Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (292 page)

Edward Colman remained considering for a while.

“Why,” he said at last, “it is a very good offer, save in one particular. If you should die I shall pay to your wife forty pounds by the year for seven years, or I shall leave in good hands
£240
that with its interest shall make that sum.”

“Aye,” Hudson said, “for I am minded that my wife shall not starve and have so devised this means.”

“Aye,” Edward Colman said, “I am willing to that if that you die and I remain alive, for I shall be here to profit mine own new wife. But if we both should die it is too much considering that mine own wife shall in no wise profit whilst you shall have had no loss by me but only my services.

So, if I die alone, you shall repay to my wife the whole of that sum, whilst if we both do die your wife shall have the half,
viz.
twenty pounds by the year and the rest revert, with my other goods and gear, unto mine own wife, whom I love.”

Hudson looked at his wife.

“Why,” she said, “if the young man shall faithfully serve and protect you, and urge you against too much drinking of strong waters and see that at night time, when the seas are high, you wear my knitted caps, if he will so much help in these things that shall do much to the preserving of thy life, I am well contented with this compact.”

CHAPTER III
.

“AYE,” Anne Jeal said to the young officer who the night before had failed to take Edward Colman in the Pastor’s house, “you men are all of a make for swaggering and roistering, and making postures; but where would you be but for us women?”

They were in the Mayor’s garden which was outside the town walls in the part called Gallows March, beside the Tillingham. The garden had three sides of a high-clipped quickset hedge and along the Tillingham brook grew many willow trees to hide it, so that it was a very private place. This marsh was all within the liberties of the town itself, but just beyond the Tillingham stream the land was in the county of Sussex and not subject to the town. Across the stream went a little bridge from the Mayor’s garden, and in the middle was a little, high gate with oaken pillars for side posts and an oaken arch above it. It was on the inside of this gate that Anne Jeal stood with her hands upon the bars — and without it stood the officer of the Lord Lieutenant, his horse cropping the grass of the river-bank, being tethered to a post in the hand-rail of the bridge. There were a few sheep in the wide fields beyond; but the land was always very wet and soggy in February and March so that no man ever passed that way and it was a very private place.

Anne Jeal had summoned him there with a private letter sent by a fish-seller of the town to Udimore, where still the Lord Lieutenant stayed in the hope to gather evidence against the wool-sellers. She had promised to tell him where Edward Colman lay hidden in the town, and, in his disgrace at having let the owler slip, he was glad to hasten to her. He was a young, gay, dark, Sussex younger brother; he had little bashfulness about him, and he wore a cuirass of bright steel, a little rusted by the rain of the night before, a jerkin of yellow leather beneath it, a long Toledo sword and high, muddy boots. Anne Jeal rated him for a little while. Men, she said, were bunglers, clumsy, timorous, foolish. It had taken a woman to find for the Lord Lieutenant evidence against the owlers; he had found no other. And, after meddling and muddling with silly warrants — where any woman would have broken down the Pastor’s door and taken what she needed — he, the young man before her, had let this prisoner slip, gulled by a ruse that any woman would have seen through.

“Why, it was a good enough trick,” the young officer laughed to think of Magdalena’s figure scrambling over the thatch; “and it was a thing not very easy to do, to break in the Pastor’s door against the laws.”

“The laws! The laws!” she mocked him. “A woman will tell you that the laws are made to be used for her purpose. Laws that hinder are no laws.”

“Aye, mistress,” he began and laughed. “I warrant you could give evidence against a great many other owlers than Edward Colman.”

She looked at him a little contemptuously through the gate and he continued in a good humour —

“Edward Colman is not the only one that sells wool to Flanders and the French. There are few in this town and a few only in this county of Sussex that have not at one time or another broken the owling law. Will you give evidence only against Edward Colman? Or against some others?”

“That is not my purpose,” she said coolly and contemptuously.

“Oh, very well. I know that it is not your purpose to aid the law but to avenge a private wrong.” She did not answer that, but spoke hotly.

“If you had been a man,” she said, “last night you would have broken in Rye gates... But no! All men are women. If you had been a woman you would have left no stone of Rye unturned, but would have taken your prey.”

He stretched his booted legs apart, muttered, “Oh, aye,” and began to stroke the fingers with which she held the bars of the little gateway. She did not move her hands. Suddenly he asked—”Even where is your man?”

She took in her hand, and said —

“Nay, I know not!”

“If you can swear and aver that he is’ hidden in the town of Rye,” he said, and stretched his gloved hands through the bars to touch her fingers, “we will have warrants from the Lord Warden — he lies still at Udimore — to enter and take him.”

She let him catch her hand indifferently.

“I do not know,” she said — and she was thinking deeply. “I do not believe that you are very eager to take these owlers.”

She snatched away her hand, and repeated fiercely —

“I do not believe you are very zealous to take him!”

The young man’s hand clutched at the empty air, and he was up against the gate.

“Before God,” he said, “I am zealous enough to take Edward Colman if he have wronged you. But as for the other owlers — why, I would not hang half the lords of this county; neither would you.”

“Before God!” she mocked his tones, but with a fiery rage of her own, “I would hang every man in Sussex to come at what I would.”

He was a little appalled at her, but he laughed still, as at a spitting kitten.

“Take another sweetheart,” he said. “You will forget the one that was faithless, and the world will be less troubled.”

She clenched her small, nervous fist and held it in the air.

“By all the saints that were,” she said, “and by the Archangel Michael, I will forget the man I would slay only with my life. I will make a waxen image of him, that I will sweat by the fire and stab with pins of gold; I will pray for his death each night till he die; I will see his leman set in the pillory for a bad woman; I will see his house sold to others; I will call down the law upon his woman’s people, that are Anabaptists, and worse; I will move all powers that are, of the earth, or of heaven and hell, against all his and hers; I will have no rest nor no sleep save such as shall maintain life and reason, till this I have accomplished.”

“Oh, call not upon the old saints,” he said; “they are done away by the law. Take another sweetheart;” and again his dark-gloved hand stretched towards her. A heavy wet wind swept among the willows of the brook all round them, but a shaft of watery sunlight fell upon the little hills that bordered the flat and tranquil marshland. They glowed, low and green, like emeralds, and then faded into the greyness again. She went nearer to the gate.

“I will go to the King himself,” she said seriously, for she had mastered her passion. He caught at her fingers and rubbed them between his own; she looked down at them, and said —

“Why, if you will aid me in this enterprise you shall have me if you will. It is all one to me. But I will see the King.”

He laughed, still credulously, and said, as if it were nonsense —

“Belike King James will be taken with your face till he works your will.”

She looked at him fairly and directly; her eyes were quite clear; only her nostrils quivered.

“Belike he may, belike he may not,” she said. “But the King is the head power of this land.

The King is above the laws. The King is very set against both owling and all Puritans.”

“Well, we shall have new laws against these nose-singers,” he said. “That is certain.” But he avoided her main theme.

“I will see the King,” she said; “a Mayor of Rye has no overlord and superior but the King alone, and may speak with him. And I am Mayoress, and when I come before the King in his Council I will tell him such tales of this owler and these Anabaptists—”

He let go her hand to gaze at her the more. “Why, I believe you would,” he said. “But this is very mad. You have my Lord Lieutenant to tell your tales to.”

She shrugged her little shoulders to her ears. “The Lord Lieutenant is a coif,” she said; “the Lord Lieutenant is a Scotch oaf. I have trusted him once and you once; but I will trust no man in Sussex again.”

“Why, the King is a Scotch oaf, too,” he answered her, for he was jealous of her desire to take the King’s eye. “I have seen him now and again; he stutters and sits cross-kneed. And how will you come to the King? Your father the Mayor shall not help you, nor shall one of your kin again be living with you, but you will be outcast and accursed.”

She said disdainfully —

“My father I sway as I will; for my kin and the townsmen I have devised a scheme to fool them.”

He listened to her, leaning his face against the bars of the gate, as if to the musings of a pretty child.

It came about, then, in pursuance of her scheme, to which he had half consented, that, towards three of that afternoon, her father was sitting, very much perturbed with his business of ordering whether his foundries for the next six weeks should make cannon or chimney-backs. His forges and works were up behind Brede, most of them, and his master founder, black with charcoal and pink only around the eyelids, was troubling him terribly with alternatives. For, on the one hand, they had twenty chimney-backs ordered from five several new houses between there and Tonbridge. These should be put in hand, and each took half a day to make, because they were big and with coats-of-arms. On the other hand, news — if it was but a rumour — had come that the King’s new ship, that had been building for so long, was nearly finished. At any moment the King’s Comptroller might come upon them and claim, under a fine of 13s. and 4
d.
per day each, twelve cannon. To make the cannon would mean clay-stopping half their furnaces, and that could not be again undone within a week, so that the chimney-backs must wait unduly, unless they were first made. And there were seventy yards of iron railing promised for London town, and nine gross of rough horse-shoe rods for Lewes, and three ship’s anchors for Rye Harbour. All these must be put off if the cannon were made, but if the cannon were not made it might undo them. The master founder put these dismal problems again and again to the Mayor, returning from one settlement, when it was arrived at, to all the objections to it. He was a lean man, who shook his head lugubriously, and his hair was full of soot.

The Mayor could make nothing out of it; he sat in his little office — the only room that his daughter allowed him — in the house-end, with a door that gave on to the wet alley between their house and Edward Colman’s. The room was little and dark; the rough upright beams showed through the white plaster of the walls; and the Mayor sat in a stuff chair behind a board counter. When he had not his robes on — as now — he wore a puce-coloured linsey-woolsey coat; his beard was going very grey, and every day new furrows were showing in his brow. He raised his hand from time to time, and uttered an —

“A — gh I Was ever man thus troubled! A — gh! I shall be maddened with this maze.” He had been up so late the night before with Edward Colman, and his mind still ran so upon the problem of where he should stow Edward Colman’s gold — for he had devised no hiding-place, his own being filled with wool — that his head ached and his senses reeled. He was of late little used to troubles, though he was turned of fifty; but his wife had been dead ten years.

He dropped his eyes sullenly, and almost guiltily, on to the board of his counter, when Anne Jeal came to stand in the little door at the elbow of his chair. It let her speak with him when she had business in the house, and it came from a room where there were stored sacks of corn for bread, and, in winter, the salted carcases of oxen and hogs. She was much more like a wife than a daughter to him, for he was a man that had always been dominated by his womenfolk.

She stood quite still in the narrow doorway, looking down upon her father and listening with a contemptuous air to the tale of the founder, who began all over again to tell of his railings, his horse-shoes, his cannon, and his chimney-backs. From time to time the Mayor raised his fist an inch or two and let it sink again on to the board counter, that was polished where his hands usually rested. He had not seen her that day, nor at all since the Lieutenant’s dinner the day before. Many things had happened since then; and his fear of her drove out of his head all thoughts of his iron business. Besides, his hiding-places were filled — packed tight with wool. How could he move them in these dangerous times? And where was he to place Edward Colman’s gold? His head swam; he raised his hand quite high, and uttered again —

“A — gh! Was ever man thus troubled! A — gh! I shall be maddened by this!”

Anne Jeal spoke calmly and disdainfully—”Well, what have you decided?” And he let out another sound of intense exasperation—”Nothing! nothing! I shall be maddened by this! This is your doing!”