Love's Alchemy

by Bryan Crockett

  “I like not to use you as bait, Nick.”

  “Better if I am caught than both of us. And you are known to them; I might talk myself free.”

  “True,” the priest said. He exhaled heavily. “Well, I will allow it.”

  Together the men murmured a Paternoster and an Ave Maria. Then Owen said, “I’ll pull up the rope after me and ask Eleanor to lower you some food.”

  “I would relish it,” the priest replied. “Take some food yourself before you venture outside; I can wait.”

  Owen nimbly climbed the rope, and when the garderobe became too narrow for him to bend his knees and use his feet, pulled himself up with his arms alone. Eleanor was waiting at the top with roast mutton, bread, and clear water from the well. Owen told her the plan.

  “And what of the old servant?” she asked. “Burr. Isn’t he coming up?”

  “Burr went out by the moat four days ago.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Had he been caught, we had all been betrayed.”

  As they talked she tied some of the food and a corked bottle of the water into a cloth, pulled up the rope, secured the bundle to the end, and lowered it to the bottom of the shaft. Meanwhile Owen ate hastily, took a long draft of the water, and asked, “What happened to Donne? Why didn’t he come down after us?”

  Eleanor said, “I wish I knew. To help us below, I think. Perchance to delay the search. But he is captured. They bound his hands and took him into the wood.”

  “Hm. I like not the sound of that.”

  Owen stepped into the hallway. The house looked as if a storm had raged through it. Boards had been pried out of some of the walls in search of hidden closets. Owen shook his head. The pursuivants could have simply used a string to measure the rooms, and they would have seen that no closets lay behind the walls; there was no need for such destruction. Beds had been overturned and the thicker mattresses slit open. Bones and scraps of food lay strewn everywhere. Coals had scorched the floors where the pursuivants raked out the fireplaces to look up the chimneys. What was left of the heavy door to the bridge hung racked and splintered, its iron hinges twisted out of shape. Owen looked up at the portcullis, wondering how the pursuivants had raised it without a winch; the thing was heavy as a brace of oxen.

  Before venturing outside he whistled the call of a chaffinch. An answering song, a good imitation of a short-eared owl, came from the woods. That would be Ned Tidwell: the boy had been watching the grounds, and the owl was the all-clear signal.

  Owen stepped onto the bridge. What a blessing simply to stand in the sunlight and breathe in the clean air of day. He crossed the moat and walked to the barn. To his surprise he found all the horses still stabled; he had expected the pursuivants to steal some of the animals. But they looked well fed and watered, no doubt by Ned. Owen patted Jack’s big bay mare on the neck and went to check the tool shed. A mattock and spade were missing. Not a good sign if Donne had been led into the forest.

  Owen found traces of boot-prints where the men had entered the wood. He followed the signs of their passing. At every turn he expected to come upon a fresh grave. But he found none. The woods were thick, crossed with animals’ trails and indecipherable marks on the ground. At least Owen could not make sense of them; he was not an expert tracker. Soon he lost the trail altogether.

  He walked back to the grounds of Baddesley Clinton. He would signal Father Garnet that it was safe to escape into the moat. After that he would tell Ned it was safe to go back to his fishing. Then he would resume his search for Jack.

  The scrape of the wooden trencher sliding into the chamber sounded against the stone walls, waking Jack from his fitful sleep. He shivered, stood, paced, and smacked his open hands against his thighs to start the blood flowing. The walls reluctantly gave up their dull echoes. He cupped his fingers and blew into them, his breath swirling in ragged wisps and fading in the dim air. As always, the smell of stone that had mouldered through the centuries, stained with every fluid these frail sacs of human skin contained, lingered dankly in the nose. Barring the Second Coming of Our Lord, the stones would remain for millennia more with their ever-thickening accretions of human misery.

  Warwick Castle. Months ago, it must be by now: upon painfully coming to his senses on the floor of this dimly lit chamber—there must be a high window somewhere out of sight from the cell—he had guessed he lay in the dungeon of Warwick Castle. His wounds were still fresh when he awoke, so he could hardly have travelled far from Baddesley Clinton. And apart from Warwick Castle, what structure near Eleanor Vaux’s house could hold among its foundations such thick-ribbed walls as these?

  He had been cast into this darksome place in June but had since lost track of the days. Weeks had passed, surely, even since the chill in the air had betokened the turn from summer into fall. It was October, he guessed, or thereabouts. For perhaps the thousandth time he thought of Anne and the children. What would they be doing now? Would they be outdoors in the crisp fall air? Would their breath be fogging too?

  In all his months in the dungeon no other human being had spoken even a single word to him. In the early weeks he had tried every day to talk to his gaoler, plying the dusty-haired old man with questions, or attempting idle chatter, or demanding an audience with someone in authority. But the old man was deaf and mute, or only half-sentient, or under some strict command to utter no word. All Jack heard from him was the sound, once a day, of the shuffling feet as the old man descended the long stone stairway. If Jack stood near the bars, the approaching gaoler would stop, set down the trencher of food, the vessel of water, and the empty jordan, move the fingers of one hand as if to scratch an invisible itch that hung in the air, and wait until his prisoner had moved to the far wall. The old man would deliver the food and drink, then replace with the empty jordan the full one Jack had left by the bars. No matter what Jack said, the keeper would turn and climb stiff-jointed up the stairs. Weeks had passed since Jack gave up trying to talk with the man.

  During the months of his confinement the only human voices he heard came echoing from a great distance away. His shouts when he heard them always went unanswered. He must be the only prisoner in the castle—or at least in this part of it. Once again he wondered: why would local pursuivants led by a mere constable accord Jack Donne such singular treatment? Why had they not killed him in the forest and left him in the shallow grave? After all, he had done his best to kill them. This must be Cecil’s doing somehow. For whatever reason, Robertus Diabolus wanted Jack alive but out of the way.

  He thought about his last hours at Baddesley Clinton, his last memories before waking up in this dungeon. The pursuivants had bound him to a post in Eleanor’s house, then for the rest of that day and most of the next, ransacked the place in search of priest-hides. Eleanor had been right to warn Father Garnet and the others away from the hidden closet Owen had fashioned in the attic. From where he sat bound to his post Jack could hear the pursuivants shouting to one another about the discovery. Then he heard their anger at finding the closet empty. During the rest of the search Jack neither saw nor heard Eleanor, Ned Tidwell, nor the boy’s sick mother upstairs. Probably they had been taken away somewhere. He trusted they were safe. Even pursuivants would not dare to injure or kill a woman with a family as prominent as Eleanor’s, Catholic or not. And she would see to it that no harm came to the boy or his mother.

  When the pillaging finally stopped on the third day, Jack asked once again for a drink of water. Once again he was refused. The constable said, “Tell us what you know of these scurf-ridden Catholics, and you will get a drink.”

  The constable left the room for a while to talk with the others. Jack could hear them but could not make out what they said. When they were finished they released him from the post, retied his hands—in front of him this time—and prodded him before them through the shattered door, over the bridge, and across the lawn. They sent Ridgely to fetch a mattock and a spade from the tool shed. The vacant-faced man they left to wat
ch the house. Jack heard him whistle once. Two whistles answered from different points in the fringe of the woods. The constable and the red-bearded man stopped with their prisoner at the well and filled three wineskins. Had there been spit enough in his parched mouth to do it, Jack would have salivated at the sight, the sound, the very smell of the fresh water. Ridgely joined them, the tools from the shed propped on his shoulders. They entered the forest and walked for perhaps half an hour. Jack’s thirst made him weak in the knees, but he struggled on.

  The constable stopped them at a small clearing shaded by ancient oaks and poplars. He turned his rough-hewn face to Jack. “Who lies hid in that house?”

  Jack said hoarsely, “I swear by Almighty God, on peril of my salvation, not a soul lies hid in that house.” He did not utter such oaths lightly. What he said was true: the three fugitives hid under the house, not in it, and they did not lie but stood. The constable eyed his prisoner for a long while before nodding to the red-bearded man, who gave Jack a backhanded blow across the face.

  “Not too much too quick, Sam,” the constable said. “While he lives, we want him where he can talk.” The red-bearded man grinned and shrugged his innocence. The constable turned to Jack. “Dig,” he said.

  With his hands still tied before him, Jack took the spade from Ridgely and started in. The men stood back to let him work. Jack thought darkly that they did well to back away. The constable did well to draw his sword, and the red-bearded man did well to take the mattock from Ridgely. If they did not keep their distance, Jack would use the shovel to lay waste the lot of them. But they watched him carefully. Twice Jack had to trade the spade for the mattock to chop through roots too thick for the shovel.

  After the hole was some two feet deep, the constable held out a skin of water and asked, “Do ye want a drink?” Jack glared at him and nodded. “Then tell us where to look,” the constable said. Jack recommenced his digging. At the sound of water pouring onto the ground, Jack looked up. “Just tell me when to stop,” the constable said stonily as he held the slackening skin at arm’s length. Jack spaded up another scoop and tossed the soil onto the wet ground at the constable’s feet. The man stopped pouring. “Go ahead, Sam,” he said.

  This time the red-bearded man handed the mattock back to Ridgely, then strode over to Jack and used not the back of his hand but his fist. Jack staggered in the hole he had dug but kept his feet. Blood welled in his mouth. He spat out a piece of a molar and went back to his digging. “That’s your own grave you’re standing in,” the constable said. “You know that, don’t you?” Jack dug some more. “Damn his eyes, Sam, give him another.”

  Jack scooped up another shovelful as the red-bearded man approached. In one motion he flung the soil into the constable’s face and continued his swing, meeting his assailant with the edge of the blade. The red-bearded man stood wide-eyed with his cheek laid open. Jack leapt from the hole and jabbed him in the midsection with the butt-end of the spade. With the red-bearded man doubled over, Jack darted toward the cursing constable to take his blade.

  It was Ridgely he hadn’t reckoned on, Ridgely with the mattock. Jack had the constable’s right hand in his grasp and had already heard the man’s wrist snap when he glimpsed something coming at him from the right. A white-hot jolt fired through his head, and then he woke up stiff and bloody in this rocky cell.

  Now, months later in the dim light and boggy air of the dungeon, once again Jack saw or heard—his senses had begun to blend over the days and weeks—a rat scuttling toward his trencher of food. He was there before the animal, unaware of crossing the space in the cell, but ready to snatch the creature and dash it against the rocks. First, though, he would look closely at the beast struggling in his grip. If it was not Nellie, he would kill it. When he did so he always reached between the bars and threw the carcass as far as he could. He did not like to kill the creatures, but it would not do to let them overrun the cell. Besides, he worried one of them might hurt Nellie or one of her little ones.

  In the first days of his imprisonment Jack had feared he might soon have to eat the animals raw rather than fling them away, but so far he had avoided that: as the weeks wore on, the keeper unaccountably began giving him increasing amounts of food. Perhaps the old man had, in the dim chambers of his mind, taken some sort of liking for his prisoner. If so, the quantity of food he brought was the only sign of it. But Jack was grateful. By now he had daily offerings of more than enough moldy bread and barley-meal stew, usually with greens and sometimes with bits of some sort of meat, not only to keep him alive but to keep up his weight.

  Still, of all the rats only Nellie and her little brood could he afford to feed. After perhaps three months of soul-numbing loneliness he had lured her to him with a few crumbs of bread. Now he fed her and her three young ones from his daily portion. The mother rat and her children had lost all fear of him. They would frisk about his cell at their play, and Nellie would let him pick up her little ones and hold them in his hands. He learned to interpret the family’s chirps and squeaks: learned when they were hungry, when they wanted to play, when they smelled another of their kind, when they were frightened by some sound inaudible to him. They did not respond when he tried to imitate their little noises, so he spoke to them in human words: sometimes English, sometimes Latin, French, Italian, or Greek. They did not seem to care which.

  Especially when Nellie and her children were away on some business, Jack kept up his strength by whatever exercises he could fashion. He had room, at least, to move freely: the cell must once have held a dozen prisoners, maybe more. Sometimes he darted from corner to corner, hundreds of times, until he stood panting with his palms on his knees. Sometimes he contorted his body in one direction or another, then pushed against the bars or the stone walls as hard and steadily as he could, counting his pulse-beats until he could bear no more. Then he turned a different way and began again. He remembered the counts for every position and each day tried to increase the numbers. Sometimes he scaled the walls as far as he could, gripping with his fingers and toes the cracks between the massive stones. After a few weeks he could almost hang pendant from the beams overhead.

  When his strength finally gave out and he sat chastened and quiet, he would try to pray, try to listen for any faint echo of encouragement. But God remained silent, inscrutable. Still, Jack kept at the meditations, hoping for the light. At such times he could not escape the plaguing sense that he had brought all his dark loneliness and misery on himself, that he was a damned soul, rightly forsaken by God and man. Then he told himself it was only the voice of the fiend trying to lure him to despair. But the whispering would not relent. It troubled not only his waking hours but crept into his dreams. So he prayed. He prayed long and tearfully. Two or three times he thought he caught a glimmer of the becalmed radiance of the Blessed Virgin, but such moments were painfully rare. All the rest of the time his prayers brought him no consolation at all.

  When the silence grew too heavy to bear, he talked to himself. In the absence of pen and paper he composed aloud his poems, devotions, and letters. He spoke the words, mentally recast them, and began again. The poems he committed to memory. Some were darker than any he had written before, but they did more than his prayers to still the beating in his soul. He used the verses to confess his fears, used them to pray. Today he paced as he recited the words:

  As due by many titles I resign

  Myself to thee, O God; first I was made

  By thee, and for thee, and when I was decayed

  Thy blood bought that, the which before was thine;

  I am thy son, made with thy self to shine,

  Thy servant, whose pains thou hast still repaid,

  Thy sheep, thine Image, and, till I betrayed

  My self, a temple of thy Spirit divine;

  Why doth the Devil then usurp on me?

  Why doth he steal, nay, ravish that’s thy right?

  Except thou rise and for thine own work fight,

  Oh I shall soon despair
, when I do see

  That thou lov’st mankind well, yet wilt’ not choose me,

  And Satan hates me, yet is loath to lose me.

  After praying the lines aloud he continued pacing in silence for a time, then felt led to compose a letter to Anne—one she would never receive, for the words died like a vapor in the air no sooner than he gave them voice. But maybe somehow she would know. . . . Each time he composed one of these evanescent letters he asked Anne about their third child. If the infant had lived, the little one must be three or four months old by now. And if Anne had survived the birth: he did not even know that.

  During the early days of his travels, part of him had found that the search for Guido somehow freed him to look about him at the wide world, to let his mind range, to laugh broadly among men in a way he had not done since his time at Lincoln’s Inn and then in the wars. But as the distance from Anne and the little ones increased, so did the pain of separation. On chilly, wet nights he had longed for the fireside, for Anne’s warmth, for the fresh intelligence of her conversation. He wished he could hold the little ones in his lap. The months in the dungeon had turned the longing sometimes into an ache and sometimes into an emptiness, a hole in the soul. The search for Guido now seemed utter folly. If only he could be granted it, any sight, any sound of his family—even the children’s crying—would gladden him for days; he was sure of it. A single word from Anne would allow him to sleep in peace through a month of cold nights. It now seemed unforgivable he had not written more letters to her while he could. Time and again during his travels he had told himself it was not safe to send her messages in the absence of a courier he trusted, but could he not have written of inconsequential things? It would have been enough simply to describe the color of the plants, the shifting of the clouds, the shape of the lands he crossed. She would have been grateful for whatever he wrote, would have understood why he could not confide more.

  As it was, it grieved him that as the months of living among these desolate stones passed, he found it harder and harder to recall Anne’s face, or Constance’s, or Little Jack’s. He could describe their features: the color of hair and eyes, the shape of the nose, the line of the jaw. But these descriptions did not coalesce into any familiar likeness. Sometimes the images of his loved ones seemed on the verge of coming into focus, but then they receded before him, watery and insubstantial, like the fading scenes upon first waking from a dream. The mind cast after them, but the net returned empty. It was maddening: these were the faces he loved, and he could not recall them.