Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  “He’s a lively old apple-john, right enough!” observed a gravelly female voice from a bench just inside the door. “And you, young sir? Are ye after lodging or only a pint of ale?”

  Roger looked around the dirty, dreary little room uncomfortably. “Neither. I’m looking for someone. Garland. The player.”

  “Him with the King’s Men? You’ll not find any players here, sweet heart. They’ll all have packed their precious skins off to the country. Chelmsford or Mortlake, I hear tell.”

  “He’s come back.” Roger shrank from the pudgy fingers patting at the hand he held on his purse. “If he comes here, will you tell him his brother is looking for him? I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “God keep ye’ll be able to.” The woman sighed. “I shall tell ’im, my dear, if I’m here. But look’ee—where are ye off to? There’s bands of bloody ruffians abroad these nights that’ll prick your gizzard for so fine a doublet as that as soon as knock’ee on the head.”

  “I’ve not far to go.” Roger was vaguely uneasy at the shrewd look she gave him. She might well have her own ruffians. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Ye’re right at that, sweet heart. Trust’s not for such days as these.” The woman chuckled. “God speed ye.”

  The house in Brande’s Rents was not far, but by the time he came there and had the door locked fast behind him, Roger’s heart was racing. Coming down long, straggling, tree-shadowed Maid Lane he saw that some houses in Hunt’s Rents had fortified themselves against intruders by taking up their plank bridges across the deep roadside ditches. Twice where a glimmer of moonlight dipped into the dark ditch he saw bodies, the first one naked, and the second half so, with two scavengers pulling at his boot-hose and breeches while a third kept watch by their heaped-up barrow. The man’s eyes had glittered at the sight of Jack’s rich suit, and Roger took to his heels down toward Brande’s Rents as if the devil himself were after him.

  He had no key, but there was a dim light in a window downstairs where Barton the starchmaker and his family lived. After a long while a haggard Mistress Agnes came in a nightgown hastily pulled over her shift to let him in with a resentful air and a sniff of “So we’re not rid of thee after all.” When her own door had slammed, Roger stood in the narrow hallway to catch his breath before he climbed the steep stairs to the Garland rooms. Upstairs there was no sign anywhere that Tom had been before him. In the kitchen he found and lit a candle and saw that the cheese and the half loaf they had left that morning in the hanging bread safe—was it only so long ago as that?—had not been touched. But Tom must have found when he went to Cliffe’s lodgings at the Temple that it had been a lie about Cliffe’s baggage waiting there. He must come home.

  Roger’s stomach tightened painfully. He was on a fool’s chase, but he could not give it up. Tom would come. And when he knew what Jack had done, there would be an end to all that pain and anger and New House could sleep in peace. Roger was too tired, too full of all that he had seen, to think beyond that one, bare need: If thou didst ever thy dear father love…

  In Jack’s bedroom he stripped and sat exhausted on the bed to rub at his sore shoulders. Half in a daze, he felt himself running his hand lovingly along a leather cord around his neck and fondling a wash-leather pouch that hung from it. Puzzled, he pulled it off and opened the almost empty but oddly heavy pouch and poured out into his palm twenty-two little gold crowns.

  For a moment he could only stare at the coins.

  “Why you bloody little creep,” he breathed at last. “He paid you for her!”

  And he began to be afraid of Jack, waiting in the shadows of his mind.

  Afraid almost to sleep…

  Like John-a-dreames

  TOM DID NOT COME. IN THE MORNING Roger woke with his neck and shoulders stiff and every muscle in his body dully sore. When he moved to turn away from the sunshine that streamed in at the open window a pang shot across his upper back that made him whimper aloud. For a long moment he lay frozen in confused alarm until the long, aching journey down the moonlit Thames from Isleworth came back to him disjointedly, and he remembered that he had not found Tom, nor Tom him. The little room was somehow less familiar than it had been by candle light. The low beamed ceiling, the high, narrow bed with its coarse linen sheets and faded hanging, even the ewer and basin on the chest beneath the open casement window had a look of hard-edged strangeness. Roger sat up gingerly, wincing as he turned his neck and looked round him. The Garlands’ lodgings. That was where he was. Crossing to the window in his bare feet, he looked out upon a patchwork of walled gardens and tree-ringed houses, and across the lane and a deep drainage ditch, the fields and orchards of a wide park. In one field men came and went with hand carts laden with long plank boxes and what looked like bundles of old clothes until he saw that they went among fresh-heaped graves, and tumbled the poor bundles into a wide pit. At night it would have been an eerie, frightening scene. With the sun well up and glaring on the fields, it had a flat, brightly painted unreality. The air held a threat of heat and a muggy day to come, but Roger shivered uncontrollably.

  Tom’s—Tom’s and Katherine’s—room was as oddly unfamiliar as his own, as was the pleasant little corner dining parlour that looked from its north window out across a jumble of trees and rooftops past a square, pinnacled church tower to the distant tops of a dozen spires and more. Framed in the other window was the only landmark of which he was half sure. It stood not far up the lane he had run so blindly down last night, set among the trees beyond the last of the rooftops of Brande’s Rents: a large, octagonal, three-storied building, thatch-roofed and half-timbered, a vivid, sun-bright shape against a sky as blue as a painted backdrop. The Globe Theatre. Like and unlike all the pictures in the books. Roger was alarmed that it should be no more familiar than an image in a book. Last night every ditch and doorway had been familiar. But now—if the other window were looking north, as the shadows said, then the tower must be Southwark Cathedral. Beyond it would be the Thames and the church spires of the City.

  Roger felt frighteningly adrift. Last night he had known where he was; this morning it was as if Jack had dwindled away from his grasp, leaving him stranded in a London he did not know. Roger squeezed his eyes tightly shut, desperately trying to regain that surer footing. The church. Southwark Cathedral was really only a copy of this one. This was … St. Saviour’s. And beyond were the roofs of the houses on London Bridge. The pointed tower east of the bridge on this side of the river was … St. Olave’s! As he forced himself to see them inwardly, the names came to him. The street beyond the Globe was Maid Lane. Dead Man’s Place with its stream down the middle lay a few yards to the east. Suddenly, abruptly, it was all there, as if a door he had been pushing against had been suddenly unbarred.

  “It’ll be all right. It has to be,” Roger told himself as he went to search out something to eat. In the kitchen he found a dish of eggs, a comb of honey in a crock, and a dish of rancid butter. The eggs he broke into a bowl, and though one was bloody, they smelt all right, so he set about building a small fire in the fireplace. When it had taken hold he set the long-legged trivet over the flames, melted a knob of butter in a shallow, long-handled pan, and poured the eggs in when it had begun to sizzle. “I will find Tom. I will,” he repeated to himself with each shake of the pan. But when he had finished eating and gone to dress himself the food lay heavy on his stomach.

  In the bedroom he folded Katherine’s letter and tucked it for safekeeping into the pouch with the gold coins. His upper arms were still so stiff that the simple act of replacing the cord was difficult, and dressing was worse yet. The loose shirt went on easily enough, but his neck and shoulders cramped painfully as he eased on the drabbest doublet he could find: a dull mouse-coloured silk with white cutwork bands and silver buttons. The sleeves had to be laced into the doublet with silver- tagged laces first, the doublet’s long row of front buttons buttoned, and the matching paned trunk hose laced through eyelets to the doublet’s waist. It was a compli
cated job and he fumbled more than once, losing time he could ill afford to spare, but it was done at last and he hastily tied on the cork-soled shoes Jack had worn the day before. In the parlour Roger searched out pen and paper and ink. Though his hand dragged, as if he shaped the words against its will, in the end he managed to write: Dear Tom, Katherine was safe at Purfets’ all along. It was not her. I will explain. Stay here if you come. I have gone to look for you, but will return. Jack. Folding the note he wrote Tom across the face and propped it against a candlestick on the dining table. Then, on impulse, he scrawled another: It was not K. I must see you. Brande’s Rents or the Blue Pump. He addressed it to Tom Garland of the King’s Men and put it in the purse at his belt. He would leave it at the Cardinal’s Hat. Returning to the kitchen, he lowered the food safe to cut himself enough bread and cheese for lunch, wrapping it in a piece of paper and a handkerchief and putting it into a Spanish leather pouch that had hung in Jack’s wardrobe. It was already mid-morning, and the sound of carts rumbling up St. Margaret’s Hill and the distant cries of street-sellers in Long Southwark bid him hurry. With the waking sense of strangeness past, it was almost as if the part of him that was at home here ached to be abroad and searching too.

  Roger was out and on the doorstep, looking for the key he had found and put in the shoulder-pouch, when he discovered the first note for Tom, folded small and tucked beneath the food parcel. Unfolding it in dismay, he shivered with a sudden chill and then went slowly up to prop it once more against the candlestick. Be careful, caution whispered. Take care…

  Once into Dead Man’s Place, Roger decided to walk to the Temple and save the waterman’s two pennies. He had too little money left and would not, could not, touch the gold. Past St. Saviour’s, London Bridge was strangely quiet. On an ordinary day the press was so great that anyone with the tuppence to spare could cross by water in a quarter of the time, but now the grinning heads on their pikes loured down from the entrance tower onto the traffic as if to cry “Abandon hope!” A grisly welcome to a deathly town.

  The narrow arcades and passages between the tall houses lining the bridge were not deserted, but people hurried on their errands, hollow-eyed and harried. More than half the lamps in the dim arcades were dark, and beggars whined in shadowed doorways. Half or more of the shops were locked and shuttered, and not a few of the ornate doors to the upper stories of the houses were marked and sealed. Even so, here and there a haberdasher’s boy called out, “See here, young sir, silk roses for your shoes,” or “Would ye go wi’out a hat, young sir? Come see, we’ve French hats, hats from Florence, hats…” but Roger hurried unheeding through each arcade, half dazzled by the sunny passages between where the arches opened onto the narrower, uncovered stretches of bridge. Great Nonsuch House, splendid beyond belief, he passed through and scarcely saw.

  At the north end of the bridge Roger turned from the cobbled way into a side street half by dead reckoning and half remembering, aiming westward toward the Fleet and Temple Bar. The day had begun to burn in earnest, and the mingled aromas from the stockfishmongers’ and the cookshops and the stench from doorside garbage heaps were overpowering. Roger was giddily unsure whether the shimmer of heat that rippled in the narrow strip of sunshine between the overhanging house fronts was in the air or in his mind. In a deepening daze at the city’s squalor and splendour, he threaded his way past coffin-carts and dunghills, on past Bridewell and the alleys of Alsatia, and came at last to the Temple.

  “Why, you ha’ missed him, lad,” said the stout and melancholy porter when at last he answered the bell. “You ha’ missed him twice, if ’tis a tall, dark, slim fellow wi’ a trim beard you want, in a pepper-coloured silk lined wi’ apricock.”

  “That’s him. He would have been asking after Harry Cliffe.”

  “Aye he was. Last midnight, and him out with no link-boy to light him his way. I told him Mr. Cliffe and his baggage’ve been gone this sennight to the Earl of Northumberland at Syon. If the Earl be gone from there, says I, may hap they’ve all gone north to wild Northumberland to ’scape the sickness and the heat, and would that I were with ’em! As for where in Essex young Cliffe calls home, I’ve never heard. There’s a cousin out at Bushey that has him to stay sometimes, where I’ve had to send his letters, but I forget the name. Now if ’twere me, as I said to your friend, I’d ask at the inn at Highgate. Travellers for the north must rest their beasts awhile after Highgate Hill, and the landlord won’t have forgot a peacocky gallant like young Cliffe.” The man snorted. “He’s well enough remembered at every inn ’twixt here and the Hoop.”

  Highgate. And the roads to Bushey went either by way of Hampstead or Kilburn. Simple enough for a reckless and determined man to walk from Highgate to Hampstead and down to the inn at Kilburn to ask after a gallant in pale silk and a fair, blue-eyed young woman with an old Florentine-stitched cloak bag. And to return to the Temple by way of St. John’s Wood and Lillestone, Tyburn and St. Giles. Poor Tom, bound to time’s wheel by the strength of his love and hatred … and Tony bound with him.

  “Are ye all right, lad?” The porter looked at Roger with concern, but drew back warily. “ ’Tis more like August, this heat, than the tail end o ’June.”

  “I’m all right. It’s just…” June? Not August? But that was not important. Roger caught at the memory that had almost slipped away. “You said I’d missed him twice. When he came back had he hurt his hand?”

  “Aye.” The porter’s look was more doubtful yet. “How d’ye know that? ’Twas but five o’ the clock and no more than grey in the east when the watch came a-knockin’ with their staves at my gate. They bade me keep ’im in my lodge awhile. I gave ’im a pot of ale, but no sooner had I brought to mind a nuncle young Cliffe went to in Cheapside for a meal of a Sunday than your friend was off again. The more fool he. There’s none astir at that hour but rogues and knaves, and he’d already near lost his purse to the knife that cut ’im.”

  “But he went anyway?”

  “Aye, poor fellow. To sit upon the doorstep, I’ll warrant, for the householder’s a nut-pated fool who opens to a knock before day. And I would ha’ been glad of his company for an hour or two. Wi’ the lodgings here all but emptied and my gossips at the Rose all stowed underground but one, the days are flat as Lenten pancakes. Now that Bartholomew Fair’s been forbid, there’s naught to look forward to but drink and watchin’ the dead go by.”

  Roger edged impatiently toward the gate. “Cheapside, you said?” he asked, breaking the garrulous flood of words. “That uncle of Master Cliffe’s, what was his name?”

  “Barentine. Ballantine? Something like. Must ye go? Aye, of course ye must.” The man sighed. “Jesu keep thee.”

  Cheapside was not far, but twice Roger lost his way and stumbled through dark, unpaved lanes the sun had not pried into. When he came out at last onto the broad, clean, tree-shaded street and saw, past Bread Street, the block of splendid houses that outdid all their prosperous neighbours, he felt more than ever as if he walked in an unreal world. Four storeys tall, ornate, with handsome timbering, glittering with wide expanses of windows, each house with gilded rainspouts and the carved and gilt Goldsmiths’ arms—in that brilliant, heavy air they shimmered like the shifting images of dreams.

  Ballantine. Barentine. He must ask in one of the shops. Those along the splendid row were goldsmiths’ and most were shuttered tight, but in one a gold candelabrum was displayed against a black brocade in the shop window, and the upstairs casements were open wide. Roger’s knocking brought a polite assistant to point out Barentines’ and say that they had gone away three days before in two hired coaches, no telling where.

  Sore and tired and frightened, Roger sat under a sycamore tree to cut his cheese and bread for a sandwich. The bread was stale, the cheese strong, and together they made him fiercely thirsty. His headache had returned with the deepening of the heavy, humid heat, and he felt too hopelessly confused and muddled to know what he should do. If he had something to drink … but what was
safe that would not make his muddle even worse? Small-beer. Near-beer. Schoolboys drank small-beer. Roger giggled, half in panic, at remembering that. He had read it in a schoolbook three hundred and seventy-odd years from now. But then he sobered, chilled despite the heat. “That’s a queer thought,” he said aloud. “I must be dizzied from the sun.” He should have ha’pennies enough for half a barrel of small-beer. He must find the nearest tavern. Then he could think what to do next.

  Fumbling in the purse at his belt, Roger’s fingers touched a folded paper among the coins, and in dismay he drew out the note he had meant to leave at the Cardinal’s Hat. Two silver three-farthing pieces dropped from a second folded paper and rolled away unheeded as Roger stared at the tightly folded note. Surely he had brought and forgotten only—written only—the one? But even as he unfolded the second paper he knew that it was not a copy. It was the other note, the longer one beginning Katherine was safe at Purfets’ all along. He had climbed the stairs to prop it a second time against the candlestick, had propped it there, and still had brought it away with him. “He”? No, Jack.

  He would have to go back. If Tom—when Tom fell ill, it was to Brande’s Rents he would go. He might be there now, and ill. When Tom fell ill… Roger stiffly pushed himself erect, but it was Jack’s panic that sent him headlong down the narrow, crooked lanes to Blackfriars Stairs where he hailed a waterman and paid four of his ha’pennies to cross to the water stairs at the top of Thames Street. The white-painted walls of the old stews and taverns along Bankside glittered across the river, and Roger kept his eyes fast on the red sign of the Cardinal’s Hat all through the crossing as if he could will Tom to be there. The Cardinal’s Hat … why did it stick in his mind? The note, that was it. He must ask there for news of Tom and leave his note.