Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (284 page)

The Pastor Koop had been born many years before in the Prince Bishopric of Munster on the Dutch border. His parents, when he was but a lad, had escaped with much difficulty from the Prince Bishop’s persecutions and had found refuge in the town of Sandwich. There he had studied with much diligence the Scriptures in High Dutch and Hebrew — by the light of what was called Knipper-Dollingry, and, having grown monstrous stout from constant sitting at his loom or with his Bible, he had married his cousin, had Magdalena, lost his wife, become deacon of the Knipperdollings in Sandwich, and had finally been translated to the care of the Knipperdollings of Rye town. He wore his hair very long for those days; he dressed in hodden-grey; spoke Dutch better than English and Hebrew better than either. He was extraordinarily square upon his feet; had a lifeless face; corrected all conversations addressed to him, so constantly upon points of doctrine that it was very seldom that he conversed with any one, save his deacon or his long-haired apprentice. He had very few grievances against the English powers; he had licence to preach, to bury, to marry and to baptize — and, upon Sabbath and Fast Days, as well as upon the anniversaries of the First and Second takings of Münster, he preached sermons of an astonishing heat, in which he doomed all such of his neighbours as were not then in his houseplace within earshot to a Hell very full of flames and Revelation beasts.

Magdalena Koop had been born in the Dutch settlement within the walls of the port and town of Sandwich, which is in Kent. Her father had not yet accounted her worthy of baptism; but during the enforcement of an Act of the late Queen, whilst she was still a child, she had, along with many other Dutch children, been baptized in a pew by the English Vicar of Sandwich High Church. It was perhaps this act of oppression which gave to her her silence and her seriousness; for it seriously perturbed her, in secret, to know whether it would be better to take her chance of Heaven with the Churchmen of that land or to remain assured, in spite of all her efforts, of a certain damnation within her father’s fold. She was very conversant with both doctrines by reason of her father’s enunciation of the one and denunciation of the other; she was fairly confident of another fifty years of life; she was able to contemplate herself with placidity, for she was fair, large, strong, gentle and enduring. She could read Dutch and English, she could write English, she could nearly understand Hebrew when it was read in passages familiar to her in the Scriptures. She wore rather Dutch clothes: a white hood, and on fair days golden twists above her ears; her hair was golden, her eyes large and blue, her forehead white and smooth, her cheeks smooth and pink. She smiled enough to show white teeth when Edward Colman passed her door or entered; she could be silent to listen to his calculations when he talked of them; she could confirm him in his opinions when he was determined, or advise him when he wished it, or she had an open mind upon a thing, just as occasion demanded. She wove an excellent strong cloth for making men’s coats of, and had a linen loom of her own in the big room below the rafters where she sat all through the summer days, with the roof door open looking at Edward Colman among his ships and throwing backwards and forwards the shuttle.

She sat with Edward Colman in the shadows of the dusky houseplace. The Pastor, huge, square, and decorated with horn spectacles, sat astride a three-legged chair, his huge book upon a ledge that rose from the chairback, after the manner of a lectern. It was the Pastor’s habit thus to sit astride whether he read or wrote. Beside him, with long, lank hair, a high-crowned hat and a lugubrious expression, on the broad hearth, with his wollen stockings stretched across the sea-coal fire, there sat the Pastor’s deacon and apprentice, Tribulation Jones, an Englishman, who patiently carved the head of a bobbin of boxwood into a grotesque face with squinting eyes and a protruding tongue. Edward Colman was drawing upon a slate that he used because paper was dear, the lines of a ship of seventy tons. The price of timber having risen very much in that neighbourhood of late years, it was a matter to be considered to make the lines of a ship to take very little timber. From time to time he spoke, saying, “Sol” or “Sol” with his eyes upon his drawing and the little smile upon his lips.

Magdalena sat close beside him upon the polished oak wood top of the chest; at times she looked tranquilly over his shoulder; at times she polished the brass sconce that she had taken down from the wall; at times she lifted slowly to her nostrils one or other of the two oranges that Edward Colman had brought to her and that lay on the dark, polished wood of the huge table. The firelight flickered tranquilly upon the wooden chests that lined all the walls as high as the beams of the ceiling; it flickered on the metal hinges, and dimly on the sconces along the walls. Mirror-bright as they were, they were covered with network to keep them unsullied. Every piece of furniture in the room was, in the older Dutch fashion, formed of a chest. The seats all round the walls, upon which, during service time, the Pastor’s disciples sat, were formed of chests standing before the other chests. The huge table itself had lockers below; the chairs themselves, all save the Pastor’s, were formed of chests that had necks or arms set to them. And all of these things were of wood that Magdalena polished, with a love for the brown, rich surfaces and for the work of polishing, that was as great, as tranquil and as deep as her love for Edward Colman or for the scent of that rare fruit, the orange. She looked upon Edward Colman’s drawing, and it was good; upon his smile — and it was good; upon the brown wood of the chests, and it was good; and she inhaled the perfume of the orange’s surface — and that was good.

The Pastor turned over a leaf; pushed the horn spectacles up to his forehead; took with the little tongs a coal from the brass brazier on the table and set it on his pipe. He puffed out wreaths of smoke, but never took his eyes from his page. The apprentice laid down his carving with a sigh; turned up his eyes towards the chimney bar above his head; muttered with his lips and then began to bray the Pastor’s cane-tobacco that was warming in a boxwood mortar beside his knees. Then they were all still again, and the fire rustled.

The half door of the cottage flung ajar, and against the blue evening light was to be seen the body and pale, gleaming face of Anne Jeal. She stood with one hand upon her breast, the other fumbling at the bolt that kept the lower panels closed; she panted, and she cried out at the same time —

“Aye, your doom is come; aye, the guards come out of Rye Gate; aye, you cannot back into the town; you shall be taken here in the Foreign I You shall be hanged, traitor that you be!”

She flung the half door open, and there appeared the farthingale of white damask that stood out like a cart-wheel all round her waist; she drew in the breath hardly through her curved nostrils; her closed lips worked one upon the other.

“I have told my Lord Lieutenant,” she cried out; “he hath sent his guards. Wool hath been found sticking to nailheads in the holds of your ships. The guards come to take you: hear their footsteps!”

They heard indeed a noise of footsteps of several hastening men.

The old Pastor turned his head round as he sat astride; he arose sedately; he approached her, and with his elbow pushed her aside; closed the two doors; set sound the bar that fitted from top to bottom; turned the great key and put it in his pocket. Anne Jeal was so breathless with her running that she leaned against the wall by the fireside, and the key was in the fat man’s voluminous hose before she had sprung at him, for he moved faster than he seemed to.

CHAPTER III
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Anne Jeal, in going to the dinner with the Lord Lieutenant, had been so incensed that she omitted to say an “Our Father” as she passed the spot at the bottom of the Udimore Road where formerly a cross had stood. And this, as afterwards came into her mind, had made her enterprise appear ill-omened — for, if the folk of that countryside were by that time Protestant enough, it was still accounted ill to set out upon any adventure, and more particularly upon any adventure that was illicit or unsavoury, without paying attention to the ancient observances. The old crosses had been torn down in the county of Sussex, but there lingered about the spots where they had stood a certain supernatural savour, that grew a little more ominous as, with the settling down of the New Faith, they came to be believed more evil. The old saints were devils now — and in these days folks paid attention to demons.

But up to this point her adventure had gone favourably enough: it was all to her advantage that the Lord Warden of the Five Ports had come, hardly expected, from Dover to confer with the Lord Lieutenant. The Lord Lieutenant was one of the Spaniardized Scots that King James had brought with him from the north country; he wore his beard pointed, dressed in black, and had such a round ruff that his head appeared to repose upon a trencher. He cared no more for the privileges and the traditions of the Five Ports than he cared for the men who had beaten the Armada in the Queen’s days. The Lord Warden was a failing, ancient man, who cared so much for the Cinque Ports he governed, as Viceroy, that he was ready to concede many points so that he and they might stand well with the King and his minions. This made Anne Jeal’s task very easy.

It was easy for her to stand forward out of the ranks of the Barons of Rye and the Barons of Winchelsea who, in long ranks of scarlet, reverend and stiff, sat round the long hall, awaiting dinner. The Spaniardized Scot approached her, as manners called for, with odd hitchings of his black legs, and she had only to speak a little slowly to get his ear. She had to say, “Sir, I will give you very secret and good advice concerning the wooling trade if you will take me apart!” and his eyebrows lifted! But he took her by the fingers and led her, with high steps, to a window twenty yards off, whence they could see the little hill of Winchelsea, the long grey valley, with its tide-swamps, and the distant grey sea.

She had told him that they had only to send men to search the holds of Edward Colman’s ships in Rye harbour and he would find, sticking against nail-ends, fragments of wool. He could not, she said, take a Portsman in a Cinque Port, but if he would send soldiers, after dusk, to the house of the Pastor Koop, which lay beyond the gates, in the Foreign, where the King’s writ ran, he might take Edward Colman and hale him before the Star Chamber for examinations and for hanging.

“My Lord,” she finished, “I am Mayoress of Rye, and these things I vow are so. I would not work treachery — but this man was my suitor, and has betrayed me first.”

The Scots Lord, who had a difficulty in understanding English, raised his brows again at these words, until she spoke them again in French; he could well believe them. He fingered his collar of the Thistle upon his breast of black satin.

“But then!” he muttered; “these plaguey, pocky liberties of the Portsmen!”

With a jerk of his head above his ruff he summoned to him the Lord Warden, who came between anger and trepidation, his grey, square beard bristling below his square face.

“Lord Warden,” the Scot said, “is it lawful for me to search ships of the Ports in a port?”

“By no means!” the Warden answered.

“I must have the Writ of the Barons of the Port?” the Scot asked.

“Sir,” Anne Jeal broke in, “if you ask for that, assuredly you will not have it, and the barons would send messengers to Edward Colman.”

“Even so!” the Scot answered. “Dame Mayoress, ye have a keen wit! I kiss your hands.”

“But, sir,” he turned upon the Warden, “your writ overrides the writs of the barons, for you are even as the King in these liberties of theirs?”

The Lord Warden’s worried blue eyes wandered along the faces of the aligned barons.

“Before God!” he said, “I came here to do your Lordship favours. I would I had not come, if you will have me—”

“Sir Warden,” the tall man in black answered, “I will do all things with rule and in precedent. Very sacred are the rights, doubtless, of the Five Ports and of the two ancient towns. God forbid that I must make report to the sacred Majesty of our father the King, who is called Solomon Britannicus, that I have been letted and hindered in doing the King’s devoirs.”

“God forbid it!” the Warden said, and mused in his short beard.

“Well, here,” the Lord Lieutenant said, “is information brought me of a wicked cozener and thief. I ask you for no writ to take his body, for no warrant to take his ships from the port. These, maybe, you cannot give, for I know not what be your powers in your vice-royalty—”

“Even what, then?” the old Lord asked.

“I am come here,” the other answered, “to take cognisance; to gather together information how certain disorders, not in the port, but in the countryside, may best be purged. I ask you that you give me no warrant to take, but one to examine, your subjects’ ships, that if (which God forfend!) they show evidence of guilt, such ships may be known and raided against in waters that are not those of the Ports, but of the King’s realm.”

The Lord Warden said —

“Anan? I may not follow your long speeches. We have simple English wits here.”

“I will put it simply,” the Scotsman said, “though God knows your tongue is an impediment to me. If you will not aid the King’s Majesty to gather knowledge, what shall prevent the King’s Majesty to say that these Ports of yours, which form a realm within this realm, are barbarous, antique, stiffnecked cumberers of the ground of England?”

“My Lord,” the Warden cried out, “you are overbold. With our ships of the Ports for eleven hundred years we have defended England against French, Spaniards, and Scots—”

“Aye,” the Scot answered, “that is good reason why your liberties, which were given for your services, should be respected, revered, and preserved. If ye can do little now, with your small ships, your locked ports, your dwindled peoples, ye may yet shine in the eyes of a Scots King. But will ye not so, the more surely, if you aid him, rather than these that are deemed to be traitors to him?

I advise you to give me a warrant of search—”

So, in the end, the warrant of search had been given; the Ports, as the Warden saw it — those glorious Ports which at different times had fought all England and all Scotland, and came out well — could not, in these days of their gradual decay, contend against Scotland and England together.

Nay, more; they were even at that day suing the King to send them subsidies with which to keep open their slowly-vanishing harbours. The Lord Warden had given the warrant; the Lord Lieutenant had, with tact and discretion, kept near him all the barons of the two towns, and the men that Edward Colman had seen from his window had been the Lord Lieutenant’s guards searching his ships beneath his nose, whilst the barons still ate in Udimore.

Now, whilst Anne Jeal stood in the Pastor’s houseplace, they were coming to take Edward Colman in the Foreign. Anne Jeal had hastened back to Rye, forsaking her litter and riding a mule, with a young man she could trust to guard her. From her own window she had seen the Lieutenant’s men search Colman’s ships. That they would find wool ends and traces of wool she was certain, for she had bidden one of her lovers — a Spanish renegade who had a post of harbour-warden, and could thus go in and out among the ships at will — she had bidden him go into the hold of the
Anne Jeal
and drive into the planks nails with grapnel heads, to which strands of wool would be caught up, as if they came from his last cargo. And having seen the Lieutenant’s four men and an officer come up from the ships, she had hastened down through the town, out at the gate, which was closing for the dusk, and so down to the cottage of the Koops she had run, hindered by her farthingales and skirts, and short-breathed on account of her tightened bodice.

“Aye!” she cried out to Magdalena, “now you have lost your gallant; now you may go shed tears into your weavings; now you may mumble your Dutch prayers; it is all one; he will be hanged!”

Edward Colman sat back on one chest, his head against the other behind him; his lips were tight-set at the corners. Magdalena leaned forward, her arms along the table; her perfectly clear skin shone a little in the firelight; the gold ornaments in the ears of her white hood shone a little too; she was beauteous, and large, and strong, and silent, where Anne Jeal was drawn in dark, and small, and quivered, as a wasp quivers above an apple.

The Pastor was whispering in Hebrew in the ear of the deacon, who rose lugubriously to his feet.

“And what make of dull Dutch dump are you,” Anne Jeal cried out to Magdalena, “to take a man’s eye? What can you? Weave, and rub wooden chests and brass I What else are you fit for? My white mare is as good a woman as you. Can you talk Spanish or Latin? Can you play on the lute? Can you sing? Your voice is like a bull’s rumble! Your face is like a Dutch clock! How long would this false man be content with you if he had you? Sit you not there like a clod of earth I Lift up your skirt corner and weep into it. I do you a service to rid you of this false man. He would play with you and tire of you, as if you were a collop of fat bacon.”

“Woman.” Edward Colman said sharply, “I was tired of you or ever I began with you. I saw you beat your little negro maid, when you were but waist-high, for not knowing how to say you were fairer than the Duchess of Guise. Since that day — and you were not fourteen — I have known you, and avoided!”

Anne Jeal cried out —

“Aye; coward that thou art, thou wast afraid of beatings. But thou hast spoken to me civilly; thou hast passed my door and smiled at the sky. Thou hast lived! What right has a man to live — what right has a man to be pleasant in the neighbourhood of a woman if she may not have him?”

“He hath been no more pleasant with thee than with all men, women, and boys.” Magdalena Koop spoke slowly and deeply.

“Aye, dollop without understanding!” Anne Jeal cried out. “But of what right is a man pleasant to all?”

Magdalena Koop rose to her tall and tranquil height; she spoke with a deep and level voice.

“Anne Jeal! If you were the only woman in the world he would never have looked at you.”

She had understood what her father had said in Hebrew to his apprentice, and she unlocked, with a key at her belt, the strong door of her great hanging press, that was taller than a man and broader than six men, and she said to her lover, in Dutch: —

“Sit quietly; my father may find a way to save thee, little one of my heart.”

Anne Jeal, with her ears straining to catch the speech, made, at the incomprehensible words, a shudder of disgust and rage.

Edward Colman answered, in Dutch: What could she do, for there was no door at the back of the house? But because he had only a little Dutch, picked up there in the Pastor’s house, Anne Jeal cried out —

“No, there is no back way of escape from me now! I hold you, and you are mine for ever, for you shall die.”

It was at that moment that the apprentice threw upon the fire a whole bucketful of water, and all the light died out of the room, save only the very feeble glimmer from the taper, twisted round an iron spike and thrust into a socket on the Pastor’s lectern. Anne Jeal caught her breath at the hiss of the coals, and whilst the smell of wet sulphur spread through the room she could not again speak. She sprang a little aside; close to her elbow the latch lifted gently. She put her hand to her heart, and said —

“Now they are here!” The apprentice stepped softly behind her back along the chimneypiece, but she was so intent upon Edward Colman that she never noticed this movement. She stretched out to the young man her hand.

“What make of mortal are you, Edward Colman,” she asked, with a sudden and mournful hatred, “to make me do this treachery? Am I one that ever before lied or betrayed?”

There came quite a soft knocking, and they held their ears open to listen; then they heard through the great door a faint cry of “Open! open!”