The Pilgrim

by Hugh Nissenson

  I said, “And my cloak? What think you of my cloak?”

  “You fished fair and caught a frog, as the saying is.”

  “I am in your hands. Fashion me anew from top to toe.”

  “I want only to make your heart grow full, like the moon.”

  I wrote my uncle Roger the good news, and he congratulated me in the return post, “Yes, my dear boy, may your heart grow full, like the moon. A fine simile!”

  Sarah accompanied me to buy a new hat, a new suit, and a new pair of shoes. Appletree and I spent two months searching for a house in Westminster. We found one in Axe Yard that was three storeys high. It had seven chambers, including the work chamber on the ground floor. There were two brick fireplaces, a cellar, gables at the front, and a well in the back. The ceilings were plastered. Rigdale, who knew something of carpentry, said it was solidly built with a goodly timber frame. I found two large cracks in the casement windows on the second floor.

  The owner asked sixteen pounds a year for rent; we agreed upon twelve. He said he would have the windows repaired at his expense. I agreed to take possession of the house upon the first day of the August following.

  I signed a contract with Rigdale to make Sarah and me furniture for a total of twenty-three pounds: a four-poster bed that we would hang with green serge, a dining table, six joint stools, a bench, and two cupboards. We decided to keep her oaken chest at the foot of our bed and cover the wattle walls with painted blue cloths.

  I also hired Rigdale to make four desks and six stools for my working chamber, and bought a goodly amount of paper, ink, and pens.

  My Sarah said, “When we are married, we shall plumb each other’s depths and find such new things therein that rival the discoveries of the New World.”

  Three weeks following, we went to Rigdale’s shop to watch him at work upon our bed. He was making a strong mortise-and-tenon joint, with fish glue and wooden dowels. Thereafter, I said to my Sarah, “We shall soon lie abed, taking pleasure in each other as man and wife, according to the ordinances of God. May our bodily delight be a temporal intimation of our eternal spiritual union with Christ, the husband of our souls.

  “And may it bring us children, my beloved. I do so want your children to love.”

  Providence, though, decreed that my Sarah had less than one month to live.

  On the morning of the second of June, while paring the nail of her left forefinger with a pair of scissors, she cut away a piece of flesh around the nail on its right side. Two days thereafter, the little wound was red, hot, swollen, and painful.

  Sarah felt feverish and took to her bed. Applegate summoned Dr. Nicholas Bunn. He said the wound was sorely inflamed and prescribed a slender, diluting diet, plentiful bleeding, and repeated purges. The skin around her nail grew very tense and caused her great pain. On the doctor’s instructions, I constantly bathed it with a mixture of sweet oil and vinegar and afterwards covered it with a piece of wax plaster.

  The morning following, she said to me, “My fever is rising. My finger greatly pains me. My whole body resides there, within each throb. Give me more laudanum, my beloved. Thank you, yes. Ah, thank you! A good thing, laudanum, a most excellent thing. Thank God for laudanum, though it constipates me.

  “Such a little thing—a snip of my scissors. I looked away, for an instant, at a stain upon my sleeve, and snip! ’Tis the little things upon which life and death turn. One little snip, and I am done. Yes, I will die, as you shall see. Mine was a short, sad life until I fell in love with you. Tell me the truth. Were you falling in love with me during our last months together?”

  “I was.”

  “God hath apportioned me to spend eternity with Him among His saints. I am saved. I knew it for sure upon that Sabbath, after church. It began to snow. Some flakes melted upon my tongue. I said, ‘Bliss!’ Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “I have here your mother’s gloves. Keep them in remembrance of me and give them as a token to the woman whom you shall marry. Yes, you will marry, Charles. We shall not be husband and wife in heaven. That vexes me.”

  Her fever increased during the night, and the tumor on her finger grew larger. She suffered violent pain. I remained awake and tried to promote the tumor to suppurate with a soft poultice. Toward noon, she said, “Tell me again that you were falling in love with me in those few months we had together.”

  “My sweet Sarah, I love you now.”

  “Why, look you, my big, tall man weeps! I never saw you weep, Charles. Yes, weep, my beloved, my dearly betrothed. Weep! I shall take your tears with me to my grave as tokens of your love.”

  All during those four days and nights, at different times, on a sudden, I felt compelled to pray, “O Christ, restore my Sarah’s health.” The words welled up within me, unbidden, while I wiped my nose or changed her poultice. Once, to my shame, I prayed in the midst of making water; my prayer and my piss streamed together from my vile body, one heavenward and one into the chamber pot.

  The doctor came again and said, “See the thinness of skin about the wound? The abscess is ripe for opening.” He sliced it with his lancet, to a great profusion of blood and pus. The inflammation became livid. Little bladders oozing green and yellow ichors spread all over the skin. The tumor subsided, and for an hour or so, I hoped for the best. Then her whole forefinger turned black.

  My Sarah said, “I bit my tongue,” and became insensible. Her pulse quickened, she had the clammy sweats, and at seven in the morning of the ninth of June in the year of Christ 1619, she died at nineteen years of age.

  Someone shrieked. I looked about me. It was I. I shrieked again. Then I was benumbed. I neither grieved for Sarah, nor rejoiced in her salvation. I had no pity for her father mourning the death of the last of his three daughters.

  In the churchyard, by the open grave, Mistress Appletree clasped her spaniel to her bosom. Sarah’s swelled black finger was ever in my mind. I thought of her rotting in her grave and cursed God.

  The owner of the house in the Axe Yard agreed to cancel my lease. I forfeited the one pound I had given him on account. Rigdale showed me the furniture he had made. Even the four-poster bed summoned no emotion in me. Rigdale promised to try to sell everything and return my money; I did not care.

  I went to St. Dunstan in the East with Rigdale every Sabbath, and we alternated reading a portion of Scripture aloud in the evenings. He favored the Psalms, saying, “I like to sweeten my mouth with a Psalm before going to sleep.”

  I said, “I am utterly estranged from God. I will burn in hell.”

  I returned my dowry to Appletree and continued working as his clerk. I took my breakfasts, dinners, and suppers at The Sign of the Bear and Ragged Staff. I ate only calf, wether mutton, and rabbit stew, according to Doctor Troth’s prescription for melancholy. The meat had lost its savour for me. I drank aunt Eliza’s decoction of hollyhocks, violet leaves, and fennel, together with a bottle of sack at supper and dinner.

  At The Sign of the Bear and Ragged Staff, Hendy and his companions reveled with the plump, muddy whores. One evening, two drunken boy prostitutes, about fifteen years of age, smutted each other with candle grease and soot. I watched them in the smoky room as from afar. I saw myself as at a distance: my drooping feather, filthy cloak, and ragged beard. I felt sundered from myself and the world.

  After supper, I wandered round Westminster and the City, visiting again and again those places where Sarah and I had spent time together. Neither the linen shop on Bridge Street, nor a walk under the oaks in St. James Park, brought tears to my eyes.

  One rainy afternoon in November, while walking abroad in Candlewick Street, I met by chance one of my former Cambridge chamber mates named Richard Witt, who was from Sussex. We repaired to a tavern. He told me that he had a lectureship in religion at St. Sepulchre’s Church, endowed by a rich London linen merchant, that paid thirty pounds a year. Witt w
as betrothed to the merchant’s daughter. He said, “I have had good luck. The Goddess of Fortune hath smiled on me.”

  “I have no complaints.”

  “I am glad to hear it. I heard about Robin’s death. Is that how you came by the smallpox?”

  Said I, “Yes, I caught it from him. He caught it from a strumpet at The Sign of the Rose on Dowdriver’s Lane.”

  Witt said, “Bad luck! He was so comely. Rota fortunae volvitur. The wheel of fortune turns. So true! So true! Share with me another bottle of sack, and we shall drink to the Goddess Fortune, who rules the world.”

  I said, “Nothing or no one rules the world,” and walked out into the cold rain.

  Rigdale sold the furniture for twenty-three pounds, which I paid back to Appletree.

  On the third of January, Appletree said to me, “Today is Sarah’s twentieth birthday. Since she died, I am without the petty anxieties and torturous fears that hitherto vexed me. I pay no heed to the fashion of the king and play bowls. I am no longer frightened of old age, losing my money, sickness, pain, death, or even God’s judgment in the hereafter. My soul is calm. My three beloved daughters are dead. Nothing worse in this life or my life to come can happen to me.”

  Uncle Roger and I wrote each other once a month. At the beginning of February, I asked him if I could return to the Hempstead and resume useful and wholesome work with his sheep. Roger and Wells both entreated me to remain in London; the woolen business was bad because of the rapid decline of the price of cloth. This was the result of the great preparation for war between Protestants and the Papists in most parts of the Continent. The twelve-year truce between Spain and the States of the Low Countries had ended. The German Protestant princes stood ready to defend themselves against the Emperor. Europeans could no longer afford to buy high-quality English cloth. Our merchants had piles of unsold stock on the quays. They bought no more cloth from the clothiers across the country, so the clothiers ceased producing and let their workers go.

  Uncle Roger wrote, “The streets of Winterbourne are crowded with idle woolen workers living on charity and poor relief.”

  I thought of Goodwife Stone carding, John Johnson at his loom, and Robert Hayman raising the cloth’s nap, who were now living on charity and poor relief.

  Wells wrote that my investment in his business at present earned me only one pound per annum. My income was thereafter diminished to thirteen pounds a year.

  Seeking to feel some emotion, I took leave of work on three wintry afternoons and went to Blackfriars Theatre, where I saw three plays by the late William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Othello—The Moor of Venice, As You Like It, and The Tempest.

  Rigdale said, “Mark me! Going to the theatre will lead you to sin. Plays nourish idleness, and idleness doth Minister vice.”

  For a few hours, on those afternoons, I inhabited the imaginary worlds that the poet had drained of Christ and filled instead with ravishing poetry. Noblemen occupied stools upon the stage. When the play was over, they with small cost purchased the acquaintance of the pretty boy actors and took them away.

  Toward the end of The Tempest, an actor wearing a false grey beard declaimed, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded by a sleep.” The beauty lodged in the words of the verse consoled me. The sensation lasted but a moment. And then I re-awakened to my desolate life.

  At the end of March, the Devil tempted me to revive my somnolent sensibilities by watching bear baiting on a Thursday afternoon in a ring at Paris Garden in Southwark. Rigdale said, “No godly Christian would see poor beasts rend, tear, and kill others for his bloodthirsty pleasure! And although they be savage animals to us and seek our destruction, yet we are not to abuse them for His sake, who made them and whose creatures they are.”

  A bear with little pink eyes pursued one of the mastiffs, while the other five dogs pursued the bear. One dog clung with his jaws to the bear’s left front leg, and the bear bit him through his neck bone and got free. Another dog clung to the bear’s belly, just above his private parts. The bear sat up and, with a front paw, struck the dog’s left shoulder. He would not relinquish his hold. The bear ripped open the dog’s breast with his front claws. I glimpsed the dog’s beating heart. The drunken spectators cheered.

  Then it was all biting and clawing and yelping and barking and howling and roaring in the ring. The bear tossed the dogs, one after the other. They shrieked and whimpered. When the bear was loose once more, he shook his massive head, spattering his viscous, bloody slaver in the air. The three remaining dogs leaped on him again.

  Caring not if the bear lived or died, I took my leave, went to a nearby tavern, and became drunk.

  • • •

  I could not abide London while the whole population joyously celebrated St. Bartholomew Fair on the twenty-fourth of August. So, like the two years previous, I saved my money and, with Appletree’s permission, returned to the Hempstead in Winterbourne for that selfsame week.

  My aunt Eliza’s left eye was covered by a cataract. I recited to uncle Roger the metaphor I had gleaned from The Tempest.

  He said, “I once dreamed that I died, but I remained aware that my swelled body was rotting. My eyes shriveled in their sockets, and my jawbone fell off. My shankbones showed through my putrefied flesh. I thought, one moment more of this, and I’ll go mad. Then I was alive again.

  “My restored body was drifting in the night sky towards a certain star that I knew was my soul. I heard a voice, resounding throughout the heavens and earth, saying, ‘In the end, the soul cometh to meet itself.’ Then I awoke. Such is the stuff I’m made on.”

  Tom Foot, as the bailiff of husbandry, had sold one hundred and fifty of my uncle Roger’s sheep. Foot had a surfeit of out-of-work woolen workers who wanted to be hired as day labourers in harvest. With uncle Roger’s assent, Foot had lowered the wages of the five men he had hired from sixpence to four pence a day.

  There was a local drought for the second consecutive year. Since the previous year, the price of wheat had risen from twenty-five shillings the quarter to forty-five shillings. Uncle Roger said, “With God’s help, I will be a rich man.”

  Herewith, what I learned from my uncle Roger about Winterbourne:

  Item. The previous September, a constable, the churchwardens, and overseers of my father’s old parish had been given powers to purchase, erect, or procure a suitable building to be used as a workhouse for setting poor and idle persons on work. The cost of the above was to be paid for through rates assessed and collected in each parish in town.

  Item. The said officials had done nothing except appoint a governor who chose another constable to search out and apprehend persons to be punished with fetters and a moderate whipping.

  Item. Six people in the town recently died of the plague.

  To occupy myself, I reaped, bound the sheaths, and gleaned and winnowed the meager crops with the other day labourers in harvest for a paltry four pence a day.

  One evening, after winnowing the south field with Esau, I asked him how he felt abut giving the testimony that had condemned his friend Peter Patch.

  He said, “I rejoiced in doing my Christian duty.”

  At supper, uncle Roger told me, “Patch’s whole body shivered, shook, and trembled in the cart beneath the gallows. His teeth chattered. He cried out, ‘Kiss me! For Christ’s sake, somebody kiss me!’ But no one did. The ewe was hanged first, and then it was Patch’s turn. It took him a long while to strangle.”

  Tom Foot said, “Your face is exceeding pale, Master Charles. You need a dram or two of Aqua Vitae to bring some color back into your cheeks.”

  We walked to The Sign of the Bull, where we each drank two drams. A young whore smiled at me and sat down at our table. She had a dimple in her left cheek. Her name was Grace Orchard; she was Foot’s friend. She also drank two drams of Aqua Vitae and said, “Good sirs, I am hungry. I have
not eaten all the day.”

  I bought her a mutton pie. She smiled at me again; I was beguiled by her dimple.

  She said, “My mother and I were wool carders who lived in a cottage in South Street. There was not enough work for both of us, so I left home and became a maidservant to a rich farmer named Long Snooke who freely held a farm of eighty-three acres near Hazelbury Bryan.

  “I was begotten of a child by him, and he turned me out of doors, calling me a very lewd girl. I was delivered of dead twins in a ditch and became a vagrant. I wandered from parish to parish. I slept under hedges by the road. Last winter, I was arrested for stealing wood worth ten shillings, but the magistrate freed me when I showed him that I had taken but a few rotten roots and green furzes.”

  She smiled again, and again I beheld her bewitching dimple. Then she said, “You may have me for a shilling, sir. Tom will tell you that I am well worth it. Tell the gentleman, Tom.”

  “In faith, she is.”

  “The chamber upstairs hath a feather bed. You can rent it for us from the tapster for another shilling.”

  I gave the upstairs door a shove. Grace set her candle on the stool by the bed. I watched her put off all her clothes. She put my shilling in one of her shoes and blew the candle out.

  I committed fornication in the dark. For a few minutes, on a fetid feather bed, the Devil fully roused me to life.

  • • •

  Immediately upon returning to London, I confessed my sin to Rigdale.

  He said, “I warned you that going to the theatre would lead you to perdition.”

  “You did. I remember. It hath done so.”

  “I fear that hell, destruction, and death everlasting will be your fate. Yet ask yourself this: do you still believe in God and accept the principles of Christian worship?”

  I said, “Yea and nay; sometimes yes and sometimes no.”

  I henceforth fasted upon every Sabbath and read Scripture. I was confounded by the text from Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” I am confounded by it still.