Christopher Uptake

by Susan Price

  I returned to my seat and, while I finished my drink; took the necklace from round my neck and examined it. The beads were dark brown, black-grained, and joined with delicate links of silver chain. Two circular, silver medallions were set into the beads one showing a seated woman, encircled by stars and holding something on her lap; and the other a haloed man with something in his hand. Hanging from the centre, on a thread of silver chain, was a silver Christ on a black, wooden cross.

  It occurred to me, as it should have done much sooner, that I had bought a rosary, something I had read about, but could never remember having seen until the moment I realized what the necklace really was. I had been told that rosaries were for throttling Protestants, but otherwise knew little or nothing about their use. I hung it round my neck again as I left the tavern, and carefully arranged it on the front of my jacket. As I went through the door, I looked up to see the tavern's name. I thought that my meeting with the old Catholic would make a good story to tell at my own local.

  I did tell the story once or twice, as amusingly as I could, and I took the necklace from round my neck for my listeners to see. One of them, a man named Trudgeover, who had been raised as a Catholic, confirmed my guess that it was a rosary, and even showed me how to use it, chanting 'Hail Mary's in Latin, and counting them on the black beads.

  "They're not for throttling Protestants, then?" I said. "I'm disappointed."

  Trudgeover shook his head, smiling, before coiling the rosary into the palm of his hand and giving it to me.

  "They don't throttle Protestants; they stab 'em in the back," someone else said.

  "On a Saint's day," someone added, and all the other arguments that you commonly hear began to come out. It was like the Papists' pride to think that only they could speak to God - and their priests all with knives in their sleeves, going straight from Mass to arrange a poisoning.

  Thank God England was free of it! And these English Catholics, if they loved the Pope so much, why didn't they go and live in France, or Spain, or Italy?

  Trudgeover said nothing. I don't think he was a very religious man, but he remembered the time when England had been Catholic, as probably no one else present could.

  "Yes, Catholics are vile," I said. "They murder Protestant children and drain their blood into the chalice to use as sacrificial wine in their Mass."

  Trudgeover made a huffing noise, but everyone else looked at me in varying degrees of disbelief and amazement. "And then they chop up the bloodless carcasses to make the Host," I said. "That's what they mean by offering up the body and the blood."

  More disbelief and amazement, and a brief silence.

  Then one of them said, "Oh, come on," and glanced quickly at Trudgeover, who laughed. The others realized that they had been led on and and that made them angry with me.

  "What's the matter with you, Chris?'' one of them asked. "Are you turning Papist?'' I couldn't answer him because I had begun to laugh, which made Trudgeover laugh again. The believing, horrified faces of the others had been very funny.

  "It's something new to hear you defending a Christian, even a Catholic, isn't it, Chris?" someone asked tartly.

  "Mohammedans, Jews - any heathens, yes."

  "What happened to our proud new Atheism?''

  I said to Trudgeover, "Now they're going to persecute me for not believing in a god."

  "If you don't believe in God, why do you side with the Catholics?"

  I walked away, leaving them to slander me. I was in another Tavern, The White Hart, when I was joined by a stranger who asked if I was Christopher Uptake. I said that I was, and he asked if I had written The Hawksmere Joiner. When I said that I had, he told me that it was a play he had much enjoyed, and could he buy me a meal?

  I quickly accepted. George had taught me never to let such an opportunity pass, and besides, I feel an antagonism toward those who tell me they have ‘enjoyed my play'. I suspect them of lying for their own ends. I don't mind taking from them whatever I can get.

  We talked as we waited for the food to be brought. He asked me some questions about the theatre, which I answered as briefly as possible before asking him what he did. He said that I wouldn't be interested in his work; he was only a draper.

  I was interested in all work, I said, provided that I didn't have to do it, and then he told me about his job. I began to wonder why he was trying so hard to convince me that he was a draper. The detail was being built up and each detail was being presented - 'Would anyone but a draper know this?' - just as I would build up and present details to convince an audience that the actor they had last seen playing a priest was now, for two hours at least, a gunner or an alchemist.

  This man wants to convince me that he is a draper, I thought, because he is not a draper - but that was ridiculous. Why would anyone want to be thought a draper if he was not? We had broken open the tops of our meat-pies to let them cool, and his lecture on the drapery trade came to an end when he started to eat. For a short while we both ate without speaking; then the draper said, "Weren't you in the Bear earlier?"

  "I usually go to the Bear," I said. If he should want to buy me another meal, he’d know where to find me.

  "I thought it was you. Talking to some friends, weren't you - about Catholics?"

  “I did mention Catholics, several times," I said. "Why should that interest you? Are you a Catholic?''

  "Yes," he said, to my surprise. "I've been trying for months to find other Catholics." I looked at him. I didn't believe him. "I'd be willing to pay you if you could put me in touch with them," he said. "Can you give me an idea of where to find them?"

  I put down my spoon and stared at him, trying to guess if he was lying, but it is impossible to tell, except with a child.

  "I'll pay you to help me," he said. ''Two nobles for everything you tell me. I overheard you say that you met a man..."

  "Yes," I said

  "A young man or an old man?"

  "Just a man."

  "I thought I overheard you say 'an old man'" the draper said, and before I could ask why he needed me when he obviously knew everything, he put two nobles down on the table in front of me. "Now . . . What did he look like?"

  Thirty shillings for saying nothing - and suppose that he was a Catholic, looking for other Catholics? What harm could describing the old man do in that case? "He was an ordinary old man," I said. "What more can I say about him?"

  "How old was he?"

  "I don't know."

  "About how old? Fifty? Sixty? Older?'' He took more coins from his pocket.

  "I don't know," I said.

  He sighed, then held up two more nobles. "What about the name of the tavern where you met him? Come on - the tavern's name, that's all - for another thirty shilling."

  What if I did name the tavern? It couldn't bring him any closer to that particular old man. Dozens of old men must use it. "The Old Vine."

  "The Old Vine in Hoxton Lane?"

  "Mmmm.'' I said, leaving it vague.

  He put the two nobles on the table, stood, and said, "I'll leave you to finish your pie."

  I leaned across the table to stop him leaving, and said, "He was about sixty - he looked well-heeled . . . He had white hair." The draper turned, his hand in his pocket, took out two more nobles and put them into the hand I had stretched out to stop him. Then he went away.

  I leaned back against the wall behind me, holding those last two coins. I had panicked at the sight of all that money going away. I felt guilty at first, but then remembered that I had no real reason to suspect the man to be anything other than the Catholic draper he claimed to be and, even if he had been lying, the description I had given him couldn't help him very much - but it had earned me six nobles.

  I was determined to enjoy the money and forget how I had earned it, and so I invited George to spend the evening with me. He seemed much better than when I had last seen him, so I took him out and bought him a chop, and then played on his bad memory by insisting that he had lent me a pound a we
ek before, and that I was now repaying him. I saw him home that night, because he was more drunk than I was, and stayed with him a while before returning to my own lodgings, where I found a note from Dick Hobson, scribbled on one of my sheets of paper, asking me to see him the next morning. I guessed that he wanted me to rewrite another play, and had half a mind not to go since I had money in my pocket, but I knew that money would not last forever and I could ill afford to offend Dick.

  Still, I didn't go to see him until five the next afternoon, when I knew that the morning rehearsals and the play would be over. I entered the theatre by its small back door, and went into the prop-room.

  The room was gloomy, and crowded with the ordinary and peculiar things needed for the stage: tables and chairs, stacked or pushed close together; fireworks, cupboards, cauldrons, stuffed bears, pots of basil and clay fruit. I couldn’t see Dick, so wandered between the furniture and looming, hanging costumes until I reached the table where the actors sat to paint their faces.

  A mirror was propped on the table, leaning against the wall behind it. It reflected the underside of my chin, and my face, crookedly, above it. Powder was scattered over the table's scratched and chopped surface, turning to mud in pools of spilt water. A bowl of cooling, grey water stood at one end of the table, a layer of grease, hairs and sloughed-off skin floating on its surface. I grew tired of watching the grease and hairs circle the bowl, and called out for Dick.

  He came from behind the wooden screen which was sometimes used to suggest a ship's cabin, or a king's private chamber, or any other small, enclosed space. He carried a red velvet jacket, shaking it out and dusting it.

  "You took your time," he said. "And how has life been treating you, Chris?"

  "As it usually treats me. Better than it treats George Childes."

  "I'm glad to hear that, glad to hear it," he said, and held the red jacket against his chest. "For tomorrow's play."

  "What is it you want us to rewrite now?'' I asked.

  "Nothing - I have something for you. You remember Edmund Brentwood?''

  "Oh - he gave me a crown," I said.

  "Well, he's giving you a bit more than a crown this time." He pulled open a drawer in the make-up table, took out a packet and passed it to me. "I wouldn't open it until you're home, if I were you."

  I turned the packet over in my hands. "What is it?"

  “What do you think? It’s so you can go on writing. He said it was to help and encourage you."

  "Does he always say that?'' I asked.

  "I don't know - Chris, I want to go home tonight, if you don't." So we went out into the street, where Dick wished that God would be with me, and I hoped that God would stay with him.

  When I reached my lodgings I took my knife from my belt and cut open the parcel. Inside was a letter, wrapped round a small, square box, and inside the box were fourteen pounds. I spread out the letter and read it.

  'Edmund Brentwood presents his compliments to Master Christopher Uptake, and hopes that he will do him the honour of accepting the enclosed gift, which is tendered as inadequate payment for the pleasure which Brentwood received from his reading of Master Uptake's plays. It is Brentwood's sincere wish that Master Uptake may write many more plays, and if there is any service which Brentwood can do him, then Master Uptake must believe him to be,

  Edmund

  his obedient servant,

  EDMUND BRENTWOOD.'

  I could not be displeased, but I was not sure what to think. The money would keep me for months, and I had been given it in appreciation of my writing! I could not believe that. Most of my writing had been in collaboration with George, and it had been very bad. This Brentwood, I began to think. must be mad and so I wasted no time in spending his money.

  First, I went to see George and repaid another imaginary debt to him, because I didn’t like to think of his being without money, and then I packed up my things and went home to Hawksmere, away from the town and all its noise, dirt, stink, crowds and walls.

  The visit was a failure. No one had expected me. My stepmother behaved as if my sudden arrival had caught her out in some wrong-doing - or perhaps she was embarrassed because she was pregnant.

  My sisters, in growing older, had grown more shy, and would hardly look at me; and if I had not faithfully believed that, because he was my father, my father loved me, I should have thought that he hated me. He was displeased because I knew nothing about joinery; he disapproved of my writing, my clothes, my way of speaking. He loathed the earring I wore, and the length of my hair. He made it clear, by grunting or sneering, or by a look, that he thought me, and my opinions, contemptible.

  Nor could I find any pleasure outside the house. There was all the space I had longed for in the town: no walls, no narrow lanes clogged with filth, no crashing, roaring noise - but as soon as I had the space, the clean air, the quiet, I no longer wanted it. I was bored. I was uneasy, as if something were always standing close by my shoulder.

  Alone in a field, my muscles would twitch as if at a touch, and I would turn quickly to look behind me. I did not stay a fortnight at Hawksmere before running home to the town again.

  A few days later I was in the Bear when someone asked, "What hangs about, smells of incense, and steams?''

  The answer was, "A Catholic priest,'' and someone else said, "Chris was out of town when it happened!'' They all began to tell me. A secret chapel had been found. Twenty Catholics had been arrested, and a priest.

  They'd been planning to burn down shops and churches, and they'd been smuggling priests into the country. They'd all be executed, probably.

  "Where?'' I asked. They looked at me, not understanding why I had interrupted. "Where were they arrested? Near the Old Vine?'

  No one knew. But one man had been using his home as a Catholic chapel, that they did know, and it had been searched, and the things for a Mass had been found. The owner of the house had been questioned, and then the other arrests had been made.

  I soon left, and walked through the streets to my lodgings, conscious of having taken a blow I did not yet feel. There was the numbness of a heavy blow in my belly, and I breathed as if against a weight.

  I reached my lodgings, went up to my room, and sat on the bed. 'The owner of the house had been questioned, and then the other arrests had been made.' I turned cold, as if I had been standing, wet and naked, in a wind; my scalp prickled as if stung by sweat. Twenty Catholics arrested - through the information I had sold?*

  I had known, I had known as I had taken the money, that I was not helping a lonely Catholic to find other Catholics, but selling information to an informer. I had sold twenty people, each one of them as helplessly bound in their own flesh, nerves and bones as I was in mine, and I had made it possible for them to be questioned, imprisoned, and perhaps executed.

  I had no proof, or even much reason to suspect, that my information had led to their arrest. The old man whom I had met might not have been connected with the arrested Catholics and even if he had been, my information could not have been much help to the authorities.

  But did that matter? If twenty people were in pain and fear while I was sitting there on my bed, did it matter what excuses I made for myself? Their pain and fear remained unaltered.

  I was icy cold; I was startled and terrified at what I had done - but did my small discomfort ease their suffering? What on this earth could I do to help or soothe them? I had spent the money I had earned by informing on them; even if I had not, would giving or throwing away the coins I had been paid for the information change anything? Would it make me less guilty?

  What could I do - did I make the laws? I didn't spy and listen and ask for information. Could I help it if others did?

  I drew my hand down my face from brow to chin and felt the large ridges of bone under my eyes. I got up and walked about. I touched, by accident, the rosary I still wore, dragged it over my head and threw it down.

  I went out, thinking that I could distract myself by looking at the shops and
markets, but I was mistaken.

  A priest had been arrested too. He would certainly be executed, since Catholic priests had to instruct English Catholics to be ready to overthrow Queen and government. As a traitor he would be first hung up by the neck, then cut down alive, then ripped open, then beheaded, and his body divided into quarters and exhibited on gibbets.

  My mouth gaped, pulled open by my stiffening face. My imagination hung quartered bodies on gibbets, and in my imagination I saw them far more vividly than I had remembered them before - and no amount of thinking on other, pleasanter matters allowed me to sleep.