Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  “May not a sinner, being penitent, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven?”

  “God save us, the child is mad,” cried Mistress Dunne, and clapped to the door against Frisket’s nose, whereat Frisket, showing a perfect devil’s countenance of red and black, cast a flood of Bilingsgate upon the unyielding wood, drenching it with such verbs, nouns, and adverbs that would have stunk, had they been incarnate, like unto three-days’ fish. And then she turned and ran heedless among the lanes and alleys of East Cheape.

  The force that drove her no man could tell, nor could Frisket neither. She did not think as men thought, did not feel or know or hope as a child begotten of man and born of woman. The highest and most base exhalations of man’s soul had gone into her making, and the words they gave her were all she knew. Neither piety nor bawdry taught her to say, “there is no place for me here; I must return to that I was.”

  Hal came again unto his house when the bells of St. Martin’s were ringing for Evensong. His feet spurned the mud and his eyes dwelt on the wonders of being able to command a font of print and then buy the right of a pamphlet upon the making of cheese and enter it upon the Register and still have money and enough in his purse to do the same again.

  “Frisket,” he called as he lifted the latch. “Frisket, heart of my heart, come hither, and thou shalt partake of roast fowl and sack at the Doublet and Hose as ’twere any lady. Frisket? Frisket, I say! Beshrew me, where is the wench?” And receiving no answer, Hal peered and pried through his two small chambers where a mouse could not lie hid, searching in rising panic for his paper ’prentice.

  Presently did Hal go out into the streets around, calling for Frisket up and down, and then, weary and sick with worry, to Mistress Dunne to entreat her whether she had seen his niece or no.

  “His niece, quotha!” she exclaimed. “His trull, more like, and a good riddance to her and her slattern’s tongue.”

  Hal, hoping for news, kept firm hold upon his temper. “She knows no better, God forgive my brother that it should be so,” he said humbly. “I’ve hopes of teaching her better ways in time. She’s a good lass at heart.”

  “A good lass would disdain to know such oaths, nor profane the purity of her lips with bawdry.”

  “She is an innocent of offense as of the true meaning of what she says.”

  Mistress Dunne patted Hal on the shoulder. “Thou’rt a kind man, Hal Spurtle, and simple as a newborn lamb. Never doubt thy self-called niece hath cozened thee finely. She’s off with thy purse or thy linen, or some costly matter of thy trade, depend on’t.” And from this opinion she could not be turned.

  So Hal took him home again to his empty shop, emptier now of one piebald, cheeky wench, and soon came out again, determined as Jason to find that moth-eaten golden fleece the ancient alchemist, to beg of him news of Frisket.

  The while Hal was seeking her up and down, Frisket had won through the alleys of Cheape Ward to Fish Street, that was a broad street of fair houses, very busy with horses and men in furred gowns and velvet caps and women in farthingales and hooded cloaks. They jostled her as she stood, heeding her no more than the lean dogs nosing at the fish heads in the road, save for one young girl with a feathered hat perched on her bright hair, who pressed a penny in Frisket’s hand and smiled pityingly upon her. For want of a better direction, Frisket followed her, losing her almost at once in the bustle that bore her will-she, nil-she across a bridge cobbled like a street and lined with rich houses. On the further bank, Frisket turned aside from the high way to walk along the river, flowing grey and brown as porridge between slick, pewter banks. The sky was pewter too, tarnished and pitted with clouds, and the houses along the wharf leaned between them like beggars at an almshouse board.

  One in three of those houses were marked like taverns, with signs painted bright above their doors, as the Cardinal’s Cap, the Bird in the Bush, the Silent Woman, the Snake and Apple. Outside this last, a weaseling, minching fellow accosted Frisket, who gazed thoughtfully at the one-eyed snake of the blazon, that curled from Adam’s loins toward the Apple held between Eve’s plump thighs.

  “Hey, thou ninny,” he said. “What maketh thou here, walking so bold in Southwark?”

  Frisket’s ado with Mistress Dunne had taught her to stick to scripture. So she bethought her a moment and said, “The ways of the Lord are surpassing strange and beyond the wit of man to tell them.”

  The man drew closer, darted out his hand like Adam’s snake and, clipping her by the wrist, held her fast. “A prating Puritan maid, by Cock,” he snarled. “Marked like the Devil’s own, and comely as a succubus withal. What are thy parents?”

  “We have no father nor mother, save that Heavenly Parent is Father and Mother to us all.”

  The man’s eyes gleamed in his sharp face. “Art meat for my feeding, then.”

  Frisket, finding no apt response recorded in the tablets of her mind, met his eyes gravely, glanced at his fingers about her wrist, and back into his eyes, whereupon he dropped her arm to shield him from her gaze. “Go thy ways,” he said. “Thou’rt safe from me. Yet the Southwark bawdy-houses are an ill place for a maid to wander, even a maid touched by God.”

  Frisket nodded. “The way of righteousness is the way of truth, and much beset with thorns.” Then she turned her about and made away from the river, leaving the bawd muttering and scratching his head.

  Some things she did that afternoon and evening of her flight, who can say why or wherefore. She bought a loaf with the young girl’s penny and divided it among a man in the stocks, three beggars, and a starve-boned dog; she slipped into the Bear Garden to watch the baiting with ink-drop eyes, and when ’twas done, crept back to where the bears were kept tied in the straw, undid their muzzles with quick fingers, picked apart the heavy knots about their feet, and slipped away again, leaving the gate a little ajar behind her.

  Just at dusk, she passed a tall wooden building with cressets burning by the door, and a noise within like a giant’s roaring, and bills without proclaiming that Mr. William Shak-spere, his Tragedie of Cymbeline was this day to be played. The bills were hastily run-up, and the inking over-heavy, so that the letters were spread and blurred; Frisket frowned ere she turned away.

  Some little time later, she came to a tavern and passed it not, but entered under its sign of The Swan and Cygnet. Within was noise and heat enough for a liberty of Hell, from trollops and cony-catchers and ’prentices and clerks and wharfmen, all calling for ale while tavernmaids and potboys scurried among them with tankards and trays and wooden bowls.

  Frisket made like a hunting dog for the back of the house, where sat a young man all among the kegs and barrels. He, like the man in the stocks, the bears, and the beggar, was in difficulties. The host stood glaring whilst he expostulated, pale as a ghost, showing a pair of strings across his palm that might have borne a purse, before they’d been cut.

  “I’ll leave the jewel from my ear in surety,” he was saying. “An I come not again to pay you, it will bring you twenty times the price of the ale and meat.”

  “For all I know, ’tis base metal overlaid with brass, and worth no more than thy word. I’m minded to take thy two shillings out of thy hide, and set thee up for an exemplum of a liar and a thieving knave.”

  The host raised one hand like a haunch of beef and the young man sprang to his feet, caught between pride and fear whether he would flee the host or close with him. Frisket slipped between them and laid her hand upon the host’s uplifted arm, and said, “I’ll pay thy price, though it be an hundred pound.”

  The host shaking her away, she took her pocket and jingled it in his ear that would hear no other plea, and it spoke to him and calmed him, and by and by he took the monies owed him, and a little over to buy a pottle of wine to soothe the young man’s nerves, and left them there together amongst the kegs and barrels in the quiet back of the tavern.

  The young man smoothed his doublet that was worn and frayed at the cuffs, and then his beard, and having set himself to r
ights, handed Frisket onto a joint-stool as it had been a chair of state and she the Queen’s own Grace.

  “Robert Blanke the poet thanks thee, fair maid,” said he. “Whithout thy silver physic, I had been as dead as Lazarus, without hope of resurrection. How may I call thee?”

  “Mary, sir, and withal the merriest Mary thou has melled withal.”

  The young man eyed her in the uncertain light. “A harlot? Sure, I grow old, that jades look like fillies to me, and trollops like young maids.”

  “For I am thy savior, saith the Lord, and a present help in all thy trouble.”

  “Now the Lord help me indeed, for I bandy words with a madwoman. Yet the mad are touched by God, they say, and own a wisdom beyond the understanding of the wise.” He reached out long fingers and, taking her by the chin, tilted her head gently to catch the light. What he saw was a girl on womanhood’s threshold, her brow serene, her nose straight and fine, her eyes large and smooth-lidded, her lips clear-carved in a perfect Cupid’s bow, her expression open and grave. Thus might an angel look, he thought, or a spirit of antiquity dressed in flesh and a patched woolen gown, were an angel’s skin marred and mottled everywhere with flecks of black like blurred print. He released her chin and caressed his beard. “What are you?” he asked.

  “I am,” said Frisket, “none of your plain or garden whores; I can read and play the virginals. We are children of God, each one, and His angels have the keeping of the least of us no less than of the greatest.”

  “A very sensible nonsense, as I live. I well can believe that you, like the phoenix, are alone of your kind, and I accept you mean no harm. I am your debtor for your mere acquaintance, the more for your saving of me. And therefore I ask of you what you would of me?”

  Blanke was a quick-witted man, and eager to unriddle her cypher. Still it took Frisket long and long to make him understand what she was and what she wanted, by which time the tavern was empty and the host hovering by with a broom and a scowl.

  “Hark ye,” said the poet. “’Tis dawn, or very nigh, and my head is a tennis ball betwixt your sermons and your bawdries. Company me to my lodging and rest you there, and we’ll take counsel of a new day.”

  So they went their ways through the waking streets, and when they reached the tenement where the poet lodged, he bowed her reverently through the door, saying, “I serve you in all honor, Mistress Mary; in token of which I give you my bed to rest upon and will sleep myself upon the floor.”

  For the first time Frisket smiled at him, showing him her mottled teeth. “For the eye of God sleepeth not,” she said, “but watcheth ever over thy slumbers and wakings.”

  So Robert Blanke slept and Frisket watched, and Hal Spurtle came at last to the goal he had pursued throughout the long, sad night: the shop of the old alchemist, on Pardoner’s Lane in Cripplegate, outside London Wall.

  When the old man opened the door, he knit his brows. “Too late,” he said. “The offer once refused will not be made again. Thou hast thy twenty crowns. Go thy ways.”

  Hal stuck his foot betwixt door and jamb. “And right content I am with them, I assure you. ’Tis my ’prentice, sir, the child you made from my poppet of paper.”

  “Hist,” said the alchemist, and bundled Hal into the shop as quick as he’d been minded to bundle him out. “Hast no sense, man, to quack hidden things abroad in the public street? Thou’lt be the death of us both.”

  “And she’s less sense than I, poor unbegotten mite, three days old, knows printing and naught else, not even her name, nor the skill to ask her way home again. Here are ten crowns, the half of your fee, to inquire of your demons where she may be and how she may be faring.”

  And Hal pressed his purse into the alchemist’s greasy hand, who put it by, saying gruffly, “Nay. I’ll help thee for kindness’ sake, or not at all. Now,” he said when Hal had put the purse into his bosom again, “now. The tale of the paper ’prentice. Calmly and simply as may be.” He listened, his sharp eyes hooded and his stained hands laced before his long nose, while Hal told him of Frisket’s cleverness and her goodness and her speaking in phrases either from Dr. Beswick’s sermons or from one of the bawdy pamphlets whose spoiled sheets he’d used in her making. And when Hal was done, the alchemist lipped at his fingers, and hemmed once or twice, and nosed out a great clasped book, and found a page in it, and ran his finger down the page, and hemmed again, and peered out another that was small and black and powdery with age, and consulted that, and shut it, and closed his eyes, and munched his jaws. And just as Hal had decided that the old gentleman had fallen asleep, he sat himself upright, saying,“Thine apprentice, called by thee Frisket, was lent thee for a space, to answer thy present need. Give thanks for the loan, and grieve not the loss. For she is not of this earth, nor is there a place for her therein.”

  The tears started to Hal’s eyes, nor was he too proud to let them fall, but wept for the daughter of his heart. And the alchemist rose from his chair and laid his hand upon his shoulder and pressed it. “Be of good cheer, man. The joy thou hadst of her is real. Consider that all children grow and leave their father’s house, and ’prentices become journeymen at last.”

  “Yea,” said Hal. “And yet may their fathers mourn them.”

  And Hal went from the alchemist to St. Paul’s church, and knelt within, and prayed a space, and from thence among the bookstalls, inquiring for a journeyman to hire.

  And it came to pass that Robert Blanke the poet woke to the sun’s golden fingers laid upon his face and Frisket seated in the peaked window of his chamber, that was small and damp and high in the house.

  Blanke sat up, scrubbed his hands in his eyes, and raked his hair seemy with his fingers. “Art up, old snorter?” Frisket inquired. “Or shall I lend a hand to raise thee?”

  “Peace, good Mistress Mary; I prithee, peace. I am up, as thou see’st, but in no wise awake. Give me an hour to learn to believe in thee again, and to think what I may do with thee.”

  So Frisket accompanied Blanke to a cookshop, where she bought him a mutton pie, and to a tavern, where she bought him a tankard of small beer, and watched him eat and drink the same, and then into St. George’s church, where she sat in a bench while he took to his knees, and so back to his lodging again as dusk drew her mantle across the sky.

  “’Twas less magic than desire birthed thee,” Blanke said to her, “the printer’s desire for company; the alchemist’s desire for his grimoire. So logic would argue ’tis desire must send thee back to thy papery womb. And there, dear Mistress Mary, is the rub. For my desire is rather to keep thee whole and sensible than to see thee senseless rubbish.”

  “Beware the Last Days, when all men are come to Judgment, and the inmost secret thoughts of their hearts laid bare.”

  For a space each pled his case, to and fro like lawyers, until at last Blanke threw up his hands and declared himself desirous, at least, of pleasing her who desired no other thing than to put off her dress of flesh, that chafed her as it had been a dress of fire.

  “I have considered and I have prayed and I have invented a rite seems to answer your purpose.” And he opened his mind and said what he purposed, whereat Frisket nodded and did off her clothes and laid her down upon his table, that he had cleared of his writing and his candle and his pens. The which persuaded him above all else that she was not of mankind.

  “The Lord giveth,” he said solemnly, “and the Lord taketh away. Even as it pleaseth the Lord, so cometh things to pass: blessed be the name of the Lord.” And he took his quill pen into his hand and pressed the inky tip of it to her breastbone, that fanned apart as he touched it into leaves of paper, close-woven and white as snow, printed small and even, the margins wide and straight. Thus he unfolded Frisket and sorted her, praying over her all the while the Service of the Burial of the Dead, and when he’d made an end, he folded the great bundle of pages into her scarlet petticoat, that became a binding of scarlet leather stamped with gold on the cover and on the spine. And he lit a candle, for it had gr
own full dark, and turned the book to the light, and opened it.

  The title page was plain and bare of ornament, bearing only the name of the book—The Philosophy of the Senses: A Novel in Five Parts—and the name of the author—Mary Spurtle. Blanke turned the page, crisp and white as a communion host, and read there, printed sharp and clear beyond all common type: “This book is dedicated to my father, Henry Spurtle, printer of East Cheape, and to Robert Blanke, poet and friend.”

  On the instant, Blanke started up from his chair and hied him to East Cheape, where he inquired high and low of the printer Henry Spurtle, where his shop lay. By and by he came to the lane behind St. Martin’s church, and a low house that leaked out light and the heavy, wooden clacking of a printing press. Blanke knocked at the door, which was opened by a tall, sad-eyed man with a grandfather’s lined cheeks under his nut-brown hair.

  “I deal no more in curiosities,” he said, and made to close the door.

  “Stay, Henry Spurtle, an you would hear news of your daughter Mary.”

  A light came into Hal’s dull eye and he drew Blanke into his shop, that was all a-bustle with activity. A man sat at the composing-table, selecting and sliding type into a composing stick with the steady rhythm of a new-wound clock. A boy stood at the press, an inking-ball in each hand, ready to apply them to the form when his master should be pleased to return to the press.

  Hal wiped inky hands on his leathern apron. “A pamphlet on cheese making,” he said and, bidding his new apprentice and his journeyman make all tidy ’gainst the morning’s work, he gestured Blanke into the inner chamber, where the poet told him of Mistress Mary and all that had befallen her that he knew or guessed. And when he had done, he gave Hal the book bound in red leather and said, “Here is the book. I read the title and the letter dedicatory, and not one word more. For the book is yours, and no man else hath the right to read it.”