Low Treason

by Leonard Tourney

  Matthew was served, in time; the waiter thumped the bowl and plate down on the board before him, the wine spilled, the plate was dirty. Matthew was too glad for this meal to complain about the service and the waiter too churlish to apologize. Matthew sent him off, ate and drank happily while the crowd thinned and mellowed. He was

  about to begin the second of the apple-johns when he observed the woman heading toward him in a purposeful way, toward him certainly for he was alone now at the table in the far end of the room; she couldn’t have been steering a course for anyone else. Flamboyant and confident, she wore a flame-colored taffeta gown, a broad kirtle at the waist that accentuated the fullness of her bodice, a dazzling display of rings on her fingers. She had a mass of yellow hair that fell about her shoulders in a riot of wanton curls; large, wide-set eyes, and a semblance of youthfulness that diminished as she drew near. She must have been pretty once; up close, there was something hard and calculating in her countenance. Matthew felt his face flush.

  “Norwich,” she pronounced confidently as though it were his name, standing over him.

  Puzzled, Matthew started to stand and inquire whatever she meant, but she urged him to remain seated, pushing him down with good-natured roughness, and then, taking possession of the space next to him on the bench, she drew very close to him without asking his leave or identifying herself.

  “I can always tell a man from the towns,” she minced. “You are from Norwich?”

  “Chelmsford,” Matthew replied awkwardly, feeling suddenly that his tongue had grown very large in his mouth and shifting himself to put a more decent interval between them.

  “Are you alone?” she asked.

  “Here? Yes.” *

  “Good,” said she. “I thought that surely such a gentleman as you would be accompanied, that perhaps your lady had stepped out to do her business in the jakes. ” She winked. “Chelmsford lies in the same direction as Norwich, does it not?” she continued.

  “Indeed it does,” replied Matthew uncertainly, anxious not to take up the wrong tone.

  “Well, then, I have you,” she said, grinning broadly. “I can always tell.”

  She then proceeded to introduce herself as Beth Drury 97

  and to identify Matthew as a gentleman merchant. By your dress, she said, and your demeanor—a word she pronounced very oddly, though somewhat self-consciously, as though it were French. Yes, she insisted, Matthew was a merchant come up to London to buy horses at Smithfield and was now sojourning in the Bankside for the quality of the air.

  She giggled girlishly at her own jest and then asserted, “I can always tell about men. Where they lie, when they lie, and with whom they lie.”

  Beth Drury waited patiently for Matthew to appreciate her joke, then she burst into laughter. It was laughter of a very raucous sort and seemed to Matthew to fill the whole hall. He looked about him very embarrassed for them both and was amazed to see that no one else had seemed to notice her outburst.

  While she continued to chatter, Matthew studied the woman’s face. Sitting as close as they were now, Matthew could see the loose flesh of the woman’s neck, the large pores of her face, and the lines in her forehead and around the eyes, only partially concealed in the heavy rouge. She was clearly older than she had first seemed, and then she had not seemed young. There was a kind of cruel mockery in her effort at rejuvenation, and Matthew suddenly felt a surge of pity for her. She had very large breasts that quivered as she talked and she was thrusting them toward him provocatively, so that he found it necessary to avert his gaze. It had grown very hot in the room; beneath his doublet Matthew could feel himself sweating fiercely. He could smell the sweet-sourness of her body too, feel the warm, winish breath in his face as she jabbered. His head began to ache from the tobacco smoke.

  The woman lisped as she talked, either naturally or from excessive drink. He offered her an apple-john. She looked at the shriveled fruit, poked it with a finger, laughed and teased.

  “I’ll give you a sweeter morsel anon,” she whispered. She moved closer to him, throwing her arm around his shoulder.

  She had lived all of her life in London, she said. Her 98

  parents had been gentry, fallen on evil days. She had earned her bread since she was nine. She wiped a tear from one heavily made-up eye as a testimonial to her veracity.

  Matthew listened intently, grateful not to have to say anything, but then, abruptly, she wanted to talk about him.

  “What is your humor?” she asked.

  Matthew did not understand.

  “Your will, your pleasure,” she said, pinching his cheek saucily. Now Matthew thought she meant his business and was about to describe the clothier’s trade when her scowl of impatience made it clear she was thinking of something quite different.

  “I am looking for a giri. About sixteen or thereabouts. Her name is—”

  “Name me no names,” Beth Drury interrupted indignantly. She gave him a long stare of unmitigated contempt. “Young flesh, young flesh,” she scolded. “What is it with you men? Will no woman serve your turn but she is half-grown and yesterday a virgin, thin as a bean and all green sickness and mother’s milk? I swear it is the new fashion, even among the gallants, to want nothing older than a pup.”

  She seized a passing waiter by his apron and pulled him toward the table.

  “A cup of sack—and within the hour, if it please you, sirrah. And permit our Chelmsford clothier to pay the cost.”

  The waiter, different from the one who had served Matthew so ill, looked at him dully; Matthew nodded, he would pay for the drink.

  Not mollified by this overture, Beth Drury renewed her attack. “You whoremasterly rogue, you corrupter of children,” she sputtered.

  Matthew was about to take exception to these calumnies when quite unexpectedly her scolding ceased and she flashed a conciliatory smile as though her previous outburst had been a jest. “Sixteen or thereabouts, you say? Five or six of such girls I know intimately; two fair, two dark, one a Moor or African, in this very house. What is

  your pleasure? A shapely leg? Shoulders white damask? A soft breast cupped by the Queen of Love?”

  As she wanned to her theme, Matthew realized it was time to make his intentions clear. He told her he wanted to find a Catherine Skelton for her parents’ sake. They were old and infirm, and she their only child, their last hope. It was a pitiful case, which a hard man might weep at just the hearing.

  Beth Drury listened. Matthew had manufactured the tale of a sudden and as the words came tripping forth from his lips it was almost as though he could hear them ringing false onto the floor like counterfeit coins. But Beth Drury seemed to believe him. He thought she would be used to believing, a woman like this, who must hear patiently the counterfeit words of many a counterfeit man. He forgave himself the lie because he could not see any good reason for telling the truth. His quest had grown very complicated now, and besides, he was not sure 'whom he could trust.

  She nodded noncommittally, looked pensive. ‘‘A narrow face, clear forehead, small rump, and simpering voice,” she said. “That’s your girl.”

  Matthew admitted that he had never seen her. She might resemble the Devil’s dame for all he knew.

  “And well she might, considering the leaping house in which she does her tricks,” Beth Drury remarked dryly.

  “Which is?”

  “A moment, sir,” said Beth Drury, scooping up the wine the waiter had just delivered and finishing the most of it at a gulp.

  She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and said, “lama woman of business.”

  “A woman of business?”

  “What will you give me for her whereabouts?” she asked now, looking suddenly very old and ravaged.

  Matthew ventured again into his purse. His supply of money was slowly vanishing, but it was true this woman was on the verge of doing him a service. He found a piece of silver and shoved it across the table.

  She smiled with satisfaction and swept the coin into so
me private place in her bodice.

  “The sign of the Dove,” she said. “It’s but a quarter of an hour’s walk to the east, on this very street.”

  Matthew thanked her and finished the last of his apple-johns. Beth Drury did not seem interested now in detaining him, and he left her in the comer in the midst of the flounces of her flaming taffeta, her great breasts sunk into her lap like two weary pilgrims. With great relief, he walked out into the air.

  The street now seemed full of whores and their confederates. They accosted him at every step, beckoning him to follow, pleading for money, promising incredible pleasures, half of which he had never before imagined. He shook them off and walked ahead boldy, one hand before him to ward off the appellants and the other close in to his belt to safeguard his purse.

  He found the Dove where Beth had said; where the human habitations ended and the flat, dark fields began and the night air was fetid with cattle and marsh grass. The house was tumbledown—that Matthew could discern even in the dark—with crumbling plaster, shutters battered and askew, and a riot of vines scaling the walls and masking the upstairs windows so that the little illumination from within glowed a sickly, pale color. A sign, hung on the crosstimber of what looked like a ship’s mast and adorned with the crude outlines of a bird with a sprig of holly in its beak, was the only indication Matthew could see that the house was a place of business. The path to the front door was well trodden; and from where he stood, just outside the gate, Matthew thought he could hear from within the sound of voices and the forlorn pluckings of a lute.

  He hesitated to enter; the remoteness of the house, which first had seemed a welcome relief from the crush of humanity farther up the street, now seemed unnerving. He knew well what sort of place this was, and as he looked about him at the other dwellings in the immediate vicinity, he could see how brutish they were too, how loathsome, and he shuddered for fear not so much for his person as for his soul, for he felt he had come to the end of his

  journey, this last house on the street, this house so inaptly called the Dove.

  He stood about a few minutes longer mustering up his resolve and making peace with an intractable conscience that protested his being there, then he proceeded without further deliberation through a wicket gate and down the wide, well-trodden path to the door.

  It was a very solid door, and Matthew knocked thrice before hearing any response from within. Presently, however, he could make out the scraping of a bolt being drawn and the door opened a crack and a bent figure seemingly without years or sex and not half Matthew’s height peered out at him and without a word beckoned him to enter.

  Inside he found himself in a hall paneled in dark oak and furnished threadbarely. On a distant table there was a single lamp and by that Matthew could perceive that the person who let him in was a very old woman wrapped up tightly in a shawl as though it were the dead of winter. She had a long, drawn face, watery blue eyes deeply embedded in a maze of wrinkles, and a little tuft of white hair at the end of a pointed chin. Seemingly incapable of speech, she smiled at him foolishly from a mouth bereft of its teeth and began to push him toward the stairs, making strange clucking noises like a hen in the yard.

  Uncertain as to what to do next, Matthew allowed himself to be guided and while the old woman waited at the foot of the stairs, he climbed to the next floor, thinking all the while of Joan and wondering what she might think were she to know he had entered such a place. Indeed, what would he do were he to encounter one of his neighbors here? Good morrow to you, Mr. Stock. A great wonder meeting you here! How travel broadens the mind!

  God’s eye missed nothing. Matthew had thought of that, too, between the foot and the top of the stairs, as his hand grew sticky on the cold wood of the banister, rubbed to a high sheen by how many sweaty palms. But then he remembered that God saw the heart, read its script no matter how smudged or curious, knew therefore his present intent, a mission of mercy.

  At the top of the stairs he found a sort of waiting room

  adorned with faded wailhangings and furnished with a scattering of highbacked, uncomfortable-looking chairs. In one of these a callow youth with very long legs extended before him was folding and unfolding his hands and staring morosely into his lap. As Matthew approached he looked up from beneath shaggy brows that ran without intermission from one side of his face to the other and then quickly averted his gaze to the opposite wall where there was a woman seated behind a small desk.

  The woman smiled thinly at Matthew and told him to be seated. She was not what Matthew had expected. Clearly the proprietress by her demeanor, she was modestly clothed in a simple chaste bodice and a narrow white collar with only a margin of yellow lace. She wore a little white cap, had plain, somewhat stem features, and bare plump forearms, pale as milk curd in the lamplight. By her side an old bitch hound, nestled in the rushes, emitted a long, guttural snarl as Matthew approached, and then rolled over on her side to expose her swollen dugs.

  The woman was sewing; her eyes were fixed on her work. The dog began to snore softly and from some distant room Matthew could hear the sound of the lute, quite distinct now, but played without skill by someone who knew only where to place his fingers.

  “I am looking for Catherine Skelton, who I have been told lives in this house,” Matthew said, looking about him curiously, a prey to unfamiliar sensations of shame, curiosity, and a strange excitement.

  “Catherine Skelton,” repeated the woman without looking up. “Yes, she lives here. That will be sixpence.”

  “I have come only to have . . . conversation with her.”

  “Call it what you will,” said the woman brusquely. “Yet that will be sixpence. For your conversation,” she added.

  A gentleman, very heavy set with fat, sweaty cheeks and bushy beard, emerged from a darkened corridor, mumbled good night to the proprietress, and then lumbered down the stairs, breathing heavily. The woman signaled to the string-bean youth and Matthew watched him proceed in the direction whence the fat man had come.

  Matthew reached into his purse, found the required sum, and placed it on the desk. The woman swept up the coins into her apron and again told him to sit down. He must wait his turn, she said, as others before him had done.

  “It is Catherine Skelton that I want to see,” Matthew reminded her, sitting. “I am from the same village. In Sussex.”

  “Catherine is occupied,” responded the proprietress curtly, obviously indifferent to Matthew’s place of origin. “Can you not contain yourself this quarter hour?”

  “But no other will do,” he insisted.

  She fixed him in a long cold stare. “You must be patient, sir.”

  The hound, alert now, glared at Matthew suspiciously.

  Matthew sighed heavily, resigned himself to wait, while the woman returned to her sewing. She was intent on her task and for a while seemed to forget Matthew’s presence. The minutes passed, and Matthew no longer heard the lutanist. It was very quiet in the house and no other patrons appeared. He concluded that the Dove was a poor house, even for a brothel, and that its clientele was no better. When the woman looked at him again she smiled sweetly.

  “Mary is ready now,” said the proprietress of the Dove.

  “Mary?” exclaimed Matthew, rising from his chair. “But I said-”

  “You will not be disappointed,” she said peremptorily. “Mary is Catherine’s sister. She’s younger, but they are much the same in form and manner. The chamber is clean and the girl, too.”

  Mary Skelton. So, thought Matthew, the girl had followed her sister’s lewd example.

  “Down the corridor,” said the proprietress. “Second door to your right. Please knock before entering. The girls appreciate that.”

  Ill at ease, Matthew came to the second door, knocked softly, and heard in almost the same instant a thin, quavering voice from the other side bid him enter.

  Despite the proprietress’s assurances to the contrary the chamber was not clean, and it was very small and smelled


  of mildew. A leaky roof had left the dark wainscoting water-stained and cracked, and the few articles of furniture— a battered chest, two stools, and a bed—were scattered about upon old rushes. Mary Skelton was seated on the bed. A thin girl with long uncombed hair that fell about her shoulders, she seemed at once to Matthew to be more a frightened child than a woman of pleasure. She was holding the stub of a candle in her hand and staring at Matthew with great round glistening eyes. As he shut the door behind him and approached her she stood and he could see that despite her winsome features, her skin had an unhealthy pallor. She was wearing a plain white cambric smock material that hung like a sack on her body and her feet were bare.

  She placed the candle on one of the stools and with trembling fingers began to disrobe. Alarmed, Matthew said: “No, child. I’m not come for that. I am a friend,” he said, in a tone of assurance.

  She stared at him blankly, biting her nether lip and holding her thin arms folded across her breasts. He took a step toward her and she shrank from him. He spoke more words of comfort, telling her that he meant her no harm, that he was a decent, honest man come to help her, but his assurances seemed only to confuse her the more. It quickly became apparent to Matthew that Mary Skelton did not know what to make of a friend, not in the Dove, not in the place of business.

  He gave an account of himself that seemed to calm her. He told her of his shop, of his office as constable, and immediately regretted doing so for she seemed terrified of the law and he had to inform her that he had no authority outside his own parish.

  After more such assurances, the girl’s fear began to subside and she listened to him with intelligent interest. They sat upon the bed and he pressed her to tell her own story, which after a few tears of relief she did in a timid little voice a sparrow might have used were it endowed with human speech.

  “You’re wondering what a maid such as I am doing here,” she said between sobs. “I who but two weeks hence was respectfully employed ... as a seamstress . . . had friends . . . who . . .”