Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (286 page)

CHAPTER V
.

IT was, nevertheless, some six hours before the new warrants came from Udimore; in all that time the Pastor’s house remained dark and silent; the shutters to, the cold wind sweeping in the narrow ways between cottage and cottage. They stood so close together and the thatches were so broad that the eaves almost touched, and, for a matter of fifty houses on each side of the narrow street, there was an almost continuous mass of little roofs showing black against the starlight of the blue heavens. The three soldiers hid themselves by turns in the black channels between the Pastor’s wall and the wall of his neighbour; from time to time the officer walked down from the lighted gateway that, high and massive, towered an indistinct mass upwards to be lost in the night. From time to time, too, a window would open and a Dutch head peer forth; it would not be easily that the soldiers would attack the door of their Pastor. They had, too, by that date, many English converts in the town and countryside, and if these all paid taxes and lived quietly, they were not ready to see the officers of the law come amongst them — for already it was rumoured that this first James of England was ready to press hardly upon all that were not of the Church of England, and already — though it was ten or a dozen years before the first of them began to gird up their loins — already there were some Puritans who talked of a New World where they might worship as they would and constrain all and sundry so to worship. And, these Dutchmen and the Englishmen they had infected, being a suspicious and a crafty folk, they were ready to believe that the officer’s avowed intention to await warrants might be no more than a stratagem to have them out of the way so as, with axes, to assault the Pastor’s door. Thus, in the lighted cottages, they sat in their black cloaks, drinking Dutch cordials, reading Bibles in High and Low Dutch, discussing points of regeneration and rebirth, or talking of the days when the Duke of Alva had harried their fathers with flame and blood throughout the Netherlands. There was amongst them, all of the seven sects, a common uneasiness that kept them wakeful; the days of Elizabeth had been tranquil with them; but who could tell that the Stuart kings were not a rebirth of Charles and Philip that they had fled from? Who could tell that these soldiers who had come among them, avowedly to search for a prisoner, were not actually the first-comers of days of a new tribulation?

It was, however, one of the clock before, amid all this watchfulness, the officer issued from the gateway, having in his hand the new warrants that, in Udimore, had been granted only with difficulty and after much wrangling between the Lord Lieutenant on the one hand and the Warden and the angry barons upon the other. There had been turmoil in Rye town when the barons had come back; nevertheless most of the townsmen were by now abed, but the officer had with him a half-dozen Rye men who walked with him to observe his acts. He kept his head cool, for, in the main, he favoured the townsmen; but he had his warrants and he must execute them, for from Anne Jeal — who had sat talking to him an hour, seeking to get him to set flames to the Pastor’s roof — he knew that Edward Colman was in the upper part of the Pastor’s house; that he had not come out he was certain, for there was no backway; there was no issue save only the door and the loft door above from which, with his pulley, the Pastor was wont to let down or to hoist up bales of flax or of wool. He had marked this loft door very carefully, and remembered to keep it in his mind.

As he went down the street in the mud, doors opened and light shone out from the doorways; there issued forth many men in black cloaks with high-crowned hats; they stepped sedately into the streets, and many of them had cudgels beneath their cloaks. He noted this with satisfaction — for what could be more satisfactory than to have his prisoner taken from him by great forces, once he had been warrantably arrested?

Thus there was some crowd in the street before he came to the Pastor’s dark house. He had to call out very loudly before he could make his voice heard among all these black forms —

“Ho there! Stand back. Keep a silence. Observe the King’s peace!”

Then he knocked with his sword-hilt upon the Pastor’s door; he stood back again to keep his eye upon the loft. At his second knocking the Pastor came to the window, and from the black space his voice said —

“Man of wrath, have you your warrants?”

“Aye, Knipperdolling,” the officer said, and passed them through the window; the Pastor disappeared; they saw a faint glow of light in the cottage, it faded; the Pastor returned to the window.

“Wait; I will open,” he said curtly.

The officer stood back again.

He bade three of his men be well in the roadway with their eyes upon the loft; the other one he bade enter at his back, and he drew his sword.

“I am full certain,” he said to one of the townsmen at his side, “that your friend will spring from up there down into the street. But I am too old a bird to be taken with that chaff.”

The door opened before him, and there was a space of blackness; he entered in, and he heard the Pastor’s voice —

“Have a care that you defile not the house of the Lord with oaths!”

He answered good-humouredly —

“Make a light, Pastor.”

And the Pastor’s voice came expressionlessly—”Have you a warrant that I should make a light?”

The officer shrugged his shoulders; he had nothing better to await than this. But the light from the cottage window opposite made a faint glow in the large room, and so polished was the wood of all the chests round the wall that he could see all light save the open door of the hind house and the shadow of the ingle. He set his man to blow the coals in the fire and satisfied himself that no man sat there. He took a lighting stick from his belt, a thin splinter of pine wood, and with it in his hand adventured himself in the hind house; he was a very bold man and trusted his sword. He found little closets and then a stairway that ended at a trap-hatch, and the board was down. The voices of the crowd in the street sounded like a pleasant babble.

He knocked upon the trap-hatch with his sword-hilt; he set his head against it and lifted it; a strong gust came down and blew out the lighting stick.

He said, “H’m; a window is open there!” And, at the same moment, he heard a sudden, loud, urgent wail and the cry of many voices. His man in the room below cried out —

“Ho, captain; the fox bolts from above our heads; come quickly!” and he fell down the stairs in his haste.

There had been such a babble of voices in the street that no man had heard the bolts of the loft door drawn back; they were only aware that the door was open when they saw its motion, as it swung back, against the sky, beside the mass of the gable. And then, without doubt, against the sky was a hat of a man who clambered cautiously on the thatch. The great shout went up then, and all the faces were turned skywards. The black mass crept along the roof; it went fast; it came down the house ends between the houses; but when the officer ran into the alley to take his man, it sprang across the little space between the thatches, that was no more than a foot, and began to climb the next roof. Men held their breaths.

A soldier cried out —

“Climb the roof and take him!” But a townsman said —

“Fool; he has thatching irons on his ankles; you could never climb there.”

And a voice cried out in Dutch —

“Go round behind the thatch, Edward Colman; drop in Cat’s garden, where there is no gate to the wall.”

The officer shrugged his shoulders —

“I have the man now,” he said to his friendly townsman; “this is a fool’s trick; he may run along a roof but we are faster on the ground.”

The figure, as if it had caught the advice, disappeared behind the roof-ridge; the officer went through the alley-way to the back, and breaking down a fence, waited and followed; the crowd crushed into the alley and followed; the Pastor’s door was left deserted and open. The Pastor himself came out, followed by his deacon, and, leaving his door open, after he had coughed methodically, he waddled slowly down the street. He waited by about the seventh door down — the house of Pitmsovn der Tessel — and presently the crowd came out of the alley in ones and twos. The officer, following the fugitive, had climbed the wall of Mynheer Cat’s garden; the figure must perforce keep on its way along the roof.

The crowd paused to surround the Pastor.

“What will he do?” they said; “what will he do?” For they half believed that their Pastor, who had studied alchemy in the interests of the Church, had a gift of wings or of invisibility. The Pastor, however, let nothing escape from his lips but the smoke of his pipe. “Surely you have help for him,” they said.

He answered to that —

“Is he of the congregation? What is he to me?”

“Pastor,” a man said in Dutch, “he has worked against this accursed King that with his temporal power will oppress us.”

The Pastor smoked his pipe.

“Stand back,” he said; “the men of wrath approach. Do not hinder them, for the day is not yet.”

“Accursed Knipperdolling,” a townsman said; “is this how you repay us that have sheltered you?”

The Pastor answered only —

“Stand back and spare your breaths. This is your law, not one of the Saints’.”

The soldiers came one by one from the nearest alley; the figure appeared on the roof line and sat astride, gasping for breath. Between this house and the next was a matter of two yards and more where a streamlet ran across the roadway.

“Aye, he is done now,” the officer said. “He can never jump that.”

A great groan went up from the crowd; the dark figure on the roof was descending slowly; it climbed down cautiously; it hung by its hands, wavered and was in the mud. The officer held his man by the shoulder; the soldiers drew their swords and held the crowd off. He called—”Silence, that I read the warrant.”

The Dutchmen were not set, without word from their Pastor, to make a rescue; the townsmen were too few, and the officer sighed with satisfaction.

The prisoner made no move; the officer held the warrant to the window of Van der Tessel’s cottage, where there was light enough to read by. But as his voice began to sound the Pastor waddled towards him.

“Man of wrath,” he said, “where is your warrant?”

“Old Jan o’ Leyden,” the officer said, “you have seen it once.”

“I have seen no warrant to take my daughter, Magdalena,” the Pastor answered. “Take heed how you lay hands upon one of the elect. For by the Statute of Queen Elizabeth—”

CHAPTER VI
.

IT may stand as a record of the seriousness with which the town of Rye viewed this attempt to take one of its barons that, at a quarter to one, when Edward Colman climbed over the town wall, a little to westward of the gateway, he should find not only the Corporation sitting in the Court Hall, but that several of the barons — four at least of Rye and two of Winchelsea — quite sober. He had come very silently out of the Pastor’s door, unseen by any of the crowd, who were all down the street, between the cottages, and, setting his toes between crevices of the stones, and catching his fingers in to the roots of the ivy and the wallflowers, he had climbed up the wallside, stepped along the passage way on the wall top, and come down by one or two projecting stones into the little street that was between the old monastery wall and the wall of the town. It was quite still there, and in the darkness he paused to listen, to take thought, and to brush from his knees and elbows the invisible clots of dirt.

It was all so dark and silent in the little town, roofs, walls, and windows seemed all so fast asleep, that he was afraid to venture on any knocking; he was afraid, because it seemed to him that any knocking noise must he heard to the very top of the church steeple and to the furthest limits of the quays. He was accustomed to act swiftly and with a good humour; he could still even smile at the way he had come off; he could smile more tenderly at the thought of Magdalena — and wasn’t she his wife now? — making her way over the roof tops, sedately and capably. She was always, and would always be, sedate and capable. But for the rest, it was all doubtful. They had debated the matter in the Pastor’s loft up above; but they had been so shut in and alone that they had had no news of what had passed in the town. They could not, either of them, imagine or conceive that the inviolability of a Cinque Port should have been trespassed upon; they could not, that is to say, imagine that the Lord Lieutenant could have ventured to send soldiers into Rye town itself. Custom forbade it, the law of the realm, privilege, the baronial standing. The King himself would not have the right. And, if he were young and good-humouredly sceptical, he still had, all his life, so relied upon his privileges as a Free Man of this realm of the Five Ports — this realm, whose origins were hidden in the black night of antiquity, but whose rights had never been challenged by the mightiest of kings — he was so accustomed to being immune from pains, penalties, and taxes, that he had not well been able to make himself believe that he could be taken in the town of Rye. It was bad enough that they had made an attack upon him so near home; but the Pastor’s house
was
outside the walls; it could be humorously acknowledged that the King was within the letter of the law, and in those days all men, and Edward Colman among them, loved chicanery, sanctuary, and all the differences of life that had come down to them from former days.

But if he could not believe that the Lord Lieutenant would dare to send soldiers into Rye town, nevertheless, that part of him that was modern, humorous, and sceptical allowed him to see that a foreign Lord Lieutenant, with strong powers behind him, might well disregard the rights of a little and nearly powerless, but very ancient, nest of dwellings. New days had come in, a year or two before, with the death of Eliza; the newness might well begin to touch Rye town. English kings had had cause to be grateful to the Ports. A Scots king had none, and there would be really little cause for surprise if there should prove to be soldiers in his house, ready to take him when he came home. It was not probable; but some likelihood there was.

He must, then, find in the streets a friend who could inspect and take cognisance of his house. But it was one o’clock; folk went to bed at nightfall, to save candles.

He slipped out from between the wall of the monastery and the wall of the town; he found himself in Friars Alley, that ran steeply down between dark, small, thatched buildings. But they were all black; there was no light; there was no sound. In the main street, along the hill, there were also no lights and no sounds; the houses towered very high, their tops loomed ever above him, and from above came the croak of a heron flying out from the heronry at Brede. The cobbles resounded beneath his feet, with little metallic echoes, along the housefronts; he stepped into the kennel, where it was all mud and soundless walking. He discovered that, having thus once escaped capture, he was more intent on further escape than he would before have believed; his heart beat fast.

He went up West Street, where, between the smaller houses, the steep gutter still ran like a river after the fortnight of rain that they had had. Here there were smaller houses and one or two inns; but there were no lights and no sounds. In the butchers’ street, that ran aslant across the top, there was, against the laws of the town, a sheep’s carcase before a door, and he started when a dog growled beside it. The stars shone down, but there was no other light. As he came into the great square round the church the quarter-boys struck the half-hour.

“Assuredly,” he said, “Rye town is no place to revel late in.” It displeased him, though before he had been well content with the ways of the town. Around the great church were many little, old, dark houses, with pinnacles and tiny doors, that before had sheltered many priests, with their dark ways. Here he saw one little light, high up, and faint. But he shrugged his shoulders. It was the window of the widow Belise, an old culler of simples, a woman reputed to be a white witch, but one who was notoriously bedridden, and likely to be of no use to him. On the east of the ghostly church was his own house and the houses of many of his friends; all dark and silent. He did not approach them, fearing a trap, but slipped, silent, foxlike, and still laughing a little, beneath the flying buttresses of the dark church. He did not like churchyards at night, and he started very much when, between the buttresses, he came upon a black mass, that might be a figure of a woman or of a beast. He started back, and then advanced; the figure remained without motion.

“Ho I Who be you?” he said.

It took three questions from him, and he had crossed himself three times, before the figure mumbled that she was the widow Belise.

“Ho!” he said, and felt a great contentment because this was no vampire nor black ghost. “You gather simples! It is forbidden of the law.”

“Edward Colman,” it answered, “I gather no simples. I watch round the corner.”

He took her by the hands, which she offered him; she had in them neither plants, nor trowels, nor baskets, and it pleased him, because he was never one to love troubling old women said to be witches, though that the law demanded.

“How could I see to gather simples in this blackness?” The shrill whispering sounded like the clitter of a bat’s voice.

“What do you?” he asked again; and she uttered, with an intense whisper —

“I watch windows. I am a wise woman; it is my place to know.”

“Why,” Edward Colman said, “you tell fortunes by watching at windows; and what you learn by the keyhole you read for the foolish in weevilly nuts. It is a very base practice.”

Having before surrendered her hand to his magistrate’s search, she now caught hold of his arm; she whispered —

“Edward Colman, if I read fortunes for the foolish, this fortune I read for you, who are middling wise, from the stars and what I have in my head, and know of assured truths: Anne Jeal will have your life!”

He answered —

“Why, she would if she could; that I know without divination, or the stars, or listening at keyholes!”

“Aye,” the old woman said; “you may fight her in temporal matters with temporal things; you are as good as her there, or may be better. But” — and her voice sank—”I am a white witch; you have heard it said. I cure where others have made ill; I warn where others seek to render mad by evil counsels. I am against Anne Jeal, as white is against black. Nevertheless,” and she paused, as if she were weary, “evil is always stronger than good in this earth. Anne Jeal may pray a man to death; there are Saracen prayers; Anne Jeal may sweat before a fire the waxen dummy of a man—”

Edward Colman set back his head and smiled noiselessly; the buttresses went, inky, and as if of a fluid black, over their heads below the clusters of stars, that were like bees together.

“You are a good old woman,” he said aloud. “Why, put your head round this stone,” she said, “and see!”

Edward Colman put his head round the corner of the wall buttress, and he was aware that the windows of the Court Hall were lighted. It stood higher than the church, but close to it and up against the bank; and, leaning to the east window, her body drawn back into the shadow, was a woman’s small form. Seven windows there were, and she was against the last one, nearest them, and the light from within just touched the white outlines of her dress. Without doubt the tones of Edward Colman’s voice had dimly reached her ear; for, as he looked round the buttress, her head was turned outwards from the window, and her eyes searched the night. He drew in his head, and whispered —

“What does she make there?”

“Two things,” the old woman answered, “she prays you to death, here in the churchyard, betwixt midnight and cockcrow; and she watches upon the Council to see if you come in; and she listens to what is said in the Council to know what they shall devise to save you; and since from there, as well she knows, she may see your door, she watches your door to see if you do come.”

Edward Colman reflected for a minute.

“There are no soldiers set in my house?” he asked.

“No,” the old woman answered; “she was devising with the officer at the gate, she praying him, and he refusing, to enter this town and take you.”

“You heard all that!” Edward Colman said, and he had for the moment a swift feeling of anger and dismay, that thus these common folk and mean flotsam should so well know the actions and the speeches of him and his like. “You speak a very good English.”

“Edward Colman,” she answered, “I hear all things that I may hear, for that is my avocation; I speak a very good tongue because I am of origin a French woman, and it is the pride of the French women to do all things well and seemly.”

“Then there is no guard set upon my house,” he said.

“Edward Colman,” she answered, “that shall not stay the dwindling of your fortunes, even as dwindles the waxen doll that Anne Jeal melts of you.”

Edward Colman answered patiently and with good humour that he set little store by the melting of dolls and suchlike, otherwise long since he would have moved with other magistrates to cleanse the town of that old woman herself. He spoke with patience, for he was devising within himself how he should act, and he was not prone to hurry to an action.

“I do not say that witches and witchcraft, necromancing and the alchymist’s art, never were or are not now. I have heard of great cures wrought by alchymists when all physicians’ remedies have failed. But for sure they have grown seldom, or near died out, along with antique customs, before Eliza’s reign or in a few years after.... Tell me,” he broke off to ask, “who sit within the Council?”

She answered —

“Only men that you may trust: townsmen of Rye and one or two barons of Winchelsea, come with them to devise of how wooling best may be protected.”

“There are no emissaries of the Lord Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Nor no lawyers of the Lord Warden’s,” she answered; “none but men that you may trust. I know them all for true men, and your friends.”

“And Anne Jeal watches upon them!”

“Aye,” she answered, “that is a folly of Anne Jeal’s. In these matters you may well outwit her. But if she was to stay with her incantations and her sweating of images, very soon should your ships be beset by storms upon the seas, your correspondents, whether in Bordeaux or Haarlem, steal your goods, your house be breached by heavy weather, and knives of assassins be aimed at your ribs. Nay, thieves should find the secret horde of gold your grandfathers left you, that is hidden between the walls of your house.”

Edward Colman caught her by the wrist.

“Ah!
 
you hurt,” she said.

“How know you that?” he asked. But because in the darkness he could neither see her face nor make her answer more than that it was her avocation to know, he soon desisted from his questions; for, for sure, he must soon move that store of gold, whether she knew of it or no.

“What would you have me to do?” he asked. “Shall I go in to the Council?”