Alchemy and Meggy Swann

by Karen Cushman

  "Go then, you writhled, beetle-brained knave!" she shouted. "You churl, you slug, you stony-hearted villain! May onions grow in your ears!"

  Meggy stood and slowly wabbled toward home. Where Fish Street Hill crossed Crooked Lane, she saw her father, head down into the wind, hurrying to the house. He looked so worn and so worried that she was filled with pity despite herself. Aye, he was cold, remote, willful, hard, and selfish, a fraud and a trickster, mayhap even villainous and a black-hearted murderer. He had left her mother with child and his daughter before he knew her, had sent for her but did not want her, and now sometimes made her feel like a ha'penny, small and not worth very much. But such as he was, he was her father. She would not let him be but a head on London Bridge. She would warn the baron and then do what she could to help her father with his Great Work. And chicken-hearted Roger must be made to help.

  Meggy did not turn for home but climbed to Pudding Lane, cursing the boy for causing her to chase after him. Finally, stepping carefully over pigs' innards steaming in the sunshine, she arrived at the Grimms'.

  Master Grimm and Master Merryman were leaving the house as Meggy arrived. Master Grimm grumbled, "No time. We have no time for you," and strode off. But Master Merryman smiled sadly and spoke. "We are to see about the purchase of a wagon. Without patronage it be right hard to secure a space to perform. We may have to return to the road." He shook his head. "Even there belike we will not be safe from the law."

  Roger, he told Meggy, had gone with friends to the Bellowing Bull on Candlewick Street. Meggy hastened there. A pox on Roger, she thought. If he was cupshot, up to his eyes in ale, he would be no use to her.

  The windows of the inn were thrown open to the day's warmth, and Meggy peered in each one until she found Roger.

  The other young men at his table were carousing, teasing and laughing, but a downcast Roger sat quietly. "Roger," Meggy called softly, but not softly enough. The entire tableful of fellows turned to her.

  "What ho!" shouted one. "A maiden with the sweetest face this side of sugared plums beckons us."

  Roger looked up. "Begone, Meggy," he said.

  "No, I pray you, Roger, come hither. I want you."

  "Oh fortunate Roger," one of the boys at the table called. And another, "Would that your sweetheart wanted me!"

  Sweetheart? Ne'er! Impossible! She had no desire for a sweetheart. But belike if she had...

  Roger was blushing red as a summer sunset as he hurried to her side. "What?" he asked.

  "Roger, be you codswalloped?"

  "Nay, I am as sober as a newborn babe, not that it be your affair."

  Meggy nodded. "Good," she said, and she began as she had practiced on the way. "I have resolved to see the baron, myself, without you, as you will not. It must be done. I care not for the danger, although if I am assaulted or imprisoned, 'twill be on your head for compelling me to go alone. And so farewell, Roger, if it should happen that we ne'er see each other again."

  "How will you find him, Lady Obstinate?"

  "I will ask. And ask. And ask. I will ask every living soul in London until I find someone who knows where lives this cursed baron. Now, I say again, fare thee well."

  Roger sighed a sigh that could have blown the entire English fleet to France. "The baron dwells off Dowgate, near the river."

  "How know you that?"

  "I asked," he said. "And I will attend you, as you have known all this time I would."

  Meggy smiled as they turned for Dowgate Street. 'Twas true. She had known.

  Meggy and Roger walked a middling long way down from Candlewick Street and over on Thames Street. On one side of Dowgate Street were shops, taverns, and houses much the same as in the rest of London. On the other side was a residence that was nearly a city unto itself. Beyond a short wall of stone, Meggy saw, was a jumble of large redbrick buildings—towers, chapel, stables, and various chambers—set in a garden with abundant trees and a stretch of grass down to the river.

  They stopped before the vast gatehouse. Meggy cleared her throat and called out to a face in a window, "Good morrow, good sir. Be you the baron?"

  Roger poked her. "Clotpole! He is but the gatekeeper."

  The face attached itself to a gross-bellied man who came through the door and stood before them, legs apart. "Be off with ye! No beggars here."

  Meggy frowned, remembering the similar welcome given her by her father. She pulled herself as tall as she could. "We are not beggars. We would have speech with the baron."

  The man laughed and rubbed his nose. "She would have speech with the baron! I would be knighted by the queen! Now off, I say!"

  "But we bear a message for—"

  He thrust his great belly toward them. "Do ye wish me to call the dogs?" Roger took Meggy's arm and pulled her away.

  Men came and went through the gatehouse, but Meggy could see no way of attaching herself to them and sneaking past the gateman. Dowgate was crowded with peddlers and hawkers and vendors, but they were all shooed away from the baron's gate. All but the ballad seller, for the gateman and passersby both stopped and listened as he sang, offering the last words, confession, and dying declaration of one Anne Fogget, hanged that very morning for the crime of murdering her husband: My husband coming home somewhat in drink, as he was going to bed, the ballad seller sang, I took an axe I had prepared, and clove him in the head. Meggy shivered, imagining the last words and dying confession of an alchemist of the city, hanged for preparing poison for a noble lord.

  She pulled Roger away from the gate. He bought herring pies from a passing peddler, and they walked to the river to eat. Pigeons and sparrows and gulls cried as they fought over scraps of fish and other bits from the gutters. Roger took a large bite of his pie and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "We have tried, Meggy," he said, "but we cannot—"

  "Cannot, will not, would not!" Meggy said. "Do you wish to see my father's head spinning in the wind on London Bridge? Hear his last confession sung on London street corners? We must think of something."

  "You are as stubborn as a donkey with sore feet! What think you to try next? Tying a message on one of those pigeons and letting him fly to the baron? Or mayhap you will take flight over the baron's walls and sing a song at his window." Roger began to sing in a surprisingly sweet voice.

  Oh Baron, most loyal,

  Although you recoil,

  I must tell you this:

  Something is amiss.

  You must not partake

  Of comfits or cake

  For—

  He began to laugh so hard at his own foolishness that he slipped and dropped his pie into the water, whereupon it was fought over by ducks until it sank to the bottom of the Thames.

  "Belike you deserved that, Master Ninny," said Meggy, handing him the remains of her own pie.

  "We can do no more." He reached a hand to her. "Let us leave this—"

  "Ye toads and vipers, Oldmeat!" Meggy hissed. "Now my father will do murder, and he will be seized, and the baron will be dead, and I will be alone. I want—"

  "You want! You want! Mistress Margret Swann, you are the most selfish, ungrateful wench I ever did know." Roger shook his head, and the feather in his cap wobbled sadly. "You think only of yourself and your own concerns. I would I ne'er had met you and wish ne'er to meet you again." He hastened away, leaving Meggy there.

  She sat and watched the birds. "Fie on him, the mewling moldwarp," she said, but the birds said nothing.

  Finally Meggy made her way back to the baron's. She approached the gatehouse once more.

  "Be it you again?" the gatekeeper asked. He sneezed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Get you gone."

  "Master Gatekeeper," Meggy said, "I know you will not allow that I see the baron, but if it please you, will you take a message to him? 'Pon my honor, he is in grave danger, for—"

  The gatekeeper stepped toward Meggy and waved his hands at her. "Go, I said! Clear the way. The baron has no interest in the fancies of a crippled ragamuffin. Go!"


  "But—"

  "But no! Go away." He sneezed and turned his back to her.

  Ye toads and vipers, thought Meggy, but this saving of someone's life takes a goodly amount of effort.

  She turned and walked back toward Crooked Lane. Fish Street Hill was teeming with folk. Peddlers, costermongers, and chimney sweeps milled about, crying their wares to passing merchants, sailors, and fine folk in cart-wheel ruffs and feathered hats.

  A ballad seller climbed on an overturned crate and called, "Gentlemen, ladies, pay heed. Hear of treason in our city." Treason? Meggy stopped, fearing to hear her father's name. "Hear a new ballad," he continued, "recounting the dangerous shooting of a gun at court." A gun? And he began:

  Weep, weep, still I weep,

  And shall do till I die

  To think upon the gun that shot

  At court so dangerously.

  As the ballad seller described the events of July, when a stray bullet had narrowly missed the queen in her barge on the river, those gathered to listen muttered and grumbled. "Hang 'im!" shouted a man in a blue padded doublet. "God save the queen!" added others.

  And then Meggy had an idea. People stopped to listen to ballad sellers and paid heed to their words. So she would write a ballad about the baron and the ginger-haired lout and sing it outside the baron's house. Someone would hear and warn the baron. The lout would be imprisoned and her father free. It was an inspired idea, Meggy thought, and she did not need Roger anywise.

  SIXTEEN

  Her father did not return at all that night, which Meggy knew, for she lay long awake, planning her ballad. "The Ballad of a Red-Headed, Black-Hearted, Pig-Eyed Lout," she would call it. She must be sly, use stealth and hugger-mugger, and not just blurt out the plot. It must be a real ballad with poetry and rhyme, but yet a clear enough warning so that when the right person heard, he would understand. And she must not reveal her father's hand in the plot. Could she do all that?

  She lay on her pallet, rhyming and unrhyming, trying this word and that. "You lack-witted oaf," she said to herself, flopping over and back again, "a sausage could be a better poet than you." And, "No, no, no one will understand and I will be shamed." Her face grew moist, not so much from the labor of composing the ballad as from the mighty swings she took from despair to hope and back again. Finally, long after midnight, she repeated her song to herself once more. It would serve. But how to make certain it reached the ears of the right person? She pondered for a moment, and then—of course, she would have it printed! Aye, she would have it printed and sell it to every man going through the baron's gate. Certes someone would make sure it got to the man himself.

  Should she tell her father what she was about? Or was it better if he did not know until after she had succeeded? What would he think? Would he be grateful or accuse her once again of meddling? She had no answers, so she pulled her cloak over her and nestled into the pallet. She dreamed of herring and dead birds and Louise's head on London Bridge.

  In the morning she went again to Master Allyn. "I be here to make a bargain with you," she told him. "I have writ a ballad I would have printed. I will pay for it by selling other ballads and broadsides for you." She motioned to a printed stack on the table. "If those do sit unsold any longer, they will be old and stale and good for naught but plugging the holes in your shoes. Let me sell them."

  The printer thought a moment and then said, "It seems a fair bargain. So you are a poet?"

  She hesitated. Should she tell him the truth? Fearing he might be reluctant to be involved in her scheme, she said only, "Aye, sometimes I am a poet."

  "Well, little poet, give me your ballad and I will set it in type."

  "I know what I wish to say, I know my letters and read some, but I have no writing."

  "Sing it to me then, and I shall write it." She did, using a tune that her granny had taught her.

  "'Tis a most interesting ballad," he said when they had finished. "How did you come by it?"

  Meggy answered, "I have a fine imagination," which was true. But she added nothing about the plot she had overheard or her father's part in it.

  The printer began to pull metal letters from a box and arrange them into words on a composing stick. Though the letters were backwards, he pulled them with a speed that astonished Meggy. Then he moved the letters a line at a time onto a rack. He finished the sheet with the legend he used on all his broadsides, "Imprinted at the shop of John Allyn off Paul's Chain, near Ludgate," then wiped his hands on his apron.

  This matter was taking a goodly long time, so Meggy said, "Mayhap I can assist you in some way." Taking one of the leather balls, the printer showed her how to smear ink on it and then rub it against the letters until they, too, were inked.

  The man watched her carefully. "From all your years with the walking sticks," he said, "your hands and arms be right strong and nimble." She looked down at her hands, surprised. She had never thought they might have value, just that her legs did not.

  He put the rack of inky letters onto the press and laid a piece of paper over it, grasped the lever, and pressed forward, so that the top of the press sank down against the paper. "How many copies are you wishing?" he asked Meggy.

  She frowned, not knowing. One would be sufficient, were it to get to the right body. But to be safe, she said, "Twenty?"

  "As you will, mistress." The printer pulled a printed sheet from the press and laid it on the table to dry. This he did until he had a stack of twenty. He handed one to Meggy.

  She held the broadside in her two hands with a tingle of pride and delight. She had done this—she had bethought it, she had written it, she had helped to print it. And then a quiver of fear stirred her. What had she done and what would it bring her?

  With a shake of her head and a sharp inhale, Meggy took the broadsides with her ballad and a great many others to sell for a ha'penny each, and she put them in her sack. She slipped her arms through the handles and the sack hung down her back. Slowly she wabbled to the door. "Mistress Meggy, I fear this is too much for you," the printer said. He put his hand on her arm.

  "Leave off, Master Printer. I will do this." She stopped, and added, "I thank you, Master Printer, for your service and your trust."

  Down Watling Street to Budge Row and thence to Candlewick she went. Master Allyn was right—the heavy sack made her going difficult, and a cold wind was rising, but her mind was set upon this deed, and her stubbornness was as persistent as her pain. She turned south toward the river and Dowgate.

  Before the baron's great residence, she put down her sticks and leaned against the wall. Pulling broadsides and ballads from her sack, she called, "Come and buy. Come and buy," as she had heard the ballad sellers calling. "Come and buy"—she looked at the broadsides in her hand—"'The Ballad of Lady Margery and the Cook.' Or perhaps 'The True and Last Confession of Richard Dowling, Murderer and Thief.' 'Tis a sorrowful lamentation with woodcut illustrations, sung to the tune of 'All in a Garden Green.'"

  People came and went past the baron's gate. Some avoided her, casting suspicious or pitying glances at her walking sticks, but some stopped to listen, and others even paid a ha'penny for a copy of a ballad. Whenever a man or men came or went through the gate, she sang her own ballad.

  I am a man of high renown

  Attendant to a lord.

  I am a man of villainous heart

  And poison is my sword.

  No one paid heed.

  She moved closer to the gate. The lardy gatekeeper peered out his window at her but did not chase her away. She sang of a murder in Wiltshire and a sea serpent off Dungeness and of Robin Hood rescuing Will Stutly from the sheriff. She sold not a few copies and dropped the coins into the sack. Emboldened by her success, she sang louder, and people stopped to listen. So she tried her own ballad again.

  My flaming hair, my piggish eyes

  Mark me as a fiend.

  And I will dispatch my goodly lord,

  Although he serves the queen.

  He
is a traitor, listen well,

  I tell you verily.

  He plots against his honest lord

  And there will murder be.

  Her voice grew tired, her hair tangled in the wind, and her legs ached. Many times she thought to leave and find her pallet, but she sang on. Finally as midday turned to late afternoon, several gentlemen passed, talking and laughing, making for the baron's gate. Meggy stopped singing. The ginger-haired man was among them. Were they all in the plot? Would they hear and understand and throw her into the river with the fishes? Or might one of them be the baron's true friend and warn him?

  She took a chance and a deep breath and sang.

  So eat, my lord, and drink the wine,

  You will not fall down sick

  Until the fatal time has come

  For the dose of the arsenic.

  He is a traitor, listen well,

  I tell you verily

  He plots against his honest lord

  And there will murder be.

  So barons all, both west and east,

  I cannot tell you more.

  But there is a traitor in this land

  As I have said afore.

  Yes, barons all, both west and east,

  I cannot tell you more.

  But there is a traitor in this land...

  One of the men making their way in turned to her. "Where found you that, girl?" he asked Meggy quietly. "Who gave you that?"

  A lump the size of Master Grimm sat in her throat. "'Tis the newest ballad. Everyone be singing it. Will you buy?" she asked, and then swallowed a mighty swallow.

  The man gave her a ha'penny, took a copy of the ballad, and stood by the gatehouse to read. His brow furrowed as he looked at the ballad sheet and then at the men passing into the baron's yard. With determined step he followed them.

  Meggy let her breath out with a great whoosh. She took her sticks and her sack and wabbled slowly back to Master Allyn's printing house. She could not be certain the baron was warned, but she had done all she could. And without Roger.