Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Eventually the lucky dead were those who were dragged with a rope round their necks to a field and then burnt.

  The dead bell and the sound of tears.

  You were half-choked by the spicy smoke of the plague powder, burnt everywhere. The doors and lower windows of most of the houses were nailed up. Food used to be handed to the inhabitants by means of ropes and baskets.

  Of the whole Town Council in Yarmouth, only two survived.

  There were people in Caister who did not leave the church from mattins to compline. With a loaf of bread and a bottle of beer in their pockets, they remained all day at prayers. These folk wore deep mourning black and thought by their garb and their devotions to turn aside God’s anger. They spent every hour on their knees. They wept. They prayed. They whined with such passion that it is a wonder the statues did not melt.

  I have heard that there were certain warnings of the advent of my lord the Black Death, dark heralds, precursors.

  A comet, God’s chastising rod, appeared over London before he rode in. The moon was overcast blood-red in an eclipse. This was followed by a long, unnatural frost. The comet was of black fire.

  At the same time a child lying swaddled in its cradle at Cremona addressed its mother by her name, and told how it had seen the Blessed Virgin Mary beseeching her son not to destroy the world.

  On Christmas Day of – I think – 1348, there stood at dawn a plume of flames above the palace of the Pope at Avignon, and on the Feast of Stephen following a ball of fire passed over Paris from east to west, and Notre Dame was struck by lightning.

  The Fen country was full of stinking mists, and rainbows, and it rained snakes and frogs.

  In Venice there was an earthquake which rang the bells of St Mark’s before cracking the altar in three.

  My uncle Hugh saved me from the plague. He was a student of the good doctor, Paracelsus. Following this master’s teaching, my uncle told my parents that whatever happened they must not let my thoughts sink down to death. I was made to listen to music. I was set to the contemplation of gold and silver and precious stones that comfort the eyes and the fingers and the heart. Long tales were told to me, of Red Knights and Green Knights and Amadis de Gaul, of Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus, and of Robin Hood. Sweet instruments were played in all my hours of sleeping. My imagination was filled up, fed, inhabited, and occupied by images of life. For as soon as the fear of death and an imagination of it obtain the upper hand, according to Paracelsus, then certainly what we dread will come to pass. ‘The heart adheres to its own pitch,’ my uncle taught me.

  My uncle taught me to believe that I was invincible if not immortal. The Black Death could not kill me, nor any other hue of death. I was instructed also to have faith that I could not be laid low by illness, and by this belief the Archaeus or Aura vitalis was fortified – that is, the hope which is opposed to the dread inspired in us by fear and trembling.

  In particular, that wise physician, my uncle Hugh, recommended and prescribed wine for me – wine as a preservator, wine as a medicine, wine as a benison, and wine as a cancellor of cares.

  ‘Neither drunk nor yet too sober, is the way of getting over,’ he used to say, pacing the shore, with me on his back or at his heels.

  My father therefore had the servants wash me every morning with wine – strong wine, clear wine, old wine, wines red and wines white, pink wine, golden wine, the wine of young lions. My hands were washed in wine, and my mouth was washed with wine, and my face was washed in wine, and my nose was washed in wine, and my ears were washed with wine, and my shoulders were washed in wine, and all the rest of my body was washed regularly with wine. Every morning also on rising I enjoyed a little vinegar of wine with toasted bread together with my breakfast, and followed it up with a wine gargle. Then during the day my father would have me drink a cup or two of wine every time I thirsted. My white wines were cooled in a jacket of water. My red wines were always as warm as my room.

  I passed my childhood thus butressed with wine, and, thanks to this provision of my uncle’s, I did not fall foul of the Black Death in his fury.

  My father had me also, as his eldest son – Lord God, sir, there had been other visits to the Cerne giant, and I had brothers and sisters now – sitting between two huge fires of sea-coals when the plague was at its worst. These coals we had dredged from the icy sea. I have heard since that Pope Clement VI did no less and escaped the pestilence thereby.

  My mother all this while reciting tales of great queens and noble ladies who had survived far worse afflictions – mostly men – burnt incense, juniper berries, laurel leaves, beech and aloe, wormwood, balm mint, rosemary, thyme, green rue and amber, mastic, laudanum, storax, birchbark, red myrrh and sage, lavender, marjoram, camphor, and sulphur, until so thick a fug hung about the house that the canaries were suffocated in their cages. Some of these birds may have died, though, as a result of the infection of the air – I have heard that in the Alps, where you can touch clouds with your hand, the very clouds stank at that time if you poked your fingers into them.

  My mother also introduced a capacious bag of spiders into the house. The spiders ran in all directions. Her thinking was that the spiders would absorb possible plague poisons, thus preserving us. They were big spiders, and speckled, as I recall.

  Either because of the spiders or the wine, or both, I was spared.

  I should say it was the wine.

  I noticed two things of interest in these visitations of the Black Death.

  First, the tanners in Yarmouth seemed from the start immune to it – whether from the wonderful properties of the tannin contained in their bark, I don’t know. Those who cleaned out latrines also escaped. From this, my uncle Hugh reasoned that another good way to avoid the plague was to stand early in the morning above a latrine and inhale the stench. This might seem the opposite of his faith in wine and sweet music and imagination. How shit can be a boon in times of plague when it is a bane at other times, I confess I do not understand; unless, indeed, a man has a strange liking and secret affinity for filth, so that his heart is more completely comforted by dirt and dung than by the scent of musk and amber. I once knew a sheriff’s officer called Fang who preferred the smell of pigs’ dung to anything in the world, and another who was always singing the praises of stinking billy-goats, so that he could never get the upshot unless the girl’s armpits had a whiff of goat about them. Paracelsus certainly teaches that in times of plague all excrements, and particularly human excrements, are healthy. Man is made in the image of God, so even his shit must have some value. My uncle Hugh lived to the age of eighty, anyway, and died singing and clapping, his hands.

  This brings me to the second thing I noticed. It was that the old corpse-washer in Yarmouth, who must have bathed the boils and closed the eyes of more than a thousand victims, preserved himself from the Black Death by means of his own piss. He would drink a handful of it every morning in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

  Chapter Nine

  About the number 100 & other numbers

  Cuckoo Day

  Bussard is back. Bussard has a face like a pig’s arse and an arse like a pig’s face. Hey, Bussard! Hey, Snout-bum! This is given to Snoutbum Bussard. Grrr. A pig’s arse of a day too.

  Concerning Caister. Caister in the county of Norfolk is my family home. But this house was smaller in the times I have been telling of – in my childhood days. The great hall here is now thirty-eight of my paces long, which makes about fifty-nine feet. It is sixteen paces, or twenty-eight feet, in width. When I was a boy you could stand with your back against one wall and aim your spits to hit the other wall without too much straining.

  My ancestors were merchants of Great Yarmouth, small-time burghers, hardly wealthy. I am, to be plain, by origin the eldest son of an ordinary esquire of King Edward III’s household. My uncle Hugh was an admiral, but he wasted his wages on women and relics.

  My patrimony was small when I came of age. I inherited at the t
ime a few decrepit tenements in Yarmouth and a clutch of threadbare farms between Scottow and East Somerton. No rents to speak of. And a family house that was falling down while my mother played charades and my father brooded on the construction of military machines. Tormenta, catapults, perrieres, slings, biffae, springals. The king never properly employed my father’s skills. He was a great inventor of fierce and useless toys. Once in my boyhood he made a mangonel which knocked down part of the house. That house itself I have rescued from the fen and made into my castle. During the course of my career, this house has been the emblem of my fortune, the repository for my wealth. I have spent more than £7000 on this place. Reader, do you wonder how I managed it? By honest spoils, that’s how. By a soldier’s pay. The wages of death is no sin. I was always a believer in the right rate for the job.

  Between the year of Man’s Redemption 1421 then, when I became Deputy Constable of the castle and town of Bordeaux, and my final return home in (was it?) 1440, I was King Henry VI’s councillor in France, at an annual fee of £110 sterling. I also held twenty other offices, too boring to enumerate. In my time I have been councillor to Thomas, Duke of Clarence; Thomas, Duke of Exeter; Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester; Richard, Duke of York; John, Duke of Somerset; and John, Duke of Norfolk. Not to speak of the Devil. It all adds up.

  My French profits and extractions all lie invested in good rich English land. I have estates here, and in Yorkshire, and in Wiltshire. There were the tips as well, you see, and the commissions, and the side bets. O France. O ransom money.

  Other capital transactions. I bought the Boar’s Head tavern in Southwark in 1445. The price was £214. A bit steep, but I wanted it. The seller was my brother-in-arms, Nicholas Molyneux. Molyneux originally had it in partnership with another old campaigner from the French wars, John Winter. After Winter died, Molyneux gradually lost interest in the Boar’s Head. He had married a rich widow in the expectation of her dying. When she did not oblige, despite him leaving her out of doors in all weathers, Molyneux consulted an apothecary in search of a safe poison. ‘The best poison lies there between your legs,’ the apothecary told him. ‘Give it to her seven times a night. No woman can stand that. In seven months she’ll be dead. The perfect murder.’ Poor Nick. I bought the Boar’s Head from him some six months after he embarked upon this master plan. He lay absolutely knackered in an upper room, covered in flakes of sweat, twitching and quaking. When I tried to shake hands with him, he yelped and pulled the sheets over his head as though I’d meant something improper. His wife meanwhile was the life and soul of the endless party downstairs, only popping up to see him every hour on the hour between midnight and dawn, tripping upstairs and down in a trance of delight. Nick’s last words to me were, ‘The bitch doesn’t know it, but she’s only got a month to live.’

  Not a few of my finest hours were spent in this same Boar’s Head tavern. To own it is a pleasure I scarcely dreamt of in my less substantial days. You will hear soon enough of my days and nights there in my prime, with Prince Hal and Mr Edward Poins and Mrs Quickly and the others.

  When I came of age I was worth a beggarly £46 a year. My story is of how such a one could rise to be a baron of France, and then a gentleman landowner here in England, with a rent-roll of over £1,450 per annum clear. O brave old world, in which such things are possible. For an Englishman.

  I will tell you my politics. I am a feudalist. I believe in the dead. I adhere to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England.

  But I am running on too fast.

  A pig of a cunt of a day.

  What I said.

  Cold, wet, and windy – like an old man’s bum.

  Brandy!

  Let that stand too. Every word I say, Sow-face, my three-inch fool, and in the way that I say it.

  Reader, my grand plan is this: I shall talk to my man Bussard, or to my secretary Worcester, or to Fr Brackley, or to one of the others, even in the last resort to my stepson Scrope, or I shall write in my own hand, every day here for a hundred days. For as long as I talk they are commanded to set it down, every day, every word, without fear or favour or crossings out or any alteration. At the end of these one hundred days I shall have told the story of my life.

  This number 100 interests me.

  There was lately the war in France – the wars in France – which went on for one hundred years. This began in the year of our Lord 1337 – or thereabouts, rather before my time anyway – when King Edward III woke up one morning and decided to stake his claim to that patch of God’s earth which every true-born Englishman has always regarded as his happy hunting ground, or at the least back garden. Edward, I mean, added France as a jewel to the English crown. In that same year we defeated Flanders, the ally of Philip VI, at Cadsand. But the Frogs did not like belonging in our king’s hat. They resisted and, with interruptions, poor peace, the war resultant went on for one hundred years. To tell you the truth, I’ve had so much to do with it, one way and another, that I’ve sometimes felt I was as old as it, and dated my birth from its beginning. My fancy, of course. It ended just six years ago, with England shamefully and disgracefully giving up all her rightful territories in France except the port of Calais. In the same year, our present monarch, King Henry VI, who would make a better Pope than he makes a King, went mad. Two years later he recovered his wits when eating a blancmange. How they can tell the difference I don’t know.

  Set it down, Snoutbum. No bloody arguing. Brandy!

  Set down brandy. Yes.

  The eau de vin which is an eau de vie.

  Brandy: alchemy. Brandy: the elixir. Eau d’or. Aqua auri.

  100.

  There was a war for one hundred years. Between England and France. Between me and the enemies of my belly. Between Sir John Fastolf knight and the continental gnats.

  Fly-swatting – that’s what I did in France.

  Money came back to England through my Italian banker in Paris. I made more than £13,000 in one day at the Battle of Verneuil in the year of our Preservation 1424.

  A century is a not infrequent total.

  This is getting out of joint, out of step, out of tune, out of time, out of chronological order. I must observe the rules and niceties of history. Clio, she’s the Muse, she’s the one. Tomorrow we address ourselves to Clio. Today is too late for history.

  Brandy, God damn you! Brandy, you trotting turd! There is hope in brandy, none in history.

  Brandy prolongs life.

  Brandy sustains health.

  Brandy dissipates superfluous matters in the bowels.

  Brandy revives the spirits.

  Brandy preserves youth.

  Brandy alone, or added to some other proper golden remedy, cures colic and dropsy and ague and gravel and paralysis.

  Above all, it cures Time.

  Brandewine, brand wine, brandy wine. Nothing’s more fine than brandy wine. O spiritus vini gallici.

  Neither drunk nor yet too sober, is the way of getting over.

  100.

  Cock’s passion! Just as there were ONE HUNDRED YEARS in the Hundred Years War, so I shall write these memorials of my life and valiant deeds for ONE HUNDRED DAYS exactly. I began here at Caister, my ancestral home, in the evening of New Year’s Day. Today is the something or other of piggish April. I can’t remember. Hell’s bottom-grass, set down Fastolf can’t remember. This is the something or otherst of April. Or the something or othered. And I don’t care what date it was yesterday. Have I ever cared for yesterday, or yesterday cared for me? How do I know that yesterday wasn’t a lie? Only now is ever true.

  Cuckoo Day. Isn’t it Cuckoo Day, Pigbum? The day the green lady is supposed to let all the little bleeders out of her apron, to fly up and lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and sit making their idiot cry that Spring has come. To hell with their cuckoo cuckoo. Bugger Spring. Selah.

  Hundred Years War. Hundred Days War.

  I fought in the first war. I am fighting now in the second.
I am by profession a gentleman, a soldier, and a knight. I am a knight banneret. That is my declension.

  Sprinkle my glass with pure gold leaves.

  I drink the Sun. Benedicite.

  My life. So much roast beef. Who dreamt me then? Those things which I held for the truth, were they nothing? Have I been sleeping these eighty years, and didn’t know it?

  I am awake today. So much is certain. Brandy wine sees to that. Hail, Brand. This afternoon everything is strange and far away – mackerel fly through the trees that have turned their backs to the wind. Shit, sir, even though yesterday those sandbanks out there were closer to me than the palms of these hands. Lords and lands, lords and lands and herring taken from the sea in season – all as hidden from me now as if they were a lie. If I set it down now about the companions of my most extreme youth – about little Margaret in the linen basket, that gigglelot – where have they gone? They run and dance and laugh and blush and are happy in my head only. Margaret is gone and green. She lies in the grave, in wet Norfolk clay, and there are worms on her fingers and in her hair. Felled is the forest. The water goes on flowing.

  The Hundred River goes on flowing. The world on all sides is full of disgrace. And everything is suddener than we think. I see the bitter gall amidst the honey.

  Brandy! Benedicite!

  I see the bitter honey amidst the gall. 100. I was brought up in the flowing company of the Hundred River. I live now where I can stand on the banks and see my belly in it. From my windows I can watch the swans drift.

  I shall live to be a hundred years old.

  Shall I tell you my secret? It is this: I, Sir John Fastolf, of Caister and London, of Paris and Rouen, of heaven and hell, shall most certainly and assuredly and blessedly live to be one hundred years old. I had this of a certainty from a sybil.

  Ergo, there was a war between England and France which lasted for a hundred years; there is a war between me and my life which shall last for a hundred days; and I, John Fastolf, knight banneret, shall of a surety live and last and endure and eat figs and prevail and drink brandy wine for a hundred years.