Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (179 page)

There was a swishing repeated three times and three thuds and twists of white on heads and shoulders just before her. Undistinguishable yells of mockery dwindled down from high above, and a rush-light shone at an immense elevation illuminating a faint square of casement that might have been in the heavens. Three apprentices had thrown down paper bags of powdered chalk. The men who had been struck, and several others who had been maltreated on former nights, or who resented this continual ‘prentice scandal, began a frightful outcry at the door of the house. More bags came bursting down and foul water; the yells and battlecries rolled, in the narrow space under the house-fronts that nearly kissed each other high overhead, and the crowd, brought to a standstill, swayed and pushed against the walls. Katharine lost her hold of the old knight’s sleeve, and she could see no single thing. She felt round her in the blackness for his arm, but a heavy man stumbled against her. Suddenly his hand was under her arm, drawing her a little; his voice seemed to say: ‘Down this gully is a way about.’

In the passage it was blacker than the mouth of hell, and her eyes still seemed to have in them the dazzle of light and triumph she had just left. There was a frightful stench of garbage; and it appeared to be a vault, because the outcry of the men besieging the door volleyed and echoed the more thunderously. There came the sharp click of a latch and Katharine found herself impelled to descend several steps into a blackness from which came up a breath of closer air and a smell of rotting straw. Fear suddenly seized upon her, and the conviction that another man had taken the place of the old knight during the scuffle. But a heavy pressure of an arm was suddenly round her waist, and she was forced forward. She caught a shriek from Margot; the girl’s hand was torn from her own; a door slammed behind, and there was a deep silence in which the heavy breathing of a man became audible.

‘If you cry out,’ a soft voice said, ‘I will let you go. But probably you will lose your life.’

She had not a breath at all in her, but she gasped:

‘Will you do a rape?’ and fumbled in her pocket for her crucifix. Her voice came back to her, muffled and close, so that she was in a very small cellar.

‘When you have seen my face, you may love me,’ came to her ears in an inane voice. ‘I would you might, for you have a goodly mouth for kisses.’

She breathed heavily; the click of the beads on her cross filled the silence. She fitted the bar of the crucifix to her knuckles and felt her breath come calmer. For, if the man struck a light she could strike him in the face with the metal of her cross, held in the fist; she could blind him if she hit an eye. She stepped back a little and felt behind her the damp stone of a wall. The soft voice uttered more loudly:

‘I offer you a present of great price; I can solve your perplexities.’ Katharine breathed between her teeth and said nothing. ‘But if you draw a knife,’ the voice went on, ‘I will set you loose; there are as good as Madam Howard.’ On the door there came the sound of soft thuds. ‘That is your maid, Margot Poins,’ the voice said. ‘You had better bid her begone. This is a very evil gully; she will be strangled.’

Katharine called:

‘Go and fetch some one to break down this door.’

The voice commented:

‘In the City she will find none to enter this gully; it is a sanctuary of outlaws.’

There was the faintest glimmer of a casement square, high up before Katharine; violence and carryings off were things familiar to her imagination. A hundred men might have desired her whilst she stood on high in the masque. She said hotly:

‘If you will hold me here for a ransom, you will find none to pay it.’

She heard the soft hiss of a laugh, and the voice:

‘I would myself pay more than other men, but I would have no man see us together.’

She shrank into herself, and held to the wall for comfort. She heard a click, and in the light of a shower of brilliant sparks was the phantom of a man’s beard and dim walls; one tiny red glow remained in the tinder, like an illuminant in a black nothingness. He seemed to hold it about breast-high and to pause.

‘You had best be rid of Margot Poins,’ the musing voice came out of the thick air. ‘Send her back to her mother’s people: she gets you no friends.’

Katharine wondered if she might strike about eighteen inches above the tiny spark: or if in these impenetrable shadows there were a very tall man.

‘Your Margot’s folk miscall you in shameful terms. I would be your servant; but it is distasteful to a proper man to serve one that hath about her an atmosphere of lewdness.’

Katharine cursed at him to relieve the agony of her fear.

The voice answered composedly:

‘One greater than the devil is my master. But it is good hearing that you are loyal to them that serve you: so you shall be loyal to me, for I will serve you well.’

The spark in the tinder moved upwards; the man began to blow on it; in the dim glimmer there appeared red lips, a hairy moustache, a straight nose, gleaming eyes that looked across the flame, a high narrow forehead, and the gleam of a jewel in a black cap. This glowing and dusky face appeared to hang in the air. Katharine shrank with despair and loathing: she had seen enough to know the man. She made a swift step towards it, her arm drawn back; but the glow of the box moved to one side, the ashes faded: there was already nothing before she could strike.

‘You see I am Throckmorton: a goodly knight,’ the voice said, laughing.

This man came from Lincolnshire, near her own home. He had been the brother of a gentleman who had a very small property, and he had had one sister. God alone knew for what crime his father had cursed Throckmorton and left his patrimony to the monks at Ely — but his sister had hanged herself. Throckmorton had disappeared.

In that black darkness she had seemed to feel his gloating over her helplessness, and his laughing over all the villainies of his hateful past. He was so loathsome to her that merely to be near him had made her tremble when, the day before, he had fawned over her and shown her the side door to Privy Seal’s room. Now the sound of his breathing took away all her power to breathe. She panted:

‘Infamous dog, I will have you shortened by the head for this rape.’

‘It is true I am a fool to play cat and mouse,’ he answered. ‘But I was ever thus from a child: I have played silly pranks: listen to gravity. I bring you here because I would speak to you where no ear dare come to listen: this is a sanctuary of night robbers.’ His voice took on fantastically and grotesquely the nasal tones of Doctors of Logic when they discuss abstract theses: ‘I am a bold man to dare come here; but some of these are in my pay. Nevertheless I am a bold man, though indeed the step from life into death is so short and so easily passed that a man is a fool to fear it. Nevertheless some do fear it; therefore, as men go, I am bold; tho’, since I set much store in the intervention of the saints on my behalf, may be I am not so bold. Yet I am a good man, or the saints would not protect me. On the other hand, I am fain to do their work for them: so may be, they would protect me whether I were virtuous or no. Maybe they would not, however: for it is a point still disputed as to whether a saint might use an evil tool to do good work. But, in short, I am here to tell you what Privy Seal would have of you.’

‘God help the pair of you,’ Katharine said. ‘Have ye descended to cellar work now?’

‘Madam Howard,’ the voice came, ‘for what manner of man do you take me? I am a very proper man that do love virtue. There are few such philosophers as I since I came out of Italy.’

It was certain to her now that Privy Seal, having seen her thick with the Bishop of Winchester, had delivered her into the hands of this vulture. ‘If you have a knife,’ she said, ‘put it into me soon. God will look kindly on you and I would pardon you half the crime.’ She closed her eyes and began to pray.

‘Madam Howard,’ he answered, in a lofty tone of aggrievement, ‘the door is on the latch: the latch is at your hand to be found for a little fumbling: get you gone if you will not trust me.’

‘Aye: you have cut-throats without,’ Katharine said. She prayed in silence to Mary and the saints to take her into the kingdom of heaven with a short agony here below. Nevertheless, she could not believe that she was to die: for being still young, though death was always round her, she believed herself born to be immortal.

The sweat was cold upon her face; but Throckmorton was upbraiding her in a lofty nasal voice.

‘I am an honourable knight,’ he cried, in his affected and shocked tones. ‘If I have undone men, it was for love of the republic. I have nipped many treasons in the bud. The land is safe for a true man, because of my work.’

‘You are a werewolf,’ she shuddered; ‘you eat your brother.’

‘Why, enough of this talk,’ he answered. ‘I offer you a service, will you take it? I am the son of a gentleman: I love wisdom for that she alone is good. Virtue I love for virtue’s sake, and I serve my King. What more goeth to the making of a proper man? You cannot tell me.’

His voice changed suddenly:

‘If you do hate a villain, now is the time to prove it. Would you have him down? Then tell your gossip Winchester that the time approaches to strike, and that I am ready to serve him. I have done some good work for the King’s Highness through Privy Seal. But my nose is a good one. I begin to smell out that Privy Seal worketh treasonably.’

‘You are a mad fool to think to trick me,’ Katharine said. ‘Neither you nor I, nor any man, believes that Privy Seal would work a treason. You would trick me into some foolish utterances. It needed not a cellar in a cut-throat’s gully for that.’

‘Madam Spitfire,’ his voice answered, ‘you are a true woman; I a true man. We may walk well together. Before the Most High God I wish you no ill.’

‘Then let me go,’ she cried. ‘Tell me your lies some other where.’

‘The latch is near your hand still,’ he said. ‘But I will speak to you no other where. It is only here in the abode of murder and evil men that in these evil times a man may speak his mind and fear no listener.’

She felt tremulously for the latch; it gave, and its rattling set her heart on the jump. When she pulled the door ajar she heard voices in the distant street. It rushed through her mind that he was set neither on murder nor unspeakable things. Or, indeed, he had cut-throats waiting to brain her on the top step. She said tremulously:

‘Tell me what you will with me in haste!’

‘Why, I have bidden your barge fellows wait for you,’ he answered. ‘Till cock-crow if need were. They shall not leave you. They fear me too much. Shut the door again, for you dread me no more.’

Her knees felt suddenly limp and she clung to the latch for support; she believed that Mary had turned the heart of this villain. He repeated that he smelt treason working in the mind of an evil man, and that he would have her tell the Bishop of Winchester.

‘I did bring you here, for it is the quickest way. I came to you for I saw that you were neither craven nor fool: nor high placed so that it would be dangerous to be seen talking with you later, when you understood my good will. And I am drawn towards you since you come from near my home.’

Katharine said hurriedly, between her prayers:

‘What will you of me? No man cometh to a woman without seeking something from her.’

‘Why, I would have you look favourably upon me,’ he answered. ‘I am a goodly man.’

‘I am meat for your masters,’ she answered with bitter contempt. ‘You have the blood of my kin on your hands.’

He sighed, half mockingly.

‘If you will not give me your favours,’ he said in a low, laughing voice, ‘I would have you remember me according as my aid is of advantage to you.’

‘God help you,’ she said; ‘I believe now that you have it in mind to betray your master.’

‘I am a man that can be very helpful,’ he answered, with his laughing assurance that had always in it the ring of a sneer. ‘Tell Bishop Gardiner again, that the hour approaches to strike if these cowards will ever strike.’