Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  Tidwell said, “Oh, it will never serve.”

  Burr continued stirring as he asked, “And your reason, young Master Malapert?”

  “A stew can never serve. It is people who must serve it.”

  “Ah. Then today you, a person of sorts, will be the one to serve it. How does it feel to be subservient to a mess of pottage?”

  “I had rather serve a pot of message.”

  “Your exquisite reason?”

  “The message in the pot,” Tidwell said, “might be a good one. And I fear your stew is not.”

  Before Burr could respond, Ned was on his feet. He stared at the kitchen wall as if looking through it into the next room, where the thick door stood against the portcullis. “Someone on the bridge,” the boy said. Burr strained to listen, but he could hear no sound outside the house. He first thought the boy was lying, but Ned seemed urgent and sincere as he said, “Pursuivants, maybe. Tell the others, and I’ll hold them out of door as long as I can.” He bolted from the kitchen into the next room.

  As Burr went to tell Jack and Mistress Vaux what the boy had said, a loud knocking rang through the house, as if someone were pounding on the door with the butt of a shaft. A stern, half-muffled cry from outside: “King’s business!”

  “Anon!” shouted Ned.

  Burr and Eleanor Vaux arrived at the same time outside the door to the room where the priest had heard Jack’s confession. There was no need for Burr to speak. Eleanor threw open the door and said, “Ware you: that’s a pursuivant knocking, or else the devil that spawned him.” She gathered the blanket from the floor and began, somehow reverently and hastily at once, to wrap up Thomas More’s skull.

  Garnet asked, “The hide in the attic?”

  “I think they suspect that one,” Eleanor said. “They were near to finding it last time. It will have to be the garderobe.” Garnet looked momentarily dismayed, then bitterly resolved. Eleanor glanced at Jack, then at the blanket. “I have a safe place for your kinsman Sir Thomas here.”

  Burr hardly had time to wonder what she meant by that. He noticed a change in the light, a passing shadow, and turned to see Nicholas Owen: the bandy-legged craftsman they had met at Harrowden. Owen motioned for the priest to pass ahead of him in the hallway. “Follow us close,” he said to Burr and Jack. He headed up the stairwell as Eleanor hurried toward the kitchen.

  The small room with a privy—a lidded wooden box against one wall—could hold only three of the men. Burr stood outside the door, craning his neck to see. Owen knelt. From a crack low in the wall he pulled a small nail, inserted its point into a tiny hole in one of the four pegs in a broad floorboard to which the base of the box was nailed, and pulled out the peg. He did the same with three others. Then he slid the privy, still nailed to its floorboard, toward the opposite wall. The end of the board slid under the wall, into what room Burr could not say. A few seconds later the old man recoiled at the stench rising from the sewer beneath the now-open shaft: the garderobe Eleanor had mentioned, he supposed, dropping underground and issuing into the moat.

  Owen set the pegs back into their holes. No longer aligned with their holes in the subfloor, they protruded an inch or so above the board. Owen looked at the priest and spoke quickly: “I’ll go first, Father, then you. Give me your doublet.” Garnet shuffled out of his coat and handed it to Owen, who tied the sleeves around his own waist and said, “You’ll need this jacket against the chill tonight. I’ll stay on the rope and help you down from below.” Owen turned to Jack. “You help him from above. Then your man comes down, then you. You’ll have to pull the privy back against the wall from the underside.” Jack looked at the pegs. Owen said, “They’ll drop into place when you’ve slid the box all the way. All will look as it did.” As he lowered himself into the garderobe, he said, “Once you have the privy near the wall, it will be dark. It’s a twenty-foot stone shaft, like a chimney, wider inside after the first few feet. At the bottom you’ll be in water to your knees. There’s a hidden door in the stone. We’ll come out and climb onto a ledge just above the moat.”

  As Owen disappeared into the shaft, Burr entered the room and, with the other two, bent over the hole in the floor to see the man descend, hand over hand. At first Burr couldn’t tell what Owen held onto, but after a few heartbeats he made out a thick, black, knotted rope. No doubt the rope had been blackened to make it hard to see if pursuivants raised the hinged lid on the privy to look inside.

  Burr looked from the garderobe to the round-bellied priest. He doubted the man could fit into the narrow, stone-walled shaft. The priest appeared to have the same doubt. Without being able to make out the words, from downstairs Burr heard Eleanor’s voice, or maybe Ned Tidwell’s, shouting something. Then there was more pounding against the door. This time it sounded not like the sharp knocks of a cudgel or staff but heavy, hollow, and loud, like the battering of a ram. More shouts as the ramming continued. Then Burr heard the sound of splintering wood.

  The top of Owen’s head had passed out of sight, but his hands still gleamed faintly in the room’s dim light when his voice came, quiet but urgent, from the hole in the floor: “Father, there’s a knot in the rope here, just above my hand. I’ll guide your foot.” Burr and Jack held Garnet under the armpits as he lowered himself into the garderobe. With his broad buttocks halfway into the shaft, halfway bulging over the rim at the floor’s surface, he appeared to stick. Burr heard Owen’s muffled voice from below: “Father, I’m going to pull.” Garnet’s eyes widened as his hindquarters scraped slowly down the stone-walled shaft. Now his belly spread out onto the floor around the rim, making the hole completely invisible. He looked like a man sawn in half, amazed to find himself still alive.

  If Owen was saying anything now, Burr could not hear his voice; all the sound came from the priest’s labored breathing and the ram’s thuds below as the thick door continued to splinter. Garnet grimaced as he appeared to shrink an inch or so, his belly bulging even wider at the base—as if he were melting. Then he seemed to regain the inch of height he had lost. Two or three heartbeats later he shrank again. Owen must be pulling hard from below, then relenting. In a slow rhythm the priest bobbed this way twice more. Burr said, “Breathe out: now.” The priest exhaled, shrank an inch, and gasped for air as he rose again.

  “It’s no good,” Jack said. “This shirt needs to come off.” With both hands he grabbed the opening at Garnet’s throat and pulled, tearing the fabric from top to bottom, stopping at the floor. Burr took one side of the unseamed garment and Jack the other. They tore the shirt sideways around the priest at floor level until the cloth came completely free. Garnet’s soft, white flesh now flowed onto the floor around the top of the shaft.

  In the same way as before, he slowly bobbed three or four times more. “Father,” Jack said, “we’re going to have to push.” He put his palms on one of Garnet’s shoulders; Burr did the same on the other. When the priest began to shrink as Owen pulled from below, Jack and Burr pressed from above. Garnet winced, his mouth clamped shut against letting some cry escape. As the two men eased their hands off the priest’s shoulders, he rose again.

  Jack said to Burr, “Grease. We need grease. Did you see any in the kitchen?”

  “I did.”

  “The blood-suckers are near to breaching the door. Be quiet and quick.”

  Burr hurried downstairs. As he made his way to the kitchen he could hear that the shouts were Eleanor’s: “There’s sickness in this house, I tell you! You do not want to come in!” The ram thudded, and the door shivered. “Bartholomew Ridgely, I know your voice! Would not your dear mother, if she lived, die for shame to see you now?” Another crash against the door. “Bartholomew, she weeps from her grave even now!”

  Burr entered the room long enough to whisper, “We need more time.”

  Eleanor turned to him and whispered back, “I’ll do what I can, but they’ll soon be in. Already they’ve raised the portcullis somehow.”

  From an urn in the kitchen Burr scooped a d
ouble handful of goose grease and made his way back upstairs. He and Jack smeared Garnet’s torso. They lifted his flesh where it rested on the floor and tried to work some of the grease into the edges of the shaft. All the while Owen kept pulling, then releasing. “All right,” Jack said to the priest. “We’re going to push again.” Garnet nodded grimly.

  As Owen’s next pull started, Jack and Burr leaned heavily on the priest’s shoulders. This time he seemed not to rise again after dropping a little. With the next pull he moved a full two inches. They could hear his flesh scraping through the shaft. Garnet was clearly in great pain, but he let no sound escape. After three or four more straining efforts he had descended nearly to the armpits. Jack picked up the torn shirt and wiped the grease from his hands, then passed the cloth to Burr. “Raise your arms, Father,” Jack said. Burr held one wrist, Jack the other. With Owen’s next pull the priest dropped again, wedged at the shoulder-sockets. For two more pulls he held there. Burr tried to imagine how the scene must appear from below. Like some darkling underworld midwife, some Plutonic graybeard, Owen hung in the air as he delivered a breached and bloody man-child, a hieratic infant, into the void.

  The thudding against the door below continued. Garnet had blanched almost white, and the sweat on his head ran into his eyes. “You’re holding your breath,” Jack said. “Blow out all your wind. All of it.” The priest nodded and with the exhalation uttered a half-stifled sound like the cry of a small beast at the moment the trap snaps shut.

  With a dull cracking sound that made Burr shudder and Garnet’s eyes roll back, at last Owen pulled the priest free, and Burr felt the man’s sudden weight. With Jack he slowly lowered Garnet into the hole until the priest whispered hoarsely, “I see the rope.” Jack nodded to Burr, who released his hold on the priest’s wrist. When Garnet had the rope with his free hand, Jack released the other. Burr watched the trembling, halting descent into the darkness as Jack stepped into the hall. He stood listening.

  Then he was back in the room. “The door splits,” he said, “but they’re not yet in. Down the shaft, Tim. Do you need help?”

  “No.” Surprised at his own nimbleness after watching the much-younger Garnet’s struggles, Burr quickly lowered himself into the garderobe, found a knot on the rope with his feet, and began his descent. On the stone wall inches before his eyes he could just make out the mix of Garnet’s blood with the smeared remains of untold years of excrement.

  After a near-deafening crash of the ram against the buckling door, one that left a jagged, foot-long splinter pointing an accusatory finger upstairs, Ned Tidwell shouted, “We’re trying, but the bolt is jammed!”

  “You lie!” came the cry from one of the men outside.

  “One more,” Eleanor whispered to Ned, “and we do it. Then back away spry.” Near her feet lay an iron skillet; near Ned’s, a heavy set of fire-tongs.

  The next crash let in a shaft of daylight between the two thick doors. Ned laid his hands on the bolt, Eleanor hers on the other door’s stop. She waited one second, two, three, and said, “Now!” Ned slid the bolt as Eleanor pulled the stop. The two jumped back from the doors just in time. With an explosion of sound and light, four men and a ten-foot oak log crashed into the room. By the time the men had sprawled into a heap against the wall opposite the doors, Eleanor held the skillet in her hands. She had room to swing freely, and the man nearest her did not see the blow coming. Ned heard not only the ring of the iron but the crack of the skull. An instant later the end of his tongs glanced off the head of a burly, bald, red-bearded man, half-tearing off his ear.

  “Hold them!” someone shouted. Eleanor did not get in another blow. The man she had just hit tripped her as she drew back the skillet. He pinned her to the floor where she fell. The thick-necked, red-bearded man with the bloody ear scrambled to his feet with surprising speed. Ned swung the tongs again, but the man blocked them with a forearm. He hit Ned full in the face with a heavy fist that lifted the boy from where he stood and propelled him over the threshold. He lay stunned, sprawled half in the house and half on the bridge.

  Eleanor struggled against the vacant-faced man who held her to the floor. He looked unaware that his skull had been fractured and that he was bleeding steadily from the back of his head. Eleanor turned her head and said to a young, gaunt man with greening teeth, “Bartholomew Ridgely, did I not tell you that boy’s poor mother lies upstairs with a fever? It’s the plague, most like. Why did you think I would not open the doors? I’ll not wish the plague on you, if only for your poor mother’s sake.”

  Ridgely said, “You leave my mother be.” He turned to the red-bearded man and said, “I want no part of the plague, Sam. We must needs go.”

  The big man had been holding the side of his head and was now looking incredulously at his reddened hand. He murderously eyed the half-conscious boy he had hit, then turned to Ridgely to growl, “She lies, do you not see that?”

  The fourth of the pursuivants, a grim, flint-faced man in a constable’s buff-yellow leather, had not yet moved; the oak ram lay across his thighs. With difficulty he shoved the log aside and rose stiffly. Then he said, “Don’t hit him again, Sam. I want him awake to hear the tale he tells. For now I’ll have a look at this plague-ridden mother of that whelp there that near knocked off your ear, and I’ll take Ridgely with me so he can see how these papists outdo the Devil himself with their lies.” Without looking at Eleanor he said, “Woman, show us where the boy’s mother takes her sick-bed.”

  The man with the cracked skull seemed only too glad to release her.

  Jack had started to lower himself into the shaft when he heard footsteps on the stairs and Eleanor saying loudly, no doubt to warn anyone who remained in the closet with the privy, “I tell you she’s fevered, and I’ve the plague on me, too, most like. You’ve been warned, so now you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  Bartholomew Ridgely whimpered, and the constable snarled, “Hush.”

  Jack silently lifted himself out of the shaft; if he dragged the jakes into place from below with the pursuivants nearby, the sound would alert them. And he could not join Burr and the others while leaving the garderobe exposed. He drew his dagger and pressed himself against a wall, listening as Eleanor and the two men entered an adjacent room. Jack had not realized young Tidwell’s mother lay so near; she had not made a sound.

  He could hear the conversation in the next room. The constable said, “She burns hot, but I see no sign of the plague.”

  “Then you do not know the plague,” Eleanor replied. “It begins like this.”

  A woman, apparently Ned Tidwell’s mother, said in a frail voice, “Is that you, Charles, back from the dead? And little Tobias. How you have grown since I put you in the ground! Have you come to take me with you? Come and hold me!” She began to cough.

  Bartholomew Ridgely sounded terrified as he said, “I am no Tobias, back from any dead. Swetnam, we must needs leave this house!”

  The constable snapped, “Quiet, I told you, boy, or I’ll cuff you about the ears.”

  Mrs. Tidwell said, “My dear husband and child. Take me with you.”

  The constable’s voice was now urgent: “Back in the bed, woman. Back in the bed! Never come near me; I am no husband of yours.”

  “Charles.”

  “In the bed, I say!”

  In spite of the danger, Jack smiled at the sick woman’s performance. He heard a shuffling of feet and a confusion of several voices, then the loud closing and latching of the sickroom door. The constable said, “Sam Parvin can search that room, if he wants it searched. I’ll have no more of that woman.”

  “I’ll have no more of this house,” Ridgely said.

  Jack heard the sound of an open hand striking flesh as the constable said, “You’ll have what you’re given and do what you’re told.”

  At the sound of boots descending the stairs, Jack exhaled. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath. With the remnants of Garnet’s shirt Jack wiped as much of the grease f
rom the floor as he could. He dropped the rags down the garderobe. Again he began to lower himself. His feet dangled until he found the rope. As his head dropped just below the level of the floor, he reached up and grasped one of the boards bracing the back of the jakes and began with some difficulty to pull the heavy box, heavier still for the broad floorboard attached to it, back over the hole in the floor. Even as he bent his effort on getting the jakes into place quickly and as quietly as possible so he could join the others below, the feeling he had forgotten something tugged at some part of his mind.

  He froze. The letters! Just before his confession Eleanor had left the letters from his mother and the Earl downstairs on the little table beneath the window. Then she must have laid the goose-down pillow for Sir Thomas’s head on top of the papers. Unless Eleanor had remembered them amid all the commotion and hidden or destroyed them, probably they lay still under the pillow on the table. He closed his eyes—hardly necessary in the dim light of the shaft—and made a quick calculation. Eleanor would have been too busy with the attack on the house to give the letters any thought. She had hurried away with the skull, and all her effort would have been bent on preserving Sir Thomas. The pursuivants would find the letters, and when they had found them, would hardly believe Eleanor’s claims that no one was hiding in the house. The letters could also be used as evidence against not only his mother, should she ever decide to come back to England, but also the Wizard Earl. Jack would have to risk going downstairs to get them. Stifling a curse, he pushed the jakes back the few inches he had moved it and hoisted himself out of the hole. Since his chances of being caught were high, he could not leave the garderobe exposed; he slid the jakes back over the hole. Just as Owen had said, when the box reached the wall the four pegs dropped into place, looking as if they had never been moved. Jack wondered what the men in the shaft beneath the house must think. If any of them hung on the rope or stood at the bottom of the garderobe and looked up at the rectangle of light, he would have seen both of Jack’s abortive attempts to descend, then the eclipsing of the light as the box slid against the wall.