by Robert Nye
The Hotspur. Who killed him?
First, the facts.
I faced the Earl of Douglas in single combat. You will recall that he lost an eye at the Battle of Holmedon. We met. We fought. He did not see me clearly. He gave me one thwack with the flat of his sword – which would no doubt have been to the point if he had enjoyed the benefit of two eyes. I fell. I lay. I was wounded.
Dry your nose, madam. Not dangerously wounded. Not severely even. Not so much as scratched in any useful part.
But wounded.
And winded.
And rather confused and concussed.
What with such a God Almighty fall coming on top of so much sack.
Now, while I was fighting with Douglas, I had spied Hal – oh yes, I have eyes in my arse, sir, like your dog Argus – and he was going at it hammer-and-tongs with the Hotspur.
As a matter of figgy fact, I remember distinctly trying to encourage the young prince – with some such remark as ‘Go to it, Hal!’ or ‘Give it to him Hal!’ – just before Douglas knocked me down, and then ran off.
What happened next I simply do not know. And nor does any of Clio’s minions. And the girl keeps her lips as tight shut as her pussy. Tighter.
What I do know is that as I began to come round from my concussion, I heard a voice like Harry Monmouth’s – but it seemed a million miles away – saying something about embowelling me. I suppose now, having thought it all out, that he took me for dead, and was looking forward in that grimly efficient Plantagenet way of his to the process of seeing the magnanimous belly of your author laid open to the public view for purpose of embalming.
But by the time I got up on one elbow to make some joke to the effect that if he had me embowelled today, I’d give him permission to steep me in brine and eat me like venison tomorrow – he was gone.
And that left me.
And the Hotspur.
Reader, I was dazed.
Reader, I was as a man returned from the dead.
Reader, for one moment I thought I was a ghost, a counterfeit. This flesh! I even touched my parts.
No. Not dead. All present and correct. I embraced my belly like a bride.
To die, I decided, that was to be made a counterfeit. No doubt I had saved my life by seeming to be dead in the one eye of hasty Douglas. Was it my fault he wore no monocle?
I had seemed to be dead, but that was not a counterfeit, for here I was now, alive. Such a counterfeit may be considered the true and perfect image of life.
The better part of valour is discretion.
In which better part I had saved my life.
But …
that still left …
HOTSPUR!!!
There he was. There he lay. He might be dead. He might not be dead. I might have been dead. I had not been dead. I had risen from the dead. What about if he now did the same?
I drank some sack and thought this problem out very very carefully I can tell you. Then I drank some more sack. And some more. I consulted the Three Fates, the Three Graces, the Three Harpies, the Three Sheets in the Wind, and the Muses that are three times three. My problem was thus gradually reduced by itself to these three heads:
1) Was Hotspur dead?
2) If Hotspur was dead, who killed him?
3) If Hotspur was not dead, who was going to kill him?
I realised in a blinding flash of sack that by answering the third and final question, I could settle the other two.
So, sir – (and, madam, please skip this bit) – I drew my sword and stabbed him in the thigh!
Yes – as quick as it would take you to piss, sir.
Then I drank some more sack three or three times and reconsidered the situation, going over my accounts as you might say:
1) Hotspur was now definitely dead.
2) If he had not been dead before I killed him, then I had killed Hotspur.
3) There was no further point in anyone else killing Hotspur.
These matters clear, I took it upon myself to take upon my back this mighty Honour. I mean, Worcester, I picked him up and carried him round my shoulders like a dead deer.
And this is where the story gets confused. (Before, remember, only I was confused.) For in striding from the field with Hotspur across my shoulders I met the Prince of Wales, and he immediately launches into some complicated rigmarole about me being dead, and him having killed Hotspur.
‘Lord, Lord,’ I said, in the heat of the moment, ‘how this world is given to lying!’
I regretted the words the moment I had said them. They were words for which Harry Monmouth never forgave me. They were also unfair words.
Hal may have killed the Hotspur.
He thought he had. He apparently left him for dead.
But then he apparently left me for dead too. And if he was wrong about me, how can anyone be sure he was right about Hotspur?
But he never forgave me for what he considered a lie.
And he never forgave me for the implication that his claim to Hotspur’s killing might be a lie.
I appeal to you, Clio. And to our posteriors.
Gentle Reader, in whatever age you live … Turn to your wives and your servants. Ask them to fetch you a volume of the history of this century in which I have lived. Turn to the Battle of Shrewsbury and see for yourself if any dispassionate hack has come up with a definite answer to that puzzle: Who killed Hotspur?
I lay you 100 to 7 that History will say it is an Open Question.
More curiously and subtly – though it is a thing I cannot prove – I estimate the odds in reverse, at about 100 to 7 on, that Prince Hal bore me a grudge to his dying day, either because I sowed seeds of doubt in his mind and his courage, by making him think that perhaps it was not his own blow that had killed Hotspur, but mine after all; or because he just crudely resented the fact that anyone, and maybe especially me, should have even put forward his name as alternative hero.
Hal had his heart set on high heroism now. His dad had watched him from the hilltop. He had won his spurs. More, he had won Hotspur’s spurs. Or had he?
He never forgave me for being the one gentleman in England who provided the living excuse for those three little words: Or had he?
If you think I belabour the point, be assured that I do so for the sake of making clear something which is still to come. Namely, the base ingratitude of this same Prince Hal. He had no motive for his later treatment of me. Only this one. This matter of Who killed Hotspur?
Worcester, I confess I erred. In the heat of battle. At the end of that long day at Shrewsbury plain, when the wind would not stop blowing. Oh I can still hear it howling in the sedge, and the screams of the horses, the groans of the dying, the endless drum that beat and beat all night. And, search as they might, no one could find out the drummer.
I should have allowed that Hotspur was killed by a man in a buckram suit.
Heliogabalus, madam?
Heliogabalus was Hotspur turned inside out.
Heliogabalus was Hal turned upside down.
To hell with Heliogabalus.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
About St Swithin, Mrs Quickly, & the Lord Chief Justice
St Swithin’s Day
It’s raining, of course. Out there, and in here.
Hanson and Nanton, my two pretty boys.
One writes one sentence for me.
And the other the next.
Well, it makes a change. And it keeps their fingers out of the treasury of my Miranda.
You know the reason for St Swithin’s Day? He was Bishop of Winchester, and when he died (in the year of our At-one-ment 862), he wanted to be buried in the churchyard of the minster, for he loved the sweet rain, like St Francis, the rain was his sister, hey ho, the gentle rain. But when he was canonised the monks thought it was not right that a saint should be left in the common earth, under the open sky. So they translated Swithin’s body into the choir, and they fixed this day, 15th July, for his feast day. But Swithin was not comfortable in t
he cathedral choir. He wanted the stars and the moon and the sun and the green green grass, and above all he wanted the rain which is sometimes like grace itself falling from heaven. So he had a word or two with whatever Weather Angel orders these things, and from that 15th July of his removal into the choir at Winchester it rained day after day for forty days, until even the monks got the point and moved his bones back.
I think of him as christening the apples.
St Swithin is also the patron saint of drunkards.
Blessed Swithin, pray for me.
The rebellion was put down. The King was sick. I met the Lord Chief Justice in the street, and while conceding that my day’s work in the field at Shrewsbury had proved more to his liking and his understanding than my night’s exploit on Gadshill, he saw fit to remark:
‘God send the Prince a better companion!’
But I knew that the wind that had started blowing at dawn on that Shrewsbury field had not finished blowing yet, and blowing no good for me.
‘God send the companion a better Prince!’ I answered.
Things seemed to go from bad to worse. Mrs Quickly, my good mistress Ursula, my nice Dame Partlet the hen, in one of her sillier moods, engaged a couple of sheriff’s officers, Fang and Snare, to arrest me for debt and breach of promise. We met in Lombard Street. Bardolph was all for cutting off Fang’s head, and throwing Nell Quickly in the Thames. Some choice abuse –
‘You scullion!’
‘You rampallian!’
‘You fustilarian!’
‘I’ll tickle your catastrophe!’
– was interrupted only by the arrival of the Lord Chief Justice again, who was taking his duties quite seriously at this time, and patrolling the streets with his men on the look-out for any disturbance of the King’s peace.
‘I am a poor widow of Eastcheap,’ Nell cried dramatically, ‘and he is arrested at my suit.’
‘For what sum?’
‘For all I have,’ said Nell. ‘He has eaten me out of house and home.’
Tear-jerking stuff, I agree. There was sadder to come.
‘What is the gross sum that I owe you?’ I asked quietly.
And off she went …
If I were an honest man, she declared, I owed her myself and my money as well. She claimed that I had sworn to marry her (hadn’t we all?). But she remembered the occasion so vividly that I came to quite hazily remember it too. At a round table. By a sea-coal fire. In the Dolphin chamber at the Boar’s Head tavern. A Wednesday in Whitsun week. When Hal had hit me on the head for saying that his father was like the lowest form of human life, your choirboy. And when she, Nell, had been washing my wound. Oh, there was a good deal else of circumstantial evidence – we had been offered, at the time, a dish of prawns by a butcher’s wife called Keech, and Nell had prevented me from eating them, on the grounds that they would aggravate my wound. And I had kissed her. And then borrowed thirty shillings.
The same old story.
I was very fond of Nell. She was very fond of me. We had these little differences of interpretation. They were no business of the Lord Chief Justice.
I sighed, and smiled, and took her on one side.
Within a minute I had persuaded her to dry her tears and pawn her plate and her tapestries. I was suffering from a consumption of the purse.
‘We owe God a death,’ I whispered in her ear.
‘Oh Jack! Don’t speak of it! No more of that!’
I kissed her.
‘Well, we owe him a life as well,’ I said, laughing. ‘And that is a debt I will willingly pay with you, lovingly pay with you, pay with you better than any man living.’
Nell’s eyes were meteors now.
‘Come to supper,’ she said.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘Doll Tearsheet?’ she said.
I touched my finger to her lips. ‘No more words,’ I said. ‘Let’s have her.’
Needless to say, the Lord Chief Justice didn’t know what to make of it. Lord Chief Justices don’t.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
About Doll Tearsheet & a night at the Boar’s Head
16th July
Figs are figs and apple-johns are apple-johns. That was the first blot on a merry evening later marred by certain droppings from the eaves in the Boar’s Head. I noticed the drawers withdrawing with a dish of apple-johns. I was once in company with Hal and five of these dry little, round little, withered old fruits. He took off his hat and said goodnight to the six of us. I can’t endure the sight of apple-johns. Your apple-john stands in for impotence.
My adorable Doll had drunk a good deal of canary.
‘Drink canaries, dance canaries,’ Nell Quickly was half-prattling, half-chanting, as I rolled into the Dolphin Chamber. ‘Canary wine / is very fine / a drink to make you dance!’
‘Bloody piss,’ said Doll. ‘From the Isle of Dogs.’
‘Explain her, Jack,’ Nell begged me, trying to get Doll to lie down on a carved couch by the fire. ‘Explain her that your canaries is not from the Isle of Dogs.’
Insula graunt Caneree. But that was a far cry from the mucky spot where King Edward III had kept his greyhounds. Canerees veluti insula de graunt Caneree. And your word canary, Ravenstone saying, as in Canaria insula (Isle of Dogs) certainly coming from Pliny’s canarius, formed on canis, your dog. AND the four Princes arguing that night in this same tavern (how many snows ago, now?) on the subject of islands off Africa. Which certainly included your Grand Canary. Lord, Lord, the amount of intolerable information a man is enabled by kind Providence to forget until a lady asks him a question!
Neither of the same ladies looking at this moment very capable of imbibing etymologies, I sang them instead my song of King Arthur. One of my songs of King Arthur:
When good King Arthur ruled this land,
He was a goodly king;
He stole three pecks of barley-meal
To make a bag-pudding.
‘That’s true poetry,’ said Mrs Quickly. ‘I always liked a bit of true poetry. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. I mean to say – it’s an escape from your personalities, isn’t it?’ She belched. ‘How do you feel now, Doll?’ she asked tenderly, looking in her handbag for sal volatile, and emptying out carraways, cummin seed, two green cheeses, a stick of liquorice, a tiny pepper-quern, a rosary, a carrot, and a volley of prunes and raisons. Also a bottle of aqua vitae.
‘Better,’ said Doll, ‘than I was.’ She settled for the aqua vitae, sitting down finally by the fire, and shaking off her slippers to warm her pretty little toes.
A bag-pudding the king did make,
And stuffed it well with plums;
And in it put great lumps of fat,
As big as my two thumbs.
‘Sweetheart,’ said Mrs Quickly, combing Doll’s hair – (Doll’s hair was the colour of golden bread) – ‘Sweetheart, your cheeks are red as roses now, and that’s the truth. But, no more the same of that, you have drunk too much canaries, and that’s a marvellous searching wine, and it perfumes the blood before you can say, “What’s this?”’
‘Hem!’ said Doll. By which she meant to cough and hiccough and drink a new toast in her aqua vitae – all in the one three-letter word. And succeeded. Such power in wine! New thresholds, new anatomies! The singing canary had flown round the whole aviary of her being.
The king and queen did eat thereof,
And noblemen beside;
And what they could not eat that night,
The queen next morning fried.
They laughed and clapped, they clapped and laughed, Doll and Nell, the two of them, my sweet ladies, my dear companions.
I held my nose. ‘Empty the jordan,’ I said. ‘It smells like one of the fleshpots of Egypt.’
‘Did you say fleshprosts of Eastchept?’ demanded Mrs Quickly.
‘I did not,’ I said. ‘That was a man in another song and dance. An Irishman.’
We started to quarrel and chaff, my Doll and I.
‘O Jesu, ju
st like old times,’ Nell murmured contentedly. ‘You two never meet but you have to fall out before you fall in. You rub each other up like two bits of dry toast.’ She pranced about the chamber, looking for all the world like a sacred cow, since she was wearing one of those monstrous head-dresses the ladies liked just then, with a great horn curving upwards at each ear.
Doll, my Doll, sweeter and simpler in her thin blue petticoat, poked me in the belly with the aqua vitae bottle. ‘Nevermind dry. There’s a whole cargo of Bordeaux wine in there!’ she laughed. ‘I’ve not seen a hulk better stuffed to the hold!’
‘Talking of stuffing—’
‘Now, Jack!’
‘And holding—’
Doll slapped playfully at my codpiece with her slipper. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be friends with you, Jack.’
We played hunt the slipper down her petticoat. I rubbed her titties. I stripped down her clothes to her waist, and bounced her plump breasts in the palms of my hands. Doll had tits like cannon balls. The fire sparkled. The wine sparkled. I sparkled. Doll sparkled. Mrs Quickly seemed to be having a sparkling good time too, just watching us, and sparkling herself.
All this brilliance was interrupted by a sudden eruption in the room downstairs. I heard a noise like a cross between a bull-calf and a volcano, and someone stamping up and down. That could only mean one thing.
Pistol.
Now, my man Pistol was a decent sort of rogue, as I’ve explained. He was a swaggerer, that is true. He was a roaring boy. Or, rather, a roaring old boy. Or bore. Always going on about his battles and his bastinadoes and what have you. But he was my Ancient, and my ensign, and as a matter of fact this is the place to celebrate him as the one – out of the whole lot of us who promised to, at some time or another – who actually went and married Mrs Quickly. Whether that was valour or discretion or sheer bloody stupidity, I refrain from guessing.
Anyhow, Pistol wanted to join us now. Pistol sniffed action and wanted a piece of it. Doll was all for hanging him. But I was all for getting him bolstered up in a focative sense with Mrs Quickly. That would give Doll and me a little peace for some pranks. Or some paddling. Or whatever you care to call it, madam.
