Low Treason

by Leonard Tourney

  He didn’t say a word at first. He just stood there gaping at her as though he had expected someone else to answer to the pebbles thrown against her upstairs window. But of course, she supposed, Tom wanted her husband.

  It was sometime after midnight, and there was a pale full moon hovering listlessly over the town like a thin gold dish flung upward and adrift on the wind. Joan was wearing her nightcap and her gown and was still half asleep. She flushed self-consciously at the thought of how she must appear to him. A haggard, forty-year-old woman in her bedclothes.

  But there was no time for her little vanities. Perceiving his distress, she ushered him through the dark shop, and then into her large kitchen and to the iron tub in which she bathed herself once a week—and more, if it was a holiday.

  She sat him down on a stool, knelt at the hearth, and in a moment the tinder was aglow, and a warm smoky smell filled the room. She lit a lamp and placed it on the table between them, and then she went back upstairs to waken Betty, who shortly thereafter came unsteadily, noisily down the stairs, her hands flat against her sides as though to hold her great girth in, complaining in broken sentences as she descended of the wretchedness of them who weren’t allowed to sleep a full night as God had ordained.

  When Betty saw the naked man hunched forward on the stool she emitted a little cry of alarm and stared at her mistress disapprovingly.

  “It’s Tom Ingram, William’s brother,” Joan hastened to explain. “He’s come home at last.”

  “And brought the barnyards of Essex with him,” Betty murmured, but loudly enough for her mistress to hear. Joan reproved her sharply, telling her to fetch water, buck-etsful, for the great tub and straightway.

  Ruffled by the reproof, Betty went reluctantly into the dark yard, continuing her complaint at a lower volume. She made several round trips, for it was a large tub, and when it was half filled Joan told her that would do and sent her galumphing off to bed again. Meanwhile Joan removed the water she had heated over the fire and poured it into the tub to mix with the cold. Then she tested the water with her finger, declared it suitable for bathing, and ordered Tom to remove what little he wore and wash himself while she went upstairs to fetch some suitable clothes. When she returned, Tom was in the tub, lathering. The noisome odor was gone, replaced by the scent of fresh herbs.

  The clothes were Matthew’s. They would not fit, she knew, but they would make Tom decent again, not a naked savage. He dried himself with a towel, mumbled thanks, and put on the clothes, a plain cotton shirt and loosefitting breeches that came down to his calves and gathered loosely at the waist. He appeared to be in a daze, looking

  about the kitchen as though he had never before seen such furniture: the great stone hearth, the long racks of iron pots and pans gleaming in the somber lamplight, the rows of pewter plate, the trencher table with its benches, the several stools, the samplers with their wisdom adorning the white-washed walls.

  She sensed him watching her while she cut the turkey cock into thin slices, laid butter to the bread, and poured the claret into a wooden bowl. The wine she watered, not wishing to see his torpor encouraged with drunkenness, and then she set it all upon the board and bid him eat to his heart’s content.

  This he did, and with a will, as though he had not eaten in a month. She watched with satisfaction and then noticed for the first time the ghastly wound at the hairline, a pale strip of raw swollen flesh. She wondered how he had come by it, if the blow had done violence to his brains. How relieved she was to find he could speak and was not like Israel Goodwin, who had fallen into a well and been rendered a simpleton as a consequence.

  When Tom had finished eating at last he looked up at : her gratefully. “God bless you, Mrs. Stock,” he said.

  “God be thanked you know me,” Joan replied. “I feared your wound had made you dumb.”

  “My wound?” he asked.

  “On your forehead.”

  “Oh,” he said, probing the wound with his finger. “It quite put me out of my memory—for a long time, I think. What day is it? What month?”

  “July,” she said. “The thirtieth day.”

  He shook his head in amazement.

  She asked him how he came by the wound.

  “I don’t remember,” he said.

  “What do you remember?”

  An expression of puzzlement fell upon his face, then cleared. He remembered. “I woke up, not an hour or so hence, and found myself bedded in filthy straw. I was in ; a wretched hovel. An old woman and her man snored in ' a comer. I didn’t know where I was or how I came to be there. I wore no clothes but a rag about my private parts,

  felt my chin to find it well beyond the beginnings of a beard, thought myself on the verge of death for want of a full stomach. My mouth was dry as dust. I searched about for my things, careful not to waken the old folks. I didn’t know who they were but thought they might cry out to someone who’d prevent me from leaving. I couldn’t find anything—no shirt or hose to cover my nakedness. The hovel had not a stool to sit upon, nothing but a dirt floor, and a solitary window covered with an old rag let in just enough moonlight for me to keep from stumbling over myself. Then I crept out into the night and looked about the hovel for most of an hour before heading off into the woods. Presently I came to Thompson’s Oak. I had climbed to the top of it as a boy—I and William. Then things began coming back to me. I knew where I was— not three miles from Chelmsford, and it came to me of a sudden where I should be bound.”

  ‘‘To your brother’s house,” she said.

  “To yours,” Tom said. “My business is with the constable.”

  “Well, he’s gone to London.”

  The boy’s face fell. “To London!” he exclaimed. “That’s a piece of ill luck.”

  “He went seeking you,” she explained.

  “I?” -

  “When you did not return, nor could be found in London. Your brother would have gone himself but we thought my husband could be better spared. Besides he knew the city, as William didn’t. ’ ’

  “How did you know I left the jeweler’s?”

  “Mr. Castell wrote to William. William showed his letter to us.”

  “What did Castell say—that I had filched some ring or bracelet?”

  “No, only that you had broken indentures and fled. He suggested you may have run away to sea.”

  “Run away, indeed!” he said, his eyes flashing with indignation. “Well may a wise man hightail it from the Devil and be called a runaway.”

  “God’s body!” she exclaimed wonderingly. “Then your master did abuse you.”

  “Yes, he abused me, and a good many others as well. The man is up to his elbows in vice and worse, were the truth racked out of him, and as it yet may be if your husband will aid me.”

  “Trust him to do so,” Joan replied earnestly. Then she urged him to tell his story, as much as he could remember, and he proceeded, beginning with his first employment at the jeweler’s, then his discovery of his employer’s wrongdoing—about which he first spoke very vaguely—and then about the two men in the woods and the merciless cudgel that had come near braining him.

  She listened, fascinated, but between his beating in the woods and his awakening a few hours earlier he could recall nothing.

  “They must have taken care of you—the old folks,” Joan ventured.

  Tom shrugged. “Maybe they found me as I found myself—filthy naked. Or maybe they made me so for what a shirt of good linen, a fair pair of hose, and a patched jerkin would bring at market. By the looks of his yard, the old man was a wood gatherer. Poor as a widow’s wen, I’d say, not a chicken nor dog to call his own. It was no trouble escaping them—they snored on most discordantly. I won’t be missed for another hour at least.”

  “You’ve been much in the sun,” she said.

  “Probably toting wood for the old man,” Tom said bitterly. “It’s not likely they would have fed me for charity’s sake.”

  Joan asked him to tell her mor
e about his employer. “This conversation you overheard. Its purpose, you say, was to blackmail the gentleman with some amorous discourse found in his purse.”

  “Stolen from his purse,” Tom corrected her.

  “Indeed, as you say. Letters, memoranda, notebooks, and the like. But how would he know which purse to pick? What if he were to find only money?”

  “He knows,” Tom replied confidently. “I reckon he first gets wind of some naughtiness from his gossips, then sets his toadies to harvest until he reaps just the right sort of confirmation. The day I interrupted his labors, Castell sat himself behind a grillwork, squat like a heathen idol, whispering through a long tube so as to distort his voice. The shop had been closed an hour earlier and all the servants and apprentices sent to bed. Castell thought he had the place to himself.”

  “How came you to be there?”

  “Marry, I had spent the day running my legs off for him, delivering goods and receiving payment. From one gentleman I had ten pounds sterling, and having come upon the donor late in the day and fearing to keep such a sum overnight, I thought I would secrete it in one of the cabinets.”

  “The cabinets were not all locked?”

  “Not all. I knew a hiding place. I thought I could retrieve the money the next day.”

  “What did you do when you returned to find the shop locked up for the night?”

  “I knew another entrance. I doubt that Castell himself knows of it. It was shown to me by my friend Ralph-some loose stonework around the foundation which a slender man can crawl through and from thence beneath the building and up by a trapdoor in one of the closets. This journey I made, the rats notwithstanding, had concealed the ten pounds, and was about to leave when I heard voices in the rear of the shop where there are several empty rooms. At first I thought to ignore the voices, but then my curiosity had the best of me. I tiptoed close, found a door ajar by an inch, and peered in.

  “There was Castell, behind the screen as I have said, his back to me. Beyond was someone, a gentleman, well dressed in black silk stockings and looking very dumpish, I warrant you. I listened for the gist of the talk, half guilty at putting my ear where it didn’t belong.”

  “That’s when you heard all of the blackmail.”

  “I heard enough. When the gentleman was led out, I betook myself straightway from the shop, waiting in the shadows to see who might emerge. Anon comes this gentleman, blindfolded now as in a child’s game, led by John

  Starkey, one of Castell’s toadies. Off the two go down the alley, Starkey in the lead. The alley’s pestilent dead after dark, being too narrow to receive coaches or carts and too dangerous for a man without twenty stout fellows to second his action, but I followed them to see the outcome.”

  “Which was?” Joan asked intently, now completely enthralled in his story.

  “They came presently to the back parts of a warehouse, in a neighboring street. Starkey had led the poor gentleman in circles—to make him think he had traveled a great distance. Then Starkey made off like a rabbit, leaving the poor gentleman standing there in the alley, his legs astraddle a puddle of horse piss, calling out, first in a thin piping girl’s voice to him who had deserted him, but now to no avail for he was as solitary as the nose upon your face. Soon he cries out more boldly, begins to curse, finally comes upon his manhood and rips the blindfold from his eyes. Then you should have heard the man! His words before were but a maid’s oaths. Now came the curses in torrents. He stamped upon the ground and reached for his sword, only to find it gone. More curses followed, then silence.”

  “Poor man. How did he fare thereafter?” Joan asked sympathetically, although she had been amused, too, by the colorful manner of Tom’s narration.

  “Marry, having no dog to kick, servant to beat, nor curses yet in his store, he stomped homeward straightway to nurse his much-abused pride.”

  “How was it you did not go up to him?”

  “Curiosity again, I think. I wanted to see what would happen next. Also I feared he might know me again when he saw me and tie me in somewhat with my master’s plot. I thought his wrath might fall upon me were I to have removed his blindfold.”

  “Doubtless it would have,” murmured Joan, reflecting now on the dangers of the city and beginning to worry about Matthew.

  “Wonder of wonders, two days thereafter I see my master conversing with this same unfortunate gentleman of whom I spoke, comes this very John Starkey whilst I am

  polishing some of the plate and inquires would I like to make something a little extra to bloat my purse. Bloat my purse, say I? Well may you ask, for my purse is a scrawny one and much in want of nourishment. Good, says Starkey. Then he leads me into one of the back rooms very privately and begins to praise my industry, my wit, my prospects—all very fulsomely. Indeed, he would have continued on to praise my points and garters had not the hour prevented him. All these, says he, my master has observed. Castell, he says, has been eager to advance my fortunes, but discreetly so as not to kindle the jealousy of the other apprentices.”

  ‘‘What did he want you to do?”

  “Well may you ask,” Tom replied ironically. “For it was to my task that all his compliments were an idle preface. He wanted me to turn cutpurse for the master.”

  “He said as much?” Joan exclaimed.

  “Not in those words, of course. I abbreviate them for the sake of time and honesty, for such was their sum. Starkey put it thus: The jeweler’s trade depends, said he, on a knowledge of the market, the market being the well-to-do, those with money in their pockets and lust, vanity, and folly in their hearts. By this he meant, I suppose, the comings and goings of the court and the circumstances of certain great ones in the city and so forth. Presently he made it very clear in his knavish way that intelligence was got by a kind of judicious pilferage of purses.”

  “Did he explain what Master Castell did with the intelligence so garnered?”

  “He was very woolly about that. He assured me all this went on with his master’s blessing, that certain purses were prized above others, and that he, his master’s agent in this side of the business, should direct my labors. First, however, I must learn the trade, which amounted to understanding just how to create a distraction in the street, to slip my hand most privily in and out, and where about my person to conceal the harvest.”

  “So you were to be put to school. What did you say to this Starkey?”

  “To go to the Devil, I told him,” Tom Ingram replied 123

  with a scowl. “My words he must have reported to Castell within the hour for afterward I had many frowns from the both of them. I had the message then. Though I am honest, yet I am no fool. That night I packed my belongings and was off to Chelmsford.”

  “To see my husband.”

  “I thought he could help me. Castell’s undertaking is no simple thievery.”

  “How so?”

  Thomas Ingram hesitated before responding, long enough to make Joan wonder if his memory were slipping again, but then he said solemnly, “Castell’s schemes touch upon matters of the Queen.”

  “Her Majesty!” Joan exclaimed.

  Tom Ingram nodded and bent forward conspiratorially in the lamplight. “This gentleman who came to my master’s was in exchange for some indiscreet letter to provide Castell with certain agenda of the Queen, where she might be in such and such an hour, who in attendance, who regularly admitted to her person, and so forth.”

  “But why should the jeweler be concerned with such matters?” she asked.

  Tom shrugged. “I don’t know—only that it’s very unlikely they are any of his business and he risks his life and fortune to know them.”

  “Why didn’t you go seek out the authorities in London? It would have saved you a journey and undoubtedly sped up the courses of the law.”

  “I didn’t know whom I could trust,” Tom said. “Castell has many friends. Besides, it would have been easy for him to deny everything, since I had no more evidence than a good memory and an h
onest nose for infamy. Well might he have charged me for the crime and then who would prefer my story—the story of an apprentice—to his? I would have ended my days in Newgate or been split up the middle by one of his ruffians.”

  “Would the jeweler go so far?”

  “Has he not tried to kill me?” Tom protested, pointing to his wound as evidence.

  She mulled over this story while Tom finished his meat, believing it all and fearing now very much for her husband. She knew Matthew was too good-hearted to see the other side of a politic smile, and if Tom’s description of his employer was accurate, this Castell could assume a pleasing shape.

  Somewhere in the neighborhood a cock crowed. It was dawning.

  “I must go,” he said, wiping his mouth and gulping the last of the claret.

  ‘‘To your brother’s?”

  ‘‘To London again, after the constable.”

  ‘‘Very foolish,” she cried with alarm, ‘‘given the danger to you there. Castell thinks you’re dead and rotting. You’re safe from him now and will remain so if you stay out of his way.”

  “But I can’t let Castell continue his—”

  It was a firm protest, but Joan interrupted, “No, cannot let him do so.” She laid her hand on his and looked at him with maternal authority. “Be ruled by me. I’ll go myself and convey to Matthew all that you have said. I will not be at risk—Castell does not know me. In the meanwhile, you go to your brother’s farm and keep your presence there confined to William, Elizabeth, and the few servants. Stay out of Chelmsford, for even here someone may carry to London the word that you live still.”

  Tom considered this advice, raised several more objections, but could not sustain them in face of Joan’s determination. Finally, he conceded. He would go to his brother’s, though it vexed him sorely to have to play the woman’s part when there was a man’s work to be done.

  “Woman’s part!” Joan cried with mock ferocity, for now that she had her will she was in good humor. “See you then how a woman does a man’s work, for if I am not gone for London by midmoming you may have my husband’s shop lock, stock, and barrel.”