Alms for Oblivion Read online

  “You think I should have stayed behind to care for them?”

  I said nothing because I could think of nothing to say. I suppose I did think that Peter Agate ought to have stayed in Miching and protected his young sisters against an overbearing father. Having no sisters myself I perhaps had a rather overdeveloped, even knightly sense of what was due to them. But what right had I to say anything to Peter concerning a situation which I’d never been in? I’d already done enough damage to our friendship. So I changed the subject, or part changed it.

  “Why should you want to become a player now anyway?”

  “Vita brevis,” said Peter.

  “Eh?”

  “Vita brevis, ars longa, Nick, you know.”

  “Life is short while art is long.”

  “Yes, well, it’s more the vita brevis bit I’m thinking of. What we want to do we ought to do when we can, because who knows . . . ”

  Peter had no chance to say any more because the chalky-faced individual who’d been sitting in the corner suddenly sprang towards our bench. He left Gally sitting at their table.

  “Do not, sir, do not! Oh, preserve yourself!”

  He had an earnest, resonant voice. Crumpled ears stuck out from under his cap. Close to, he looked older, more lined.

  “Are you addressing us?” I said.

  “Not you, master. You are already lost. No, this is the gentleman I would warn.”

  He looked at Peter, who in turn looked even more uncomfortable. Now, you run across madmen in the streets of London and occasionally in indoor places like taverns too. They’re not usually dangerous but you can never be sure.

  “Warn? Me?” said Peter. “Warn me?”

  If my old friend was going to spend time in London he’d soon learn that the best way to deal with these unfortunates was not to respond.

  “Beware the playhouse, young man,” intoned this pale old person. “Do not join them, master. I was once as you are but I saw the light.”

  The moment he started in on the playhouse I recognized him, or rather his type, one that you might find out on the streets more often than in the tavern. Abstinence and playhouse-hating usually go together. Perhaps he was merely pretending to drink and waiting for the chance to rant at unwary players. The Goat & Monkey was well known as a theatrical haunt. The only puzzle was why he was keeping company with Tom Gally, Henslowe’s agent.

  By now the little crew of boatmen were sufficiently interested in the scene to lay down their cards and turn towards us. Gally meantime regarded the scene with detachment, squinting down his finger towards us.

  “Tell me,” said the pale person, shifting in my direction and fixing me with his protuberant eyes, “what is the playhouse? What is its character?”

  Pretending to think, I said eventually, “It is a den of delight.”

  “You are wrong!” he said. “A playhouse is like the sink in a town for all the filth and folly to flow into.”

  “It is a place where pleasure and instruction go hand in hand,” I said.

  “It is like a great boil on the body that draws all the bad vapours and humours into it.”

  “I can see we’re never going to agree,” I said.

  “You are already sunk into the perilous pit, master, you are damned. I can tell by your clothing and your manner that you are one of that unclean generation.”

  I bowed my head slightly in acknowledgement. Of course he was able to identify me as a player. Perhaps Tom Gally had pointed me out as one. My first instinct, on sensing where this lunatic was heading with his questions (to which he already had all the answers), had been to make a rapid exit from the Goat & Monkey. But something held me back. Peter Agate wished to become a player, didn’t he? Well then, let him see that not everyone approved of the trade, that not everyone would applaud his choice. In his inexperience he probably believed that his father’s hostility was unusual. It wasn’t. Plenty of people hated the theatre and here was one of them.

  “This is the gentleman I wish to save.” Chalk-face’s bulging gaze shifted back towards my companion. “He is not yet part of your foul fraternity. He is not yet lost.”

  I left it to Peter to reply to this, if he chose to. When he did reply I was impressed by the steadiness of his tone.

  “Sir, you were not invited to join us from your corner. This is not polite. You were not privy to our conversation. It can only be that your ears are like tennis rackets, ready to snaffle other men’s balls.”

  By luck or instinct, Peter had hit on a sensitive spot. The pale-faced individual’s ears were indeed prominent even though he’d done his best to shroud them with a cap, which he now pulled further down. His ears did look a bit like tennis rackets, I suppose.

  After that stroke of wit from Peter I didn’t think we could improve on things. There was no arguing with a fellow like this anyway and I was growing uncomfortable with the steady look and the finger-pistol which Gally was fastening on us from the corner. He seemed to be amused by the whole scene. My estimate of Peter had gone up and, faced by such an enemy of the theatre, I felt a little penitent. I’d been patronizing towards my friend, or at least not taken his playing ambitions seriously enough. That probably accounted for what I said next.

  “I’ve another rehearsal to get to this afternoon, Peter. Dick Burbage really will use my guts to tie his points if I’m late this time. We’re over the water. Why don’t you come along too?”

  “Your Burbage might decide to use my guts instead,” said Peter, “if I appear unannounced.”

  “I’ll have a word with him,” I said, by no means as confident as I sounded of the senior’s response. “You can be presented as an apprentice.”

  I stood up. The old fellow who didn’t like plays or players look aggrieved that we were no longer paying attention to him. Whether he intended to or not, he was blocking our exit between bench and table.

  “Do not go down that road, young man. Playing is the primrose path to perdition.”

  Peter made to go forward but the other put his hands out and shoved against his chest. For an old man, he was strong. My friend stepped back sharply and would have fallen if I hadn’t been there to prevent him.

  “You shall not join those saucy stinkards. I shall save you despite yourself.”

  I sighed. We weren’t going to get out of the tavern without a tussle. Then I grew angry with this insolent person who interfered with honest citizens going about their lawful business. I looked towards Tom Gally. If he was at all friendly with this strange being then surely he’d step in to save us from his company. Gally, however, continued to look down his index finger as though we were providing him with entertainment – or easy targets.

  Now help came from an unexpected quarter. The boatmen, who’d also lost interest in their card game to follow the argument, now rose from their table and moved towards us. Without a word, the foursome split into twos on either side of our tormentor and picked him up bodily, as if he was a piece on a chess board. Still without speaking they carried him towards the door of the ale-house and then through it in a sideways shuffle. The door closed. There was a pause. I waited for noises off: the thumps, the yelps, the oaths. But none came.

  The boatmen reappeared with looks of barely concealed satisfaction. I hoped they hadn’t harmed him, too much. Surreptitiously I looked for marks of blood. There were none. Perhaps they’d just given him a good talking-to. The leader, a broad-shouldered fellow, raised his hand and twining together his index and middle fingers, said, “Players and boatmen.” The others nodded behind him in silent agreement.

  I nodded too but it took me a moment to realize what he meant. That players and boatmen were eternal friends, surely not; but that the interests of players and boatmen were as interlinked as his fingers. We depended on them (to ferry our patrons across the river), they depended on us (to attract those patrons across the river in the first place). Even so I was surprised, not so much by their action – watermen always enjoy flexing their arms, in or out of their e
lement – as by their near-silence. Your average boatman is as full of filthy words as his bilges are of Thames water.

  Nodding again to our rescuers, Peter Agate and I made our way out of the Goat & Monkey. I noticed that Gally followed us with his gaze out of the door but didn’t otherwise acknowledge any of what had passed. I hoped that by this time the pale-faced old man would have vanished into the fog, to lick his wounds. There was no sign of him in the dirty air that enveloped us. There was no sign of anybody at all on this ghostly afternoon. We might as well have been going blindfold or, more fancifully, walking on a thoroughfare in the clouds.

  Perhaps Peter felt this too because from time to time he grasped me by the arm or I grasped him, as if each of us was fearful of getting lost. In fact I could have found my way through this stretch of town on a starless night, as I had done on many occasions. With the river to our right we paced beyond Paris Garden and along Upper Ground in the direction of Barge House Stairs, the closest crossing-point to our destination. Our footsteps echoed unnaturally loud. As we neared the Stairs I was pleased to hear the muffled chime of church bells and to pass other shadowy human shapes in the fog as well as the occasional cart and clomping horse.

  The steps were deserted. It was low tide and I sensed rather than saw the presence of the water below. I wondered whether the constant to-and-fro traffic across the river had been interrupted by the fog, before deciding that the ferries were doubtless working to their usual principle: that when you wanted one, none was to be found, but that when you had no desire to cross the river and were simply enjoying a stroll along its banks there was sure to be a whole fleet of them idling off-shore.

  “You are certain of this, Nick?” said Peter. “That I will be welcome at your company rehearsal?”

  “As I said back there, you’re an apprentice come to learn the craft.”

  “And craft is what we want now. A river craft.”

  “Oh, yes, ha. There’s never a boat around when you need one.”

  But at that moment I heard a creaking sound and spied a tall shape taking on definition through the yellow-grey gloom. And the moment after that something strange happened, happened to me, I mean. I felt my scalp prickling and the hair stir on the nape of my neck.

  It must have been the lurid gloom and the grinding of the oar against the side of the boat and the way in which the boatman’s outline was distorted by the foggy vapours. It must have been all these things as well as the steady, undeviating approach he was making towards our wharf. Whatever it was, it made me think of that other boatman.

  You know the one I mean.

  In the old stories it is Charon who ferries the souls of the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. It doesn’t matter that he is a man of unprepossessing appearance for he does not have to win his clients. They have no choice, since there is a river to be crossed and only one ferryman to take them. To pay him they have a coin tucked into their mute mouths. I shivered at the grizzled features of the boatman as they emerged below us in the haze. The taste of the fog was like a coin laid on my tongue.

  And then the spell was broken.

  “Hop in, gents.”

  Peter and I scrambled down the slippery stairs and took our places on the damp, padded seats in the stern.

  “Where to, gents?”

  “What? Oh, Temple Stairs.”

  “Rightaway.”

  We swung out, bobbing into nothingness. The boatman, the soul of cheerfulness, hummed tunelessly under his breath and plied with a will. At least he seemed to know where we were going. Pulling my cloak tighter about me, I noticed that there was a fire-fly of a light hanging above our heads in the stern as there would have been for a night crossing. The sight of other smudges of light around us and the sound of other oars creaking away across the water were reassuring.

  I laughed (in my mind) at my fears and premonitions and was glad when Peter resumed his account of how and why he’d quit his family home. He’d hinted in the tavern that there were other things apart from his father’s hostility which had driven him out. In confidential tones, while we sat shoulder to shoulder in the back of the boat, he now told me what they were. After a period of violent mourning his father Anthony Agate had taken him a new wife – or rather been taken by a new one. She was a well-practised widow with, according to Peter, all of a widow’s wiles.

  “I don’t like her, Nick. She’s already seen two husbands into the ground.”

  “She can’t be blamed for outliving them.”

  “And I can’t be blamed for not liking her.”

  “That’s not so unusual with stepchildren and step-parents, I suppose.”

  “She seized on my father like a – like a harpy, with her claws out and her wings flapping.”

  Peter almost whispered this, although I don’t think the boatman, humming away, plying his trade, was listening.

  “But my father seemed happy enough with this. Or at least his raging moods went.”

  Anthony Agate might have been as opposed as ever to the notion that his son could turn player, Peter explained, but now he was distracted with a change of wife he treated his children better than he had done in the aftermath of their mother’s death. That is, he largely ignored them.

  “I will say this for Mistress Gertrude Potts, even though it goes against my teeth to do so – ”

  “Gertrude Potts?”

  “The harpy. My father’s new wife. She was formerly married to Randolph Potts of Peckham. And there was some other unfortunate before Randolph.”

  “Gertrude is a pregnant name for a stepmother.”

  “Why?”

  “There is a play by William Shakespeare . . . ”

  “Hamlet? Oh yes, I know it. Well, whatever her reasons she has been . . . attentive . . . towards all of the girls, particularly my oldest sister. Perhaps she sees it as a way of winning my father’s approval. But she already had him in hand, I think, before that.”

  Sensing something here, I said, “And towards you she has also been attentive?”

  I felt Peter tense beside me.

  “More than attentive.”

  Before he could say anything else in this teasing vein we jarred gently against the base of Temple Stairs, and our brief voyage was over.

  I thanked the boatman, tipped him handsomely and groped my way up the greasy steps. Peter followed.

  “Where exactly are we going, Nick?” said Peter, catching up with me in the fog.

  “Only a little way in this direction along Middle Temple Lane. If your story doesn’t take more than a few minutes you might as well complete it. No danger of a boatman eaves-dropping now.”

  “Story?”

  “Of the young man and his stepmother.”

  “You expect some filth, eh?”

  “I live in hope.”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Evidently my father wasn’t enough for my new stepmother – or perhaps she is one of those hot-livered women who must subdue every man within her reach.”

  “I should like to meet her.”

  “You should not. Mistress Gertrude is a harpy, as I say, all claws and leathern wings.”

  “You’re protesting too much, Peter. I suspect you have fallen in love with her. Or in lust.”

  “Oh yes, she wore low-cut dresses for all that she was married to my father, and pressed her boobies against me within a few days of arriving in our house – ”

  “And you had no say in this matter. You didn’t invite her booby presses.”

  “Wait. It gets worse.”

  “Better, you mean.”

  “I mean what I mean. Be sure my stepmother would often be up night-walking when I was not yet in bed.”

  “She couldn’t sleep?”

  “She was wide awake and in search of night-work to put my father in his nightcap.”

  “What do you mean?” I said though I half knew.

  “Why, she was out to cuckold him, when she made to thrust my hand through her silken placket.”


  His tone was half-way between being amused and bitter, but with a dash of something else.

  “That would have been a good revenge,” I said, “against your father.”

  “It’s not a matter for levity, Nick. She is loose in the hilts. And she has a son of about my age too. She told me. That makes it even worse.”

  There was something a bit priggish about Peter. Naturally I didn’t say so. Instead I tried a little light flattery.

  “Have you considered that you’re an attractive young man, Peter?”

  “Her very words, as I recall.”

  “I meant them mockingly.”

  “She did not.”

  “Of course you loyally refused her thrusts and her plackets?”

  “I was too afraid that I would succumb to them, if I’m honest,” said my friend. “That is partly why I left Quint House. That, and my father’s continued refusal to countenance my ambitions in playing. I left home in a hurry. Then it took me some little time to screw up my courage and come to London. But I did come. And here I am.”

  “Exit, pursued by a stepdame.”

  “Only in my dreams. I dream of her. Have nightmares I should say.”

  I wouldn’t have said it for the world, but I was amused by the picture of my friend fleeing his stepmother’s overtures. I imagined her hot-breathed behind him, with nightgown loosened and flapping.

  By now we had reached our destination, as I informed Peter.

  “Where are we though?”

  “Countryman that you are, Peter, even you must have heard of Middle Temple.”

  “I think so. But you may enlighten me.”

  If you asked me for my ideal audience I suppose it would come close to being the law students of the Inns of Court. Or so I would have thought before I had much experience of them. I’ve no time for them as would-be lawyers but speak of them now only as an audience.

  Like the apprentices, these young men have a riotous reputation but because they’re usually well born they get away with it (unlike the apprentices). They are also players in an amateur way. Training to be politicians and pleaders in court, they no doubt regard the drama as a good preparation in rhetoric and deceit. They are inclined to the theatrical, and enjoy debate, word-play, innuendo, love-making, and dressing up. In addition these students of the law are more than happy to see men beating each other over the head. There’s nothing that the sedentary like more than a good fight, seeing other people fighting, that is. And when a lawyer is involved there is always a good chance of an action for battery, and therefore profit.