Low Treason

by Leonard Tourney

  “Clarence here will convey you to Julian, sir,” the keeper said. “Oh, I nearly forgot. The gratuity.”

  “The gratuity?”

  “A custom of the prison, sir. It’s a little something to feed the poor of the place.”

  By this Matthew understood he must pay something for the privilege of being taken to Julian. He reached into his purse and fingered some coins, waiting for the keeper to name the sum, but the keeper said nothing. After an awkward silence, Matthew asked: “How much wifi this gratuity be?”

  The keeper appraised Matthew carefully. Matthew knew the look and waited. “A shilling,” said the keeper, looking up at Clarence, who loomed above him.

  Matthew handed the keeper the coin.

  “It is a venerable custom of Newgate, Mr. Stock. An act of Christian charity. A single shilling shall see you to every ward in the prison, if need be. That and the leaving

  of that blade at your side, sir. The law permits no weapons inside the prison, save those borne by my men and me.”

  Matthew handed over his knife. He did it reluctantly. It was a good knife with a whalebone handle and he had carried it for years.

  “This is Mr. Stock,” said the keeper, addressing Clarence. “He is constable of Chelmsford.”

  Clarence’s expression showed no sign that this information was important. The keeper’s eyes had wandered over Matthew’s face and form as he spoke, assessing his person. The keeper continued: “He wants to see our Julian. You know Julian, don’t you, Clarence? Julian.” The keeper emphasized the name, and Clarence brightened. Suddenly he seemed eager to do what he had been asked. He grinned at Matthew insolently, and Matthew thought it strange that this great hulk who had been on his hands and knees a minute or so before, slobbering over the dice, now seemed so tractable.

  “One more thing, sir,” said the keeper, rising from his chair. “I would keep my purse close about me if I were you. Though the men of the yard have lost their freedom most still practice their trade—if you get my drift.”

  Matthew understood all right. He thanked the keeper for his help and the warning and felt a chill of apprehension, reasoning that if the keeper and his men dwelt amid such disorder who knew what he might encounter among the inmates. He, with some misgiving, followed Clarence until they came to a spacious yard where a great throng of prisoners was taking the air. Men in various quality and stages of dress stood or walked about, with little supervision, so that Matthew could hardly believe them to be prisoners. Against the walls some of the inmates had set up stalls and were carrying on business, mending shoes, peddling combs and brushes, barbering, and tailoring as though they were freemen. There were vendors of cakes and meats, a cluster of men rolling dice against the wall, while another group bowled and a third group sat at tables reading or discoursing pleasantly. It was a very strange prison, thought Matthew, for whom incarceration meant an afternoon in the stocks or a public whipping. But he had heard that Newgate was one of the sights of London and despite his distaste for what he had seen thus far he was prepared to give the rest his full attention.

  Clutching his purse, Matthew followed at the heels of his guide through a doorway and down a narrow passage to some stone stairs. The stairs descended into a filthy cellar, a smoky, low-ceilinged room where some poorly dressed men were crowded around a table drinking, smoking, and playing cards. There was much noise and confusion, and although Matthew’s first impression was that he had intruded on a quarrel he quickly realized that the din was the normal tenor of discourse among the prisoners.

  Matthew’s guide screwed up his eyes and peered through the smoke. He began to call out for Julian—in an odd, high-pitched voice, like a farmer’s wife calling in the pigs.

  “Julian? Julian?’’

  Somehow Clarence’s call managed to penetrate the uproar. Suddenly the noise at the table subsided and heads twisted to stare curiously at Matthew and his companion. The men began to call out for Julian, too, but their calls were less an inquiry than an assertion.

  “Julian! Julian! Julian!” the men shouted in unison.

  It was all very strange, Matthew thought. Like a chant.

  “Julian! Julian! Julian!” they demanded, pounding their fists on the table.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the chanting ceased and the men at the table returned to their cards. The conversation again rose to a roar. No one paid any attention to Matthew now.

  Confused, Matthew turned to his guide to find Clarence staring at him with a glint of amusement in his eye.

  “It seems we must seek Julian elsewhere, sir,” he said, his thin lips twisting in an obvious smirk. “Unless of course he is deaf. Shall I call again?”

  Reddening with anger but intimidated by his guide’s size, Matthew said nothing. Clarence laughed and walked away. Matthew was about to follow when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  He turned to find a thin little man with a pinched face and scraggly red beard regarding him sympathetically with watery blue eyes. “My name is Abraham,” he said. “A poor Jew fallen on hard times in the City and resident of Newgate these two years. This Julian you seek doesn’t exist.”

  Matthew stared at the little man uncomprehendingly. “A little joke of the keeper,” Abraham explained, “practiced on well-intentioned gentlemen like yourself seeking friends or loved ones among the honored guests of this place. By what price were you admitted?” Astonished, Matthew named the sum.

  “You were fortunate, then. Our good keeper has been known to charge as much as a pound.”

  “But he said it was custom—Christian charity.” Abraham laughed scornfully. “Oh, it is custom in truth, but hardly a Christian one. The jailer also gives shelter to thieves and strumpets for fourpence a night and cheats the prisoners of their victuals. It’s said his post is worth a hundred pounds or more a year. And all is custom, sir, most devilish custom. I tell you for a fact, there is more corruption in the prison lodge than in the lowest ward.” The little Jew led Matthew from the cellar into the yard. He blinked in the sunlight. “Now, then, perhaps I can help you,” said Abraham. “You were told this Julian would take you to your friend for a sum?”

  “Sixpence.”

  “Well, then, since these coins are at the ready, would you object to paying me for Julian’s service?”

  Matthew said he would not. He wanted nothing so much now as to see this Ralph, have of him what information he could get about Tom, and then be gone. If Abraham could help him find the boy, then Abraham could have coins for his bony bosom and Matthew’s blessing besides.

  Abraham wanted the money now but Matthew kept his purse safe. The little Jew would have his money, but only when his service was rendered.

  Abraham agreed, reluctantly. He was dressed in an old jerkin with leather patches, a ragged shirt, and his feet were bound in filthy cloth. There was a strange earthy smell about his body, as though he had been buried a long time in leaf mold. Now he scratched his bony ribs and neck with long, black fingernails and looked at Matthew apologetically.

  “It’s the lice,” he explained. “The wee creatures run riot in the wards. Which reminds me of a riddle. How is a jailer like a louse?” Abraham looked up under shaggy red brows, his lips parted in a thin smile, and awaited Matthew’s response.

  But Matthew could not think of an answer. For a moment his mind struggled with these mighty contrarities of man and beast; he reckoned limbs, and looked for strange correspondences, but he could find nothing. Baffled, he looked at the little Jew for the answer.

  Abraham smiled triumphantly, shaking with a dry silent laughter. “Why, the both of them feed upon the same dish. The prisoner, that is.”

  While this conversation was proceeding, Matthew was being led across the yard. Abraham walked with a limp and from time to time he turned to glance over his shoulder, as though to make sure Matthew was still behind him.

  “This apprentice you seek—Ralph what’s-his-name—he is newly arriving among us?”

  “I think since tw
o weeks,” Matthew responded, looking about him in wonderment at the variety of prisoners.

  Abraham paused, stroked his chin, stared up thoughtfully at the sun, which was now high over the prison walls. Then he turned to look at Matthew.

  “Yet all is not lost. Whom has he offended?”

  “It’s said that he stole something from the jeweler Castell, he who keeps shop at the sign of the Basilisk.” “Ah,” Abraham cried, his eyes widening with comprehension. “Then I do know this Ralph of yours. A tall, strapping lad with ruddy cheeks and wide innocent eyes like a maiden come fresh to the bridal bed?”

  “Yes, he could be the very one,” said Matthew. Abraham led him by the arm through another door and then down a long flight of stone steps. They descended through a hatch.

  “Where are we going?” asked Matthew.

  “The to Hold.”

  “The Hold?”

  “The lowest ward. You’ll tell when we come to it by the stink. It’s a place of more sickness than twenty French hospitals. The boy has a strong pair of bolts on his heels and a basil of twenty-eight-pound weight.”

  Matthew said he thought this was very hard for a theft.

  “Well, it was for something more than that, I’d say.”

  They had come to the lowest level of the prison. It was dark and damp and foul smelling. It was another cellar but without the amenity of tables, chairs, and gentlemen conversing over tobacco and beer. The stone floor was barely covered with a thin scattering of filthy straw and an open sewer ran down the middle. Along the walls Matthew could see the bodies of men. They were chained there, like beasts; some slept, others prayed, wept, or groaned in misery.

  The ceiling was so low that Matthew, no tall man, had to bend his head for fear of scraping it against the rough smoky timber bristling with splinters and groaning, it seemed, under the weight of the several stories above. There was a smell of damp stone, earth, and ordure, something like a chicken coop long closed up and all the fowl left to die therein, a suffocating closeness.

  Abraham seemed to hesitate in the midst of it all, peering around in the half-darkness—there were only two candles, puny little things—as though he was trying to remember which of the miserable creatures was Ralph. There were so many of them, lying along or against the walls.

  He continued, and Matthew followed him to the end of the room. There they sat on their haunches beside one of the bodies. Of course there would be vermin in the stale, matted rushes. Other prisoners were shackled nearby but they paid no attention to the two men. Abraham reached out to touch the shoulder of the body before them.

  The body moved and sat up; by the dim light a handsome youthful face wearing at the moment the confused, panicky expression of one awakened from sleep, or more precisely, from a nightmare, stared at Matthew curiously.

  Abraham said some words under his breath and the boy nodded. His name was Ralph Harbert, he said. Then Matthew told the boy who he was, why he had come.

  Ralph took this in slowly. He had been sleeping, he said. He was sick. He seemed almost embarrassed at having been found manacled and confined. He explained that he had been sent on an errand for his master. On his way back he had been apprehended by a sergeant who claimed to have a warrant for his arrest.

  “Did he show you the warrant?” asked Matthew, who knew something of legal procedures.

  Ralph looked at Matthew blankly. “I supposed it to be written in Latin,” he said.

  “What happened then?”

  “The sergeant’s men shackled me, and the next thing I knew I was being hauled before a magistrate, then bound over for the next sessions, he said. Straightway I was brought here.”

  “Who accused you?” asked Matthew.

  Ralph hesitated, then said: “Mr. Castell—or so said the sergeant.”

  “For theft, was it?”

  Ralph nodded. It was evident that the entire experience was painful for him to recall. “They said I stole a ring, a ring from the shop. But I swear I never did.”

  Matthew looked at the boy’s clear eyes, the smooth guileless face. If there was ever a face modeled from its owner’s honesty, Matthew gazed upon it this instant, the two weeks’ ravages of the prison notwithstanding.

  “The first few days I enjoyed the freedom of the yard, what enjoyment there was in it. Then came the jailer’s men and dragged me down here. They said it was for charges that had not been paid.”

  “What charges were these?” asked Matthew.

  “I don’t know. Charges, they were called.”

  “You had no money?”

  “Upon entering Newgate I did, but the warders took it all in fees, every farthing. They would have had my shirt had it not been such a pitiful thing. ’ ’

  Matthew said, “Tell me about Tom Ingram.”

  “Tom and I were friends, apprenticed not six months apart. About a month past he comes to me in a brown study, throws his arm about my neck very lubberly and says that he has been thinking to return to Chelmsford and entreats me to come with him. This surprised me, for I had no thought of his being dissatisfied. I asked him wherefore he desired to leave, to which he replied nothing to the purpose. So then, says I, it’s some secret, your reason. But then he said his reason concerned some practice of the master, some practice he could not abide. Said I, what practice? Said he, nay, I cannot tell you, no, not now. Well then, said I, you be off to Chelmsford and Godspeed to you. I said this in a way I regret now, for I thought it most uncharitable of him to keep a secret from me, his friend.”

  “Did you believe your master was up to no good?” asked Matthew.

  Ralph hesitated and his face formed an expression suggesting that this was the first time he had considered such a thing. “Well, sir, I did believe Tom, but I believed the master, too—that is, that he was honest. He had always seemed so to me, at least until—”

  “Until he pressed charges against you?”

  “I cannot but believe that he has been misled. Perhaps the ring has fallen betwixt the boards. It has happened many times, I’m told.”

  The boy’s eyes signaled their mute appeal and, keeping his doubts to himself, Matthew chose charity above the truth and nodded in agreement. What Ralph needed now was hope, no matter how slender and frail. The boy coughed from some subterranean region of the chest; his chains rattled and grew still. It had been a wrenching cough, cruel and ominous in its violence, and when the fit had passed Ralph wiped the daric frothy spittle from his nether lip with a tattered sleeve and cast upon Matthew such a piteous look of injured innocence that Matthew blushed for the tears in his eyes. Now the boy’s face seemed even whiter than before, almost luminous in the half-light of the dungeon.

  Matthew told Ralph about his visit to the jeweler and explained that Thomas Ingram had never come home.

  “Why, an ant could crawl to Chelmsford in two weeks,” Ralph said, raising himself to cough again and then falling back on his bed of filthy straw. “Whatever could have happened to him?” he asked when his new fit subsided.

  Matthew shook his head sadly. But then thought to ask: “When were you arrested?’’

  “Two weeks ago this Thursday,” replied Ralph, lying flat upon his back now and staring up at the low ceiling. “And this talk you had with Tom, about his running away?” “The very morning before, I believe it was. I never saw Thomas after that.”

  “That’s a curious coincidence, don’t you think?” asked Matthew, to whom the coincidence was very curious indeed. But Ralph’s eyes assumed their glazed faraway look; he continued to stare at the rafters, not at Matthew. He said he hadn’t thought about it, not until now. Jn his mind he couldn’t see how the events were connected. Tom had left the master’s employ; he had been arrested. No, he could not see how the events were connected since Tom had fled willingly and he had been dragged off against his will. He insisted again, though in a weaker voice now, that he had been happy in the jeweler’s employ, that he had never done anything amiss there, and that he hoped Castell would take him b
ack into his service.

  Ralph shut his eyes. His smooth forehead was like white marble, his body rigid with arms at his side like an effigy in a church.

  Matthew thought he might have fallen asleep but when he asked if there were other friends of Tom’s who might know of his whereabouts Ralph answered weakly yes, there was. A giri, Mary Skelton. A young milliner’s helper. “Tom bought her apples of a Sunday and took walks with her on the Strand. If he opened his bosom to anyone else it was to Mary Skelton.”

  “Where might this Mary Skelton be found?”

  “She works at a little shop without Ludgate. It has a green-and-white canopy over the front door, a sign decked with a needle and thread. Her mistress’s name is Margaret Browne. You cannot miss the shop if you come through directly and keep your eyes fixed to the right.”

  Or was it the left? Suddenly the boy seemed confused and Matthew could offer no help. Ralph began to babble and then to cough again. There was dark blood in his spittle. The boy choked with it and Abraham, who had been sitting very quietly all the while, came to help Matthew lift Ralph into a sitting position. The fit passed; the boy’s skin felt cold and clammy. They laid him back down on the straw and Matthew drew the blanket over him. But not over the face. He would not do that yet, although that was in his mind. Ralph Harbert was dying, that was clear enough. The saving grace was that he did not know of it and was too guileless to have his ignorance matter. His soul would fly heavenward as straight and true as an arrow.

  Ralph turned his face to the wall and Matthew bid him goodbye in a voice full of emotion. He started to say, to promise, that he would do something for him, but the futility of the offer lodged in his throat. Ralph had fallen asleep, and it was just as well. Matthew nodded to the little Jew and the two of them made their way from the dungeon up into the light.

  “I will speak to the keeper before I leave,” Matthew said when they were in the yard and he had pressed the promised coin into Abraham’s hand. “About Ralph, I mean. I know there’s nothing can be done for him now.”