Low Treason Read online

  But then she felt the shame of her envy and put it away among the thoughts she dared not think for piety’s sake. She loved her husband, loved him with a pure and growing love. She listened again while his voice filled the room.

  There was little light now, but she would waste no candles to draw the tiny winged creatures into the house to cavort in the rushes with the mice, fleas, and other small deer. When she could no longer see to work her needle— as though she needed to see for that—she would go to bed, windows wide open in midsummer to dispel the foul odors of the house and draw the moon onto her face.

  Matthew stopped singing. She could hear the voices of passersby in the street, familiar voices, a knock on the shop door, Alice hurrying down the stairs to answer, footfalls of more than one person on the sturdy oak planking of the shop, and finally at the threshold of the room where she now sat she saw the faces of her daughter, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s young husband, William Ingram.

  Joan asked first, “You’ve brought the baby?”

  She could hardly suppress her disappointment when Elizabeth said they had not. Since Elizabeth and William had moved into their own house Joan had seen too little of her grandson.

  Elizabeth, plump and dark like her parents, looked at her husband, a tall, raw-boned youth of twenty with a narrow face and thin blond hair and mustache.

  “Something’s amiss,” Joan observed fearfully, starting from her comer and glancing uncertainly at her husband.

  “No,” Elizabeth assured her. “We’ve left the baby with Molly. He’s asleep and we dared not wake him.” Molly was the couple’s serving girl. No more than a child herself, Molly did not inspire Joan’s confidence. A tiny little creature, humpbacked and nearly toothless, she seemed to pass her days in a dream, half listening to instructions, eating like a sparrow, and playing much with Nicholas, the Ingrams’ cat.

  “Well then, be seated,” Matthew said jovially, approaching from his window to escort Elizabeth and her husband to chairs. His dark eyes were full of curiosity.

  William sat down and pulled something from inside his shirt. It was a piece of paper, and he began to unfold it carefully. He squinted in file dim light, and Joan, seeing now that frugality must be sacrificed to need, called for Alice to fetch candles straightway. Bedtime would be postponed if there was to be more than casual talk in the offing, as she now felt certain there was, but before Alice could return, William began to explain the reason for their visit to the Stocks. “It is from Mr. Castell, my brother’s employer in London. He says that Thomas has run off.”

  They all stared at the letter hanging limply in William’s hand as though it would momentarily speak for itself. Alice brought the candles.

  “My brother would never have run away,” William declared stonily. “Thomas wanted more than anything to go to London. His apprenticeship at the jeweler’s was a great stroke of fortune, arranged by our late father at considerable cost. No one recognized that more than he. He would have never given it up, never.”

  Listening to her son-in-law speak, Joan recalled her own misgivings when the family had bid young Thomas Godspeed to London. The city was a different world, rife with

  wickedness of such sort that her imagination could not contain it all. The boy had a good heart, but was that enough—in London? She decided to hold her tongue. She would not say that Thomas’s coming to misfortune in the city had been in the back of her mind since the day of his leaving.

  Matthew Stock took the letter from William, who was breathing heavily with excitement, and began to examine it for himself. It was written on a fine grade of paper and in a bold, authoritative hand. “This signature is that of Mr. Castell?” Matthew asked his son-in-law as the constable scrutinized the elegant flourish.

  “It is,” said William. “Elizabeth feels something is wrong,” he continued, looking to his wife for confirmation,

  “Oh, I know it is,” Elizabeth said. “Were he mistreated Thomas might have fled, but never to shirk. Besides, he would have returned here—at least, first.”

  “That he yearned for the sea we have only Mr. Castell’s word,” William inteqected.

  “Which you are obviously not prepared to take at face value,” Matthew mused, almost to himself. He refolded the letter and returned it to his son-in-law. “Why should the man lie?”

  Joan looked at the feces of Elizabeth and William Ingram, sharply defined in the flickering candlelight to which now had been attracted a host of little flying things. The young couple had no reply to the constable’s question.

  Matthew Stock’s face assumed a thoughtful cast; Joan decided to help him along.

  “What say you, Matthew? The young folk have come here for your advice, I have no doubt.”

  Elizabeth looked at her father appealingly. She said, “William would like to go to London himself, but he’s never been beyond Whitford. In the city he could do little more than ask directions. Besides, he’s much needed about the farm. Him gone, our two hands will pick little else than their noses. They must be constantly looked after and . . .”

  Elizabeth ended her appeal, flustered. Joan looked at 11

  her daughter and thought, She fears for him—all reason was for it. A wife of little more than a year, with an infant at her breast. How soon the specter of widowhood casts a pall on the marriage feast. Elizabeth did not want William to go traipsing off to London, no matter how much merit the cause.

  “Elizabeth is right,” Joan agreed. “An experienced man is what’s wanted there, no novice. Matthew, now, knows London, has friends—”

  “Well, a few,” the constable admitted.

  “Enough. To make a start, at least,” his wife prodded.

  “My shop. This week’s custom has been heavy. Next week I expect—”

  “It would be a point of gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “Indeed, for the Booke of Songs, goose!”

  “Oh, that,” replied Matthew, shamefacedly, for he had not thought of the book, the gift.

  “Besides,” Joan persisted resolutely. “Thomas is William’s brother, which makes him kin. This is family business to which trade must follow second.”

  Matthew agreed that this was true.

  “Moreover,” she continued, warming to her theme, “were William to go it would mean Elizabeth would be left alone at the farm, with the baby to care for and that foolish Molly and those two men—what be their names?— who with what thoughts in their heads, the master of the house away ...”

  Matthew was about to suggest that Elizabeth could move in with them, but then thought the better of it. His wife’s reasons were strong, his own little store of objections no more than an inclination to stay home and keep Joan company. Well, he would go, for what little good it might do, but he saw no reason to disbelieve the jeweler’s letter, which had seemed straightforward enough. Thomas Ingram was a young man and that was a fact. Young men wander in their courses, and London was a great promoter of novelty. Had he not once felt the urge to go to sea himself, years before in that other life of his youth, distant and almost incredible now? Whatever the boy’s resolve when he left Chelmsford, there would have been nothing odd about it changing.

  He looked down at the songbook in his hand. What a thoughtful gift it had been. Well, he would try his best. What else could a man do?

  Thomas Ingram lay on his back, conscious of little more than a ringing in his ears and the throbbing pain at the top of his head. His hair was wet, sticky. He touched the wetness, then quickly drew the hand away, appalled at the discovery. Blood, his blood.

  He couldn’t see well. It was night. He was in a wretched hut, no bigger than a privy and as foul. An old man and woman with grizzled hair, wrinkled faces, long noses and chins were staring down at him wide-eyed, their toothless mouths agape. There was something about their expressions, something odd. A mixture of horror and curiosity. They were looking at him queerly, as though uncertain as to what manner of creature he might be.

  He tried
to speak but his speech slurred. The old folks drew back, their eyes fixed on him. Then the woman reached out to touch him on the forehead. Thomas winced in pain and the woman quickly withdrew her hand. She mumbled something to her husband and then disappeared into the shadows of the hut.

  Thomas heard the crackle of a fire, in the distance a yelping dog. He could smell the fire, the old couple, cattle, excrement. He shut his eyes and tried to remember, but there was nothing. Nothing but the pain and the great vacant place where his memory had been.

  He fell asleep and saw great swathes of color.

  When he awoke again he realized he was naked. Someone had him by the bare feet and was dragging him. Then the dragging ceased. He lay limp, unable to move, hearing heavy breathing, near him. He could feel his body being turned over on its side and then rolled into a depression in the earth.

  Helplessly supine, he willed his eyes to open with a fierce effort, having heard already the dull, thudding thrust and shunt of a spade at work. He felt the shock of something gritty and damp scattered across his bare chest—and onto his face, in his hands and mouth. Choking on clayey earth, pebbles, the acrid tang of rotting leaves, he spewed them forth, thinking, I must rise, must sit up. God help me.

  Slowly his muscles responded, his eyes opened roundly to the night. The spadework ceased. There stood the old man, his captor, looming above him in the woods darker than the night, his old face sweat-streaked and ghastly, staring down into the shallow grave with an expression both fearful and apologetic. “Jesu, we thought you were dead,” he whined. “O dear Jesu, we thought you were dead.”

  Two

  GERVASE CASTELL was a man about whom a great many people were curious that summer. A jeweler by trade, he was of middle height, fifty-five or thereabouts, with a large, square head, a black thatch of hair only beginning to gray at the ears, and a magisterial countenance a bit too jowly to be called handsome. Dressed in his velvet cap and black cloth gown faced with fur, he looked like an alderman or a lawyer. He spoke softly and well, bore himself erect, and treated those beneath him with appropriate contempt. He had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, five years earlier and set up shop in a fashionable quarter of the City and had six apprentices and various other assistants, porters, servants, all of whom went handsomely adorned in blue-and-gold livery. His shop was a fantastic place. Its long display cases garnished with the most expensive and exotic of gems, it had become the resort of those about town who wished it to be known that they had a good deal of money. The less well-to-do merely pressed their noses against the glass of the windows, peering through the iron bars Castell had had installed to ward off thieves, and dreamed of the riches of the Americas, or far Cathay, for such dreams were cheap enough.

  Although reputed to be rich, Castell lived simply and privately in a house on Barbican Street rising from a solid stone foundation to two stories crowned with as many gables and a tile roof, newly laid. He had no family, kept no women, but had a great many acquaintances, none of whom he particularly liked. His origins were obscure. The story went that his father had been a Florentine, a scholar of Latin and Greek, who had eked out a poor living in the court of King Henry VIII and who, in his later years, had married a sickly girl about the court, big with child. The woman died in childbirth and Pietro Castello, for so the scholar was named, lingered on a scant dozen years more before being laid quietly to rest himself in a London churchyard beneath a wooden cross and a niggardly few lines of undecipherable Latin as an epitaph. Somehow Gervase had survived; more mysteriously, he had prospered. Now he lived there in that solid house of timber and plaster on the Barbican, with only a single manservant and a cook for company. The servant was Denwood Roley, a young man of even more obscure origins than his employer, with a mottled complexion and melancholy airs, and his mouth always puckered as though he were whistling a tune, although no sound was ever produced. The cook—no one in the neighborhood knew her name—was a sullen, ill-tempered woman of indeterminate age, blotchy, unkempt, and taciturn, who served her master’s meals, swept his floors, held the mice and spiders at bay, and had a nasty way with callers, no matter their rank or condition.

  That Gervase Castell was well enough off was certainly the case, but he had for some years now given over the dream of heaping up gold, which, after all, was a petty dream, no sooner realized than scorned. No, Gervase Castell’s dreams were woven of finer stuff, vague and elusive in their dimensions and for that very reason indefinable, although presently he had powerful friends engaged in that effort. In sum, he was far more than a wealthy tradesman, just as his shop was more than a well-stocked shop.

  It was his habit to rise early on weekdays and walk to his place of business, through St. Paul’s Church, commonly called Paul’s, both to avoid passing around the churchyard and to take advantage of the commercial air of the City—the throng of gentlemen, merchants, servants, countrymen, farmers, pickpurses, whores, and beggars who circulated in the aisles of the sacred precincts and conducted their business. The Council had passed an ordinance forbidding such pollutions in the temple but had not taken the pains to enforce it, and thus Paul’s remained the most popular meeting place in London, a place to close deals, exchange news, or hire servants; a resort of lovers and losels, a haunt of the respectable and the something less. The walls resounded with the hum of voices and the shuffling of boots on the stone floor.

  Castell watched with a kind of admiration, for to him, who had no religion, the great church was the heart of the commonwealth. Within its walls, one stood before something greater than the majesty of the law, the glory of the court, or the grace of the Church. One stood before life— its great mystery. The atmosphere of buying and selling quickened his pulse, cleared his head. Although on his daily stroll through its precincts Castell might speak to few, he would be spoken to by many, eager for favors, desperate for money or for some vaguer connection. Here he felt strong and powerful, feared and envied—even by the wellborn whose pedigrees and more certain parentage could not, in such days as these, always fill a purse.

  He walked with a limp, wearing a heavy cloak even in summer, worn to conceal the bulge of his purse from the eyes of the envious, and he was followed closely by two of his assistants, sturdy young fellows with daggers at their waists and circumspect looks. These were his bodyguards, for although he carried no jewels, it was widely thought that he did and he feared for his life in crowds. Each morning they waited to escort him to his shop, and each evening they accompanied him home again. He squinted habitually, as though there was too much light even in the shadows of the great church. But it was a device. His eyesight was abnormally acute, and thus very little missed his attention.

  As he made his way through the crowd, he nodded at 17

  passersby who looked after him curiously and whispered among themselves, who made way for him with fawning respect, as though he would repay their courtesy with some Indian ruby or orient pearl. To some he spoke; but most he ignored, and except for the simple countrymen gawking at the great illuminated windows or ornate statuary, everyone knew who Gervase Castell was.

  He was about to leave through the little north door when his eye caught an almost too-familiar face in the throng. He waved his protectors on out the door before him into the street to keep off the beggars, and paused to watch. It was a young man Gervase Castell stared after. Dressed like an apprentice in a plain russet jerkin and apron, he seemed on his master’s business, finally stopping behind a countryman dressed in a black frieze coat, a new pair of white hose, and a fine felt hat a little too large for his head and cocked at a rakish angle. Castell watched as the two men collided, as if by accident, and then the one—Thomas Perryman, Castell now recalled—stumbled over himself in apologies, patting the simple fellow about the shoulders and chest as though Perryman had taken it upon himself to put the man together again.

  At the same time Perryman quietly and expertly lifted the simpleton’s purse.

  Castell frowned and continued to watch as Perryma
n plied the aisles, moving quickly toward the stairs to the choir, then returning the way he had come, as though to suggest by his gait and posture that his message had been delivered and he was homeward again, bowing and scraping before gentlefolk, the stolen purse stuffed somewhere beneath his apron. Within the next five minutes Perryman took two more purses and a gold chain, slipped off its owner’s neck with such agility that the man would be lucky if he noticed its absence before nightfall.

  Castell screwed up his eyes and drew farther back against the wall of the church, pretending to read some inscription beneath the window but keeping his eyes on Perryman.

  Perryman drew near and saw Castell watching him. The young man smiled and Castell glared back a warning.

  Speak to me, even seem to know me, Thomas Perryman, and I’ll have your tongue cut out and nailed to the doorpost.

  As though the jeweler’s glance conveyed a perfect image of the thought, the smile of recognition vanished at once from Perryman’s face; abruptly he changed his course for the north door of the church and in a moment was lost in the press.

  Matthew Stock gazed at the shop. He had had no trouble finding his way to the jeweler’s, for everyone, it seemed, had heard of Gervase Castell and most were ready with directions. One simply followed one’s eyes to Paul’s, and from there it was not a ten-minute amble to the east. It was very busy in the street. Pedestrians, some dressed very finely, moved about Matthew as though he were a rock in a stream, hardly seeming to notice him standing there gawking. He felt very awkward and alone, as though he were from a different country, wore a strange garb, or spoke an unintelligible tongue. The English sky was a different color in the city. It was gray and flat and the air, he decided, was unwholesome, full of smoke, and no birds sang, save in the gardens behind the houses. There were unpleasant odors, and the feces of the people were hard and mistrustful. And the noise! There was a constant rumble of carts and coaches, the clatter of hooves, a shouting of carters, tradesmen, laborers, apprentices, as though no music would serve unless it were a thunderous din. Here every day was market day, but there was a pervasive joylessness that depressed him, and as he stood in the street he was suddenly chilled by the fear that he might be engulfed in this city, his soul lost forever in its heartless masonry.