A Book of Quaker Saints

by L. V. Hodgkin

At length one of the elder boys suggested 'My father's granary?' The very place!—they all agreed: so thither the little flock of children trooped. The granary was a large building of grey stone lighted only by two mullioned windows high up in the walls. In Queen Elizabeth's days these windows had lighted the small rooms of an upper storey, but now the dividing floor had been removed to make more room for the grain which lay piled up as high as the roof over more than half the building. But, at one end, there was an empty space on the floor, and here the children seated themselves on scattered bundles of hay.

Quietly Meeting began. At first some of the children peeped up at one another anxiously under their eyelids. It felt very strange somehow to be gathering together in silence alone without any grown-up people. Were they really doing right? Dorcas' heart began to beat rather nervously, and a hot flush dyed her cheek, until she looked across at Hester sitting opposite, and was calmed by the peaceful expression of the elder girl's face. Hester's hood had fallen back upon her shoulders. Her fair hair, slightly ruffled, shone like a halo of pale gold against the grey stone wall of the granary. Her blue eyes were looking up, up at the blue sky, far away beyond the high window.

'Hester looks happy, almost as if she were listening to something,' Dorcas said to herself, 'something that comforts her although we are all sad.' Then, settling herself cosily down into the hay, 'Now I will try to listen for comfort too.'

A few moments later the silence was broken by a half-whispered prayer from a dark corner of the granary, 'Our dear, dear parents! help them to be brave and faithful, and make us all brave and faithful too.'

None of the boys and girls looked round to see who had spoken, for the words seemed to come from the deepest place in their own hearts.

Swiftly and speedily the children's prayer was answered. Help was given to them, but they needed every scrap of their courage and faith during the next half-hour. Almost before the last words of the prayer died away, a loud noise was heard and the tramp of heavy feet coming round the granary wall. The officers of the law were upon them: 'What, yet another conventicle of these pestilential heretics to be broken up?' shouted a wrathful voice. The next moment the door was roughly burst open, and in the doorway appeared a much dreaded figure, no less a person than Sir William Armorer himself, Justice of the Peace and Equerry to the King. None of the children had any very clear idea as to the meaning of that word 'equerry'; therefore it always filled them with a vague terror of unknown possibilities. In after years, whenever they heard it they saw again an angry man with a florid face, dressed in a suit of apple-green satin slashed with gold, standing in a doorway and wrathfully shaking a loaded cane over their heads.

'Yet more of ye itching to be laid by the ears in gaol!' shouted this apparition as he entered and slammed the heavy wooden door behind him. But an expression of amazement followed when he was once inside the room.

'Brats! By my life! Quaker brats! and none beside them!' he exclaimed astonished, as he looked round the band of children. 'Quaker brats holding a conventicle of their own, as if they were grown men and women! Having stopped the earth and gaoled the fox, must we now deal with the litter? Look you here, do you want a closer acquaintance with this?'

With these words, he pointed his loaded stick at each of the children in turn and drew out a sharp iron point concealed in one end of it, and began to slash the air. Then, changing his mind again, he went back to the door and called out to his followers in the passage outside, 'Here, men, we will let the maidens go, but you must teach these lads what it is to disobey the law, or I'm no Justice of His Majesty's Peace.'

Even in that moment of terror the children wondered not only at the loud angry voice but at the unfamiliar scent that filled the room. The air, which had been pure and fragrant with the smell of hay, was now heavy and loaded with essences and perfumes. Well it might be, for though the children knew it not, the flowing lovelocks of the curly wig that descended to the Justice's shoulders had been scented that very morning with odours of ambergris, musk, and violet, orris root, orange flowers, and jessamine, as well as others besides. The stronger scents of kennel and stable, and even of ale and beer, that filled the room as the constables trooped into it were almost a relief to the children, because they at least were familiar, and unlike the other strange, sickly fragrance.