Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (293 page)

She looked still more disdainfully at the master founder.

“Why,” she said, “make the King’s cannon.

There has been too much angering of the King already with aiding of traitors to come off. Let the others bide. Get you gone.”

The founder’s eyes stared more pinkly in the sooty face; he appeared transfixed with horror; his hand felt behind him for the latch of the little door into the alley. He did not like to turn his back upon Anne Jeal. For Anne Jeal was a witch to all who dwelt in the forest.

She spoke to her father, who appeared dazed. “Sir, your head aches. This has been a pretty tulsie. Let us go to the garden and debate of where the peas shall grow. That will cool your head.” He was aware that he must soon speak to her with a great wrath, that he must, perhaps, even beat her. But, for the moment, he was so glad she spoke to him peacefully that he stirred at once in his chair and began to rise. When he was upon his feet he remembered, still more fully, that he had promised Edward Colman to beat her well. He must assert his authority, though his stomach felt suddenly weak. To make a beginning, he spoke wrathfully to the smith, who was disappearing through the little door.

“It is you who muddled my wit with your bleating. Make the cannon this day.”

In the alley-way the founder rubbed the soot in his hair.

“This very day!” he muttered. “How can that be? That is not easy! It is three weeks’ work!”

Those dwellers in the forest and by the iron-pits had very little pay and very little food. The iron that was in the puddles of clay — and they drank the water from them — was said to addle the wits. So they all thought very slowly, and were content with such wages as had been paid in the day of Henry IV. That was why the Mayor was so wealthy a man.

His custom was, when he went abroad in the town, to wear a long gown, cut, like his robes, to inspire respect out of black — not of scarlet — to show that he was not proud, as some Mayors had been; and, whilst he was taking this gown from its press, Anne Jeal came to him with a little parcel, wrapped in green cloth and sealed with the device of a truelove knot, that had been given to her by one of her lovers. She asked him to keep the parcel always by him, in a sure place, till she should ask it of him again; and the request was so extraordinary to him — she was used to keeping her own things to her own self — that it put him into a new fluster. It nearly brought about, indeed, the storm that he had been avoiding all day.

“What new madness is this?” he muttered out. His voice was always very much impeded by his beard and his moustachios; “what new wickedness? what new folly?”

He had on a great black Spanish hat that hid most of his face; she a little hat like a man’s, with a feather in the band, so that even in that dim hallway her face was plain enough to be seen — and it was impassive, and, to him, alarming.

“What madness, and folly, and wickedness have I yet done?” she asked.

She wore underneath her blue cloak a short and tight red jacket of silk and a dark-green skirt, somewhat longer than women wore at that time, with her farthingale beneath it. So that, voiding her question, that he was afraid of, he put another querulously —

“Are you going to ride on a horse?”

She was pulling on silken gauntlets, that were finer than leather gloves, and she answered —

“I tore my linsey gown on a nail; it is a cold day; I will be warm above the legs if we go to the gardens.”

He asked, still ill-temperedly “And your tabac-gown and your cheval? And where are your yellow ruffs? Will you be so fine on a weekday?”

He was a man that had a very nice eye for clothes, and there was arising a very nice quarrel between them, when, at the bottom of Lion Street, they came upon their neighbour, Justus Avenel, who was looking at the masons setting bricks on the new Grammar School wall. He was a fat, harsh owner of tan works, and he had so little love for Anne Jeal — he was the one of all the Council, though there were many, who liked her least — that the Mayor would have turned down the little alleyway behind the George Tavern. But Anne Jeal held him to his course. And —

“Neighbour Avenel!” she called across the street, “come with us to our garden, to see where our peas shall grow.”

“What — a devil!” the Mayor whispered to her. “Are you clean mad?”

Justus Avenel turned round and rolled his eyes; he had had a Dutch mother, so that he was very square and paunchy — and he was also very disagreeable when sober. ‘And he had been counting the number of bricks that went to a line of wall, so that in the Council he might complain upon his com-baron, the master mason, that there were not more. But, seeing Anne Jeal, he considered that he might first rate her and then return to the tale of bricks. So that, with a row half counted, he made across the street, cockling his sore toes on the sharp flint cobbles.

It was but a short way to the Water Gate, and the streets were empty, so that, in the Mint, beneath the dark and high houses, Anne Jeal was ready to ask —

“What have you of the Council done with Edward Colman?”

“Before God!” the Mayor cried out. This was the most amazing thing that ever Anne Jeal had done. And Justus Avenel opened his mouth like a codfish. He and the Mayor stood to look at each other. In the Council they were always enemies, but they united in that action. And Anne Jeal, her body, plain to see, in quiver with rage, her nostrils dilated and her head held high, walked before them, very quickly, through the gloomy arch of the gate, out among the high, clipped hedges of the townsmen’s gardens. There were about forty of these gardens, each with its high quicken fence, that was still blackthorned and unflowering in the February gales, is that the place was very much of a maze. When they caught her up, Justus Avenel direfully silent and the Mayor muttering, with his eyes on the ground, she was passionately unlocking the little gate that, beneath an arch cut in the hedge, gave ingress to the Mayor’s garden. Within there were a hundred apple trees above a grass plat, and further on square beds for vegetables, all black and barren now, and moon-shaped, oval, or serpentine beds that showed great stalks of mulleins not yet cut down and the old bluish-green leaves of the pink, together with one or two little rose trees and a single yew clipped to look like a great letter J. This plat of beds was quite near to the little gate that went over the stream, with its thicket of willows and osiers, and it was here that Anne Jeal let her fury burst upon them.

“Fine upholders of the town of Rye be you!” she cried out. “What have you done? How have you enraged the King against you? What is this that yesterday I was asked by my Lord Lieutenant? A foul tale how that you be all owlers! Was ever the like of this? You take me, a girl, on a banquetting! You take me there. And I am to be asked who among you trades in wool. And I am to be told that all of you do this treason. So says my Lord Lieutenant.”

She pretended to pant with rage; she looked with looks of horror from one to the other of them. She pretended that never had she heard of the owling trade; that all she had known had been that Edward Colman, as she had once seen, had had wool in a ship of his.

“And when,” she cried out, “the Lord Lieutenant told me you were all of you owlers I was like to faint. My head turned giddy.”

“Oh aye!” Justus Avenel roared out. “You betrayed to the Lord Lieutenant my sister’s nephew, who withstood your love philtres and oglings.”

“Justus Avenel,” she cried at him, “you are so drunken that you have only filthy thoughts in your head. It is men like you that let a girl go unprepared to be questioned by a cunning Scot. If you would have had me conceal these foul doings — though God knows I would never have gone had I known of them — ye should have warned me afore I went.”

“Lying — ,” Justus Avenel cried out, “ye knew it all these ten years!”

She raised her hand in horror. “Then it is true!” she cried out. “And what shall I do? For this Lord Lieutenant has a warrant out to take me as one that might bear witness before the King.”

The Mayor muttered —

“Oh woe! What is this?” And she cast at him aside —

“Nan Price’s brother came running from Udimore this noon to tell me that news.” She sneered again at Justus Avenel: “You were so drunken in the Council last night that you know not where Edward Colman is bestowed.”

Avenel opened his square-chinned mouth, but could get no answer out.

“It is such drunkards and fools,” she went on, “as have brought me to this lamentable pass. For now, without the town is a warrant to take me; and within the walls all men say, ‘Fie upon her; she betrayed her neighbour.’”

“Why—” the Mayor began to stutter.

“Sir,” she dropped out her words at him, -’the Lord Lieutenant asks of me, ‘Do you know well the harbour?’ as if he were in play, toyingly. And I say, ‘Yes.’ And says he, ‘What ships fetch wine? and whose saffron? and whose Irish beef salted? and whose take away iron?’ And then he drops out, ‘And whose take away wool?’ And I, knowing nothing, give him answers. How should I know? I have seen wool upon the ship
Anne Jeal.
How should I know it was a crime that was being done?”

Justus Avenel’s square brown face was shaking with passion, as if he had had the palsy. Suddenly he cast his hands above his head and waddled away, like a hastening toad, towards a pile of pea-sticks against the hedge.

Anne Jeal spoke pitifully to her father.

“Before God,” she said, “where is Edward Colman hidden? Let me see him and speak with him, that I may devise with him what to say when they take me. He is the only man of sense in your Council. If I am to be taken I must have a tale to tell.”

The Mayor shook his head; he had sworn an oath to tell no soul whither Edward Colman had gone, for the King was reputed to have arms long enough to reach across the waters.

“Why,” he said, “I cannot tell you.” He looked at the grass with a sort of shamefaced relief. He could not believe that she did not know of the owling trade. Men did not speak of it much, but she had seen the bales of wool stuffed into the cellars of their house till they were all full. He could not believe her tale, but he was ready to make the pretence, to save quarrelling with her, and he was ready to adopt it, that he might stave off with it the reproaches of his fellows.

It was whilst he was thinking these thoughts that she was saying —

“For the sake of Heaven, tell me. And let his hiding-place be a secure one. For they will burst in the town walls to take him and me, to be a witness against him. Nan Price’s brother said this.”

The Mayor still looked at the grass. Justus Avenel appeared to have lost his wits, for he was pulling pea-sticks from the pile and breaking them across his fat knees. Being last year’s, the sticks were mostly as rotten as tinder-wood, and his grunts came to them between the snapping when they broke. The sky was very overcast, and though the dark dry hedges kept the wind from them, it swayed the feathery osiers with a continuous rushing sound.

“Why,” the Mayor said, “they will not come to take him save If they be assured that he is here.”

Her voice grew filled with alarm.

“But he is hidden in the town,” she cried.

He shook his head with a touch more of spirit; the story that she had told seemed a good one to tell his fellow townsmen. He would be able to hold up his head again. He raised it, indeed, and looked at her.

“No,” he said, “he is not in the town.”

“But,” she cried out, and her voice was full of alarm, “if he is outside the Liberties he will be taken. In every nook of Kent and Sussex there are soldiers sent to search for him and me. Oh woe! Oh woe!”

Her anguish appeared so extreme that he said, to soothe her — and now he quite believed her tale, for he was very ready to do so —

“He is upon the sea.”

She reflected for a very short minute.

“Why, Van Voss sailed this morning. He is bound for Amsterdam. Will he wait there to sue out a pardon, or what? And what shall I do meanwhile? What shall I do? I shall be taken.”

The Mayor said gravely, and with some pomposity, for his spirits were coming back —