by Ashly Graham
‘Right now he’s got his feet up in an en suite waterside room at the Prospect of Whitby tavern at Wapping Wall.’
Throughout this Arbella had remained frozen with bewilderment, unable to believe what she was hearing.
This time Carew shook his head with incredulity. ‘But, Grammaticus, my father seems to have been, by his standards, much more rational recently. I thought he was serious about the Guiana venture. Something must have happened the other night to change his mind. Do you have any idea what it might be, any idea at all?’
The retainer shook his head. ‘No. Unless...no, it can’t be.’
It was Carew’s turn to be curt. ‘What, man? What can’t it be?’
‘Unless the conundrum of the formula has been solved.’
‘The formula? The elixir? You mean that he or Northumberland might have...’
‘…found the antidote.’
‘…the antidote to immortality?’ Carew clapped his hands back to his head. ‘Good Lord, is’t possible? Come on, Grammaticus, come on Arbella, there’s only one way to find out. We must go in and ask him point-blank.’
Before they could move, there was a pounding below, and Grammaticus groaned. ‘Hell’s teeth, it’ll be more of those ghouls demanding tickets. Hold on a minute while I get rid of them.’
Grammaticus retreated down the stairs, and they heard the door being opened again. Then came the stentorian voice of a very irate woman, and the sounds of scuffling, a thump, and a cry of pain.
There was a thunder of heavy feet on the stairs, and Arbella was forced against the wall on the landing by a whirl of garments and pungent gusts of perfume and gin.
As the individual passed him Carew exclaimed, ‘Mother! What are you doing here?’
The Amazon turned at the top of the steps.
Lady Elizabeth Throckmorton Ralegh was an impressive sight. As puffy as her features were, and although her physique had run to fat, she was broad-shouldered and powerful-looking, and Arbella could tell that she had once been a beautiful, if strong-featured, woman. Now she looked like a horse which had been ridden hard and put away wet. Her expression was thrawn, her gruntle decidedly dissed, and the bags under her bloodshot eyes packed and unpacked like a bullfrog’s throat.
After surveying them haughtily for a moment, the figure turned and disappeared into the apartment.
When Grammaticus had laboured back up the steps to the landing, his face was already swelling from the blow he had received. ‘I didn’t think she’d be this early,’ he said, ruefully rubbing his jaw. ‘Master Carew, I was going to tell you that Lady Ralegh was informed of the beheading as a matter of courtesy, with a post-paid RSVP envelope.
‘The reply came yesterday and I recognized the writing. May I be forgiven, I opened it and read the letter that accompanied the acceptance myself in private. In not-so-parliamentary language, milady said she doesn’t care a tinker’s damn about the execution, in fact she offered to do the job herself for fun and to save money. I couldn’t bring myself to give the letter to your father, or tell him about it.’
‘So why…’
‘She’s come to claim the jewels.’
‘The jewels! How would my mother know about them?’
‘Her ladyship has long believed, she says, that Sir Walter’s been keeping something more than his head under his hat over the years. And of course she’s always resented his appropriating her family heirlooms, and his selling them to fund an extravagant lifestyle. So this is payback time, though I thought she might at least have the decency to…I’m sorry.’
‘…to wait until after the event. I agree, Grammaticus. But we’d better go on up, the place’ll be a war zone.’
Indeed, from the other side of the drawing-room door came a cacophony of raised voices, protestations, and screams of rage. Then there was a tremendous crash, and Grammaticus groaned.
‘Oh Lord, there goes the chandelier.’
As they entered, cautiously, Sir Walter and a figure resembling the actor Sir Ralph Richardson, whom Arbella realized must be the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Henry Percy—a.k.a. the Wiz—were diving over the back of the couch with an alacrity that men of their age and station are not supposed to be capable of.
Lady Ralegh, who must have swung from the chandelier and landed on her feet, possibly after a mid-air somersault—more astounding feats still—rounded the seat, wrenched away the chair that her husband had grabbed to fend her off with, and hit him over the head with Thomas Speght’s 1598 first edition of The Workes of our Antient and Learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer. A brass-bound edge scratched Sir Walter’s temple and drew blood.
Then her ladyship inflicted a similar injury on the Earl with a porcelain statuette that she seemed to have recognized too late as belonging to her.
Like Madame Zézelle the Human Cannon-Ball, Bess Ralegh proceeded to ricochet about the room, intent on debelling the two men while Carew, who was himself suffering from a bad case of mal de mère, went green at the gills.
Now—not only was it evident that Bess had had her drinking boots on and was less than sober, it was clear that she could not be described as no more than awash, buffy, disguised in liquor, elevated, flustered, foxed, fresh, fuddled, gilded, ginned up, or groggified. She was not just happy, half cut, high, inebriated, under the influence, intoxicated, jagged, juiced, in liquor, illuminated or lit, lathered, well lubricated or lunched, lushy, maudlin, mellow, moon-eyed, muzzy, or woozled. Not just nappy, nicely-thank-you, well oiled, one over the eight, pixilated, potulent or pot-valiant, primed, ripe, screwed, tiddly or tiddled, tipsy, or tired and emotional.
To elaborate, this was not merely a case of one who has indulged in what men, typically, do when the sun is over the yard-arm or a young second after six p.m. and it is time for an aperitif, a belt, a bevvy, a bracer, a brew, a chota peg, a dram, a draught, a finger, a jar, a libation, a lotion, a nip, a noggin, a potion, a sharpener, a shot, a slug, a snifter, a snort, a stiffener, a stoup, a tincture, a tipple, a tot, a whet or wet, or a spot of what you fancy to restore the tissues.
Put another way, although she was not howling or room-spinning or sloppy or blind drunk, top-heavy and passed out under the table—ivre morte—neither could her ladyship only be under suspicion of having no more than a drop taken, of falling-down water; of having hoisted no more than a few, bent her elbow a couple of times too many, had a snoot- rather than a skinful, or spliced the main brace once too often. Of being no more than totty of her swink.
Nay, Bess had passed beyond the point of being boozy, bottled, Brahms and Liszt or pissed, in her cups, and feeling no pain. Had she begun the day with a hangover, and decided to treat it with a hair of the dog which had bitten her, the pooch was now totally bald. In fact, not only was her ladyship proportionately more than half-seas-over, or, like the gibbous moon, half full, she was well on her way to leaving behind those of her compatriots who were at that moment in a bad way, bladdered, blasted, boiled, bombed, boozed, canned, corned, crocked, fried, full as a bull or goog, gone, hammered, high as a kite, in the bag, jugged, loaded, looped, ploughed, polluted, potted, squiffy, toasted, whiffled, the worse for wear…or deafened by cries of Steady the Buffs!
Not to beat about the Bushmills further, lest there should remain any dissenters as to the woman’s condition, or some who might still prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt, or refrain from committing themselves one way or t’other, otherwise put and bluntly Lady Throckers had been on the sauce for long enough, drinking like a fish, and hitting the bottle so hard...with such vim, verve and vigour...that, given the opportunity for the slightest further indulgence, she could with confidence be diagnosed in layman’s language as arseholed, blitzed, blotto, destroyed, incapacitated, legless, obliterated, out of her skull, paralytic, pickled, cock- or gravy- or pie-eyed, pissed as a newt or parrot, plastered, rat-arsed or ratted, ripped, schnockered, shit-faced, shot, slaughtered, sloshed, smashed, soaked, sottish, soûle comme une bourrique, ou un Polonais, soused, sozzled, stewed
, stiff, stinking or stinko, stoned, swacked, tanked, three sheets in the wind, as tight as a tick or a drum, trashed, wasted, and wrecked.
To wit and without further ado: zonked.
Remarkably, although she was as drunk as an ape, a beggar, and as Chloe; as a coot, a deacon, a fart, a fiddler or a fiddler’s bitch, or a piper; as a lord, a mouse, an owl, a skunk, or a wheelbarrow...as David’s sow…her ladyship had not yet drunk the three outs; nor was there any sign that she was about to barf, chunder, heave, honk, hurl, keck, laugh liquidly, cat, puke, ralph, retch, spew, throw up or up-chuck, toss her cookies, vomit, yawn in Technicolor, or express an urgent desire to call God...“Oh God”...on the great white telephone.
Nonetheless, by way of proving that she was not seeing double—unless it were to her own circumstantial advantage against the pair of her enemy—her ladyship demonstrated that her aim was unimpaired. Firing rusty nails from her binocular blunderbusses into the hides of her husband and his friend, the Earl of Northumberland, the crapulous consort snatched up two more chairs and launched them with an impressive display of ambidextrous strength.
The two men ducked just in time, and the items broke against the window stanchions. One of the pieces narrowly missed decapitating Ebenezer the raven, who had recovered from the recent impact of Sir Walter’s pot-pourri bowl, as he arrived to see what the ruckus was about.
Arbella could not help but admire her ladyship’s speed and the force of her arm: she seemed to be everywhere at once. Hefting a paperweight, and deciding that it was too light for her purpose, the snarling Bess crumbled it between her palms into a handful of glass croutons, and seized a brass urn.
The Wizard Earl, as he broke cover from behind an ornamental screen in a dash for the door side of the room, took the urn full on the chest and collapsed on his back, winded. Then Sir Walter, in attempting to follow him, was struck in the privates by a footstool and doubled up with a howl, whereupon his spouse buried the business end of a letter-opener in his left buttock.
When Carew attempted to pin his mother’s arms from behind in a full nelson, she made to double-elbow him in the solar plexus; but with a supreme effort he was able to twist her off her balance and send her careering towards the wall, more in surprise at the attack coming from an unexpected quarter than from the strength exerted by her son.
Then, referee-like, Carew placed himself in the centre of the room between everybody, shouting and waving his arms.
‘Stop, stop! Stop this nonsense at once!’
‘Heeargh!’ Bess, after regaining her balance and beating her chest, was about to possess herself of a heavy gilt picture-frame when Sir Walter, his face white with pain, after clenching his teeth and pulling out the letter-opener and throwing it like a dagger so that it stuck in the floor well away from his assailant, exchanged desperate glances with Northumberland.
On a quick count of three in what seemed to Arbella like a rehearsed manoeuvre, the two men gathered themselves and sprang upon their attacker. The three of them went down in a heap, and for half a minute there was a mêlée of bodies indiscriminately scratching, punching, and scissoring their legs, with each in turn briefly appearing on top as in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.
Carew’s continued pleas went unheard, and Grammaticus contributed nothing except to dance around them flapping his hands.
When Bess amazingly managed to squirm free, and the men scrambled to their feet, the termagant landed an impressive left punch on Sir Walter’s eye; and then, as he swung away, a right to his kidneys, which caused him to bend over again and make further anguished complaint to his feet about how he was being treated; whereupon his wife poor-babyed him with a karate chop to the neck that, had its alignment been better would have sent Headless Hotchkiss away without having to do anything to earn his financial package.
But then, before the virago could gather herself for a further offensive, Bess made the mistake of pausing to exult at her handiwork; whereupon Sir Walter brought her down by pulling the rug from under her feet, and the Earl pinioned her from behind. Even then her ladyship did not give up, and it cost the men considerable additional effort to keep her restrained.
The invective that issued from her mouth, if canned in spray or liquid form, could have been used to strip paint off battleships. Although in between sound-bites of abuse Lady Ralegh used her teeth to mark the arms that bound her, finally the pair was able to turn her face-downwards and sit on her.
Ralegh ordered a reluctant Grammaticus to force a gag, torn from a linen tablecloth, into his wife’s mouth. In the process her choppers made an impression on the servant’s bicep that an orthodontist could have made dentures from; but Grammaticus bore the injury stoically and did no more than grunt with the pain.
After the gag was in place a grim Sir Walter, after switching places with his servant, bound it in place with another strip of the same cloth tied around Bess’s head so as to prevent her from spitting out the snaffle. Although he pulled it as tight as possible, as if he were reining in an ill-tempered horse, she continued to express muffled rage through the material. Sir Walter then resumed his position on the backs of her legs, while Grammaticus went off in search of some stout cord and, when he came back, the two combatants and their batman trussed the prone woman like a Christmas goose, while Carew, who had been observing with horrified fascination, covered his eyes and groaned.
Sir Walter’s eye was looking bad, and his manhood and buttock were on fire; as was his lordship’s chest; and the peer was not sure, but he thought that he might have dislocated his shoulder when he fell.
While the Earl used the last of the tablecloth to fashion himself a sling, Ralegh selected an injury at random and dabbed his eye with a handkerchief dipped in a water jug, which had miraculously survived the débâcle. Grammaticus went out again to get witch hazel, liniment, and bandages for the contusions to heads and torsos, and the puncture wounds.
After the medical supplies arrived, Carew and Arbella assisted in tending the publicly affected areas; and then Arbella waited while the others went upstairs to treat the intimate ones, to the accompaniment of a number of cries from one who had recovered from his bravery.
When they returned, slowly, Grammaticus poured liberal cupfuls of wine for everybody—except for one, who was deemed by unspoken consent to have exceeded her ration for the day—from a flagon. Then, somewhat restored, with Carew refusing to be a party to the deed, and the Wiz using his good arm, the men dragged Lady Ralegh into the next room.
There they left her on the floor, for her to await being hauled downstairs and released on her own recognizance whenever they might feel up to it.
Thoughtfully Carew replaced a Meissen vase, which he had had the presence of mind during the episode to move into a corner, on the mantel over the fireplace. Gradually, under the influence of more good Rhenish wine, the parties relaxed; to the extent that the senior Ralegh, fingering his bruises and ruefully surveying the wreckage, gave a staccato bark of amusement, and commented that Mr Pepys had not done half so good a job.
This drew belly laughs from the Earl and Grammaticus and prompted dry acknowledgment from Carew and Arbella. And then they were all talking at once about the brawl, and who had done what to whom.
Finally Sir Walter wiped his good eye and held up his hand. ‘My thanks to ye all. I do not think I have enjoyed myself so much since I laid my cloak over an open sewer for Essex to walk upon. It was my best one, but it was worth it.’
Ralegh bowed to the Earl. ‘My compliments to you, Henry Percy, my staunch and sturdy partner in war as in peace. And Grammaticus, thou didst splendidly.’ The peer made a leg and fluttered his fingers in acknowledgement, and the grizzled servant’s face tautened at the rare compliment.
‘But now,’ Ralegh resumed, ‘we must turn to the matter of what hath transpired in the course of the last few days. It hath not, I am sure, been lost upon anyone that a capital event is scheduled to take place on the Green. At noon tomorrow…as it may happen.’
Through the window came the sound of drunken laughter and cheering, and Sir Walter gave a wry smile. ‘The head that will tumble is mine. I have it on the authority of the Wiz, whose expertise in such matters I freely confess greatly exceeds my own,’—again he bowed to Lord Henry, who returned the courtesy—‘that this time the axe will be wielded to better effect.
‘Ye all must understand, that I am looking forward most fervently to at last receiving my quietus; to being granted quittance from this mocking world, which, disobliging fate and destiny, and the Deity, I have encumbered for so far too long.
‘That is the sum and substance of it…but before I say anything more, let us put the cat out. For I fear that if we leave the baggage where she is any longer, the vitriol in her veins shall burn through the bindings. I do not know about yours, but my constitution is not equal to another such contest. I am, after all, a very old man.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
‘Something hath come to light,’ Ralegh resumed, after his wife had been dumped outside on the pavement; ‘something so fantastic that I am still trying to believe and understand it myself. My good friend Lord Henry, by way of bringing to conclusion our competitive strivings in assaying the composition of my Balsam of Guiana, and how it might be purged from the human system, hath at last succeeded in establishing that it hath a built-in obsolescence.
‘Put another way, by a complicated process of mathematical calculation, rather than the chemical experimentation which I pursued for so long, the Wiz hath identified that there is a date beyond which the vegetative matter I utilized in my concoction ceases to be therapeutic—though I find it hard to assign it so beneficial a description—in immunizing one against the natural causes of mortality and the ravages of disease, and the effects of accident and infliction of such physical wounds as are normally conducive to the expiry of the sufferer.’