‘Will, you are the wonder of the world. Even a dunce like me sees other worlds – when your words are working their magic.’
7
Magic. Ah yes, magic. It was years till she was equalled – overtaken, and left far behind, courtesy of a passion for poetry, an imagination run wild, and a fabulous fortune in hard cash.
Not that the experience cost me a personal penny. It was all down to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, bonny sweet Robin, once all the queen’s joy. In those days if you wanted to get well in with Gloriana you were expected to throw a nine-days’ wonder of a party. Leicester doubled it and added one more for luck. He didn’t just want to get in with her, he wanted to get in. Into politics, into her petticoats and all the rest, the whole way. Hence a nineteen-day beanfeast at a thousand pounds a day. He never really recovered from it. And if it did get him past the Gloriana garters (and that’s not entirely certain) it never got him much further. Leicester thought it brave to be a king and ride in triumph into Kenilworth and that’s why he threw the most famous thrash in all England.
It passed into the folklore of the age and into its mouth and mind. If you tried to borrow too much money for someone’s purse, the outraged creditor would start off with ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ and hope you’d be impressed by sage economic advice. If you persisted and reduced the sum but he still considered it excessive, he’d say, ‘What, lend you thus much moneys? Do you think I’m come from Kenilworth?’ Another stock reply was:‘You’re asking me for that much? You know what they call me, well enough – the name’s not Leicester, you know!’ Or again, with a touch of colour: ‘That much? Tell you what, fish me a mermaid first – and I’ll give you a thousand pounds for free!’
A mermaid. That’s what I remember. Fireworks, feasting, jugglers and viols – that wasn’t enough to impress a queen, not in Leicester’s eyes, he wanted something more elaborate, so he had a hundred lackeys, lashed with sweat, dig him out a great lake in front of Kenilworth and whip it up with artificial waves, working in shifts. Into this instant water attraction went all sorts of marine marvels, including the monstrous mermaid, twenty feet of her, and Arion on a dolphin, who reeled off his speech to the queen without a stumble, but then, being the worse for wine, dispelled the magic by throwing off his mask and shouting, ‘I’m none of Arion neither, but honest Harry Goldingham!’ And Leicester doubtless had his arse for that. As for me, it didn’t matter. Mermaids and dolphins survived Harry Goldingham’s rough abjuration. My father set me down on a grassy mound to get a better view, and from this little eminence, under a universe of sulphur and stars, I watched the newest wonder of the world, a once-upon-a-time phenomenon, when once I sat upon a promontory and saw a mermaid on a dolphin’s back, uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, that the rude sea grew civil at her song, and certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the sea-maid’s music.
Years later I recreated the Kenilworth magic at almost no cost at all, in words, though behind the beauty was another ass’s head than Leicester’s, and another honest artisan, a weaver who had had a most rare vision.
Such were the Leicester fireworks, shooting stars laid on. And a mermaid singing to a queen. Well done, Dudley, well conceived – even though she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. A mermaid – and a monarch with a membrane: ‘Two cuntless wonders of the thronèd west,’ old Henry said. Not that I recall seeing the queen that day, but I remember the mermaid and her song, and all those other miracles, staged under the stars by the greatest star in England, his castle the grotto of the globe. Fresh fish plucked from the lake and sizzling on fires, all kinds of wines, full cups on the hour (and that was every hour of every day for all those nineteen days) with the gods themselves presiding, Neptune on the seafood, Bacchus at the bar, Vulcan and Jupiter firemasters extraordinary. And Venus flitting through the chambers, to the galloping of haunches, all night long.
For twenty miles around they say they heard the revelry, saw the lights in the sky, felt the deep-throated cannon roar the royal pledge. Boom! Elizabeth bent her virgin elbow, wetted her chaste lips, knocked back some more of Leicester’s liquor, bleeding him dry, because every time she lifted her glass a thousand nodding nobles drank with her, their wrists on puppet strings. Boom boom! Hear that one? Dudley’s at it even now, getting his money’s worth out of the queen’s private purse, high-reaching Leicester, reaching lower now, well beneath the girdle. Boom boom! Come again, Dudley – let the great cannon to the clouds tell all, and the queen’s carouse the heavens shall bruit again, re-speaking earthly thunder.
Did they copulate? It’s the universal question, isn’t it? Everybody always wants to know if two together did the deed of darkness. But Leicester’s courtship of the queen was politics and religion too. Of much greater moment than the friction of two members and an ejaculatory discharge. Well, if Dudley did discharge his part, doubtless he discharged it well. Her Majesty had been most royally entertained. Thousands had watched the most public courtship in the realm, including me. Not that I knew much at my tender age about what was really going on. Next day we went back home to Stratford.
It was the hottest July of all time. And Stratford lay quivering in front of us, violent in the waves of heat. I could hear them already as we drew near, the summer flies that quickened in the shambles, buzz buzz, and settled in clumps, black daisies bedecking the slaughter block. Yes, I could smell death in the air again, assaulting the sky with offal, making a mockery of the fields. A long way back now to inhabit Leicester’s fabled world, where sea-maids sang to virgins, queens quaffed kisses left in the cup, and honest kersey Harry Goldingham was a poet on a dolphin for a day. A long way from home.
And suddenly I felt like an orphan without hopes. But it set up in me a longing to bring it all back to life again. Dudley’s diablerie had given me such an unaccustomed dram that my blood was truly corrupted. And I knew I’d never rest until that ring was rung, that charmed circle drawn again and set in the sensible fields, the island of illusion I once called art. I had drunk the spider, spinner of dreams, and my knowledge was infected. Work, work, my medicine, the subtle poisoner said, the god of dreams. I was a client of Dr Thespius, my wit diseased. I told my father I was too hot, that was all. A fair excuse. The sun was thumping me on the nose as we finally came drifting back into Stratford, two long shadows on the road, the long nettles were flicking and teasing, and there was something infinitely pleasurable about that green drenching nettle-dust, powdering my nostrils, peppering the air with life.
8
By this time it was impossible to keep fat Francis from his flitch, which was duly brought up on a tray, much less tempting to me than the tits of little Alison that surmounted it, as she brought it to the table with that sly little smile of hers, secretive as the fauns among the ferns in the times before we were born, before Stratford was even heard of. I couldn’t even smile back at her, as Mistress Mine, never one to rove, was frowning at her back, though I winked at the small beer that came with it, which I thought permissible. Anne thought otherwise.
‘To wash it down, Master Collins – but not for the old and ailing, if you please. He’s had enough of that to be going on with.’
Enough for a lifetime is what she meant.
‘Oh, enough’s never enough, Mistress Anne.’
Purse of the mouth, frown of the brow, twitch of the nose – and the twin temptations were escorted from my eyes, leaving only the ale. Bacon is beyond my capabilities now – thin gruel’s my last diet – and so is Alison, though thought’s free. In my mind’s eye she dipped her nipples in the jug and bid me wet my lips.
‘Care for a drop, old man?’
It was Francis, offering me my own hospitality.
Pour away, my friend, the usual two fingers’ worth for me. And you can make free with the flitch.
‘I intend to. And intend to make progress from where we stand, which is no further, other than some household stuff to the Halls – painted cloths unspecified – and ten pounds to the
poor of Stratford.’
Ah yes, Stratford. And my father, the big man of the place. Had we been squirrels we might have leapt from bough to bough across the entire country, especially in wooded Warwickshire. Being man and boy, my father and I, we walked. Down through dubious Arden, where Guy of Warwick in days gone by became an old religious man after he’d finished frowning on Danes and splitting their skulls. That was achieved on a diet of roast beef of old England and buckets of beer – which he gave up for river-cress, river-water, a life lived among lecturing trees and schoolmastering streams, and the serendipity that lets you find sermons in stones, books in the running brooks.
‘Our local hero.’
Stratford. What was it anyway?
‘What is any place?’
Faces at first. Wedgewood was the tailor. He was our neighbour in Henley Street, a peeled radish of a creature whom I rarely saw in his shop. He was forever skipping around the corner to Hornby’s smithy just below the stream – usually with shears and measure in hands and the latest news hot on his lips. If you peered in through the heat haze you’d see him hopping excitedly about the giant Hornby on slippers that he’d thrust on the wrong feet in his hurry to purvey his piece of gossip. They’d be joined soon enough by the furious customer that Wedgewood had left rudely half-measured in Henley Street for doublet and hose, while Hornby stood clothed with smoke, listening gravely, oblivious to the flying sparks that bounced off his chest like baffled bees. One or two always lodged in the tangle of hair and beard and burned briefly there till Hornby brushed them away with a strange gentleness, while the iron cooled on the anvil and the huge mouth opened wider to swallow the thimbleful of rumour that Wedgewood could make outlast the shoeing of a hundred horse. You’d think the gaping Hornby would swallow Wedgewood too, for the mere fly that he was. But he was a busy little fly to boot, for the randy bastard was known to have two wives and had flown to Stratford to escape the first.
‘And he wasn’t the first to fly from a female.’
Not far from where Wedgewood buzzed like some inextinguishable spark about the labouring listening Hornby, stood a shop in the High Street that fairly drew me in.
‘Like the charnel-house?’
Not far off it. Philip Rogers, apothecary, in tattered weeds with overwhelming brows – his looks were meagre, sharp misery had worn him to the bones, and in his needy shop a tortoise hung, an alligator stuffed, some other skins of ill-shaped fishes, and about his shelves a beggarly account of empty boxes, green earthen pots, bladders, and musty seeds, remnants of packthread and old cakes of roses, thinly scattered to make up something of a show. He could have been taken for one of his own exhibits, except that you might have detected more humanity in the alligator, more movement in the tortoise. He could barely be said to keep the shop – rather he hung about it, haunted it like something almost obsolete, an ancient haze, scarcely visible. Rogers was what was left over. He was part of the smell.
‘Don’t put me off my bacon.’ Munch munch.
It wasn’t all bad. Master Philip also sold sweet confections, liquorice, aniseed, sarsparilla, Hawkins’s hellweed, the infamous tobacco, poppy, mandragora, and all the drowsy syrups of the east. But he sold poisons too – so mortal, they said, that if you dipped a knife in one of them, where it drew blood no cataplasm so rare, collected from all herbs that have virtue under the moon, could save the thing from death that received the merest scratch. If you had the strength of twenty men it would make you drop down dead on the spot.
‘And so,’ croaked Rogers – whispering so softly it could have been an exhalation in the air, an unstoppered phial, your own foul imaginings – ‘And so, my friend, if you have a troublesome rat that comes about your chickens, or a two-legged one, let’s say, that comes between your sheets and troubles your dearest chuck too sweetly for your taste, come to old Rogers and he’ll rid you of the fear of them with one noxious drop.’
‘A friend in need.’
Such was the gossip, drawn out of the eerie odours of the shop, spun from a glance, that was all – and it was enough. Famine was in those cheeks, need and oppression shining in the eyes, contempt and beggary hanging on his back.
‘Who needs starve – when bacon’s as plentiful as blackberries?’
Apparently it was all an illusion. Rogers had a cook who swore he ate like a horse and wouldn’t throw a crumb to a sparrow, and the shop did a fair business. Roaring trade would be a metaphor inappropriate to the ambience but there was, let’s say, a steady susurration. The scrapings and siftings, all the distillations of the world had made their way to London and up the hundred mile road to Stratford to sit like defecations of the devil on Rogers’ shelves and draw out my mind through my nostrils, so intoxicating were they to the eye, these scourings of strange continents and shavings of unchartered parts. This was the crucible of forbidden dreams. I wanted desperately to suck the liquorice offered me once by the gimlet-eyed apothecary but was terrified by the thought of what else that claw hand had touched, in what powdered bowels the bony finger had raggled and groped, and what I might turn into if I tasted even the fumes of that liquorice on the air. Agnes assured me that the stuffed alligator suspended from the ceiling was once a Stratford boy who’d eaten too much liquorice and was metamorphosed as a warning to sweet-toothed juveniles who started with liquorice and went on from there, tempted to tinker wickedly with worse weeds.
‘All balls,’ swore Henry. ‘She just don’t want you shitting yourself, that’s all, and don’t want you going up in smoke neither.’
But I believed this story of the alligator well into my schooldays.
‘Sure you don’t fancy a rasher?’
They were mines of magic, these shops. Another trader called Baynton had sugar loaves and gunpowder on his shelves, and everybody said that when Baynton became too free among the winepots the night before, he put the gunpowder instead of the sugar into the bread, and the flour into the gunpowder, and so if you dared trade with Baynton your enemies would live to laugh at you, for your shot would fall like bad dough but he’d sell you a loaf and blow you at the moon. I carried home the bread from Baynton’s like a bomb, in arms that were rigid, and I took the first bite with a face on me, they said, like one looking at a bare bodkin.
‘So that was your Stratford, Will.’
A market town, a trading place, and all the trades shop-fronted by talking faces. They talked about wool, the weather, animals, and each other. The drapers Barnhurst and Badger, both of Sheep Street, sold you scripture first and cloth second. The cloth was the same – the scripture was of an entirely different weave. Arch enemies, they argued about God and split him down the middle, ripping the seamless garment of the gospel and making a rag of religion in the same street. Protestant Barnhurst wiped his arse, he said, against the Catholic fabric of his rival, and Badger, who wouldn’t even piss on Protestant weave, swore he wasn’t the only papist in town to sell good Catholic cloth. That was true enough, said Barnhurst, the whole town knowing from Wedgewood how alderman Whately kept more than bees in his garden. He had two brothers who were priests on the run – while Ralph Cawdrey had a sprog who was a Jesuit for certain.
‘Tittle-tattle, eh?’
‘And he’ll see butchery enough,’ says Wedgewood to Hornby, ‘if young Cawdrey gets caught in a priest-hole one fine day. He’d be safer up the queen’s cunt, for that’s never searched, they say, (hee-hee) nothing gets up there, not even Leicester’s lofty knob, for how can the Dudley dolphin penetrate a cleft-less mermaid eh, Master Hornby? Work that out if you can…’
And Hornby’s grin grew wider and redder than the iron that he spread out on the anvil, but he kept on hammering all the same, while Wedgewood’s clients raged for their late breeches and his second wife swore they’d be beggars in hell, what with her loose-mouthed husband’s shit-stirring and that idle tailor’s tongue of his tattling away nineteen to the dozen.
‘Gossiping goshawks.’
‘So what I say, Master Blacksmith, and wisely i
s it said,’ Wedgewood stopped for no wife, first or second, ‘that Cawdrey the younger will wish he’d stuck to butchery when his time comes to be the scaffold calf, as come it will, and be turned off at Tyburn, for there’ll be butchery enough will stick to him when that day comes. And as for Whately’s bees, I can tell you this much about them, they’re taught to buzz abroad the Catholic creed, it’s true, I’ve heard them, they fly into folk’s gardens for the purpose and infect their flowers and their children that pick them. Put your ears to the foxgloves and you’ll hear them, I tell you, bees buzzing in Latin. Man’s a fucking wizard. And a traitor to boot. Trade with Whately and you die, it’s that simple.’
‘Yackety-yack.’
That’s how it was – a treasury of talk in Stratford, where trades were tongues in faces, clacking about politics and God, you couldn’t keep them apart. And besides the drapers there was another Protestant and Catholic battleground, again in the same street, occupied by the landlords of two inns. John Sadler, the miller, kept The Bear and was rival to Thomas Dixon Waterman, owner of The Swan. But there was a third Bridge Street inn, The Angel, which was reckoned to be the safest place to knock back your ale if you didn’t want to be marked down as Rome or anti-Rome by the faceless tavern spies. For although she who sat on the throne was a notorious sitter on the fence, you never knew when the chair might suddenly be empty again, to be re-occupied by papist or Protestant, there was no certainty. In the meantime the workings of your soul were always a matter of interest to the tavern spies, who were as thirsty as the next man when ale was on tap. So in spite of its name a drink at The Angel was likely to keep you well away from the angelic host, so it was reckoned. A nice neutral hostelry. Through its doors came the High Street bakers Hamnet and Judith Sadler (for whom I named my twins), Quiney the vintner, Gilbert Bradley our neighbour (that my brother Gilbert was named for), and many friends of my father, trading in leather, wool and wine, bread and beer. And in words. Words, words, words. They grew on folks’ lips slowly enough at times like wool on sheep’s backs or like pears on the trees, but sometimes brightly like daisies in the fields. And they rang in my ears like uncracked gold clattering on the counter.
Will Page 9
