The Penny Heart by Martine Bailey Read Free Book Online

Masters, and our fine English painters. His idol was the Italian engraver, Piranesi, and one evening, having just returned from the tavern, he beckoned me to look inside a vast leather binder. At first I saw only black cross-hatchings, then gradually pieced together gigantic dungeons strung with hanging stairways, coiling chains, and grotesque lightless lamps.
    ‘The famed Carceri ,’ he murmured. ‘The prisons of the mind that men try to impose upon us. A trap for our dreams. If we can only break out, child, the light is all about us.’
    I stared at the monstrous vision – more ghastly even than Beelzebub’s Castle in The Pilgrim’s Progress – of men dwarfed like ants on colossal stairs, of figures chained to walls beside spoke-wheeled apparatus. I backed away, but Father grasped my arm and said through beer-sour breath, ‘It is not a real prison. It is a fancy, a capriccio is the proper word.’ I took a step back to him and looked again. ‘A great artist has the courage to reveal the soul’s suffering. Not etch catch-penny advertisements, debasing everything he learned.’
    ‘The prisons of the mind,’ I repeated softly, and thought my father had spoken some great truth, but what it was I didn’t yet understand.
    Later I recalled his words, and those dungeons of forgotten captives. Sometimes, what we believe is trapped in the metal mirror can quicken and jump out from the frame; our dreams can bite back as savagely as any mythical Hydra. At times it is wise to feel fear.
     
    *
     
    By winter-time John Francis and I were sworn sweethearts, exchanging locks of hair, twisting together his fair strands with my darker brown. From John I learned our neighbours mistook my timid earnestness for pride, and envied my father’s wealth. Our talk turned to how men and women might live better lives, with dignity as man and wife. I suppose it was mostly youthful fervour, for we believed the world would soon be ours to inherit. Now I judge those innocent hours the happiest of my youth. But always there was the shadow circling above us, of discovery, and retribution at my father’s hand. These were the extent of my worries when I turned sixteen. All such innocence ended on the night of May the 5th, 1786.
     
    We were woken by a great hammering at the door long after midnight. Through the wall I heard the commands of strange men, and my father’s voice, at first angry, then high-pitched with alarm. He was arrested and taken to Lancaster jail, which made me at once recall the ink-black prints of the Carceri . There were no machines of torture at Lancaster, but it was wet and cold and crowded, and my father was thrown in a lock-up with scores of other wretches. By eavesdropping, I heard that Father had at last performed his act of courage. A riot had erupted in a nearby town, the poor whipped up by hunger to riot for bread. The signal for revolt had been the raising of a halfpenny loaf upon a stick, streaked with ochre and knotted with black crêpe, and the emblem: ‘Here Be Bleeding Famine Drest in Mourning Black’. Though the corn merchants were forced to lower their price, the leaders were arrested. Inflamed by their execution, Father printed a hundred penny pamphlets on the dangerous subject of Liberty. All Englishmen must rise at once, he proclaimed, to overthrow King and parliament.
    Poor Mother took to her bed and would not leave it, turning her face to the wall and refusing all food. Shame killed her faster than starvation. I was alone with her, holding her weightless hand as her spirit slipped gratefully from this world to the next. I kissed her dry lips, and, not knowing what else to do, cut a long tress of her thin grey hair. Later, I wove those strands into a crucifix, using bobbins and weights, as a lace-maker braids yarn. Set in silver like an amulet, that cross was most precious to me, keeping my mother’s presence close.
    Father was imprisoned for only ten weeks before a magistrate acquitted him. But in