Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Badby would have none of it. He was a Lollard, found guilty of heresy in the Bishop’s court at Worcester, his sentence confirmed by London convocation. Archbishop Arundel had required him to recant. But Badby, who was a tailor by trade, stood by his false opinion – the bread, he said, was merely an emblem or token of Christ’s body. He dared not believe, he said, that twenty thousand Christs were made in England every morning. (He meant by priests saying Mass.) Arundel handed him over to the secular arm.

  There he was in the barrel. Hal stepped forward to offer him a last chance of life.

  ‘I’ve nothing to retract,’ said the tailor.

  The faggots were lit. The flames fastened on him.

  ‘Mercy!’ cried the tailor.

  Instantly, Hal ordered the executioner to pull Badby out of the barrel and rescue him. The rakes were put in. The fire was dragged aside. They brought out Badby, half-burnt, from the barrel.

  ‘Very sensible,’ said our prince. ‘In the circumstances, Mr Badby, I feel that I can offer you a pension in return for your decision to recant.’

  But Badby had cried out for mercy, not bargains.

  ‘No, my lord,’ he said, with his black tongue and charred lips. ‘I am sorry, my lord. I can never recant.’

  ‘Rekindle the fire then,’ said Prince Henry.

  Badby was put back in his barrel and burnt to death.

  Worcester, I say that a better prince would not have bargained with a man half-dead. By stopping the fire, he made a double agony.

  Martyrs I do not like – an extravagant, unnecessary bloody breed, with stiff necks and hard hearts. But this John Badby made no fuss. Was he hardened beyond redemption by the Devil? I doubt it. I remember him lying there unconscious and half-burnt, his face black patches and purple, and the Prince in his gold shoes. And, when Badby came to himself, the Prince leaning over and touching him with his stick.

  Threepence a day: that would have been his pension.

  Mr Badby sat up very politely and refused the prince’s bargain. He apologised. Said he was sorry. Hal did not even blink.

  O England. O bugger.

  John Badby did not ask for mercy twice.

  The smell of roasting human flesh in Smithfield was what put me off meat dishes. Wine is clean.

  The chancellor of Oxford, Mr Cortenay, he was there, standing by the barrel in his hood, to instruct the little tailor in the faith of Holy Church.

  The Prior of St Bartholomew’s brought the Blessed Sacrament with thirteen torches and held it before the Lollard’s eyes.

  3d a day.

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the death of Sir John Fastolf’s father

  18th April

  To get back to the subject. What subject? How many subjects are there, when you come down to it? One. Life is the subject. When I am dead there will be no subject. The object is not dying. Not to die. I shall not die for a long while yet. I shall live to be a hundred. Meanwhile, I have a hundred days in which to tell my story. The story of my days. Although I may most be telling that story when I seem to wander away from it. You do not always take a castle by advancing in a straight line.

  But to resume these chronicles. Where was I? Just out of the monastery, God be praised. Fresh from a surfeit of prayer, my voice not improved by anthems, nor my bum by Br Mikal’s osier rod. That’s right, I was on my way home, on the road back to Caister, to see my mother and my father once again.

  Mowbray’s remark about my father agreeing that I should be made an oblate had stuck in my head, and festered. It rankled all the time I was in Hulme abbey. I wanted to find out for myself if my father really had such a low opinion of me that he considered monkhood all I was fit for.

  When I reached Caister, the grass was long in the paddocks. I met my uncle Hugh on the arm of a new mistress.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said. This was an emerald bottle with what looked like a few drops of candlegrease in it.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  ‘The sweat of St Michael the Archangel,’ explained my uncle Hugh. ‘Shed when he fought with Satan, you know. Priceless.’

  I did not care to ask him how much priceless had been, in the case of such a relic.

  ‘Where is my father?’ I said.

  ‘Look in this box,’ said my uncle Hugh.

  I looked. The box contained a dry black broken stalk or two, set out on purple velvet.

  ‘Hay,’ said my uncle Hugh.

  ‘I can believe it,’ I said. ‘My father—’

  ‘Not just any old hay,’ explained my uncle Hugh. ‘Hay from the manger in which our Lord was laid.’

  ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t darken your mind with doubt,’ said my uncle Hugh. ‘It cost me a small fortune, that holy hay. Now shade your eyes and take a peek at what’s hanging round Cleopatra’s neck!’

  I looked. The woman simpered. It seemed to be some sort of star.

  ‘Not the one which guided the Wise Men?’ I said.

  My uncle Hugh pressed his finger to his lips and winked. ‘I admit that may not be genuine,’ he said. ‘There’s another in Edinburgh just like it.’

  ‘And my father?’ I said.

  ‘My prize,’ said uncle Hugh. ‘The best yet. My most miraculous.’ He took a pouch from his waist. He handed me a sort of sausage, all wrapped in wool and wadding. ‘You’ll never guess.’

  I did not want to.

  ‘The finger of St Thomas Didymus!’ cried my uncle Hugh in triumph. ‘Just think, boy, that finger touched the wound in our Saviour’s side.’

  I handed him the pouch again. ‘Where is my father?’ I said wearily. But I knew the answer.

  ‘Dead,’ said my uncle. ‘Your father’s dead.’

  I sat down on the steps of the house. I wept. The tears trickled down my fingers and fell through my hands and drowned a spider. It was one of my mother’s speckled spiders. They had been busy breeding ever since the bad days of the plague. Spiders thrived on the Black Death.

  Seeing the spider made me dry my eyes and go and look for my mother. She had quit the family house and married a man called Farewell. One thing about my mother, even when she set fire to the arras or gave birth to puppy dogs on the hall floor – she always kept her sense of humour.

  I found Mrs Farewell in good health. She assured me that the house at Caister would be mine when I came of age. It was my father’s bequest. No, my father had not wanted me to be a monk. My mother indeed was horrified when she heard where I had been. She had imagined that I was still in Mowbray’s retinue as a squire. That nice twat had reported merely that I was ‘away on business’ when she made enquiries after me.

  Not, it must be admitted, that she had made so many enquiries. Her new husband occupied her days and nights very thoroughly. I gathered that they were generally to be found in bed together, going at it hammer-and-tongs.

  I had an unsatisfactory interview with my mother, during which she offered most of her answers from beneath the bedclothes while my stepfather Farewell said nothing but professed many a grunt and grumble of achievement as she kept up a running flow of chatter directed towards me.

  Of this interview, I remember only one thing. I had asked my mother what my father died of.

  ‘Laughing,’ she said.

  ‘Laughing at what?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ she said.

  I liked this.

  Placut dropped down dead when he had to pay a bill.

  Saufeius choked to death on an under-boiled egg.

  Aeschylus met his end when an eagle flying overhead dropped a tortoise it was carrying and the tortoise fell on Aeschylus’s bald head and broke his skull.

  Titus Haterius died bending to kiss the hand of his wife.

  The soothsayer Chalchas died of laughter at the thought that he had just outlived the hour he had predicted for his own death.

  But my father died of laughing at nothing in particular.

  Chapter Twenty

  How Sir John Fa
stolf undressed himself of his suit of virgin white

  19th April

  Venus and death go hand in hand. There is always a lot of fucking after a flood or a fire, or in time of war. Pistol roaring drunk down a Paris street, doublet undone, no need of a sword, his prick sticking out as big and red as Bardolph’s nose. In France, I can tell you, men ran wild for women after Agincourt and Verneuil and the other great battles. Perhaps it was the relief of finding yourself still alive. It made you want to celebrate that life. But I suspect a deeper cause. What does a child do when he is frightened? He runs to his mother, and hides his face in her lap. When the child is disguised as a man he runs to any woman not his mother. Death makes a man a child again.

  In no other way, by no further preliminary, can I explain the swift loss of my virginity upon my learning of my father’s death. You may say, when you have heard the tale of its losings, that the matter hung upon opportunity. That is always true. But there had been opportunity before. If I had been too young to do much to the maidservant Katharina, who had felt some of the potential of my cock when I was whipped by my tutor Ravenstone, then I had not been too young to mount one of my Lady Elizabeth’s maids of the bedchamber when I was forced by them into my sweet bondage as a woman, and shared a bed with them, and witnessed them in all kinds of inspiring attitudes. Several of those maids would have been glad of my services. They used to touch me and tickle me, finger me amorously in their sleep (when they were not fingering themselves), caress me and rub their naked bodies up against me when they thought that I was asleep. The Duchess of Norfolk herself might have opened her legs for me, if I had insisted upon the identity of my burgeoning manhood despite those female trappings …

  The fact is that on none of these occasions did I part company with my suit of virgin white. But soon after my knowledge of my father’s death, I did.

  It happened like this. My stepfather Farewell had a daughter by a previous marriage of his own. This daughter was now sixteen, the same age as I was. Her name was Ophelia.

  She was tall and fair, Ophelia, with hair that fell to the middle of her back. I could see the outline of eager breasts beneath her bodice, and her little bottom made a shape like two plums rubbing tight together as she walked. She had this habit of staring. Her eyes were big blue pools. She would sit and look at me – unflinching, curious, steady – until I felt uncomfortable. When she saw that I was disturbed, by some movement of my hands perhaps, or an involuntary stirring of my cloak, then she would smile a slow smile – her lips were very thin and very red – and shrug her delicate shoulders under the wispy stuff of her dress, and get up and leave the room.

  I suppose that technically she was my stepsister, but this did not cross my mind at the time I am telling of. Later, in any case, when it did – and it was Ophelia herself who pointed out the forbidden nature of the relationship to me, in her usual innocent and wondering and highly provocative way – it only lent a spice to our erotic dallyings. The feeling between us was entirely a question of Eros. Just after my return to Caister, it posed a very large question.

  Ophelia’s appetites had been whetted by what she had to witness in her father’s new married bed. For over a year this impressionable young girl had been dancing attendance on Farewell and my mother, and most of that time – from what I could work out – the couple had spent voluptuously between the sheets. When they felt hungry or thirsty, my stepfather would pull a bellrope and Ophelia had to tiptoe in with a tray for them to take refreshment. She told me that sometimes they were eating each other again before she could retire from the room. As I say, she was a curious, sweet kitten, Ophelia, with those big blue eyes that didn’t miss a thing. In the circumstances she was not over anxious to leave the room anyway.

  By the time that I came back to Caister she was palpably itching for a man. As for me, my spell in the monastery, following my exploits in the wars with Mowbray and my previous adventures in his wife’s bedchamber, had left me in a state of readiness for anything. Thus, at sixteen, and without benefit of figs – I needed none! – I was ready for Ophelia.

  The first night she came to my room, late, when I thought the house was all asleep. It was raining. I could hear the river. A fire burnt in the grate.

  Ophelia was wearing a blue silk nightgown, her hair braided up, and had come fresh from her bath.

  ‘Jack,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘I think I have a speck in my eye,’ she said. ‘Will you look?’

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and presented her face close to mine.

  ‘It’s in the left eye,’ she said. ‘Please, Jack, be careful. I know you’ll be careful. You have such careful hands.’

  I looked at her. I could see nothing unusual in her eye. Only myself reflected.

  Ophelia sat and stared at the fire. Infrequently, she blinked. A tear touched my fingers where they touched her cheek.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Am I hurting you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’

  That was that. The next night Ophelia came again. Her bare feet made a sucking sound against the floorboards as she crossed the room.

  ‘Jack,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t get to sleep,’ she said. ‘I think I have palpitations.’

  ‘Palpitations?’ I repeated stupidly.

  ‘My heart,’ she said. ‘Feel.’

  I had never felt a young girl’s heart before. Worcester, in case you don’t know, I had better explain that it is firm and white and has a pink nipple on the end of it. I could observe the virgin texture of Ophelia’s nipple through the blue silk of her nightgown. My fingers felt its pricking excitement.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. Then, as though surprised to hear herself saying such things, she whispered: ‘Rub it ever so softly.’

  ‘Like this?’ I said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘Goodnight.’

  When the third night came, I was determined on action. I was tired of her ‘Goodnights’ when things were just starting to get interesting for me and the bed clothes were beginning to perk up. The fire flickered in the grate. The wind sighed in the arras. Ophelia did not complain of anything in particular in any part of her person. She just sat primly on the bottom of my bed, her hand to her braided hair, and stared at me with those large liquid eyes that were like drops of sky.

  ‘Jack,’ she said at last.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Ophelia’s fingers played with an errant wisp. ‘What do you think it is,’ she said, ‘that keeps my father in bed all the time with your mother?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It can’t be sleep,’ Ophelia said. She was licking her thin red lips. Now she half-shut those bright eyes under lids of dreamy speculation. ‘I’ve listened to them at the keyhole,’ she said. ‘They make all kinds of noises that people wouldn’t make if they were asleep.’

  Then I realised the splendour of it. This beautiful girl – far from trying to seduce me – was not conversant with the commerce of lithe limbs at all. Her own untutored instincts had been indubitably tickled and aroused by her father’s goings on in the big bed with my mother, but she had no idea what amorousness was actually about. In that moment, observing her tender breasts quickly rising and falling with ignorant wishfulness under the blue silk nightgown, I determined to take Ophelia’s education in hand.

  I leapt from the bed.

  ‘Ophelia,’ I said, my hands covering my member.

  ‘Jack!’ she cried doubtfully.

  I removed my hands.

  ‘What do you think this is?’ I said.

  Ophelia’s eyes had been big before. Now I swear that they were hot blue whirlpools – Hellesponts of astonishment. Her mouth opened also, hungrily. ‘It’s a prick,’ she said, her lips pouting on the p and her teeth sounding the ck very precisely as her tongue moved against them.

  ‘Oho,’ I said, moving towards her, ‘then you’re not so innocent, aft
er all, my dear …’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, dodging. ‘Father has one like that. Only bigger.’

  This infuriated me. ‘Bigger?’ I cried. ‘Bigger than mine? Bigger than this? You just come here and we’ll see who’s got anything bigger than Fastolf’s fellow. It’ll be big enough for you, my kitten – that I promise.’

  Ophelia looked at me over her shoulder. Her hay-gold hair fell sideways, half-masking her flushed face. ‘For me?’ she said. ‘Why should I want it? What could I do with it? Don’t be silly, Jack. I know it’s just what you men piss with.’

  I leant against the wall and laughed, and laughed. Ophelia turned to face me. My member shook with the force of my laughter. The blue gaze of my stepsister never left it for a second. She was fascinated by the open display of an organ she had no doubt spent most of her girlhood imagining.

  I decided on mischief as the best policy. ‘But naturally,’ I said, folding my robe about me. ‘You’re not interested in that old hobby horse. You’ll have your own to play with.’

  Ophelia pouted. ‘Girls don’t have them, don’t you know?’ she said.

  I forced my face to express disbelief. ‘Everyone has them,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ cried Ophelia, ‘not at all. Look!’

  And, so saying, my sweet stepsister of sixteen did what I had hoped she would do – fell back prettily across my bed and drew up her nightgown to show me the loveliest little grotto sacred to the goddess Venus which (up to that early age) it had ever been my privilege to see, or to imagine in my hardest dreams.

  I knelt between her legs and kissed her there.

  ‘Greetings,’ I said. I kissed some more. ‘Is that nice?’

  Ophelia’s fingers plunged into my hair. My tongue probed her tight slit, licking and sucking. The little knob at the top inside was like a rose-bud. I nibbled at it. She was thrusting from side to side. Her bottom thumped the bed. ‘It’s delicious,’ she giggled. ‘Oh, oh—’ Then she pushed my head away from her thighs and suddenly sat bolt upright, her cheeks burning, her blue eyes ablaze.