it. Oh, mum! Hit wasn’t meant.”
Susanna heard herself send the woman away. She wrapped her arms around her newborn and cradled it, rocked it, hugged it. By slow and painful degrees her head, and then her heart, accepted what had happened.
By evening she had gathered her wits sufficiently to arrange the infant’s burial.
They probably had fired her house. They most definitely had torched Sam’s flax. And now—the maid was right—they were responsible for her baby’s death. Ghastly wretches, repugnant in God’s eyes and hers. Politics! How she hated politics. To cause such heavy sorrow and loss—
What more could those isle men do to her beleaguered family?
A few weeks later they got Sam arrested and sent to debtors’ prison.