Death of Kings

by Philip Gooden

  Not far along the northern bank is that Tower of London which men say was erected by Julius Caesar. I could see it from where I stood. There is a gate that leads straight from the river into the bowels of that grim building, through which traitors can pass direct and from which they may never emerge again. I was a small and unwilling player in this business, but who knew what sweepings-up of small players ‘they’ would authorise. My predicament would grow even more parlous when it was discovered that I was a member of the Chamberlain’s, that notorious Company which only the preceding day had fomented public discord by staging the dangerous drama of Richard II. In my mind’s eye, I saw the crouched instruments of agony and persuasion. I heard myself crying out all those answers which they will ease from you.

  I shivered in the brisk air from the river.

  It is strange how rapidly the scroll of disaster – of discovery, trial and penalty – can unfurl inside one’s head.

  During this brief space I’d almost forgotten my unwanted companion, Signor Noti. Now this gentleman tugged at my arm in his excitable fashion and gestured with his other hand at the open water, as if to demand that I personally produce a ferryboat, perhaps out of the sleeve that he was clutching. Why wasn’t Captain Nemo here now, with his mysterious craft? He’d got me into this, with his persuasion and threats. Where was that stealthy nightboat? Why wasn’t it waiting to rescue me? I was in this predicament because of a man with an ashen face, an individual who rejoiced in the name of Nemo, the title which Odysseus had chosen to escape detection in the cave of the Cyclops.

  Then Noti pulled at my sleeve again and I saw that he was alerting me to the sudden appearance of a ferryboat virtually at our feet. Why, all this while, a boat had been tucked almost out of sight below the jetty! Now the boatman propelled himself into view and looked a query at us.

  In his eagerness to get away, Noti jumped down into its cushioned stern and almost capsized boat and boatman.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, you stupid cunt!” said the boatman, in tones that were (by the standards of Thames boatmen) comparatively mild.

  “Scusi, scusi,” said Noti, holding his arms aloft, either in a penitential display or to counter the violent rocking of the boat. “Non capisco, non capisco. Scusi, scusi.”

  “I’ll fucking skoozi you if you do that again.”

  The boatman looked up to where I stood as if he suspected me of being foreign as well. Indeed, in many English eyes, the act of being foreign is a grave crime, and one altogether without extenuation. If there’d been more than one boat I would have left Signor Noti to his own devices. With any luck the Italian might have so upset the boatman (metaphorically) – or the boat (literally) – that he would not have made it across the river. But there was only the one boat. So I smiled placatingly at the boatman and asked him in good, clear English to bring his craft nearer the ladder that was fixed to the end of the jetty. Then I clambered down the ladder and hopped nimbly into the boat in what I hoped was a mariner’s manner, as if to say ‘We Englishmen know a thing or two about boats and the water, we laugh at foreigners and their clumsiness.’

  But I should have known that it is almost impossible to impress a Thames boatman. In fact, try to impress one and his mouth curves down in contempt while the rest of his face turns to stone. Which was the expression that now fastened itself to the bearded individual sitting opposite. The unattractive quality of his countenance was exacerbated by deep scars which furrowed one of his whiskery cheeks. As I settled down unwillingly next to the Italian fugitive, the boatman dug his oars into the glinting current and we moved away from the north shore.

  Noti kept on looking round at the bank we’d left behind, as if he was expecting trouble or pursuit from that quarter. I pretended that I was nothing to do with the Essexite, that we were two men sharing a ferry by chance. But the boatman caught Signor Noti’s anxiety, and probably mine as well. It did not require much perception.

  “Trouble?” he asked slyly.

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “There’s been a stirring and rumbling on the north bank all morning.”

  “Has there?”

  “What’s the matter with him then?”

  “He is foreign.”

  “I thought I heard the sound of shots a short time since,” said the boatman, jerking his head. “In the direction you come from.”

  “Did you?” I said.

  “Fucking strange how sound carries across water.”

  “I expect so,” I said.

  “What are you, a fucking parrot?”

  He pulled in the oars and rested them on his broad and begrimed lap.

  “No further until you tell me what’s going on.”

  “Is it money you want?”

  “Maybe. Depends on what you’ve got to say.”

  I reached into my doublet. I didn’t have much on me but it might be sufficient to persuade the boatman to carry us to the far shore. I was aware of Noti, sitting close by on the thin, spray-spattered cushions and glancing uneasily from the boatman to me and back again. He must have had enough English to work out that we were being threatened. Expression and intonation alone would have been sufficient. I wondered what had happened to all his fine and dangerous airs. Why didn’t he get out that narrow little dagger with which he’d pricked me on my first visit to Essex House? Why didn’t he try to exercise a portion of his menace on this surly ferryman? Instead he sat, silent and seemingly unsure of himself, in the stern.

  While the boatman waited on my answer, our boat was being carried remorselessly downstream by the current, which was more powerful at this point because of our proximity to the Bridge. Not liking the idea of ending up in the deserts of Surrey or, much worse, of being swept out into the open estuary, not liking the idea of staying on this pirate’s craft a moment longer than I had to, I drew out a handful of coins and made some appropriate gesture. Reluctantly, our ferryman dug in his oars once more and waggled them about a bit, but only so as to arrest our drift, not to transport us to the south bank. When we were more or less back where we’d first halted in mid-stream he again ported his blades. Not before I’d handed over sixpence though.

  “Now then,” he said.

  I’d decided that a measure of honesty would be the speediest way of rescuing us from this predicament.

  “You’re right,” I said. “There is trouble in the city. We were unlucky enough to get caught up in it, innocent bystanders though we are, and . . . we had to run . . . for our lives.”

  “My arse,” said my interlocutor. If you say so.”

  “Don’t you start fucking parroting with me again,” said this deeply unpleasant man. “You were right in the middle of it. I can see it on your fucking face. Admit it.”

  So much for my skills as a player.

  “All right, yes, we were. I was anyway.”

  “This is to do with Essex.”

  This was not a question. The boatman was sure of his ground (or water).

  Oh God, I thought. Just my luck to have stumbled across the only well-informed boatman in London town. This bearded being, with his downturned mouth, scarred cheek and contemptuous stare, who held our lives arrested and in mid-river, was probably one of those ordinary working men who consider themselves experts in statecraft. No doubt we’d now be treated to his views on a variety of subjects.

  “With him or against him?”

  “Who?”

  “Essex, the fucking Earl of. With him or against him? Simple question, isn’t it?”

  I paused. Then said tentatively, “With . . . I was marching with the Earl . . .”

  “And him?” said the boatman, nodding at Noti.

  “Him too.”

  “Si, si,” said Noti, his little mouth working earnestly. He seemed to have been able to follow the rudiments of what we’d been talking about. “Earl of Essex – ’e is uomo diguerra, uomo di more, uomo bravo, uomo—”

  “You get the drift,” I said quickly to the boatman. “The
gentleman beside me is a supporter of Essex.”

  “He takes all fucking sorts, the Earl, don’t he.”

  “Per molto variare la natura e bella, ” said Noti. I didn’t know what he meant but I couldn’t help contrasting the musicality of his tones with the guttural, oath-strewn harshness of the boatman’s language. Even so I was eager for my Italian to keep his teeth together. If being foreign is crime enough in many English eyes, then speaking in another tongue is, to those same English ears, a dangerous aggravation of an already serious offence.

  “With the Earl then?” said our boatman.

  “Yes.”

  There was another pause. Then a strange transformation occurred in the boatman’s grim visage. The down-turned mouth creased upwards in a species of smile. His tangled beard seemed to catch the sun, and the spray-sprinkled whiskers sparkled with light. Even the angry scars on his cheek looked to be glowing with approval.

  Evidently I’d jumped the right way in claiming to be on Essex’s side. (In truth, the gamble wasn’t as great as it might appear. For one thing, many Londoners were supporters of the Earl – or at least they had been until he called on them to take up arms. For another, boatmen as a class were notoriously hostile to the authorities and so would have instinctive sympathy with any rebel. And for a third, the way in which the boatman had phrased the question, “With him or against him?”, suggested to me his own leanings in this affair. I also thought I’d detected a near-tenderness in the way he’d mentioned the Earl by his title, even if he’d appended a ‘fucking’ to it. This, in a boatman’s mouth, is not necessarily a mark of disapprobation. So for all these reasons, which flashed across my mind like lightning, I’d felt on fairly safe ground when claiming to be of the Essex party. Even so, it was a relief to see our ferryman responding as he did.)

  He now reached across and patted me approvingly on the shoulder. He almost brought himself to do the same for Signor Noti, who grew visibly brighter at this turn in our fortunes.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” he said.

  “Not all of London is a friend to the Earl.”

  “Not in my boat, they’re not fucking not,” said the ferryman, tying himself up, sailor-wise, in his nots.

  “Essex, ’e good man, ’e uomo di corte, ’e uomo d’onore, ‘e—” began Noti vigorously before I cut him off.

  “Could you ferry us to the other bank now?”

  The boatman planted his oars firmly into the current and we made good progress towards land. As we travelled on, we were honoured with his maritime reminiscences.

  “I was with him, see, in the Islands voyage. With the Earl in the A-zores. In ’97. Where I got these.” He tilted the scarred side of his face.

  “A great campaign,” I said, groping in the cupboard of memory to discover whether this was one of Essex’s victories. Unfortunately, the cupboard was bare.

  “A great commander,” said the boatman. “Not his fault if the fucking dagos cheated us.”

  “They’re foreigners, what else do you expect,” I said, but the boatman was now well launched on his private stream of memory and required no prompting or agreement.

  “They knew we were lying in wait for them off the A-zores, and so did not send their treasure fleet that way from the Americas. Those bastard sods, those devious dagos. So we did not get our chance to crack their skulls and seize their golden plate that year.”

  I pulled a commiserating face. By now we were only yards from a key on the south bank.

  “Is he a dago?” he asked, meaning Noti, who had been pursing his little mouth in puzzlement over the boatman’s words.

  “Oh no, he’s not Spanish, no,” I said quickly.

  The boatman’s curiosity as to the race of my fellow-passenger went no further. “They are fucking duplicitous,” he said, “and do not play fair. Not sending their treasure boats past where we were lying in wait for them. Still, never let it be said that it was the fault of fucking Essex, though there were some back home – over there [he jerked his head sideways in the vague direction of Whitehall upriver] — who sought to blame him.”

  We bumped up against the jetty. I made to pay the ferryman for the crossing but he shook his head.

  “Answer me this one thing.”

  “If I can.”

  “He’s lost, hasn’t he?”

  “This time, yes,” I said.

  “It’s his last campaign, his last fucking campaign, isn’t it?”

  “I fear so,” I said.

  “I knew it,” said this pirate, sniffing loudly and waggling his oars about.

  Sensing my moment, I again made a gesture of payment.

  “Any friend of Essex’s a fucking friend . . .”

  He grasped me feelingly by the shoulder once again and his eyes glistened with moisture – incipient tears, or perhaps no more than flecks of Thames water. Now that this boatman and I were firm friends, I briefly considered whether it was worth asking him for the return of the sixpence which he’d extorted from me midstream (sixpence is sixpence) but decided against it (sixpence is only sixpence, after all). He might be a man of feeling but he was also a pirate.

  While I paused, Signor Noti had hopped onto the jetty ladder with surprising nimbleness. Now he hung there by one arm and, half smiling under a moustache which had regained some of its exuberance, reached out with his right hand to facilitate my own passage from ship to shore. It’s hard to turn down an outstretched hand. As I made to clasp it, thinking that I had misjudged this slippery foreigner, Noti must have lost his own footing on the slimy rungs. He managed to keep clinging onto the ladder with his left arm but his right jerked sideways, almost seeming to consign me to the water. At the same time the boat swung away from the jetty so that I was straddling a watery abyss.

  I went down.

  I do not like water or boats (or boatmen). Nothing that happened in the next few seconds caused me to change my mind. Some of the murky Thames blurred past my descending eyes, some entered my gaping mouth, while the rest of it sogged my clothes and boots so as to pull me down into the dark depths. The entire river was my enemy. The water was freezing.

  I flailed wildly. My head shot clear of the water and I spluttered and tried to call out. How big water is when you are immersed in it! In my panic I was aware of the side of the ferryman’s boat and of him waving his oar about before I went down for a second time.

  This time I seemed to be sinking faster and further. Yet, such is the celerity of one’s thoughts in these drastic moments, that I also had time to remember how I’d once seen some men of fashion swimming in these very waters, using bladders to stay afloat. Ridiculous! If God had intended humankind to take to the waves He would have furnished us with fins.

  Then I resurfaced. Only to see the boatman waving his oar about as if he wanted to strike me over the head. As I sank for the second time, I considered that he must be a very unfeeling pirate to lash out at a drowning man. I thought we were friends, fellow Essexites.

  Struggling, kicking, trying to push out sounds through a water-logged gullet, I came to the surface for a third time and there was that same fucking stupid fellow still attempting to smash me about the ears. Only I suddenly realised that what he was actually doing was holding out the oar for me to catch hold of and once I’d seen that he meant me no harm I reached out my hands and clasped gratefully at my salvation and was pulled towards the side of the ferry and with much puffing and oath-making was hauled and tugged and manhandled until I was landed on the bottom of his boat where I lay gasping, breathless, thankful.

  After a time, I sat up and he pulled in towards the jetty. In truth we had never drifted very far from it – but what of that? A man may drown in a bucket, let alone a portion of river. My ferryman, now my saviour too, looked at me with a mixture of concern and mild amusement.

  “Foreign?”

  He didn’t have to say who he was referring to. The ladder leading up to the jetty was empty. I nodded, scattering water droplets about me.

  “W
hat did I say?” said the boatman triumphantly. “Fucking duplicitous is what I said.”

  “You were right, my friend,” I said, suddenly aware of a nasty river taste in my mouth. “Thank you for . . . for saving . . . my . . . you know . . .”

  The boatman’s awkwardness matched my own. His scars blushed, he looked away.

  “Would’ve been fucking otherwise if you weren’t an Essex man. Then you’d’ve got this over your pate.”

  He clattered one of his oars. Smiling weakly and waterily, I hoisted my water-logged self up the slimy ladder and once atop the jetty waved farewell to my preserver. He was already on his way back to the other bank. Then I looked about me. The platform was deserted. There was no sound apart from the soft patter of my dripping clothes.

  Signor Noti had vanished. The sensible Italian. Because, if he’d still been there, I would have thrown him into the water, moustache, finery and all.

  Well, I thought to myself, I’m well out of that. Little did I know.

  As I learned later, the second act of the Essex uprising was a short-lived affair. The shots that Noti and I had heard as we sped down Rood Lane were indeed the result of a skirmish between the retreating band of the Earl’s men and a detachment of pikemen and halberdiers by Ludgate. The tattered remnant of the rebels had then, like us, fled in the direction of the river. At about the same time as I was heading hot-foot (and also wet-foot) for my lodgings at the Coven, the leaders of this lost cause must have been boarding boats at Queenhythe. From there they made their frantic way back to Essex House. God knows why. Perhaps the Earl thought to use his great hostages to bargain with; perhaps by then he was beyond thought.

  The last scene of this strange, eventful history occurred when the Lord High Admiral brought up cannon and threatened to blow Essex House and its occupants into the next world. Surrender soon followed. The Earl together with Southampton and some of their lesser fellows were brought to that same mighty Tower which I’d glimpsed and shivered at on the north bank.