by Greer Gilman
He went by the south door into London’s voice. A still roar at first, its many seeming one; but as he walked, he heard the great polyphony: each line a moment flashing out from the discordant concord. Tallis’s forty-part mottetto—that was praised so—forty-fold. This Babel of Londoners was Ben’s own music: his choir.
“. . . and bore a monster with two fishes’ heads . . .”
“. . . sweet oranges, a penny!”
“. . . turd in thy teeth! Thou liest . . .”
“. . . had his pond fish’d by his next neighbour . . .”
A clackdish. “. . . poor Tom. Remember Tom . . .”
“. . . woe befall great Babylon! whose spawn is Players . . .”
Up against the vestry wall, a whore, still beating down her skirts. “. . . a pox on thy Harry tester! And thy ha’porth o’ prick!”
The thieves alone were silent.
Up and down Ben went, and in and out the great pillars, hacked with centuries: I was here, I loved, I won so much at dice. And the monuments answered them: all die. We are ephemeral, as flies are; and our span a play.
In the north aisle, Ben spied his masquing Phosphorus, their own Siderius Nuncius, idling—graceful as a gossamer—beside a noseless bishop’s tomb, as if he read the inscription: Ranulphus Munday, decidit 1331. A snub-nosed, yellow-haired boy went by, glanced back as if to deprecate the angels. And anon, the player drifted on the same way. O ho, thought Ben: a riddle for the game. Nostoch? No planet, but a shooting star; no star, but shotten.
Musing on his epigram, Ben only half heard a voice behind him: “. . . by the chariot . . .” Turning, he heard a lower voice reply: “. . . with powder . . .” Turned, he saw no one this could be: a pair of city wives talking of the price of fish, a pantaloon; a small girl playing jackstones on a tomb. Yet he knew—he thought he knew—those voices. Musicians? Sylvans? Carpenters? Behind him again: “. . . if the prince . . .” A device against his person? Powder? O treachery! Quicker now, he turned; and seeing no one, slid (or rather stuffed himself) behind the tomb: whereon the child in green tatters glared at him in high dudgeon; and gathering up her jackstones, stalked away.
For a quarter of an hour, he prowled about the church, stalking those voices, in and out, up and down. One or twice heard whispers, and a laugh. What so? There were ever voices in this roof, high-vaulting echoes.
He passed Nuncius again in the chancel, at another tomb, alone. Huh. Slighted. Or an Estrich for appetite.
Compassing once more, his eye was caught by a patch of yellow, like a pissabed sprung up between the stones. Behind a pillar in the north aisle, by a knight and his astonied lady (as if he’d risen from their blameless bed), he saw Snub-Nose buttoning. He grinned—and all at once, he quivered like a gaze-hound.
For by that chance of yellow, he espied at last what he’d been seeking: two of the sylvans in Duke Humphrey’s walk, bent close in conversation. As they moved away, he heard: “. . . and the powder? Is’t enough . . . ?” Full sail, he followed, the small craft scattering before his prow; when someone caught his sleeve. Another, his coat-tail. And a third, in a great fume of canary, pawed his shoulder.
“Good Master Muldsacke!”
“Sweet Sir Words.”
“Holla!”
Three satyrs, drunk as lords. The riot of the tipsie Bacchanals.
“We have con—con—Devil take it! What we’ve done?”
“Consheaved.”
“—the rarest mock of Jones’s moon.”
“His idol.”
“Looks mobilious.”
“O swear not by the moon, th’inc!—th’incontinent moon . . .”
“There is no man in’t.”
“By’r lady, what’s a moon without a man?”
“So we will paint a great face—”
He had lost his quarry. “Down, sirs! Down, you puppies! Down, you pissing litter of a draggle-dugged bitch!” He pushed past them onto Ludgate Hill.
On Friday Street
A knocking at the door. Gil again? Back for the scarf? Nat Field, in nothing but his blackwork shirt, glanced once at his glass, and called, “Anon!”
“You must let me in.” A boy’s voice, none he knew. A jangling of sweet bells.
“Is it the guisers?” Nat threw on his gown.
“If you will, it is.”
“Walk in.”
And the door flew open. In came but one small guiser, in his petticoats and tawdry crown. The skirts were too long for him; they draggled, and he held them up.
Enter Dol Common as the Queen of Fairy. O most excellent mock!
“Who sent thee, boy? Here’s silver for thy box.”
“My embassage is from the Queen.”
She now is set
At dinner in her bed, and she has sent you
From her own private trencher, a dead mouse,
And a piece of gingerbread, to be merry withal.
O, a witty boy. To play Ben’s own play to his Face. Would have it word for word. They all did, these upstarting boys. All suitors: for a part, a piece, a tumble. The playhouses ran with them, as kitchens with mice. But Nat took the gingerbread with its dim star, and ate it, gilt and all. “Art thou not she? The Queen of Fairy?”
A deeper courtesy. A dancer. Could he sing?
“Thou art overparted, boy.”
“You, underclad.”
An impudent boy, with a fire of red hair; who bore himself as if a Queen indeed. And bowed as to a brother King, or consort. But the face he raised to Nat, alight with mockery. A whey-faced brat. But one that stirred him.
He had a choice of revels he might grace this evening: two or three ladyships whose admiration he was; a tittering lord, who doted more the more refused; or any of the Inns of Court. But it snowed; the ways were foul. He thought he might as well stay in.
“Come then, I will hear thy piece.” He sat on the table’s edge. “But where’s thy hobbyhorse? Thy company of sword?”
“But one sword: which is yours to wield.”
Stark impudence. “Will George not die and rise?”
“Over and again, since time began.” The imp laughed. “But the play is new.” That tilt of face: appraisal of the blackwork shirt, and that it clad. “You do not know / What grace her grace may do you in clean linen.”
Alchemy again, thought Nat: which worked in him an exaltation. Noted, with another, lower glance. No novice.
Nat kissed him—O the mouth was sweet—and felt against his thigh the eager little horn. “My smock rampant!” Two could play at capping verses—were their mouths not stopped.
When he pulled the smock up, over the bright hair, the boy came away with it, as if his body were attire. And something else emerged—a she-in-he—as from its husk a butterfly, and shook its wings.
O . . . ! He breathed; but could not speak for awe. Astounded still, as if the smock had pulled with it himself, his wits.
Now perfect in her nakedness, the creature wafted once or twice her iris’d wings; was still.
A whisper. “O thou witch, self-Circe.”
She spoke: no boy had ever such a voice, as if the night itself commanded. “Down o’ your knees and wriggle.”
Willy nilly, he obeyed. Her fingers twisted shrewdly in his hair. And shrewder still. A shudder; then a sigh.
That sweet face of yours hath turn’d the tide,
And made it flow with joy
And overflow. O nectarin! When he could draw his breath, he said, “Mistress . . .”
“What you will.” And came to him.
“My fine flitter-mouse! My bird o’ the night!”
And now she rode him, spurring in an ecstasy of haste.
Gasping, he could manage, “Gallop . . . ough! . . . apace . . .”
“Wrong poet,” said his wagoner, and whipped him to the west. Hesperides.
Where he lay drenched. His mistress over-canopied, as if he lay beneath a moonwhite thorn and breathed it in: all flower and all fox.
The wings beat once. T
he leaves uprose in fire.
“Mistress?”
Master now. Uncleft. As beautiful: but crested. The voice unchanged.
He that hath pleas’d her grace
Thus far, shall not now crincle for a little—
Gape sir, and let him fit you.
Rougher now: as if he ran with stags. The cry a triumph, belling out.
He lay—he thought he lay—upon a bank, on winter leaves. Cast up. As if he were a tangle of great branches that the water had brought down. Yet still the torrent raged in him, and he was tumbled onward over stones.
The other’s voice now pitying: “Let me now stroak that head.” As gently as a nurse a child. In his great weariness, his eyes were shut: he knew not which, his mistress or his master, coyed him. Neck, inward elbow, anywhere. “Yet, slower yet,” he murmured.
And the backs of fingers brushed his languished pride. “. . . a wither’d daffodil.”
Drowsing, he was lifted up in arms. The voice now in his head. Here is your fly in a purse, about your neck. He felt a something pulled about his ears, up and over; whimpered protest, like a sleeping child undressed. He knew no more.
Toward noon of a snow-bright day, Nat woke: dishevelled, soul and body. I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream. Methought . . . No other in his bed. Bleary-eyed, he patted round him, sniffed and pawed the sticky sheets: where he had crushed a comb of honey, a New Year’s gift. Spilt syllabub. O gods. He sat up suddenly and felt for the acorn round his neck: still there. Still locked: he shook it and the moon within it rattled reassuringly. It still would hatch.
Rising, Nat looked out on London palimpsest. Sheer snow and falling snow that endlessly was overwritten with repassing. Paul struck three-quarters. ’Slid! What’s o’clock? What day? Ye gods, the masque!
At Whitehall, New Year’s Eve
The last rehearsal went ill.
Strings broke, winds flooded or they parched; a satyr’s hoof broke and he fell, twisting his knee; sat rocking and whimpering, protesting his soundness. The boy who sang First Faie had taken cold, and croaked as if the play were Aristophanes. His master spanieled him, soliciting with scarves, electuaries, purges, and succados. Phosphorus, recoiling, flapped them off with his perfumed handkerchief, clapped it to his nose. “Breathe less, and farther off!” Silenus had kept Christmas over well; he sat, head in hands, groaning like the Pythian cave, amid his fumes. (Ben prophesied the wrath of Revels, and was proved: a shilling fine.) The Second Satyr was in a melancholy of rejected love, with no more spirit in him than a sat-on bagpipe. The Third still argued for the Second’s part; the Fourth still urged himself as Phosphorus. No less than three of the fairies were down with styanies. The bears’ cage stank.
And the bears? were in a lordly sulk, like twin Achilles, in their cage. They had caught the distemper of the meeting, and were snappish.
Only Nat Field had not quarrelled with his fellow players: he was truant. The Master of Revels, who was Rhadamanthine in his sentencing, looked black. “Thou, boy, hast seen this reprobate?” The Fifth Sylvan (a megrim), said waspishly, “He’ll be with his aunts. They keep sweet linens, aye, and three or four good cellars.” And the Second (a fit of the mother) tee-hee’d. “He’s away with the fairies, I doubt.”
Just then, most woefully late, the runagate burst in, whited over like a man of snow: through which he glowed like Sol in alchemy. “Twelve pence,” said Revels.
“Overslept,” Nat muttered. His unstudied elegance—the art of ten year’s study as a player’s boy—had vanished. He hung his head and stammered like a boy who sees the birch. He kept patting his breast as if his heart thumped.
Fifth jeered. “I see Queen Mab hath been with you.”
“Sneck up.”
“And twopence,” said Revels. “For that indecorum.”
Field played not with his accustomed fire.
Worst of all, the moon was hicketing again: a witch was in the works. The Surveyor’s velvet cap was crestfallen; and his great dignity was on the point of shirtsleeves and bare head. Pushed but a coin’s edge further, he might stamp. At last he stepped back. “I must consult with—h’rm—”
“Thy Daedalus?” said Ben. This gall was honey to him.
“My workman. My artificer, late of the Doge’s household: a Venetian. He hath good skill of hand, and knows the manage of the thing.”
Hah, thought Ben. The bird looks well upon his glove; but when it will not come to lure, he must call his falconer.
The moon gave one despondent shrug; and slid.
One satyr nudged another, smirking; the Third, seized with a sudden looseness, ran headlong to the bears’ cage and letting down his breech, let fly.
A critic, Ben thought.
He was surly. The Third and Fourth Sylvans had told him—with transparent innocence—of a powder of pearl, far excelling that of Antwerp, for the face: to paint a queen’s ghost or a lady mad in love. “To be had, sir, on Silver Street,” said Third. “At the Chariot.” (Ben knew the sign: Boadicea in a monstrous tire.) He saw his own broad craggy face in Third’s disdainful glance: ale-russeted, and weathered like his coachman’s coat. “Have you need of such a remedy?” A lifted brow, that would have signalled to the furthest gallery: surmise. Blunt Ben? And both had nudged and tittered as he walked away. He’d turned. “I am told, sirs, it is sovereign for a toothache.”
If nothing else, he’d had a watch set on the chariot.
And on the no one—a shifter of scenes—that was Prince’s cipher, riding in his stead in triumph, but to weight the wheels. He kept place until the hour itself, the metamorphosis. For the sheep rehearsed not with the goats, nor antimasque with masque. The courtiers knew the dances; had been walked through Jones’s Troy-town, lest they stumble; would be silent. Do the sun and moon rehearse? Their part is but to condescend to shine on us. All this pudder—the spangling and the bears and Jones’s gilded tabernacle—was to say: Here is a prince.
The music, though, was excellent.
He looked with expectancy—a mingled glee and dread—to when the sluices opened, and the eddies whorled together: water and wine. To when the swan majestic was united with its frantic netherparts.
A flourish of trumpets sounded. All quarrel and endeavor ceased. In came both the princes with their retinues, and all bowed down before them.
Prince Henry Frederick stood—no, not as for his portrait. As himself, a moving icon: as if the sword and garter were essentials of his spirit, and his very plume the flourish of his soul. He would look magnificent in Jones’s armor, as his Roman Oberon.
His hand uprose them.
“Come, we are a’ players here. Na ceremony.”
Ben’s cynic smile was brief; for the Prince beckoned. “Our makar of masques! Our Horace! Master Jonson, I await thy lyrics. For thine art is to command close hearing.”
He turned then to the musicians. “Our belovit Master Ferrabosco! I study to improve what thou hast taught me of harmony, and of the ordering of strings.” A reverence. “And our sweet sangster!” Robert Johnson bowed, still cradling his lute. “The stars, I think, will bend to hear your musics.” He smiled. “And my sister longs to dance.”
And then—he made the last seem crown of all—he turned to his Surveyor. An attendant gave to him a vellum book, which he opened: Jones’s schema of the moon, his lux mobilis. “A most ingenious device, Sir; I wad have it mountit for my cabinet.” He turned a leaf. “Could it not be of use in war? A beacon on a ship?” A glance from page to tackle, and his face grew keener still. “Ah! But thou hast ca’d my peregrine to hand. So then. I wad see a flight.”
Beardfallen: at his wits’ end and the rope’s. Ben had never heard the Surveyor speak so small. “It is, your Grace, distempered.”
“This weather, sir; ’tis passing cald and snell. I will see the fires are made high tomorrow—David?—But I doubt thou art distract with many cares, to bring these revels to perfection; I will leave thee.”
Ben vanished to the backside of fa
erie, its unpainted wall. Turning his face to it, he thumped with both fists. Softly, as the company constrained him: but he danced his own hobgoblin’s antimasque—he eat the dormouse!—and laughed until he stitched. All Elfland rattled; and a clog left by some rude mechanical danced itself, and toppled from the dome.
Meanwhile the Prince’s shadow, York, had slipped away to the bears’ cage, where the backside shat. The vent of grammarye. Gazing raptly through the bars, he said, “Which is Callisto?”
Tukeler shovelling, said, “Clyster (sir reverence) is no word for a prince’s mouth to hear.” He stroked the head that twitched from him; as would a schoolboy from a scrubbing. “This bully boy is Toby.” He slapped a flank. “His sister’s Jug.”
“She is bonnier than Toby.” At the warden’s nod, he reached a timid hand to her ruff. “O! She’s soft!”
Tukeler grinned at him with his three teeth. “Aye, she’s a May-Queen. A bird o’ paradox.” She yawned: abyss.
“Will they not draw the chariot? But now?”
And just then, Henry, coming up with his retinue and a distracted Revels, said: “Is this my team?”
