Low Treason

by Leonard Tourney

  “Where—?” he began with astonishment.

  The tall, youngish man had the swarthy complexion of an Italian or Greek. He smiled impudently. “One man’s as good as another for a guide, if he knows the way.” Parr didn’t say anything. The man was armed with a stout cudgel and looked as though he would welcome an occasion to use it.

  “Follow me, sir,” said the swarthy man.

  Parr did what he was told and passed through the door to come to a square chamber without windows or furniture except for a plain stool placed before an ornate grillwork. Beside the stool was a small table on which a candle burned, illuminating the room. The light was very feeble but Parr could see the shadowy form of a man sitting on the other side of the grille.

  Parr was ordered to approach and take the stool, which he did, relieved to find himself at last at the end of his strange journey. The man with the cudgel stood at his back.

  “Well, speak,” said Parr, trying to assume his wonted authority.

  There was a pause, a rustling behind the grille, and then a voice. Parr was sure he had heard it before, somewhere; he tried to place it.

  “I would moderate your tone with me, sir. I have you at a disadvantage.”

  “You have my sword.”

  “I have more than your sword—”

  “More?”

  The voice responded shrilly. “I have you by the bal-locks with this letter, sir knight, and by God I’ll yank them hard if you do not moderate your tone.”

  Parr sat very still now, listening to his own heavy breathing. Behind him the man with the cudgel shifted his weight. The voice began to speak: Parr knew the words. They were his own. His letter to Alice Farnsworth was being thrown back in his face. He cringed. The devil on the other side of the grille. A high-pitched, mocking voice. Parr felt his cheeks and ears flush with anger and humiliation.

  “Is that enough for you, knight?”

  “It is enough,” Parr answered weakly. He sat forward on the stool, exhausted, his arms hanging between his legs, reaching almost to the floor. He removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “What is it you want of me?” he asked in a dry whisper. The voice of some other man, not his, a knight with an income of three thousand pounds a year and a position at court an earl might envy.

  “That, later. I want to make sure, Sir Jeremy, that you first appreciate your position. This letter confirms your alliance with a woman not your wife. Indeed, it has adultery written all over it, betwixt each line. Were it to become the common talk, you would be disgraced—especially in the eyes of your father-in-law.”

  Parr thought of his father-in-law, misshapen old devil that he was, rich as Croesus, clutching obscenely to his life and dangling his money over his daughter’s head. No, the voice was right. The old man would hardly take kindly to his son-in-law’s perfidy. Parr had no choice but to submit. Whoever was behind the grille had devised this plot with particular care. Parr was in the hands of no mean order of scoundrel. How he would have liked to pull aside the grille, seize his tormentor by the throat and . . .

  “Your fellow said—” Parr began. He could hardly talk now his mouth was so dry.

  “My servant, please.”

  “Your servant . . . said you didn’t want money.” “Information,” responded the voice.

  “What sort of information?”

  “Facts and figures.”

  “Pertaining to . . .”

  “Your duties-”

  Parr felt sick, his brain reeled, and his sweat turned cold; he began to shake.

  “You are master of the ordnance in the Tower, are you not?” Parr could only nod dumbly. The plot was beginning to assume its ugly shape.

  “I want a full inventory of what artillery, cannon, musket, and other pertinences are housed there, what number of men, in whose command, and the hour of the watch.” “Wherefore would you know this? Why, I could be drawn and quartered—”

  “Indeed, if your cooperation should become known. But consider this, Sir Jeremy. That would do little good to me or my friends. Trust me that we have the best interests of the state at heart. We are not traitors, sir, far from it.” “Who are you, then?”

  “Ones who wish their country better governed.”

  “And you carry on thusly, hugger-mugger?”

  “Secretly,” responded the voice.

  “When I have given you this . . . inventory . . . will you then give me the letter?”

  “You have my word on it.”

  Parr thought about that. Obtaining the information requested of him would be no trouble at all. Within the week he had commissioned such an inventory himself. If his two assistants, Scott and Woodruff, had done their duty, the inventory would be even now in his cabinet at the Tower. But there was no doubt about it, delivering the document to unauthorized persons would be treason, plain and simple. He felt he desperately needed time to think. He decided to agree with the person on the other side of the grille. At the moment he felt he would do anything to get out into the open air.

  “Well, what say you, Parr?”

  He cringed at hearing his own name without the respectful “Sir Jeremy” he was used to.

  “I agree. Where shall I bring the inventory?”

  “Take it to your lodgings in Westminster. Place it in your cabinet, the one with the ornately molded top. Leave the desk top unlocked. I will do the rest.”

  “And my letter?”

  “You will find it in place of the document. That’s fair exchange, isn’t it?”

  Parr nodded. Behind the grille the figure moved, seemed to sigh.

  “Don’t despair, you may find this experience good for you. Improves humility, doesn’t it? There’s nothing like a good taking-down as a remedy for pride.”

  When Parr didn’t reply, the voice repeated itself: “Don’t you agree?”

  “I agree,” Parr said, in what was almost a whisper.

  “Well then, our business is done, it seems. My servant behind you will see you to the door. I trust you will endure the blindfold once again. You’ll be delivered at the place from which you came.”

  Parr was led from the room, down the passage, and out into the night. He allowed himself to be led along now,

  not listening for the meaningful sounds that might have helped him determine just where he had been, not really caring where he was being led, muddled in his mind, tortured by an aching swelling bladder, and wishing nothing more than to relieve his agony and get himself to bed. When this was over—if it ended—he would sleep, and when he would awake perhaps he would find it had all been a dream or momentary madness such as when he got himself gloriously drunk and had done those things he never would have done sober.

  “Watch your step, Sir Jeremy.”

  He watched his step, but seeing nothing, his care was to no avail. He stumbled forward, landing hard on his hands and knees and feeling his palms sink into mud and something cold and damp through his hose. With disgust, he realized he had fallen into some kind of awful slime. He scrambled to his feet, cursing; he wiped his hands on his doublet while at some distance he heard a low mocking laugh. Brought back to his senses by this assault upon his person, he called out to his guide. “You, you there?” Another laugh at a greater distance. He could hear that. The bald man’s lyrical note of scorn.

  He realized that he had been left alone, blindfolded and covered with filth, in an empty street. The fall had been no accident; he had been led into harm’s way. Was this to be the last of his humiliations of the evening?

  He tore the blindfold from his eyes and looked wildly about him. True to the blackmailer’s word he was back where he started, at the weathered door, the faded sign of cross and scepter of a long-failed enterprise, and a back alley of depressing squalor. He started to knock but never touched the door. It would be futile. There would be no one there now. He would not see his sword and dagger again. Or his hat. That had been lost too. It had been a fine evening’s work for someone, not for Jeremy Parr.


  He took note of the storeroom’s location, the adjacent buildings, knowing at the same time that it would do no good. The building was vacant. Its owner, were he found, would claim no knowledge of a bald man in tradesman’s

  garb, would swear that the building had stood empty this twelve-month.

  Parr cursed his luck and hurried homeward, hot tears of rage and shame streaming from his eyes and turning the dark streets to a watery blur. When later Furness admitted him, staring aghast at his master’s dishevelment, Parr cursed his manservant too and sent him straightway to his bed with a swift kick to his backsides.

  The knight gone, Gervase Castell came out from behind the grille and saw that Parr had left his hat. The jeweler wore no such hats himself but he recognized Parr’s as a good hat, made of fine materials. He picked it up off the floor. It would, he decided, make a pleasant souvenir of an interesting evening.

  He made sure the outer door was bolted and then entered his shop, to which the windowless room was adjacent. In the darkness he glanced down at the long cases displaying his wares, realizing that his eyes surveyed a king’s ransom. On the next day the shop would be filled with the quality of the kingdom—knights and their ladies, an earl or two, gentlemen of means from the City, all attracted by Castell’s toys like bees to the hive. Castell would wait upon them with pleasure, would listen to all their small talk, and he would suck up a wealth of knowledge more sweet to his taste than any jewel in his shop.

  At length Starkey returned to the shop and joined Castell in his watch.

  “You saw the knight back to where you found him?’’ he asked.

  Yes, Starkey had done that. Starkey also had another report, about Perryman, who had spent the entire day following Matthew Stock about London. “Perryman kept a fastidious eye on his body from sunup to sunset. The constable will sleep now, like a babe at his mother’s breast, full of roast beef and plum pudding and a sense of his own virtue. So says Perryman.’’

  Castell nodded. “Stock had no more converse with apprentices, then?”

  “Our friend with the loose tongue has met an accident, I fear, and gone off to a better world.”

  “Indeed,” said Castell. “And who did that work?”

  “I did,” said Starkey.

  “What else?”

  “Stock went to see the milliner—about Mary Skelton.” “What could she know?”

  “Nothing but that the girl has vanished.”

  Castell chuckled mirthlessly. “Good Constable Stock will think London is an Irish bog. One no sooner sets foot here but disappears.” But then he said with a dead seriousness: “It were better Mary Skelton had gone heavenward, along with that babbling apprentice. Keep a sharp eye out for her. Have Perryman continue to watch Stock. The constable’s a fool, yet even a fool may have a day of luck.”

  Castell’s bodyguards had been playing cards upstairs during the long evening. They descended now and prepared to accompany Castell to his house on Barbican Street, to which he presently went, whistling on the way, as much at home in the forlorn, shadow-ridden streets as most men are in the daylight.

  Six

  AT DAWN a surly little boatman took Matthew’s penny and ferried him across the river while the constable watched the glow of lamps ashore slip discreetly into the general gloom. The great cathedral church of Paul’s, its blunt steeple thrust heavenward like an appeal for grace, was the last thing in the City Matthew could discern with any clarity. Now he looked in the other direction, across the dark placid water to the southern bank. There he could see the vague humps of houses and trees and rising above them the larger shape of the Globe theater, like a beer tun turned upright.

  The theater would be dark now, its galleries and stage empty, but Matthew recalled the first time he had seen it. Hot in pursuit of Harry Saltmarsh—murderer, adulterer, madman—Matthew had plunged into that sweating, violent throng, his head swimming with the confusion and color and novelty of it all to him, a plain simple clothier from a small town. It had been one of the great experiences of his life. Next to his marriage. Joan had been his great experience, coming to know her. He thought of Joan now. Later, after Saltmarsh’s trial, he and Joan had gone to the theater together. They had seen a play, a wondrous comedy by Will Shakespeare. The play had been rich in poetry and song. And jests, marvelous jests. When had he seen his little wife laugh so? Matthew could not remember.

  He was still thinking about his wife as the finer details of the approaching bank materialized out of the dark and the boat’s prow nudged against the stone steps. The boatman held his lantern aloft to show Matthew the way, grumbling and sighing beneath his breath a vague complaint of his lot, as though he had bent his back to ferry the world’s troubles across the Thames instead of a single customer. Matthew bid the man good night and felt his eyes follow him as he climbed the stairs and then began to walk down the road to where the houses began.

  The air was foul along the bank, his footing uncertain. He had the vague uneasiness of one who has come late to a feast and fears both that he will not be admitted and that he may be, to his regret, but soon he was cheered somewhat by the sound of music and voices and he came around a comer to find himself in a neighborhood of shabby tenements and alehouses lining a narrow, crooked street, illuminated by torches. It was crowded and noisy. Young gentlemen out on the town, apprentices and their masters mingled together, sundry punks and brawlers, all moved, conversed, drank, in a holiday mood. There were women, too, among them, mingling familiarly with the men— women standing in doorways or loitering in the shadowy mouths of alleys, women leaning from the windows of upper stories calling to their mates in the streets below like carrion birds perched in treetops, their throaty laughter audible above the brittle harmonies of a little band of wretched musicians dressed in tawny coats.

  He stood for a moment on the periphery of the crowd surveying the scene with his businessman’s eye. Trade here was all flesh and drink and the tenements cheap rental property, the landlord doubtless some well-fed and pious merchant or lawyer of the City, a decent family man out to make a quick pound in the stews of Bankside. God knew what went on indoors. No doubt Matthew would find out himself before the night was done.

  Alert as Argus with his hundred eyes, he mingled, favoring the side of the street where he could mind his purse and view the interiors of the taverns and alehouses. For an hour he wandered, asking for Mary Skelton—or her sister Catherine—of Sussex, newly come to the neighborhood. But no one he asked knew the sisters, or would admit to knowing them. People responded to his question strangely, as though to ask after a single maid or two was a great impertinence, as though he himself were a suspect—a sheriffs man in plainclothes, or a scrapping hedge-creeper, or sneaking eavesdropper. Djfl he want some nameless drab or pretty boy? That was well. Did he want to procure the services of a blackmailer or murderer? He had come to the right place. But to ask after a certain girl!

  Getting nowhere except deeper into the wretched slum where every lane and doorway began to look like every other, Matthew took refuge at last in an alehouse that appeared more respectable than the others and promised decent refreshment, for he was sleepy and footsore and ready to give over his search. The interior was a spacious hall, girdled at the midriff by a gallery from which hung various limp and tattered flags and pennants, giving the establishment a certain military air. It was dimly lighted as though the proprietor either preferred the dark or was at great charge for oil or torches, meanly furnished with rough-hewn tables and benches, and full to overflowing with a motley collection of townsmen, sailors, laborers, and their women, sitting about at tables, drinking, smoking, and laughing. At one end of a long bar drawers were extracting beer from spigots projecting from several large kegs the size of rainbarrels. At the other end two very drunk women had begun to push and shove each other about and had drawn a little circle of spectators who were egging them on and laying wagers on the victor. A man Matthew took to be the proprietor was vainly trying to separate the
women, one of whom had succeeded in doing such violence to the other’s gown that the top of it was now in shreds revealing some very pink flesh, the viewing of which was giving the spectators no little pleasure.

  Matthew found himself a quiet comer where he could

  watch the proceedings. At the opposite end of the table where he sat three drunk men were quarreling over the reckoning. Matthew listened. One of them, a great fat fellow with yellow hair and a florid complexion, was haranguing his companions in a harsh guttural tongue. Dutch, Matthew thought, for there were a good many of these folk now in Chelmsford and he had no doubt London would have its share as well. The other two men were less vocal but by their expressions equally resolute. The Dutchman was banging on the table with his fist.

  Soon, to Matthew’s relief, the Dutchman stomped out of the house with a great show of disdain for the company and then his companions followed, leaving their end of the table a ruin of empty pots and bowls. Meanwhile the tussle at the bar concluded as well. Sheer exhaustion and the persuasion of their friends had made peace between the female combatants and they had separated to different corners of the hall to repair damages and regain their composure. All of this Matthew had viewed without the services of a waiter. Now finally he was observed by a pimplyfaced youth in a smock that looked as though it had gone unwashed for a year or more. The young waiter emerged from the confusion of bobbing heads and tobacco smoke to inquire what Matthew would have. The boy did not look as though he cared very much. He slouched and hemmed and stood before Matthew with his arms brazenly crossed and as insolent an eye as Matthew had seen.

  Matthew ignored this rudeness and asked for a cup of chilled wine and, because hunger had joined his other discomforts, a plate of apple-johns, dried fruit of which Matthew was very fond.

  This order seemed satisfactory to the waiter, who stopped long enough to stroke the miserable few hairs growing from his chin and then vanished into the smoke.