I was away from the village when they died. In Bristol. On business about my playing, trying to inveigle my way into one of the touring companies, Dorset’s, Northumberland’s, I have forgotten which. My plans didn’t work out, and I’d spent a fruitless couple of weeks hanging around inn-yards trying to ingratiate myself with the players. My father did not approve. Players were parasites and crocodiles, double dealers and painted sepulchres. They were unnatural, because men are not intended by God to be other than they are, particularly not to play at being girls and women. The shows staged in inn-yards and other public places where players flaunted their filth were not only an incitement to disorder and lasciviousness in otherwise upright citizens, they were also a breeding ground for thieves, whores and knaves.
Needless to say, my father had never attended a play. But he knew what he hated. He also knew, like all good men, that God hated what he hated and was busy with punishment, punishment everyday and everywhere. This punishment most often came in the guise of diurnal accident and disaster. Whenever a calamity overtook the village – a house-fire, a sickness among the sheep, the failure of a crop – he looked for the cause in the sinfulness of the householder, the shepherd, the farmer. For larger catastrophes like the Spanish threat, which had gone before I was grown, or the plague, which never goes, he looked to sinfulness on a grand scale. As a nation, we English were all deeply and doubly dyed with the devil’s pitch. We teetered on the lip of the everlasting pit. The strangest thing with my father was that this sense of universal damnation went hand in hand with a loving-kindness towards his fellow humans, so that the householder or the shepherd or the farmer who had suffered calamity was certain to receive gentle words and a helping hand from him. He would thunder away in the pulpit, but when he descended from it he was the meekest, mildest fellow.
You may wonder that I can speak so lightly of what evidently weighed heavily on my father, this sense of sin – mine, yours, his, ours. But I have observed that an extreme course in a parent is likely to produce an opposite, though milder, response in the offspring. So a Puritan sires the whoremaster, while the rake begets a nun. If Nell were ever to discover her parents they’d no doubt turn out to be fine, upstanding citizens. Another explanation was that I’d heard my father’s message too often. Listening to him roar and thunder Sunday after Sunday, and through the week too, inoculated me. What he saw as sin I see mostly as frailty, while what he considered to be a punitive providence I think of as unlucky chance. Most of all, my father the parson reserved his greatest wrath for what he knew least, players and the playhouse. ‘The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well; and the cause of sin are plays; therefore the cause of plagues are plays.’ So he reasoned. All fell on deaf ears, however, for I don’t reckon that above one in fifty of us had ever seen what he was so energetically condemning.
And when the plague came to our region who should it strike but those who would have no truck with players and playhouses? I mean the good, honest, simple folk of my village. My mother and father were included in that number.
I came over the brow of the hill. It was a fine spring morning. The last traces of frost lingered under hedges and in the ruts on the track, but the air was soft with the promise of better times. I had failed in my attempt to join the touring players and had been walking from Bristol since three that morning. I should have been returning tired and with my tail between my legs but, perversely, I felt fresh and cheerful. In the distance was the glint of the Bristol Channel and, beyond, the hills of wild Wales stood out in the bright air. Down below was my village of Miching. I wondered what my father would say to the prodigal’s return. He would be glad I had not fallen among the sinful players but, humanly, he would wring my hand in sympathy at my disappointment. My mother, she would say nothing. I took one last look around from the heights and then plunged downhill. In the distance at the bottom of the valley was the cluster of cottages and huts separated by thread-like paths, the church and the manor house a little distant from the common people, the scattered farmsteads, everything that, together, went by the name of Miching.
I had made a few dozen downhill strides when, without knowing why, I stopped. There was something wrong. I paused, and shaded my eyes from the sun to see better. The village lay still. I even sniffed the air like an animal scenting danger. Nothing. I went another few steps and halted once more. Then it came to me: what was wrong was that there was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to smell. On a morning like this, the beginning of a fine spring day, there should have been people moving in the fields or on the outskirts of the village, the occasional shouted greeting or question, the smell of woodsmoke curling out of the valley, the bleating of sheep. But there was absolute stillness and silence.
My heart beating faster, and with a sick feeling, I leapt down the path. At one point the track ran out of sight as it looped an outcrop of rock, and it was on the far side of this that I found a man sitting with his head in his hands. Roused by my panting and the thud of my feet, he looked up and I recognised him as my father’s sexton, a thin bony man, an appropriate shape for his principal business, I had always felt. I spoke his name. After a moment he came to himself and saw who I was.
‘Nicholas,’ he said in a spiritless voice.
‘What’s happened? Why are you here, John?’
He said nothing for a while but hung his head again, and pressed his hands into sunken cheeks. Then in a mumble he said, ‘Your father sent me here.’
‘Why? What for?’
But I knew already. There is only one cause for such a profound silence and stillness. The plague had struck villages to the east of us in previous years, and even Bristol had known it. It is a tide that creeps inexorably across the land, winter and summer, drowning without distinction young and old, rich and poor, though – unlike the tide – it leaves some spots and areas uncovered. So, in a city, one household will fall victim while its neighbour remains untainted. And yet the plague is a beast too, one that will abandon his orderly progress across country and suddenly overleap many places to land in a distant village or town. Then he will jump sideways or seven miles backwards, and all to confound expectation.
‘I was stationed here to warn people away,’ he said.
How like my father, to think not only of his own flock but of the well-being of the neighbouring parishes.
‘And to stop our own people from leaving,’ he said.
‘My father . . . and my mother . . . they are helping those in distress?’
‘You cannot go down, Nicholas. I am empowered to stop you and all travellers.’
He spoke by rote. He could scarcely have turned an ant from its path. I was already past him. Then he called out my name, the clearest he had yet spoken, so I paused once more.
‘You will go. But what you will see will be a sermon to you. It is a speaking sight, and the voice it calls us with is a loud one, to call us all to repentance.’
I turned my back on him and went on down the track. As I neared the flatter ground I slowed down. I was desperate to see my parents, and to know that they were all right, but at the same time I was conscious of the risk I ran in entering a plaguey place. It was not self-preservation, or not entirely, but a more cautious mood overtook me as I grew breathless after my downhill dash. Nevertheless I proceeded past the outlying farms and cottages at the ends of fields. This was a well-known route from the earliest days of my childhood, but now it seemed horribly unfamiliar. The first promise of the morning light as I crested the hills above my home had been replaced by terror.
As I came nearer to my village of Miching I saw deserted streets; and as I came within sight of the first houses I found what I knew I would find: many of the doors marked in the centre with red crosses, and sometimes with the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ set closely and neatly by the cross. Somehow this was the worst thing I had seen so far, not the crosses and the words themselves but their precision. There was no sign of haste or panic in the sign or the lettering. It w
as as if each sign had been painted by a craftsman with all the time in the world at his disposal. I paused in the main street. The church was around the corner at the far end. My parents’ house was close by it. I waited to catch my breath. In truth, I didn’t know what to do next. I wanted to cry out but no words came and I was afraid to break the silence.
Then I heard, off to my left, the faintest thump. A delay of perhaps half a minute, then the noise was repeated. I dithered. I did not want to go down the narrow muddy lane that led towards these sounds but, of course, I did go. On the way there were more doors with their neat crosses and pleas for grace. It was important to me to remember the name of this lane as I walked down it with dragging steps and I struggled to think, and yet I could by no means recall it. (Only now, lying in bed next to my whore Nell, do I remember what it was called by the villagers: Salvation Alley, and that not through any connection with the church but because there was a woman named Molly who lived at the bottom and who was reputed to sell herself. I do not know if it had a proper name.)
Beyond this muddy lane was an open patch of ground and when I entered on this area I discovered the source of the thumping noises. There was a cart on the far side of the green. A horse stood lonesome and patient between the shafts. By the back of the cart a great black pit had been dug. Three muffled figures were engaged in tugging and pushing at bodies heaped in the back of the cart. They used staves with a kind of cross-piece at the top. A corpse would topple into the pit, there would be a pause while one of the burial-men fiddled below with his stave – presumably to fork the body into a satisfactory position in the pit – and then another would be toppled down. Some of the bodies were swaddled in linen and some in rags only. Some were so loosely wrapped that they might as well have been naked, for their coverings fell away as they descended from cart to pit. Little did it matter to the corpses whether they fell clothed or unclothed into the common ground; little did it matter to the burial-men. But tears started to my eyes at this indiscriminate heaping together, as one might call it, of my father’s parishioners. Prosperous and poor, reputable and ne’er-do-well, industrious and idle, young and old, man and woman and child (for some of the bundles were not full size), all made their brief passage through the air from cart to ground without distinction.
I must have stood there for some minutes, long enough anyway to count a dozen bodies being offloaded. At one point one of the burial-men looked up and caught sight of me standing at the mouth of Salvation Alley. He did not attempt to warn me away or to alert the others to my presence, he merely returned to his dismal forking of bodies into the pit. I was none of his business. He was none of mine. I turned about.
There was one more thing I had to do before leaving Miching. Following the back lanes, I came out by my father’s church. The tower stood square in the morning sunshine. The doors were open but I did not look inside. Beyond the church, and the graveyard was the house of my parents, the largest in the village. Picking up speed and throwing a sidelong glance at the house as I went by, I saw what I knew I would see: that my father and mother’s door too was crossed in red. And yet I did not falter but kept on. At the boundary of the village I turned aside from the road that would have taken me up the hill again and past the place where John the sexton was sitting. Instead I traced out a grassy path that ran alongside a stream. It was where I had often fished and bathed as a boy. Eventually I started to run, Then I ran, and ran, and ran.
Later, much later, a thought came to me that, had my father still been alive, I might well have told to him. It was the desire, the itch, to become a player which had saved my life. Without my profitless trip into Bristol to join Dorset’s or Northumberland’s Company, I would undoubtedly have been kicking my heels in the village when the plague came to Miching, thus ensuring that we all kicked our heels in unison.
I wondered what my father would have said to this instance of divine providence. But I already knew the answer: God had preserved me in order that I should do something. I had been saved from the plague for a purpose, and, in his eyes, that purpose was not playing.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I said,’ said Nell, ‘do you often think of them, your parents?’
‘I was remembering them now.’
‘I think of mine too,’ she said. ‘Even though I do not know what they looked like.’
I drew her closer as she snuffled. She could be sentimental at times. And this is also a trait I have noticed in her, and girls like her. Their exposure to the sordid world, its cut and its thrust, has in some curious way softened as well as hardened them. They will shed tears over an injured animal, if it be small and young – though they still attend the bearpit, if only because it is a good place for trade. They will sometimes imagine that they would like a baby to fuss and cuddle – but if one comes by accident they are quick enough to farm it out and the more ruthless ones are prepared to abandon or kill it, because a new life puking up in the corner is bad for business.
‘How’s life over the river, in your grand house?’
She was slightly envious, I think. As she spoke there was a loud cry from a room down the passage, followed by a series of low laughs and dull thumps. For the life of me I could not have said whether these signalled delight or despair. Probably both, in which case the delight of the man most likely hinged on the despair of the woman.
‘Better to be over the river than in the stews of Southwark,’ I said, cocking my head in the direction of the sound.
‘Some men like the ladies to cry,’ she said. ‘And they pay better if they do. You should not believe everything that you hear.’
If my Nell was sometimes child-like she was also, at times, very old. And now she was obviously indignant at the aspersions I had cast on her district and place of work, because she went on, ‘You would not think that life was so much better over there from the number of fine and mighty citizens who cross the river almost daily to visit us. These gentlemen seem to prefer it over here to keeping company with their wives, in their grand houses.’
‘That must be because their wives don’t give them what they require.’
‘Some do say that,’ said Nell, ‘and it is true that I’ve seen high-and-mighty women from the other side of the water who look cold enough to piss hail. Hard enough too. But I prefer those men who make no bones about their needs. Whether their wives give them what they want or no, they still require more.’
‘A straightforward fuck, yes.’
‘There’s honesty in appetite.’
‘Who said that, Nell? I’ve heard that said before.’
‘You did.’
‘When?’
‘Does it matter? In the bed-time. When else do we talk? You see how I treasure your words. I’d write them down if I could write.’
‘I could teach you, to read and write. I did offer.’
‘You prefer me ignorant.’
‘Not so.’ But my denial did not ring true even to myself.
‘Anyway, how much more could I charge if I was able to read and write? Would it be much? I think not.’
‘There’s honesty in appetite,’ I repeated (apparently). ‘Very well, I suppose you remember too what I was doing when I uttered these immortal words . . . if we were in bed?’
Of course, I said this to draw her on. But it was true that she had a loving memory for my slightest words and actions, and was able to recall scenes with an accuracy that would be the envy of many a player. This hoarding-up of our encounters was deeply flattering.
‘We were in bed in old mother Ransom’s . . . and you had just . . . let me see . . . no, I was about to do . . . this . . . I think . . . or was it that? . . . it must have been one or the other.’
‘The other will do splendidly,’ I said.
After a time I said, ‘Nell, these gentlemen who come across the river so often—’
‘What about them?’
‘Have you been visited by any of the Eliots? Sir Thomas, or his brother Sir William – though he is
dead now – or his son, also William? Sir Thomas, perhaps? He is a grave sort of man.’
‘And his dead brother is another sort of grave man, I suppose,’ said witty Nell.
‘Oh Nell, you do not need to learn to read and write,’ I said, kissing her left nipple.
‘They are mostly grave men at first. You may be surprised, Nick, when I say that they do not all give their names. Or if they do it is as likely to be Tom as it is to be Dick or Harry. And there are many of them.’
I did not like to think of this.
‘It is the Eliot household you are staying in?’
‘Yes. Sir Thomas has recently married the widow of his brother, Sir William.’
‘So she is some crabbed bitch and he’s likely to be scuttling across the Thames to get his end in over here.’
‘No, she is not crabbed.’
‘She is a young widow full of juice then?’
‘Nor young neither. But she has some charms.’
‘Oh Nick, I see. That means she has many.’
‘Somewhere between my some and your many,’ I said, though an imp of honesty compelled me to add, ‘In truth I hardly know Lady Alice.’
‘But would like to?’
I kissed her other nipple. But Nell was not to be distracted.
‘And her dead husband, Sir Something, he was old and she wore him out?’
For some reason I found the idea, unthinkingly as she had said it, offensive. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Because she’s a lady? That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done for him – in the bed, I mean.’
‘Nell, this is all imagination. Not everything comes back to the bed.’
‘You said that it did once, in the end.’
‘He died in the spring,’ I pressed on, determined to lay the facts before her. ‘He was found in his orchard. He had gone there to sleep and when he had not returned to the house by the early evening his wife grew anxious and sent a servant to look for him.’
Sleep of Death Page 10
