“Well, what think you?” she began, before her greetings were well over; for Mistress Abbott was a genuine Athenian, who spent all her leisure hours, and some hours when she should not have been at leisure, in first gathering information, and then retailing it, not having any special care to ascertain its accuracy. “Well, what think you? Here be three of our neighbours to be presented by the street wardens—Lewce, the baker, for that they cannot keep his pigs out of the King’s Street; Joan Cotton the silkwoman as a sower of strife amongst her neighbours; and Adrian Sewell for unlawfully following the trade of a tailor.”
“Why, that is thy tailor, Aubrey!” exclaimed Aunt Temperance. “I trust thou art not deep in his books?”
“Never a whit, Aunt; I owe him ne’er a penny,” said Aubrey, flushing, and not adding that Mr William Patrick’s books were separate volumes, nor that those of Nathan Cohen, in Knightriders’ Street, were not entirely guiltless of his name.
“Ay, that’s the way,” said Mrs Abbott, nodding her head. “Pay as you go, and keep from small scores. Truly I would, Mr Louvaine, our Stephen were as wise as you. Such a bill as came in this week past from a silkman in Paternoster Row! White satin collars at eight and ten shillings the piece, and a doublet of the same at two pound; curled feathers, and velvet doublets, and perfumed gloves at twenty pence or more. His father’s in a heavy taking, I can tell you, and saith he shall be ruined. Look you, we’ve four lads, and here’s Stephen a-going this path—and if Seth and Caleb and Ben just go along after Stephen, it’ll be a fine kettle o’ fish, I can tell you. Oh dear, but you’ve a deal to be thankful for, and only one to trouble you! The bicker those lads do make!”
“We have all something wherefore we may be thankful, friend,” said Lady Louvaine gently, when Mrs Abbott stopped to breathe.
“Well, then, there’s the maids—Mall, and Silence, and Prissy, and Dorcas, and Hester—and I can promise you, they make such a racket amongst ’em, I’m very nigh worn to a shadow.”
Aubrey and Lettice were giving funny glances at each other, and doing their utmost not to disgrace the family by laughing. If Mrs Abbott were worn to a shadow, shadows were very portly and substantial articles.
“I declare, that Prissy! she’s such a rattle as never you saw! no getting a word in for her. I tell her many a time, I wonder her tongue does not ache, such a chatterbox as she is. I’m no talker, you see; nobody can say such a thing of me, but as to her—”
A curious sound in Aubrey’s direction was rapidly followed by a cough.
“Eh now, don’t you say you’ve a spring cough!” ejaculated Mrs Abbott, turning her artillery on that young gentleman. “Horehound, and mallow, and coltsfoot, they’re the best herbs; and put honey to ’em, and take it fasting of a morrow. There be that saith this new stuff of late come up—tobago, or what they call it—my husband says he never heard of aught with so many names. Talking o’ names, have you seen that young maid, daughter of the baker new set up at back here? Whatever on earth possessed him to call her Penelope? Dear heart, but they say there’s a jolly brunt betwixt my Lord Rich and his Lady—she that was my Lady Penelope Devereux, you know. My Lord he is a great Puritan, and a favourer of that way; and my Lady, she likes a pretty gown and a gay dance as well as e’er a one; so the wars have fallen out betwixt ’em—”