Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (288 page)
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Authors: Ford Madox Ford
He paused, and looked at the two Mayors.
“This is the compact, and it is a very tight knot! You shall protect my wife, each and several of you as if you were her fathers, and at the expenses of the town you shall protect my goods by all processes of our law against all processes of the law of the realm, and ere the last chicanery be spent upon it. By your bungling of matters up at Udimore ye have made me your scapegoat; you have jeopardized the estate of a Baron of Rye: you shall work to protect him.”
The Mayor of Winchelsea pulled the ends of his long moustache that were far below his chin.
“This is a very simple, sailorly and straight-made compact,” he said, “and I think the townsmen of Rye may well observe it, and I may well be witness to it. For I take it that there is no duty of us barons more due and fit to be observed than the protection of the goods of a baron and brother against the laws of the realm or the succouring of his wife against such as would oppress her.”
“I approve,” the Mayor said, and looked round upon the other barons, but they all slept reclining backwards or forwards in their scarlet. Only Solomon Keymer added to his “And I!” the proviso —
“Upon condition that this, our brother baron, acknowledge that in this the power and worship of our ancient town be shown, approved, and rendered glorious.”
“Oh, I grant you that, brother baron,” Edward Colman smiled; and his next action showed the man as much as any, for he went swiftly to the great cupboard at the hall end. It was wont to hold all the scarlet robes of the barons, but now held only his own, all the others being there around the hall. He took from his neck the chain upon which there hung the medallion with arms; with this, when a baron went without the Liberties of the Five Ports, he was accustomed to show his rank. He hung it upon the wooden peg above the furred collar of his gown.
“See you,” he said, “let that hang there till I come back again. It is not to-day nor to-morrow that the New World shall acknowledge the privilege of a Baron of the Ports, and I am minded to see if there shall not be found merchandise once more to make our town richer than Venice or Cadiz, as once it was.”
He turned to his com-barons and smiled.
“Sirs, I have spoken roughly; but here is little time, and
pauca verba
perforce my motto. Tomorrow, or to-day, before dawn I will sail with Von Voss, who setteth towards Amsterdam. And, sir,” he said to Jeal, “and you, brother baron,” to Solomon Keymer, “I think you have correspondents at Amsterdam. I pray you to walk with me to the house that is mine.
I will do business with you this night.”
“SEE you,” he said to Jeal, as, at the stairfoot, he cast the keys into the lap of the Town Chamberlain, that still slept, in that dark and damp space beside his lanthorn, “that is all of a piece. You have all sorts of guards, and they slumber by the doors whilst your daughters spy upon your most secret conclaves at your hinder windows.”
“It is very well,” Solomon Keymer sneered at him, “that you are going abroad in the morning. Truly you will find outlandish towns more to your taste.” His voice echoed in sneering whispers through the vaulted and pillared darkness of the market places, and Edward Colman caught him up.
“Beseech you, neighbour,” he said, “talk not of my plans in these darknesses. Who knows where Anne Jeal, who has hearkened at so many of your conclaves, is not now hearkening?”
The Mayor, who had held his peace for so long, spoke now with gravity.
“Godson,” he said, “you accuse my daughter of listening at our windows. Know you not the gravity of that offence?”
They went out into the dark, echoing, and wet streets, where a light rain was falling.
“Oh,” Edward Colman laughed, whilst they turned up the collars of their short cloaks, “the penalty of listening at your mysteries is to lose one ear each time of listening. Is it by her witchcraft that Anne Jeal has grown a hundred ears?”
“Anne hath never listened,” his godfather maintained stoutly.
“A hundred times she hath,” Edward Colman laughed. “Myself I took her in the act, even now — at that pane.” They were passing in the churchyard behind the lighted windows of the hall. He laughed again. “Why, I exact no penalty,” he said. “These old-fashioned penalties are a folly, along with all your relics of the dark ages.”
Solomon Keymer stopped suddenly and mulishly in the street.
“I will make no transactions of giving bills in Amsterdam for one that jeers at our ancient corporations,” he said.
Edward Colman stopped and looked over his shoulder.
‘“Then there remain for me only the prison and the torture. I am good at bearing pain, but not when it comes to looping a rope round my head and twisting it tight with a stick. That is done in the Court of the Star Chamber in London, they say.”
“You would betray your fellow townsmen I” Solomon Keymer said, as if he addressed Judas Iscariot.
“Not if they will aid me!” Edward Colman said.
“Oh, in God’s name,” Jeal broke in, “let us not hinder him from going. Willingly will I give one hundred pounds — nay, two; nay, three — that he may get him gone. I would rather give a thousand pounds than that we should lose our liberties — and that it will come to if we resist his seizure or if we let him be taken.”
Solomon Keymer looked at the wet faces of the houses before him.
“Why,” he said, “if Edward Colman will speak civil words of the liberties I will give willingly a hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred pounds. I am an old man; long I have not to live. That much will I give, that our privileges remain as they are till my eyes close for good. Aye, and more; I would keep only enough as may serve to maintain me till I die. For the Corporation of the Cinque Ports is a most ancient and honourable estate.”
“Why, so it is,” Edward Colman said; and he smiled, for he saw that these two old men were minded to bribe him to be gone; “so it is, for old men that come of King Henry VIII’s day. But I am a young man, and would be frisking it.”
The hill told upon the breath of these two, so he let them be in peace till he came to the door of his house. The key, which was small for those days, was hidden in a nook beneath the paving-stones before his door.
“See you,” he said, “how we of the modern fashion contrive! I warrant you have each two lazy and useless servitors sleeping in your doorways to let you come in. I do send my old nurse to bed, so, with her and a cookmaid and an apprentice, I make mine house seem better than yours, who have ten knaves and wenches each. And my house is bigger than either of yours.”
Nevertheless in the dark entry-hall a pale figure greeted them with a —
“God be thanked, Master Edward;” his old nurse having crept down again and again from her room to see if he were come home, though it was against his most stern commands.
“Get you gone ere I kindle a light,” he said. “I’m come off very well, as you see.”
“Oh, not now,” the aged voice pleaded; “tell me of your adventures;” and when she was but a fading whiteness on the stairs he cried after her —
“Why, old trembler I Dress you, that your teeth may not chatter when I speak. It is too cold for old ones to be out of bed. But I will tell you —
“Aye, and pray for me,” he cried after. “I am bent upon a long journey.”
“She remains a concealed Papist,” he said, whilst he was getting a light for his taper from the wood ashes that still held fire in the grate.
In the upper house, that jutted over the street, he had a great room, where his fathers had done business with pilgrims, taking of them their passage moneys to Compostella, or Rome, or to the Holy Land, according as they were pilgrims, or Romers, or palmers. It backed out upon the town wall, over the harbour, and it fronted the street that runs at the back of the church. His fathers had taken bands of pilgrims from Guildford or Horsham, or as far away as Cirencester, sending with them trusty guides, selling them poultry, and wine, and sweet cakes for the voyage, and sending them all together in little fleets of their ships when the Narrow Seas were perilous on account of pirates. And his nurse could tell that his grandmother had once seen seven hundred pilgrims bargaining in that room upon one day. Now it seldom saw more than five, or at most half-a-score, of Holland or French merchants, so that she had good reason to bewail the sweeping away of the old Faith in that land, since the folk who had gone on pilgrimages had brought great profit to the house of Colman. And now there were no more pilgrims in all England. And even, since the loss of Calais, no more royal princes set sail from Rye for France — though the walls of this great chamber were covered with the armorial bearings of all the princes and queens since Edward I’s day, that, down to Queen Jane Seymour, had set sail for France in good ships hired from the Colmans in the port of Rye. It had been a room to see much grand and lordly company, with always a Colman as rich and as lordly as any; it had seen the Lord High Admirals sitting there, to ask of Colmans their ships to do service in war time. And their ships had fought in many great sea-battles, and Colmans, with the other Barons of the Ports, had done great feats of arms. That was why they were called Barons — for, from the battle of the Spaniards-on-the-Sea, which is called the Victory of Winchelsea, to the days of the Armada itself — in three hundred years — there had been no sea-battle in which the ships of the Five Ports, and those of the Colmans among them, had not been in the vanguard. New ships of war had grown too great to enter that small port; there was hardly enough work for the few ships that Edward Colman had, and not merchandise enough in all those ports to employ the gold that his fathers had hoarded up.
It was not for him, he explained, whilst he talked in this vein to the two old men in the great chamber, dimly lighted by one candle in the midst of the long table that ran down the wall beneath the escutcheons of Queen Jane Seymour, painted on the plasterwork — it was not the life he would lead, to put out his money in usury, like a Jew, or to sit on his gold-sacks and grow fat, as an alderman, whilst the sacks grew lean as a parson’s horse. He was for new land and new merchandise, and for reviving the glories of the port of Rye.
The old men grew very tired; Jeal solemnly and Keymer owlishly blinked at the light, and his speeches and action alike dismayed and amazed them. They were used to be in bed by nine of the clock; they were used to let their minds revolve around two thoughts every day — one before dinner and one before supper — or three thoughts at the most on a Friday, when the laws prescribed fasting. So that, though they resented, they did not well understand his thoughts, and made him no answer at all. And they blinked at his actions in the dim light.
He pulled open presses where, to prove his words, there reclined, brown and faded, the old printed “Directions for Pilgrims,” in hundreds of broadsheets. His fathers had bought them in that number the year before all pilgrimages had been forbidden by law in Henry VIII’s day, and there they lay still. They were of no use; they never would again be of use: they were like the old privileges of the Ports, the old customs, the old faiths. They must get them new ones — either from the New World or from elsewhere, he said. They must cut their coats according to newer cloths.
He pulled two parchment sheets from a lower shelf and stood before them.
“Here I stand, Edward Colman, a young man and proper, going into outlawry because all that I could find to spend my time on was a trade that is against the law. Is it not silly to keep up an old law that would prevent the export of fleeces and the coming in of gold to this realm? Yet that is all that you and I — and all of us — can find to do in the ancient town!”
He turned a sheet of parchment in front of each of his elders, and cried —
“Write each of you a bill of a thousand pounds upon the merchants of Amsterdam!”
And whilst a sudden comprehension of that, at least — and a sudden protest — came into each face together, he said —
“What! You will not write to save the town of Rye?”
He put a leaden inkpot, with goose-quill pens, between them, and started to cut a pen with a little knife.
“Sir,’’ he said to Jeal,” you are a master ironworker; you have many furnaces and ironpits; you earn two thousand pounds by the year, yet you will not give a thousand pounds of a bill to save your town.”
And: “Brother Baron,” he said to the wrinkled Solomon Keymer, “you are of yourself the richest man of his town, with much gold made with former trade to Bordeaux. You are said to be worth
Solomon Keymer whimpered —
“Five hundred — between the two of us — five hundred in Dutch gold.”
The old nurse came into the room; she was turned of seventy, yet she was thin and limber, and dressed in brown linsey-woolsey, without any farthingale to swell round her waist, and with a tailed, flat hood such as had been worn in the days of Henry VIII. She came to him swiftly, with both her hands stretched out to stroke his; he cried over his shoulder to the two old men—”Two thousand pounds, paid in Dutch gold in Amsterdam, I will have bills for;” and went with her to a place in the wall beside the high fireplace where they were hidden by a great post that upheld the dim ceiling. There they might not see him, and he pulled out from the wall what seemed to be a solid panel of plastering, but it fell back on hinges that the old woman had greased once a week for fifty years. The voice of the sea-springs, that there ran far into the land, came up to them whispering from deep below. Many years before this had been a well in the town wall — four hundred years before, at the least, it had been made. But the well-sinkers had found only salt water, and when the Colmans had built their house against the wall they had come to using this well as a place for hiding such things as they would hide. At low tide its bottom now was dry, and they could go down to it by a rope ladder; but for the most part it was filled, deep down, with salt water, that came oozing from the sea through the sandbanks and the shingle.
There may have been folk in the town that had known, or had forgotten, that there was this old well in the Colmans’ house, but no one knew there what it held save Edward Colman and this old nurse of his.
He gave her his news in between his lamentations; there was something merciless in his telling her that he must go beyond the seas, since he was almost like her very grandchild, and she came of times when “over-the-seas” had meant a world of dragons, devils, Saracens, cut-throat Frenchmen, stabbing Spaniards, evil women, and fell robbers. He could not bring to her mind in that short time that over the seas he would find streets, and clean towns, and honest Dutch faith. So that whilst he worked and she aided him, he could do no more than direct her what she should do whilst he was away. She was so acquainted with his way and his merchanting that, if only she lived till he came back, he could leave his house to her and to Magdalena, who, he had advised with himself, should come there to live, out of the perils of Rye Foreign.
