Alms for Oblivion

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by Philip Gooden


  I might have pointed out that I did live a (relatively) pure life. Meant harm to no man, unless he meant harm to me. Kept my hand out of others’ pockets. Kept it, by and large, out of women’s plackets. Enjoyed or suffered from thoughts that were no more outrageous or unlawful than the next person’s. Had not visited a whore-house for weeks – and even then my visit had not been in the way of trade but, rather, in the course of friendship. To my own ears I sounded a dull fellow. But all this abstinence from sin would have meant nothing to Chesser, not as long as I stayed on the stage.

  “What does Thomas Gally say in this affair, he who works for Philip Henslowe?” I said, adding, “I’ve seen the two of you together.”

  “Master Gally encourages me in my work,” said Chesser.

  I bet he does, I thought. The work of sowing doubt and uncertainty among Henslowe’s rivals.

  “What is your work?”

  “God’s work.”

  “A species of preaching?”

  “As you say.”

  “But you don’t preach among the members of Master Henslowe’s company, the Admiral’s?”

  “A man can only do as much as God gives him strength for. I consider your Chamberlain’s to be more deeply mired in sin.”

  “This preaching is new work for you, Master Chesser. I have not seen you at it with the Chamberlain’s before.”

  “A man may be a little brain-sick, sir. I spent some time in Beth’lem Hospital. I was cured with rods until I grew weary of them.”

  There was something dignified but also curiously matter-of-fact in Chesser’s tone. He’d gone mad for a spell and been committed to Bedlam asylum, no doubt because he’d been worrying other people elsewhere in this town by his ‘preaching’. As for his claim to be cured, who knew?

  “I see,” I said.

  “If you fear for the Admiral’s Company, Master Gally tells me that he is doing his best to redeem them.”

  “I don’t fear for them. They can look after themselves. What does Gally do? Perhaps he leads them in prayer.”

  “You are not serious, Master Revill. It is you that I fear for. I fear for your eternal soul.”

  This rebuke was a bit reminiscent, in tone if not in substance, of Bartholomew Ridd telling me off for not caring enough about the Troilus sleeve. On the one hand, I hadn’t taken sufficient care of a detachable sleeve; on the other hand, I was neglecting my immortal part. The rebuke was more acceptable coming from Chesser, however, if only because he had so recently saved me from losing something between a sleeve and a soul. To wit (as WS would have said): my life.

  However, Chesser hadn’t finished. He wanted to impress on me the wickedness of my acting crew.

  “Why, man, your shareholders are not content just to take pennies from honest citizens, or to distract apprentices when they should be at work, or to encourage licentious encounters between men and women in the audience. Although they do these things too.”

  “Master Chesser, while I am greatly in your debt for what happened back there on the wharf I cannot lie down while you attack my Company. We do not ‘take pennies’ like thieves. We are given the pennies by those honest citizens in return for diverting them.”

  “Oh, but you are thieves, sir. None more than your shareholders.”

  “How so?”

  “They stole an entire playhouse once.”

  This was not a madman’s remark, although it might appear like that. Rather it was an allusion to the dismantling of the old playhouse known as the Theatre in Finsbury and its resurrection across the water as the Southwark Globe back in the winter of ’98. Not much good pointing out that the shareholders owned all the timber and fittings of the Theatre (even if not the ground on which it stood). If Burbage and the rest wanted to take a playhouse with them when they moved they were quite entitled to do so. In Chesser’s eyes, though, this was a most notorious theft. No wonder we were mired in sin.

  There really was no answer to this accusation of playhouse-theft, and indeed I wondered whether the theft of an entire building was covered by any statute. I would have to ask my friends in Middle Temple. Chesser followed this up with a reference to the stealing of souls. My patience with the old man and my sense of obligation to him were wearing thin. It hadn’t taken long. Time for a parting of the ways.

  “I am going on to Paul’s Yard, sir, about my private business now.”

  Chesser took the hint, or it may have been that he was heading in a different direction anyway. Commending my soul to God and with a reminder that I should quit the stage forthwith, he disappeared to the right towards Old Fish Street and into the fog. Immediately he’d gone I felt guilty. He was a harmless old man, a little addled but harmless, wasn’t he? He was entitled to respect as an ex-player, and now he had a much deeper claim on me. I thought, with some shame, of the way in which the boatmen had briskly bundled him out of the Goat & Monkey. Well, next time I saw Master Chesser I would speak soft and considerate. I’d even buy him a drink, as long as he wasn’t in the company of Tom Gally.

  But the association between those two was seemingly explained. Henslowe’s agent was making use – unscrupulous use – of poor Chesser to distract and unsettle the opposition. I wondered how many of my fellow players had been accosted by the Bedlam man and informed of the extra devil in Faustus and enjoined to leave the stage straightaway. Yet, if Gally was resorting to such threadbare means of undermining a rival company, that surely argued desperation on his part. Not so much a murderer as a petty intriguer.

  As I paced out the last few hundred yards to Paul’s Yard, my thoughts turned back to the runaway cart and my near escape from its iron-rimmed wheels. I discerned a plot. Perhaps it was this perpetual fog. Unable to see anything clearly, one fancied that one saw anything and everything.

  It couldn’t have been planned in advance, this ‘accident’. Nobody knew that I intended to cross the river at all, let alone at that point and at that time. If the cart had been deliberately set on its downhill course in my direction – the hand of man, as it were, rather than the hand of God – then it must have been done on the spur of the moment by someone who’d come over the river at the same time as me. I’d been alone in the boat with the disagreeable ferryman, the one who’d tried to overcharge me. But there were other ferries on the water. Two or three at least had offloaded their passengers while I was arguing with the ferryman.

  Wasn’t it possible that I had been followed across the river in another boat, that my ‘opponent’ (for want of a better term) had run up the steps in order to get ahead of me in the fog? That, coming by chance across an unattended but heavily laden cart, he had seized on the opportunity to dispose of Revill in a single, clean ‘accident’? Perhaps he’d been waiting behind the cart, crouching by the board at the hinder end, ready to leap out at me, before he realized that a simpler means was at hand. He could hear me coming up the slope now, my argument with the boatman over and done with. Quick! Angle the cart slightly so that it runs down the slanting path. A task which would call for a bit of strength but could be done with stout shoulders and desperate hands. Quicker now. He’s coming! Remove the wedges holding the wheels. Jump back as the cart begins to roll.

  It was only my good fortune that Chesser had been lurking somewhere on the scene; that, seeing and hearing the cart trundle past, he’d had the presence of mind to shout a warning.

  Was this how it had happened?

  Yes, said fear.

  Don’t be absurd, said common sense.

  What do you know? said fear. Believe me, that was no accident.

  I’ll think about it, said common sense.

  At last I emerged into Paul’s Yard. The place was full of noise and hubbub, even though no one could see more than a dozen yards in front of their noses. Whatever the season, whatever the weather, it was always like this, a crackling witch’s cauldron of indiscriminate ingredients, all bubbling and jostling against each other. Nicholson’s was on the far side with the rest of the booksellers and I bent my s
teps in that direction. The noise was loudest over here and I soon realized why.

  What I’d at first taken for a patch of dense low fog was actually smoke, shot through with little leaping flames. The continuous crackling and snapping which, from a distance, sounded like the buzz and flurry of human traffic was the noise the flames were making as they ate up timber and lath and plaster. The scurrying figures, the random shouting, the urgent commands, these were not the ordinary activity of Paul’s Yard but the frantic efforts of shopkeepers and passers-by to control the fire. I felt that little illicit thrill which a fire in a public place always gives.

  The gust from the flames brought a warmth to the winter air. Perhaps this was the reason why so many other citizens were clustering round, ready to help but more ready to watch, their enjoyment of the scene dependent on whether they had a stake or not in what was being destroyed by the fire. Someone had put himself in charge, possibly a headborough, and a chain of individuals was passing slopping buckets to the point where the fire seemed most active. A couple of water bearers had been pressed into service and the empty buckets were being filled from the bearers’ wooden churns. I guessed that in turn they were filling the churns direct from the Little Conduit nearby. Flakes of paper floated down through the air like black snow. One large fragment landed near my feet. It was not badly burnt and, without bending down, I could make out the words ‘Being the true history of’ but no more than that. It was a title page.

  The fire had taken hold in the booksellers’ quarter of the Yard. Some of the stalls usually positioned in front of the shops had been shoved to one side so that the chain of men and women relaying the water-buckets could get at the flames more easily. Books and pamphlets were strewn across the cobbles. I recognized two or three of the men in the chain as booksellers. I couldn’t see Master Nicholson. Perhaps he was at the head of the line since it was his shop that was being ravaged by fire. Why didn’t this surprise me, that it was his shop? It seemed all of a piece with this increasingly fraught day. The stalls were close-packed but they could be shifted. The shops, of which Nicholson’s was one of the largest, weren’t movable of course, and the risk of the blaze spreading sideways from one to another was considerable. Fortunately there was no wind. The stone wall (part of the Paul’s precinct) which backed the bookshops would hinder the flames from going up in that direction while the open ground which lay to the front offered little in the way of opportunity for the flames.

  There was nothing to do but watch. The heat from the blaze had driven off the fog in the immediate vicinty. Well, I’d come to see Master Nicholson or rather to get another glimpse of Milford’s play The World’s Diseas’d and here I was watching his stock go up to smoky oblivion. I owed him money. I could feel part of the debt weighing down my purse. I’d thought that Nicholson might be more receptive to selling or loaning me a copy of The World, if I came to pay for a few of the poetry books I’d bought. And now I remembered an occasion when I’d been drawn down a street in Pimlico by a delicious scent of roasting, only to find that it was emanating from a pie-stall on fire. By contrast, burning books give off a somewhat unappetizing, acrid smell. The water-buckets slopped from hand to hand, the human figures holding those buckets swayed from side to side as if they were engaged in a queer kind of dance, the flames jumped up and down (but a little less eagerly now). A mixture of steam and smudgy smoke rose from those places where the fire had been quenched.

  All at once a cry went up from those closest to the blaze. There was a hurried retreat. I couldn’t see straightaway why they’d stopped battling with the fire, but then a section of the brick side-wall of the shop seemed to quiver in the warm air before it lost its balance altogether and toppled down with a subdued sigh. Anybody next to it would have been crushed or injured by flying fragments. But the collapse had a useful effect. The seat of the fire lay underneath the wall. Now it was stifled as the flames disappeared beneath a pile of bricks and dust and mortar and plaster. I wasn’t surprised that the wall had fallen so rapidly. Probably the timber supports had been chewed away by the fire. These bookshops were more permanent than the book-stalls but they were not like churches or mansions, not edifices built to last.

  When the dust had settled, it became apparent that the fire had largely been extinguished, apart from a handful of scattered outposts which were even now being doused with water or soaking rags. It did not seem as though much of Master Nicholson’s stock could have survived.

  The crowd, realizing that no death or injury was in prospect, gave a kind of communal shrug preparatory to drifting off. Still, we counted ourselves lucky. One fire in a day, even one without serious harm, is enough to keep us all going.

  “How did this happen?” I asked the man nearest to me. He didn’t know and nor did three or four other male bystanders, although the question was passed down the line like the bucket of water going from hand to hand. Eventually I came across a gaggle of women. Since they are always better informed than men, I was confident of getting the story from them.

  “How did this happen?” I repeated. I was told by one that the fire was no accident. In an authoritative tone she informed me that the conflagration had been started deliberately, that a ‘naughty person’ had walked up to the bookshop entrance with a bucket of smoking coals and tossed them into the interior where, given the combustibleness of the shop’s contents, the flames had quickly seized control. A second woman supported this account, adding the detail that the ‘naughty person’ had been a lady, as could be seen by her dress. But this version was straightaway contradicted by a third woman who said, with even more certainty than the first two, that the bookseller himself had been responsible for the destruction of his premises and his stock. He’d accidentally overturned a chimney, one of those portable fires used for heating open areas like shops. The three women began to quarrel over which of their versions was correct, and so I left them to it.

  My aim in coming to Paul’s Yard was frustrated. I wouldn’t get a glimpse of The World’s Diseas’d now. I saw no sign of Benjamin Nicholson either. I would have commiserated with the bookseller if I had seen him. I regretted not settling a portion of my small debt with him beforehand. Of no use to offer it at this moment; it would be a drop to fill an empty bucket.

  Instead I made my way towards Paul’s and inside to the Walk, the middle aisle of the cathedral. I was searching for some peace and quiet to think in. Paul’s Walk itself was no good for this purpose. It must be one of the noisiest and most irreligious places in town, with its peacocking gallants and sneaking thieves. But a great palace has many corners and so has a great church. I knew that I’d be undisturbed by Duke Humphrey’s tomb since this is the spot where, for some reason, the truly hopeless congregate. To dine with Duke Humphrey is to go without one’s supper. I found myself a bench to sit on close to the tomb. And I thought.

  It may have been the accident with the runaway cart which put the idea in my head that the fire at Master Nicholson’s was an accident of a similar stamp. They were ‘accidents’. If the first two women were right, then a ‘naughty person’ had deliberately fired the shop just as – if my darker imaginings were correct – an equally naughty individual had pushed a cart downhill into my path. Hardly the same person since, although it was physically possible for one man to have created both ‘accidents’, the fire-raiser couldn’t have known that I was about to arrive on the northern shore of the river. Couldn’t have arranged for me to be run down by a cart while he was simultaneously firing a bookshop. There was also that strange detail, insisted on by one of the women, that the individual who’d thrown a bucket of fire into the bookseller was a lady ‘as could be seen by her dress’.

  As I’d expected, this corner of Paul’s by Humphrey’s tomb was quiet. A few vagrants paced silently up and down or sat slumped in angles. The truly desperate are mute. In this place of shadowy silence I constructed a plot which explained everything which had happened so far.

  You can probably see where I’m going.
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  I started by travelling over some old ground.

  Take Lord and Lady Venner now. Robert and Virginia. Robbie and Vinnie. The Bumpkins (even though this mocking title no longer amused me). Suppose that, opening up the pages of The World’s Diseas’d, they had discovered that ‘their’ poet and playwright, Richard Milford, was holding them up to ridicule or worse by insinuating that they were not simply brother and sister, but lover and lover. Their reaction would have been outrage and horror. I’d already considered that they might have disposed of Richard Milford. But what if their ambition reached beyond one victim?

  They knew that I’d read the play. Thought perhaps that I was keeping a copy of it – the ‘foul papers’ – in my lodgings. They knew that I knew their dirty, incestuous secrets. A different picture began to emerge. A shadowy picture in which a desperate man, or man and woman, set out to retrieve a damaging playscript, which would, if its contents became known, drive them out of the city in humiliation. Or, since incest is a crime, expose them to the more extreme rigours of the law. My supposition of the previous night returned. That Peter Agate had been stabbed in mistake for me. Seeking to recover the playscript, Robert Venner had blundered into my friend instead. In the subsequent confusion he had run him through, either because he took Agate for Revill or in order to silence a potential witness.

  I recalled the wary way in which Venner had looked at me after the Troilus and Cressida performance in Middle Temple. That piggy gaze. I was not dead but still there to be got rid of. So, once he had disposed of Richard Milford, he’d decided to finish the job by disposing of Nicholas Revill, only in a more subtle and spontaneous fashion. Not run through with a knife but run over by the iron wheels of a cart. While his sister, the lady, resorted to her own form of action by heaving a bucket of burning coals into the bookseller’s where that dangerous play, that slanderous play, The World’s Diseas’d, was being prepared for publication. What was the destruction of a shop and a load of books after all, when they’d already killed one man in error and another one quite deliberately?

 

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