The Lambs of London

by Peter Ackroyd

  Many members of the audience were acquainted with early death; in the conditions of London it was not an unexpected event. In London, too, suicide by water was not uncommon. So they listened quietly, some of them summoning up images of a lost child or relative.

  AMONG THE AUDIENCE was a young man, Thomas de Quincey, who had travelled from Manchester to London a year before. He was thinking of Anne. He only ever knew her as Anne. When he had first come to the city he had known no one; with little money of his own he had appealed to a distant relation, a cousin once or twice removed from his immediate family. This kinsman owned several properties in London, one of them a deserted and broken-down house in Berners Street; he gave de Quincey the keys, and told him that he might live under its roof until he found lodgings of his own. He accepted the offer gladly, and went at once to Berners Street. He settled himself, with his few possessions, on the ground floor of the house; there was a small piece of rug there, and an old sofa-cover, on which he could sleep. He had a half-guinea remaining for food, and he believed it would suffice until he found employment as a penman or as an office-boy.

  On that first night, however, he discovered that he had a companion. The house had one other inmate, a girl of no more than twelve or thirteen years, who had crept there out of the elements. “I didn’t like the wind and the rain,” she told him. “They are harsh in these streets.” He asked her how she found the house, but she misunderstood his question. “I don’t mind the rats,” she replied. “But I mind the ghosts.”

  She explained how she had come to this situation. It was a familiar London history of want, neglect and hardship that made her seem older than she truly was. They became friends or, rather, allies against the cold and the darkness. They would often walk through the streets together. They went along Berners Street into Oxford Street, stopping at the corner by the goldsmith’s, before crossing the road; then they passed the carriage-maker into Wardour Street before turning into Dean Street. Here they always paused at the pastry-merchant. De Quincey had money only for the barest necessities of life, and they stared into the gilt-edged window where an array of pastries, buns and cakes were laid out for sale.

  Then de Quincey fell ill with some ague or fever; he managed only what he called “dog sleep” and spent his days and nights shivering beneath whatever coverings Anne could find for him. By some miracle of determination, or quick-wittedness, she managed to obtain bowls of hot gruel that she ministered to him. She crept close to him—to “draw the vapours” from him, as she put it—and dried his forehead with a muslin cloth. After a week of sickness he recovered, and vowed to repay the girl in any way he could.

  He was then called away by his cousin, to conduct a small matter of business; de Quincey accepted the commission eagerly, since it would provide him with funds. It obliged him to travel to Winchester, but he promised Anne that he would return within four days. He arrived back in Berners Street five days later, however, and found the house to be empty. He stayed there that night, and for most of the next day, but he remained alone. On the following evening he set out along the familiar streets where as partners in wretchedness they had walked together, but he came back to Berners Street disappointed and disheartened.

  He never saw Anne again. She disappeared from the face of London as suddenly and as completely as if she had sunk beneath an ocean. But he mourned for her. He had no notion of what might have happened to her. She was lost. The world itself seemed to breathe misery.

  Now he thought once more of her, as William Ireland invoked the spirit of Katherine Hamlet.

  WILLIAM LOOKED UP from his notes, and sensed a change in the mood of the audience. He realised, then, what it must have been for Shakespeare to wield power over his auditors. “I have one other topic of interest to all of us here. An immense topic, if I may put it that way. It concerns the discovery of a new play. Found after two hundred years of oblivion.” He noticed the particular quality of the silence and expectation. Mary raised her head and smiled at him. “It is entitled Vortigern, and dramatises the career of this treacherous and bloody king of Britain. We are reminded of Lear and of Macbeth. It is purely Shakespeare’s. The renowned scholar to whom I have already alluded, Mr. Malone, has vouched for its authenticity. May I quote his words on this unexpected discovery, of such magnitude to all of us? In Mr. Malone’s communication to me he states that ‘this wonderful document is of surpassing interest to all lovers of Shakespeare. Its genuineness is beyond any doubt.’” The silence of the audience was then interrupted by sudden and prolonged applause. After a few ritual expressions of thanks, William concluded his lecture.

  His father approached him as he left the small writing-desk, behind which he had been standing. “It was magnificent,” he said. “I could not have given a finer performance myself. You have the magic of the Irelands.”

  Malone came up beside them. “Very fine, Mr. Ireland. You have not mistaken eloquence for loquacity, sir.”

  Mary was being pushed forward by Mr. Lamb. “Father insists—” she began to say.

  “Cabbage and more cabbage!” Mr. Lamb shook everyone’s hand, including that of his daughter.

  “I am delighted to meet you, sir.” Samuel Ireland looked at him with a certain wariness. “Your daughter is a favourite with us.”

  “Have much joy of the worm.”

  “Very sage, sir.”

  “And gorge at Christmas.”

  “I really—”

  “We must go, Pa.” Mary took his arm. “We cannot detain these gentlemen.”

  “Ship ahoy!” He beamed at Samuel Ireland but, when he turned to his daughter, he suddenly seemed confused and broken-down.

  “This way, Pa. Mind the edge of the carpet.”

  “A remarkable old gentleman,” Samuel Ireland said. “A character.”

  Just as Mary was helping her father out of the hall, Thomas de Quincey came up to William. “May I shake your hand, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “The hand that has touched Shakespeare’s papers.”

  “It was very good of you to come.”

  “I have had an interest in Shakespeare ever since I was a child. I grew up in Manchester where, as you may imagine, I was alone in my taste.”

  De Quincey seemed eager to talk, but it was not the moment for William to listen. He mentioned to him the address of the bookshop and hurried after Mary, who was vainly trying to hail a carriage at the corner of Milk Street and Cheapside.

  “I was delighted to see you and your father, Mary. Thank you for coming.”

  “I would not have missed it. And I like to take Father into the world. It cheers him.”

  Mr. Lamb was staring up at the sky, turning on his heels.

  “May I call on you next week?”

  “By all means. I long to hear news of the play.”

  “You are quite recovered?”

  “I am in rude health, William, I am glad to say.”

  THREE NIGHTS PREVIOUSLY Charles Lamb had found his sister sitting in the kitchen. She was in her nightdress, and had placed all the cutlery of the household on the table where she was busily arranging it according to length. He had called to her softly, “Mary, Mary, whatever are you doing?”

  She looked in his direction, but stared through him. He recognised at once that she was walking in her sleep. She stood up and went over to the window. She sighed deeply and raised her arms high in the air, muttering, “Not done yet. Not done yet.” Then she turned and, passing her brother without a sign, went upstairs to her attic room. He put the cutlery back in the drawers, and returned to his own bed.

  HE HAD NOT SEEN her that next day. She had kept to her room, pleading tiredness. But the following day, Sunday, had been set aside for further rehearsals of the mechanicals from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Charles wondered if she would absent herself, but she was at the breakfast table with a copy of the script beside her. “Tom Coates makes a good Snug,” she said as Charles joined her. “But I am not sure of Mr. Milton as Quince.�
� She was very brisk.

  “He will come round, Mary. He will fill the part. How are you feeling?”

  “Feeling?”

  “You took to your bed yesterday.”

  “I had not slept well. That was all.”

  “But you are rested now?”

  “Of course. Do you know your lines by heart, Charles? Bottom is very important.”

  “Not by heart, dear. By head. Far more satisfactory.”

  “It is the same thing.” For some reason she hesitated, before pouring the tea. “Ma and Pa have gone to chapel. There is no point in waiting for them.”

  Over the next hour Tom Coates, Benjamin Milton and the others arrived at the house. They were ushered into the garden immediately by Tizzy, who did not want their “nasty boots” on her clean floors. It was a bright day, and they sat contentedly enough beneath the decaying pagoda.

  “It is all a question of staging,” Benjamin was saying to Tom. “Snug is portrayed as having a very high voice. And what do you play?”

  “The lion.”

  “Precisely. Nothing but roaring. Have you ever heard of a lion with a treble roar?”

  “And what of Bottom?”

  Selwyn Onions could not resist adding a fact. “He is a weaver, is he not? Did you know that the bottom is the porcelain core the yarn was wound around?”

  “So Shakespeare did not mean bottom?” Benjamin was incredulous. “His nether end?”

  “That has nothing to do with it.”

  “Ridiculous, Selwyn. What about his line ‘I will move storms’? That is the cue for a fart if ever there was one.”

  Mary came up to them. “You are all very serious.”

  “We have been discussing our parts, Miss Lamb.” Benjamin was a little afraid of Charles’s sister.

  “Oh, they must be bold. They must be animated.”

  “That is just what I have been telling them. They must stride the blast.”

  “Well put, Mr. Milton. We are about to rehearse the wall scene, gentlemen. Will you take your places?”

  Selwyn Onions, playing Snout the tinker, who played the Wall, stood at the back of the garden with his hands wide apart. “Make sure,” Mary told him, “that we can see through your fingers. There must be a chink. Charles will be one side of you, and Mr. Drinkwater on the other.”

  “They are having a tryst, Miss Lamb?”

  “Yes. A tryst. Is that not what lovers do?”

  “It is a commentary upon the play itself,” Alfred Jowett was telling anyone who would listen. “It is a play within a play. What is real and what is false? If this is an illusion, is the larger play more true? Or are they both merely dreams?”

  Mary was reminded of a recent dream. She had been in a herb garden, savouring the sweet air among the shrubs, when someone had come up to her and said, “You would be welcome if you were a nun.”

  Alfred Jowett was still talking. “I think Shakespeare knew that his plays were fancies and fictions. He did not confuse them with the true world.”

  “He was not trying to impart anything to us, Mr. Jowett?”

  “No. His purpose was to amuse.”

  Charles Lamb and Siegfried Drinkwater, as Pyramus and Thisbe, had taken up their positions on either side of the Wall. Thisbe wrought her voice to a high pitch.

  “Oh Wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,

  For parting my fair Pyramus and me!

  My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones,

  Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.”

  “At the time,” Tom whispered to Benjamin, “‘stones’ was the word for testicles.”

  “So Shakespeare is making an obscenity?”

  “Of course. I kiss thy balls.”

  Charles replied on cue.

  “I see a voice; now will I to the chink,

  To spy, and I can hear my Thisbe’s face.

  Thisbe?”

  “My love! Thou are my love, I think?”

  Mary stepped forward. “Should it not be, Mr. Drinkwater, My love thou art. My love, I think? She would recognise her lover’s voice. And, Charles, you are too restrained for a lover. A lover must breathe passion.”

  “How would she know?” Benjamin asked Tom in a very low voice.

  “Have you not heard? She has an admirer.”

  “Mary Lamb?”

  “Yes. Charles has told me.”

  “That is the strangest news.”

  “It hasn’t ended yet.”

  THEY RETURNED TO THE subject a few hours later when, the rehearsals over, they sat in the Salutation and Cat. Charles and the others were standing at the counter; Tom and Benjamin were huddled in a corner, laughing at the events of the morning. “If Mary Lamb has a lover,” Tom was saying, “he will need to be careful. She bites. Did you hear her berating Charles for clowning? She was very fierce.”

  “It was only in play.”

  “I am not so sure. As Bottom, he laughed. As Charles, he winced.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “The admirer is known as William Ireland. According to Charles, he is a bookseller in this neighbourhood.” He paused to fill his jug from a large bottle of stout he kept beside him. “He is a great lover of Shakespeare, apparently. He has made discoveries which all the scholars applaud.”

  “I kiss his balls.”

  “But the question is, does she?”

  “Horribile dictu.”

  Charles was leaning against the counter, listening to a desultory conversation between Siegfried and Selwyn on the subject of the Royal Academy, when he saw William Ireland entering the tavern with an eccentrically dressed young man in a green jacket and green beaver-hat.

  Ireland saw him at once, and came over to the counter. The young man in the green jacket stood behind him as he greeted Charles. “And this,” he said, “is de Quincey.” The young man took off his hat and bowed. “De Quincey is a visitor.”

  “Where are you staying, sir?”

  “I lodge in Berners Street.”

  “I have a friend in Berners Street,” Charles said. “John Hope. Do you know him?”

  “London is very large, sir, and very wild. I know no one in that street.”

  “But now you know us. Here is Selwyn. And here is Siegfried.” He slapped both of them on the back. “Over there, in the corner, are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. How did you meet William?”

  “I attended his lecture.”

  “Lecture? What lecture?”

  “Did Mary not tell you?”

  “Not as far as I recall.” With anything concerning his sister, Charles had learned to apply caution.

  “I gave a lecture on Shakespeare last week. De Quincey was kind enough to attend. He called on me the following day.”

  “And you have become fast friends?” Charles was astonished that Mary had attended this lecture without informing him. “Will you sit down with me, gentlemen?” He left Selwyn and Siegfried at the counter discussing the suicide of the pugilist, Fred Jackson, and took a table against the wall of the narrow parlour. “I would like to have heard you,” Charles said.

  “Oh. You missed nothing. I am not an actor.”

  “Are you not?”

  “That is the gift required. To speak with certainty—enthusiasm. I cannot do it.”

  “But you have those virtues, William.”

  “Easy to have. Difficult to impart.”

  Charles did not know whether to mention the play of Vortigern: Mary might have lent it to him in confidence. William seemed almost to divine his thoughts. “How is Mary? She seemed a little tired at the lecture. After her fall—”

  “Quite recovered. Blooming.” Charles still could not guess the extent of William’s affection for his sister. “You have given her a new interest.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “In Shakespeare.”

  “She was half in love with him already.”

  “My sister is never half in love. She is always at extremes.”

  “I understand that.�
� Ireland turned to his companion. “Well, de Quincey, you are in good company. Charles is a writer, too.”

  De Quincey looked at Charles with interest. “Have you published?”

  “Only small things. Essays in Westminster Words. Nothing more.”

  “That is a great deal.”

  “De Quincey writes essays, too, Charles. But he has yet to find a publisher. He is waiting to be born.”

  “I scarcely think about it.” De Quincey blushed, and drank quickly from his glass. “I hold out no great hopes.”

  They drank into the evening, growing louder and more animated by the jugful. The others had gone, but the three of them remained. Charles had informed William of the mechanicals’ play, forgetting that Mary had warned him to avoid the subject. He had also told him that he wished to resign from East India House and become a novelist. Or a poet. Anything but what he was.

  “I am disgusted,” de Quincey was saying, “that each of us has such a small centre of being. Me. My thoughts. My pleasures. My acts. Only me. It is a prison. The world is made up of entirely selfish people. Nothing else matters a damn.” He drank some more. “I would like to get beyond myself.”

  “Shakespeare became other beings,” Ireland said. “He is the exception. He inhabited their souls. He looked out of their eyes. He spoke from their mouths.”

  Charles was now so drunk that he could not follow the conversation. “Do you believe it to be Shakespeare? It. Mary has shown it to me.”