by Howard Pyle
With a faint smile of triumph over his comrades, the gentleman, who had thrown off his plain cloak while speaking, stepped close to the fire, removed his gloves, and began to warm his fingers. He was of middle stature, thick-bodied, heavily bearded, of a brown complexion; his expression of face was melancholy, moody, dreamy; as he gazed into the fire he seemed lost in his own thoughts. His momentary smile had brought a singularly sweet and noble light into his face; but that light had vanished with the smile.
“I must thank you, Ermsby, and all of ye,” he said, after a short silence. “You drew the fellow away like the best of cozeners. How got you rid of him so soon?”
“Faith, by his taking note of your absence, and guessing what was afoot,” replied the handsome gallant. “He’s e’en looking for you now. A murrain on him! his ribs should have felt steel, but for thy fear of a brawl, Jerningham.”
“Thou’rt a fool, Ermsby,” answered Jerningham, continuing to gaze with saturnine countenance into the fire; “and my daring to call thee so tells how much I fear a fight for its own sake. How often must I put it to you in plain terms? If I be found concerned in roystering or rioting, I forfeit the countenance of my pious kinsman, the bishop. With that I forfeit the further use of his money in our enterprise. Without his money, how are we to complete the fitting of our ship? No ship, no voyage. No voyage, no possessing the fertile islands; and so no fortune, and there’s an end. Pish, man, shall we lose all for a sight of some unknown rascal’s filthy blood? Not I. You shall see me play the very Puritan till the day my ship lifts anchor for the Western seas.”
“You have played the Puritan to-night, sooth,” said Ermsby. “To steal after a wench under cover of night, and find out her house for your hidden purposes in future, — there’s the soul of Puritanism. Where does she live?”
“I’ll still be puritanical, and keep that knowledge to myself,” said Jerningham, with the least touch of a smile.
“Nay, man, the secret is ours, too!” protested Ermsby. “We helped you to it. Come, you had best tell; that will put us on our honour to leave her all to you. If you don’t, by my conscience, I’ll hunt high and low till I find out for myself, and then I won’t acknowledge any right of yours to her. Tell us, and make us your abettors; or tell us not, and make us your rivals.”
Jerningham was silent for a moment, while he motioned the attending servant to pour him out some wine; then, evidently knowing his men, he replied:
“She led me but a short chase; which was well, as I had to go upon my toes — the sound of her steps was all I had to guide me. When the sound stopped, in Friday Street, I heard the creaking of a gate; it meant she had gone into a back yard. I went on softly, feeling the walls with my hands, till I came to the gate; and there I heard a key turning in a door. I had naught to do but find out what house the gate belonged to. ’Twas the house at the corner of Cheapside.”
“And Friday Street? Which side of Friday Street?”
“‘SHE LED ME BUT A SHORT CHASE.’”
“The east side. ’Tis a goldsmith’s shop. Does any one know what goldsmith dwells there?”
No one remembered. These were all gentlemen who, when they were not at sea, divided most of their time between the country and the court; at present they lodged toward the Charing Cross end of the Strand, in a row of houses opposite the riverside palaces of the great. But Jerningham himself lived with his kinsman, the bishop, in Winchester House, across the Thames.
“Time enough to learn that, and win a score of goldsmith’s daughters, and tire of ’em too, ere the ship is fitted,” said Ermsby, losing interest in the subject; whereupon the conversation shifted to the matter of the ship, then being repaired at Deptford.
From this they fell to dicing, — all but Jerningham, who sat looking steadily before him, as if he saw visions through the clouds of tobacco smoke he sent forth. Presently was heard the noise of pounding at the street door below.
“’Tis that rascal come back, ten to one; he has given over hunting you,” said Ermsby to Jerningham.
“Then be sure you open not, Timothy,” said Jerningham, addressing the tavern drawer who was staying up to wait upon those privileged to use the house after closing hours.
“No fear,” replied Timothy. “They may hammer till they be dead, an they give not the right knock. I’ll e’en go look down from the front window, and see who ’tis.”
Ermsby went with him; and presently returned with him, saying:
“’Tis our man; and Timothy here knows him. It seems he is one Ravenshaw, a roaring captain. I’ve heard of the fellow; he talks loud in taverns, and will fight any man for sixpence; a kind of ranger of Turnbull Street—”
“Nay,” corrected Timothy; “he is no counterfeit, as most of those rangers be. He roars, and brags, and looks fierce, as they do; but he was with Sir John Norris in Portugal and France, and he can use the rapier, or rapier and dagger, with any man that ever came out of Saviolo’s school. I have seen him with the foils, in this very room, when he made all the company wonder. And ’tis well known what duels he has fought. One time, in Hogsdon fields—”
“Oh, that is the man, is it?” said Jerningham, cutting off the drawer’s threatened torrent of reminiscence. “Then so much the better he has grown tired of beating at the door. He has gone away, I trust. As ye love me, gentlemen, no scandals till the ship is armed, provisioned, manned, and ready every way for the tide that shall bear us down the Thames.”
“And look that you bring no scandal in your siege of this goldsmith’s daughter,” said Ermsby, jocularly.
“Trust me for that,” replied Jerningham.
It was several weeks after this night, and the chilling frown of winter had given place to the smile of May, when, upon a sunny morning, Sir Clement Ermsby, followed by a young page, stepped from a Thames wherry at Winchester stairs to confer with Master Jerningham upon the last preparations for their voyage. They were to sail in three days.
Jerningham was pacing the terrace, frowning upon the ground at his feet, his look more moody than ever, and with something distraught in it; now and then he drew in his breath audibly between his lips, or allowed some restless movement of the hands to belie his customary self-control.
“What a devil is it afflicts you, man?” was Ermsby’s greeting, while his page stood at a respectful distance, and began playing with two greyhounds that came bounding up. “This manner is something new. I’ve seen it for a week in you. Beshrew me if I don’t think an evil spirit has crept into you. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Jerningham, in a growling tone. “’Tis my humour.”
“’Tis a humour there’s no excuse for, then, on a day like this, and with such a prospect before one’s eyes.” As Sir Clement spoke, he looked over the balustrade to the Thames and the countless-gabled front of the spire-studded city.
The Thames and London were fair to see then. The river was wider than it is now, and was comparatively clean. Swans floated upon its surface, and it was lively with passenger craft, — sailboats, rowboats, tilt-boats, and boats with wooden cabins, gaily decorated barges belonging to royalty and nobility. The Thames, with its numerous landing-stairs, was the principal highway of London. When the queen went from Whitehall to Greenwich, it was, of course, by this water thoroughfare. It was the more convenient way of transit between the city and Westminster, where the courts were held. It had but one bridge at London then, — the old London Bridge of the children’s song, “London Bridge is falling down;” the bridge that was a veritable street of houses, and which stood some distance east of where the present London Bridge stands. To many people the better way of crossing to Southwark, when they went to the playhouses or the bear-gardens, was by boat. Water-men were at every landing-place, soliciting custom. When at work, they often sang as they plied the oars. The rich, when they would amuse themselves upon the river in their handsome tilt-boats, took musicians with them. On a fine May day, in the reign of Elizabeth, when the little green wav
es sparkled in the sunshine, the Thames alone was a sight worth looking at from the terrace of Winchester House, which, as everybody knows, was on the Southwark side, west of the beautiful Church of St. Mary Overie (now St. Saviour’s), and which thus commanded a fine view of river and city-front.
Beginning at the far west, where the river came into sight after passing Westminster and Whitehall, its northern bank presented first the long row of great houses that came as far as to the Temple, — houses that were really town castles, with spacious gardens, whose river walls were broken by gates, whence were steps descending to the water. Nearer, grew the stately trees of the Temple garden; nearer yet, rose from the river’s edge the frowning walls of the Bridewell, once a palace, and of Baynard’s Castle. And here the eye was drawn up and back from the water-front, which henceforth abounded with wharves, by the huge bulk of St. Paul’s, which stood amidst a multitude of ordinary buildings like a giant among pigmies, — the old St. Paul’s, Gothic, with its square tower in the centre, its crosses crowning the ends and corners, its delicate pinnacles rising from its flying buttresses, its beautiful doorways and rose windows. Coming still eastward, the eye swept a great mass of gabled houses ascending in irregular tiers from the river, the sky-line broken by church towers and steeples innumerable. Directly opposite Winchester House, the river stairs that fell from the tall, narrow buildings were mainly for commercial uses. A little further east, the view was shut in by the close-packed houses on the bridge, so that one could not see the Tower, or the larger shipping off the wharves in the lower river.
But this morning the sight was nothing to Master Jerningham, whose only answer to his friend was to look the more harassed and woebegone. Ermsby suddenly took alarm.
“How now? Has anything ill befallen at Deptford?” he asked.
“No. All goes forward fast — too fast.” And Jerningham sighed.
“How too fast? How can that be? Good God, man, have you lost heart for the voyage?”
“Never that. You know me better. But we shall soon be sailing, and the hours go, and yet I am no further with — oh, a plague on secrecy, ’tis that wench. There is no way under heaven I can even get speech of her.”
“What wench?” inquired Ermsby, in whose thoughts there had been more than one wench since the reader first made his acquaintance.
“What wench! Gods above, is there more than one? — worth a man’s lying awake at night to sigh for, I mean.”
“And is there one such, then? Faith, an there be, I have not seen her of late.”
“Yes, you have. Scarce three months ago.”
“That’s three ages, where women are concerned. Who is this incomparable she?”
“That goldsmith’s daughter — you remember the night we chased her from Cheapside down Bread Street, and came near a quarrel with Ravenshaw the bully, and I followed to see where she lived?”
“Faith, I remember. A pretty little thing. And she has held you off all this time? Man, man, you must have blundered terribly! What plan of campaign have you employed against her?”
“I have not been able to pass words with her, I tell you. She rarely goes forth from home at all, and when she does ’tis with both parents, and a woman, and a stout ‘prentice or two. I have stood in wait night after night, thinking she might try to run away again; but she has not.”
“Why, you know not your first letter in the study of how to woo citizens’ womankind. Go to her father’s shop while she is there, and contrive to have her wait upon you. Flattery, vows, and promises sound all the softer for being whispered over a counter.”
“I have watched, and when I have been busy at the ship, my man Gregory has watched. But she never comes into the shop. She has a devil of shrewdness for a father; a rock-faced man, of few words, with eyes on everything. He already suspects me; for now whenever I go near his shop he comes from his business and stares at me as if he offered defiance.”
“A plague on these citizens. They dare outface gentlemen nowadays. They are so rich, and the law is on their side, curse ’em! A goldsmith thinks himself as good as a lord.”
“This one has taught his very ‘prentices to look big at me as I pass. And Gregory — he is a sly hound, as you know, and when I put him on his mettle for the conveyance of a letter to the girl’s waiting-woman, he was ready to sell himself to the devil for the wit to accomplish it. But he could not; and they have smelt a purpose in his doings, too. The last time he went near the shop, and stood trying to get the eye of some serving-maid at a window, two of the goldsmith’s ‘prentices came out and, pretending not to see him, ran hard against him and laid him sprawling in the street.”
“And he let them go with whole skins? Had he no dagger?”
“Of what use? They are very stout fellows, all in that shop. And they would have had only to cry ‘Clubs,’ and every ‘prentice in Cheapside would have come to cudgel Gregory to death. They have too many privileges in the city, pox on ’em!”
“You should have begun by making friends with the goldsmith openly, and so got access to his house. Then you could have cozened him when the time came.”
“But ’tis too late for that now. Besides, these citizens distrust a man the first moment, when they have wives and daughters. Oh, we have tried every way, both myself and Gregory. Gregory found a pot-boy, at the White Horse tavern, that knew one of the maids in the house, and we tried to pass a letter by means of those two. But the letter got into the father’s hands, and the maid was cast off, and I’m glad I signed a false name. I know not if Mistress Millicent ever saw the letter.”
“Is Millicent her name?”
“Ay. She is the only child. Her father is Thomas Etheridge, the goldsmith, at the sign of the Golden Acorn, in Cheapside at the corner of Friday Street. And nothing more do I know of her, but that I am going mad for her. And now that I have opened all to you, in God’s name tell me what I shall do. Though we sail in three days, I must have her in my arms for one sweet hour, at least, ere I go. Laugh if you will! Call it madness. ’Tis the worse, then, and the more needs quenching. What shall I do?”
“Use a better messenger; one that can get the ear of the maid and yet ‘scape the eye of the father; one that can win her to a meeting with you. Such things are managed daily. Howsoever hedged by husbands, or fenced by fathers, the fair ones of the city are still to be come at. Employ a go-between.”
“Have I not tried Gregory? Where he has failed, how shall any other servant fare? Not one of those at my command has a tithe of his wit. Nor has any of our sea-rogues.”
“Why, the look of being a gentleman’s serving-man will damn any knave in the eye of a wary citizen, nowadays. And Gregory hath the face of a rascal besides. Employ none of that degree. As for our sea-rogues, we chose ’em witless, for our own advantage.”
“Troth, you might serve me in this matter, Ermsby. You have the wit; and you should find good pastime in it.”
“Faith, not I. I know the taste of ‘prentice’s cudgel. I’ll tell you a tale; ‘twill warn you that, when love’s path leads into the city, you’d best see it made sure and smooth ere you tread it yourself. One day as I was going to the play in Blackfriars, my glance fell upon as handsome a piece of female citizenship as you’ll meet any day ‘twixt Fleet Street and the Tower. She saw me looking, and looked in turn; and I resolved to let the play go hang, and follow her. She had with her an old woman and a ‘prentice boy, and her look seemed to advise me not to accost her in their presence. So I walked behind her, smiling my sweetest each time she turned her head around. She led me into a grocer’s shop in Bucklersbury. I could see by her manner there that she was at home; there was no husband in sight, the shop being kept by two ‘prentices. Here she forthwith sent the woman up-stairs, and turned as if she would attend upon me herself. Now, thought I, my happiness is soon to be assured; and I was rejoicing within, for each time I had seen her face she had looked more lovely. Sooth, the ripeness of those lips — !”
“Well, well, what happened?”
“I went but to open the matter with a courteous kiss on the cheek; but the more luscious fruit hung too near, so I stopped me at the lips instead, and stopped overlong there. She made pretence — I swear ’twas pretence — to push me away, and to be much angry and abused. But the zany ‘prentices knew not this virtuous resistance was make-believe, and they ran at me as if I were some thief caught in the act. I met the first with a clout in the face, but they were stout knaves and made nothing of laying hands upon me. I shook them off, and then, being at the back of the shop, drew my sword to ensure my passage to the street. But that instant they raised the cry, ‘Clubs!’ and ran and got their own cudgels, and came menacing me again. While I was making play with my rapier, thinking to fright them off, all the ‘prentices in Bucklersbury began to pour into the shop, shouting clubs and brandishing ’em at the same time. I saw there was naught to do but cut my way through by letting out the blood of any grocer’s knave or ‘pothecary’s boy that should stand before me. But ere I had made two thrusts in earnest, my rapier was knocked from my hand by a club. A cloud of other clubs rained on my head, shoulders, and body. And so I cowered helpless, seeing nothing before me but the chance of being pounded to a jelly by the crowd.”
“And what miracle occurred?”
“The wit of woman intervened. She that I had followed laid hold of some box or bag, and thrust her fingers in, and began flinging the contents by handfuls into the air. It was ground pepper. In a moment every man Jack in the shop was sneezing as if there were a prize for it. Such a shaking, and bending forward of bodies, and holding of noses, was never seen elsewhere. Every fellow was taken with a sneezing fit that lasted minutes, for the woman still threw the pepper about, regardless of the work it had done. Limp and half-blind as every rascal was, and busied with each new spasm coming on, they paid no more heed to me; and so, sneezing like the rest, I pushed through unregarded to the street. I fled down Walbrook, and came not to an end of sneezing till I had taken boat at Dowgate wharf. I went home, then, and put my bruises to bed; and I know not how many days it was till I had done aching. Be thankful thou hast not fared in the goldsmith’s shop e’en worse than I fared in the grocer’s; for there is no pepper kept in goldsmith’s shops.”