A Convergence Of Birds (7 page)

“I actually turned people away,” Habington is telling them; then, as he thinks better of it (priests, plotters; who else?) adds, “old friends who wanted to stay the night. I have a wife with child; I am far too busy for visitors. That includes you all.”

“Quite so,” Bromley says, himself doing nothing in the way of search; his servants do that for him. “I am not accusing you of being inhospitable, sir, or of uxorial coarseness. Oh no. I await only the conclusion of this business and will be happy to acquit you of any charges if we find nothing amiss. We have to be thorough, though, as your pig-scraper does, and your steeplejack. We cannot afford to skimp matters, sir. The national safety is at stake. As my father always said—”

But no one listens; he has been here before, with the same quotations, although a smaller crew. They intend to spend the night, sprawled anywhere soft, belching and grunting, drinking and quarreling, seeking the temporary oblivion the laborer needs from his hire. At such a time, Anne thinks, we might actually let the priests out, for a stretch and a snack, but there are so many of them you are bound to make a mistake. Little does she know it, but Bromley, an organized mind in an untidy life, has insisted that at least one man remain on guard on each floor, although how far any watchman can be trusted not to fall asleep he cannot know. If the priests make a move, he knows it will be by night. He resolves to stay awake until dawn, but realizes he has been on the go since today’s, and readily exempts himself. Does he hope to find a priest or merely to achieve the most thorough fruitless search in the world? This Habington, he muses, is a rather rash person, but manly in bearing and, if a liar, one with plausible good manners. My sister lies in the same fashion. Yet I do not worry about her; her lies are between her and God Almighty. Some of us with the highest power blow both ways. We are not without sympathy, but work is work is duty. Will I ever have to rope my sister in, merely for being a Catholic? Never, so what’s all the fuss about? If you strip away the varnish of religion, life is the same for all of us. If I were God, would I want to be prayed to? No, I would want to be left alone, lost in the lap of memory.

Even on the first day, through diligence and willingness to deface the house’s interior, the poursuivants have found grist for their mill: three simulated chimneys with planks soot-blackened to resemble bricks, and cavities—chambers—full of trinkets and trumpery (as they say) ranging from books to rosaries, vases, chalices, and huge thick candles. “I am a collector,” Habington raves, “I am entitled to put my things where I want. Nothing has to be on view.” What, then, are these? They produce the title deeds concerning the estate, opening them up and riffling the pages amid their pink ribbons. “Are you telling me,” he insists, “I have no right to put important papers in a safe place? Don’t you? What does this signify? I am a landowner; I do not want people wiping their boots on legal papers or peering at them to see how much I am worth.” Then they inform him that in the brick-work of the gallery surmounting the gate they have found two spaces, each large enough for a man. Why so many open cubbyholes? He tells them, in his protracted huff, that all country houses have such facilities, to store unwanted books, vases, hunting boots—”You know, Sir Henry,” he says, with his most produced voice, coming on strong, “the sorts of things you don’t want to part with but cannot stand to have under your feet. Any woman will tell you that. After all, dear sir, you found nobody in these places. There is nobody, as I said. I dare say, if you and the loyal Hargreaves wish to stay the night, as all the signs indicate, we can surely find so-called priest holes for you, in which you will feel so uncomfortable that you will just as soon recognize that they were never intended for human occupation. They are for storage, but you are welcome to try. A severe lesson cannot be more certainly learned.”

“I respect our armor, sir,” Bromley tells him, “but you must understand we will be here as long as necessary. Hargreaves will keep an eye on the house all night.”

“No, Sir Henry, I will.”

“No need, sir. Take your rest. I will take mine.”

“Not in a priest hole, then. We do have rooms adjudged suitable for a gentleman.”

“A sit-up sleep,” Sir Henry tells him. “Taught me by my father.” He is still pondering Habington’s riposte about a country house’s being so vast that you forget what you have and do not memorize a house by its cavities, whatever their purpose might be.

So: Anne Vaux ordered and got her ham and eggs just in time and so feels nourished for a fray in which she plays little part, now thinking of herself as merely a mouth, a tongue, likely to give evidence by accident. She keeps quiet, out of the way, wondering if music by Byrd might serve to lull the searchers, making them skimp and miss. Little John Owen, still out in the birdhouse in the pond, has done good work here, although perhaps these are not the best of his optical illusions. In one recently modified house he created a painting of a door opening on another door, three-dimensional until you get up close—just the sort of thing to suck in and confound a Hargreaves—but he has not done this everywhere. Another lifetime would help, she thinks. If only he had started work ten years earlier. Off she treads, out of the house, chunk of suet in hand to fasten to the side of the birdhouse in which he roosts—the side facing away from the house. It will be better than nothing, whereas cheese would alert their suspicions. All John Owen has to do is somehow help himself and try to keep the suet down. It is like wartime here, she decides, with troops garrisoned all over the privacy of the house. Is this how they treat the Jews in Europe? I am better doing this by day, in the open; they would wonder why I was doing it at night. If they keep watch, and they will. If Henry Garnet, who hurt his knee, cannot stand being cooped up, what are we to do?

In the blistering, gusty cold of that night, Wednesday leaking into Thursday, John Owen, who has been outside since Monday, cranks his almost petrified broken body out of the birdhouse, lifting it up and off him, and creeps into Hindlip through an entrance only he knows, thence into a hiding place known to most of them as Curly, because it does not lie straight and whoever is in it—in this case the lay brother Ralph Ashley, also there since Monday—can only lie curved. There is little room for two, but they wordlessly share the apple Ralph Ashley has been saving for three days. It is as cold in the house as it is outside, and Little John feels he has exchanged life for death. Ashley’s body gives off no warmth. What they do next is rash, but they both feel dizzy, weak, can hardly move their legs; indeed, Little John is lucky to have stumbled in unseen. The kitchen tempts, the open road next. As Little John sees it, he is bound to be discovered if the searchers occupy the house long enough, and if he stays any longer in the birdhouse he will die of exposure. Wordlessly, they decide to move out, through the wainscot into a gallery. The house is still and only faintly lit. If someone catches them, they will give themselves up; perhaps the poursuivants will be satisfied with them, mistaken as to who they are. Out they slip, one foot caressing the other before going farther, but the house becomes an uproar; Hargreaves, on his third patrol of the night, wandering into the gallery out of boredom and with no expectations at all, catches sight of two shady figures tiptoeing their way into the hall and communicating with each other in dumb show. In a second, they have been surrounded and pinioned while Sir Henry, half asleep and blustering to compensate for his bleariness, asks them who they are. Just servants, they answer, unable to sleep. But sleepless servants, Sir Henry comments with a sniffle, do not wander through the main house at night like invited guests. Who are you? Are you Tesimond and Oldcorne, Greenway and Hall? He is wide of the mark, of course, but he is convinced he has caught someone, not of high station (he knows the smell of a servant when he sniffs one, and the whiff coming off them is quite different). Rather than interrogate them, he sends them off to his headquarters and occupies himself with the expectant mother, Mary Habington, sister to Monteagle, the savior of the hour.

“No fear, Sir Henry,” she shrills, “not unless you carry me out yourself. I am staying here, where I belong. How dare you?”

Clearly he has no business trying to lug around someone so wellborn and well-connected; he makes no offer to remove Anne Vaux, whose sharpened glare upsets him, so he retires again and writes a report to Cecil, waffling away about the devious ways of Catholics, hosts, country gentlemen, ladies of the house, and just about everybody not on his side. He will not sleep this night, nor will he hit on the truth, he is so eager to present himself in a good light as the finder, the exposer. Restrained enough in speech, he tends to hyperbole at the merest touch of self-esteem, informing Cecil that “of all the various scheming and truculent priests, those Jesu-wits, I have two of the vilest in hand, for prompt sending to you, sir, and your diligent punitations. I have one or two misgivings about who these people are, for they will not say, but truth told they have, without any airs or graces as of high-born gentlemen, that bloated humbleness we all recognize as bombast in reverse. We, who have not been educated for nothing, need yield no quarter to the Roman-suckled rabble of high priests. At your service always, with intaminate pride.” He can go on in this vein for hours, sufficiently launched with writing materials, like someone taking to water for the first time and hitting on the correct stroke, even were he swimming in pitch. He calls off the search, explores his conscience, wishes he had not been so swift in sending them up to London, then renews the ransacking of the house into Friday, Saturday and Sunday, deeply conscious of interrupting a religious timetable that no one dares mention. From memory, in her diary, Anne Vaux writes as follows:

We have here again, for the seventh day, the same behaviours as before at Baddesley-Clinton, which I fiercely complained of, though this house be none of mine and therefore not a subject for mine own remonstrances. Suffice to say, these poursuivants behave like a pack of bad boys playing blindman’s buff, who in their wild rush bang into tables and chairs and walls and yet have not the slightest suspicion that their playfellows, God save them, are right on top of them and almost touching them.

She reads this through, crosses it all out as dangerous, then tears it loose, looking exasperatedly at the diary, flicks through some pages, wraps the volume in a fold of wallpaper she picks from a minty-smelling closet, and bears the whole thing downstairs to the roaring fire, into which she sets her life: unseen in the whole endeavor, for one glimpse of her ferrying something perilous to read would have them snapping at her heels. She realizes she is not living prudently: The constant hammering has unnerved her, given her a headache that reaches down the back of her neck into her shoulders, and the egg-and-ham breakfast is sitting none too well—days old, it seems to lie there and haunt her still, and she now agonizes at having put Fathers Garnet and Oldcorne through the miseries of its aroma. Indeed, nothing she does helps them. They are not in the lower chamber that sits below the dining room, where it would be possible to pass food down to them, as if they were plaintive dogs behaving well at their masters’ feet. They do not even have an apple between them. She stews about Little John and Ralph Ashley, seized and sent away incognito, and knows there has come an end to hideaway-building. Further torture inflicted on John Owen will kill him certainly, and the whole recusant scheme will perish. It would be one thing if the searchers, having found the two, had gone, satisfied with their prey; but here they are still, racketing about, so much so that she twitches at every tap or rattle, every creak of the house as it settles down into winter repose. She recalls having noticed in herself and others a curious habit of completing a watched motion: when someone, bracing to move an arm or a leg, curtails the movement and the intent watcher goes through with it, for the moment identified into union with the person watched. This is how she feels about the two priests in their hole, sensing all the movements they dare not make and accomplishing them by guesswork. Will it always be thus? No, she knows, it is going to be much worse. The poursuivants, having found two, want to have two more, yelping and scattering, heedless of a house routine destroyed. Brave Mary Habington has refused to leave, but she finds their presence vile in the extreme, and all she can do is maintain a cool austere demeanor while her husband orates incessantly about an Englishman’s home being his castle. Was he the originator of that saw? Well, castle no more, my loves, the rabble has entered its final playground and will not be contained by any code of decent manners. Sir Henry is already at odds with himself, she notes, for having not interrogated Owen and Ashley himself; whatever they said would be gold.

“The trouble is, my lady,” Sir Henry is saying to her, “the moiety of this rabble we have here has not enough proper English to get someone to draw down their trews for the jakes, if you will pardon the reference. I am among apes.”

“We are both, all, among apes, sir.”

“Hence the high degree of choler among us.”

He needs no spoken agreement, she can see that; he is accustomed to silent assent while he roams in hit-or-miss meditation, hoping for a coup that will raise him even higher in Cecil’s esteem. In truth he finds Worcester a bore and would love to move to London, at an advantage of course. In Worcester jail at this very moment, to save his life or at least delay his execution, Humphrey Littleton is telling all: He will tell who the Jesuits were who talked him into becoming a plotter. Why, Father Hall (Oldcorne, he explains) is almost certainly hidden away in Hindlip, “at this present,” and easily flushed out. Hall’s, Oldcorne’s, servant happens to be in Worcester jail, and he will know all. Show him the rack. The manacles. Littleton is getting carried away with vicarious cruelty. “After all,” he adds, “Oldcorne said the plot was a good thing and long overdue. Commendable was his word.” The Sheriff of Worcester at once stays his execution to see what else this tap of a man might yield up. After the top layer, there are many others, with truth at the bottom, tiny and glistening: a corm of fact.