Alms for Oblivion Read online

  I didn’t much want to talk. For one thing, I had to work the next day, not on Troilus and Cressida, which would henceforth be rehearsed in Middle Temple, but on an actual play for the following afternoon and a practice for a different one in the morning, both of them at the Globe. So when Peter, half sitting up on his straw mattress and wiping abstractedly at his bloody forehead, said, “You know what Master Shakespeare said to me?” I merely grunted. This didn’t deter Peter, who continued, “He smiled at me and said I had the makings of a player. He smilingly said.”

  Anyone not absolutely dead could be said to have the makings of a player. I didn’t tell Peter that from WS these words were faint praise. If they’d been said to me I would’ve packed up straightaway and headed home to Somerset. Then I felt guilty for thinking such thoughts. Instead of grunting again, I asked Peter a question which had been nagging at the edge of my mind during the day.

  “How did you know where to find me this morning?”

  Now it was Peter’s turn to grunt or make some similar non-committal noise. He lay down on his penny-and-a-half-a-night bed. I’d been about to snuff out the candle. The wick was guttering like a very small man drowning in a great greasy sea. It was my curiosity that flared up instead.

  “I mean, you didn’t go to the playhouse first, did you? It wasn’t one of my fellows who told you where I lived?”

  “Not exactly,” said Peter.

  “Who then?”

  I looked down at him lying there, his forehead painted with blood which he’d wiped at ineffectually and which showed up dark in the little light.

  “I’m bleeding.”

  “A flesh wound only,” I said. “Who told you about my lodgings?”

  Peter tried to avoid my eye. What didn’t he want to tell me?

  “I reached London yesterday,” he said finally. “Not knowing where you lived of course, I thought I’d apply at the playhouse. And I had to ask where that was first. On the way to the Globe playhouse I passed a place called Holland’s Leaguer . . . ”

  Oh, I saw where he was headed now.

  “I suppose you’re going to say, my friend, that you wandered in there all innocent.”

  The remark came out sharper than I intended and Peter seemed to bristle.

  “I had heard of the place, naturally. Even in the depths of the country I had heard of it.”

  “And you thought you’d just have a taste.”

  “It seemed an – appropriate thing to do on arriving in a new town,” he said. “And I’d had a drink or two.”

  “Of course. I’ve done the same.”

  “Had a drink?”

  “Visited a brothel early on.”

  Had I? I couldn’t remember. Did I enter a brothel on my first night in London town? The second or third night possibly – it could take that long to summon up the nerve – and then it would’ve been somewhere modest, where one could blush unseen, and not the famous, semi-fortified place known as Holland’s Leaguer. Anyway, my comment had the effect of putting Peter at his ease, even making him combative.

  “Yes, you have done the same, Nick, so you can get off that high horse.”

  No use to contradict him so I said nothing. I was very much afraid that I could see where he was headed now.

  “I met a friend of yours in Holland’s Leaguer.”

  “A customer, you mean?”

  “A resident of the place.”

  “Any whore is friend to half the men of London, to hear them talk. The whores, that is.”

  “No, this was a very particular friend of yours. After we had finished the business which we had contracted for, we exchanged a few words. Since she could see I wasn’t a townee she asked me where I came from. And when I told her it was a Somerset village she grew attentive and when I told her the name of the village she grew more attentive still. She even asked me if I knew one Nicholas Revill, the parson’s son.”

  I rather wished that Peter had bashed his head hard enough on the lintel to knock himself right out. Or perhaps I should hit him over the head myself to stop him going on.

  “‘Know him!’ I exclaimed,” said Peter. “‘We have known each other since we were boys. I have come to London expressly to see him.’”

  “Whores are sentimental,” I said. “I suppose she wanted to know what I was like as a youngster in that Somerset village.”

  “She didn’t seem very interested in that. She was more interested in what I was doing here in town. So I told her of my ambitions to become a player.”

  “She likes players . . .” I said weakly. (I could in truth think of nothing else to say.)

  “You may well say so, Nick. She gave me a free turn after that. I paid only once.”

  “ . . . and she has a heart of gold.”

  He ignored my irony, pursuing a different train of thought.

  “I think it may have been my freshness, my ambition. That seemed to touch her.”

  “She is easily touched,” I said, this time without irony. “If you are talking of Nell.”

  “Nell, yes. I didn’t know if it was her real name.”

  “It is.”

  “Not only was she able to tell me where you live but she had a message for you – if I managed to find you.”

  “Well, you have found me, Peter, and pretty soon I must sleep in order to rise fresh for work tomorrow. So tell me Nell’s message and then I’ll snuff out this filthy candle.”

  “Didn’t make much sense to me,” said Peter drowsily.

  The excitement of the day – the playing – the drinking – the blow to the head – were at last getting the better of him.

  “Nevertheless, tell me what Nell said.”

  “She said to tell you, ‘A recovery would be fine.’ That’s all.”

  “A recovery would be fine?”

  “Her words. Sounds legal to me.”

  “It probably is,” I said, leaning across to extinguish the dirty light.

  If this comment about fines and recoveries was Nell’s way of re-establishing friendly relations, I didn’t think much of it. Or, more accurately, I wasn’t sure what to think of it.

  Nell – for all our years together I never had discovered what her surname was (I’m not sure that she knew either) – Nell was a flesh-pedlar at Holland’s Leaguer, as you’ll have gathered. The Leaguer was the chief stew in Southwark, got up like a fortress with a moat and battlements, but all in a pissy play-acting style that wouldn’t have kept out a band of children equipped with pikes of straw. (Oddly enough the Leaguer had a connection with the current patron of the Chamberlain’s Company, the ailing Lord Hunsdon, since it was his father who’d owned the place when it was just a straightforward manor house.) The residents of this house of ill-fame were higher-priced than the members of the profession in other places like the Cardinal’s Hat or the Windmill, and they accordingly adopted a more lady-like air as though they were doing you a favour in accepting your coin.

  Not my coin, though. I got in free. And I could hardly object that Nell gave me what others paid for, nor that she was willing to give me in addition something you might have come close to calling love. I loved her too, in my fashion. Or perhaps it was that I was merely pleased to have her at hand, winning and grateful.

  But as we grew more familiar with London our paths began to diverge, Nell’s and mine, after a couple of years. The itch of respectability started to make me restless. I grew familiar enough with great men and their houses, two or three of them anyway. I considered that I was moving up in the world. I wasn’t the only one to feel this. When we’d first met, Dick Burbage said that players were crawling towards respectability, even if slowly. Many of our seniors in the Chamberlain’s were married men with children, in some cases happily so. They were shareholders, men of substance. Wasn’t that what I was aiming at too?

  In other words, I was growing up (or merely growing older).

  Nell too must have been feeling this itch for respectability. It’s even harder, though, for a doxy to get a le
g up in the world than it is for a player. They start from further down the ladder, you see. True, there were stories that circulated around Nell’s work-place about girls who’d been favoured by rich old men, so favoured that they’d been fished out of the stew and set up in comfortable establishments, with jewellery and servants and fine linen. Nell and her particular confederate in night-work, a girl called Jenny, often talked about these rich old men as if they actually existed. The best part was that, in the triumphant climax to the stories, the old men were persuaded to marry their dolls on their death-beds. These dolls – still comparatively young and fresh but wealthy and widowed – had worked themselves into an enviable position. Mind you, I’d never met any of these newly respectable widows, and neither had Nell or Jenny. They always turned out to be acquaintances of aunts of neighbours in the next street.

  Now my Nell knew how the world worked, she knew what was what. And, since these rich young widows were nowhere to be found, she also realized that the rich old men were as real as the unicorn. Less real perhaps, because who is to say that the unicorn is not roaming somewhere on the far side of the world, even at this moment?

  Therefore Nell was well aware that the way ahead was a rocky one. Unless she transformed herself into a madam or bawd, what lay in the future for the whore but fading charms and the pox? She must attach herself respectably, must find a protector. Maybe not a wealthy dotard who would peg out straightaway after the marriage but a younger gentleman with a bit of influence, with a prospect or two in the world. A player doesn’t have influence or prospects, not really.

  So my Nell too was growing up (or merely growing older).

  Our friendship had been cooling for many months, although we still met from time to time for conversation of every sort. Our last encounter had been in her place of work, Holland’s Leaguer, since she pleaded a busy-ness which prevented her from visiting me in Dead Man’s Place. Really I think she didn’t like Master Benwell’s prying eye. It was a mark of her increasing fastidiousness.

  Another sign of this was her desire to impress me with her ability to read. “Jenny can’t read as I can read,” she said proudly. This was a turnabout from the old days when she’d claimed, probably rightly, that being able to read and write wouldn’t add a scrap to her earnings. Now it was a different Nell. I didn’t respond – as I might have done once – “What business has a whore with words?” It would have been an illiberal remark, an ungentle one. Besides I was afraid she might hit me. She had a neat little fist.

  “Nicholas,” she said to me on this occasion. She always called me Nicholas these days, never the familiar old Nick.

  “Yes?” I said, poised between abandoning her bed and the chances of another (free) session.

  “Nicholas, do you know the meaning of bona roba?”

  “It sounds like Latin, or Italian perhaps.”

  “I have been so described,” she said.

  “Oh good,” I said.

  “It has a handsome ring, hasn’t it? He termed me a bona roba.”

  “He?”

  “A particular individual.”

  “A fine piece of skirt, it must mean.”

  “I believe so but I prefer the original. Bona roba.”

  “Soon you’ll be talking in tongues, Nell.”

  “I have another word for you. What about quaedam?”

  Quaedam. Now, I knew that this was a learned sort of way of referring to a whore, one of Nell’s profession. It meant no more than ‘a certain woman’ or one of those. It wasn’t so much respectful, but more sneering, in my opinion. But my friend seemed pleased enough, to judge from the way she was preening herself.

  “Another description? From the same man who described you as a bona roba?”

  “The same gentleman, yes.”

  “And I am not a gentleman, Nell?”

  “You are a player.”

  I ignored the implicit insult and said, “I’m not going to change trades to suit you, but what would you have me instead? For the sake of argument.”

  “What would I have you? Oh I don’t know . . . perhaps a lawyer.”

  “So that’s it! You are consorting with those fellows from the Inns across the water.”

  I meant the nests that the lawyers had built for themselves around Holborn and Whitefriars. It was a guess but one of those guesses that are certain things, and her next words showed I was right.

  “Better than those that you consort with in your inns – I mean the Goat & Monkey and the Knight of the Carpet. And most of my trade is from the other side anyway, I’ll have you know.”

  No chance of another bed-session with her now. She stiffened next to me and all but shoved me off her couch. It was irritation – and a touch of jealousy – which kept me going.

  “It’s a lawyer, is it, Nell?”

  She said nothing and, lawyer-like, I took her silence as an admission of guilt.

  “Tell me, is he young and springy, or old and vile with sagging dewlaps and gallow’s-breath?”

  “He is clever,” she said finally. “Oh yes, and he is not old or vile or the other things besides. He has a liquid tongue.”

  “A liquid tongue?”

  “Which he does not waste on groundlings in the pit, spouting other men’s cheap words. He is clever, I say.”

  This slur on players (and incidentally on playwrights) was too much.

  “Clever enough to negotiate with you for fee-simple? With that liquid tongue. Or is it fee-tail? Or free tail?”

  By now I was out of her bed and struggling to fasten up my points and be on my way. I was surprised at my own anger. That she should instal another in my place as her favourite! Something told me that this was exactly the situation. Call it an ex-lover’s intuition. To be free with her in her bed – and for free! I would have preferred a rich old man, preferably an impotent one.

  There was not much logic in this response, but when did logic, love and lust ever go together hand in hand? I might at any time have walked away from her and felt justified in doing so – we had largely walked away from each other already – but that she should walk away from me like this! And with a young lawyer!

  “Well,” I said at the door of her little chamber, “I will leave you to your friend and his fines, and recoveries, and statutes, and recognizances – and – and all his other dusty stuff.”

  And I shut the door hard so that I couldn’t hear what, if anything, she said in reply.

  It was a very brief fit of temper because, once I was outside Holland’s Leaguer and walking towards where the road crossed Gravel Lane, I had nearly calmed down. A brisk wind was coming off the river. I almost thought of going back and apologizing to Nell.

  But of course I didn’t go back. Hadn’t been back since.

  All of this – this scene – had taken place a couple of months earlier at the beginning of the autumn season. Naturally, when it was announced that the Chamberlain’s Troilus and Cressida was to be rehearsed and performed at Middle Temple, that nest of young lawyers, I was curious as to whether I would encounter her new paramour. But I didn’t know which Inn he was a member of – there were four of them altogether – and even if I had known the Inn, then I still had to locate my rival among many dozens of students. I could hardly go around these well-born gentlemen and ask which of them had acquaintance with the trulls of Holland’s Leaguer. (For sure, the answer would run to a fat figure, students of the law being as human in this respect as any other young men.)

  You may think it very strange that I was ready to accept Nell’s entertainment of many Londoners in the way of business but that I should grow aggrieved when she seemed on the point of giving away a portion of her heart. Her heart, which I had thought all mine. Well, if it was strange what of it?

  As I lay in my own bed with Peter Agate snoring heavily at my side on his thin mattresss, I reflected on Nell’s message about fines and recovery.

  ‘A recovery would be fine.’ Was this her way of signalling that she wouldn’t mind seeing me again
? Was I to recover her, and re-cover her once more? And then all would be fine? Was she using the legal terminology to remind me of our little quarrel over her lawyer friend and to turn it into a joke? If she was still averse to players, who did no more than spout other men’s words like gargoyles, then she’d made an exception to my friend from Miching, hadn’t she? He was only an apprentice player and yet she’d given him a free turn in the bed, if he was to be believed. (I did believe him.) Perhaps players were back in favour with her. Perhaps her lawyer friend, he of the liquid tongue, had fallen into disfavour. I swiftly constructed, in the confines of my head, an episode in which Nell had given him his quittance. Or perhaps it was the other way about and he had given her hers . . .

  Something in me warmed towards Nell as I lay in the darkness. I sniffed at my fingers, disagreeably scented from snuffing Benwell’s rancid candle. Well, I wouldn’t hurry to recover her, but in my own good time – say in a week or so – I’d stroll across towards Paris Garden and Lord Hunsdon’s old manor house, just to see how the land lay with my friend.

  Corpus Delicti

  But the next day something different came to trouble me, apart from Peter Agate’s connection with Nell. It was to do with another old friend, the playwright Richard Milford, and a little piece of work which he’d contrived. A dangerous little piece, as it turned out.

  How about this for a plot?

  There was once a Duke of an Italian city, somewhere with the name of Malypensa. Duke Ferrobosca was a tyrant who ruled with a rod of iron. He killed his enemies and then had waxwork effigies made of them to tease the dead men’s families. This Duke Ferrobosca had a duchess. But then he took a fancy to a younger unmarried woman called Virginia who would not capitulate to him. So he determined to make her his next duchess, thinking that if she would not be wooed with words she might be won with wealth.

  The only problem for Ferrobosca was what to do about the woman who would soon be his last duchess. Of course – and why didn’t he think of this before? – he would have her killed. So Ferrobosca hired an assassin called Vindice. What he didn’t know was that Vindice was the brother of Virginia, and furthermore her lover. Yes, sister and brother were passionately and incestuously in love. This was Virginia’s real reason for spurning the Duke.