Falstaff

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by Robert Nye


  ‘Listen, Jack! I’ve got it!’ she cried. ‘Why do you think you—?’

  She never had to complete the question. Throwing open my robe I offered her another view of the answer. Ophelia’s legs opened avidly to admit me. I pushed the head of my virgin rod into the entrance of her no less virgin cunt.

  Gentleness is no great kindness when taking a maidenhead. Ophelia’s cunt was deliciously tight and small. Well lodged in its satiny threshold, I thrust away like mad. Tears started to her eyes.

  ‘Courage,’ I said. I let my engine throb inside her for a moment, while she got her breath back. Then I started in for the final assault. Ophelia screamed at first, but not too much. She bit the pillows, tossing her head this way and that in ecstasy. I was halfway in. I was there!

  ‘Oh oh oh oh!’ cried Ophelia. ‘What’s happened? What’s happening? What have you done?’

  ‘You little darling,’ I whispered in her ear, as my hot seed gushed inside her, and her cunt tightened to drink it all down, ‘it’s called fucking, and we’ve both done it!’

  I pronged Ophelia well, and clipped and kissed her. I slipped both hands in under her bottom, and pulled her up and down on my thick sword. She wept. Her cunt wept. I wept. My prick wept. Then we all started laughing.

  I think I must have come inside her seven long times that night. Once having tasted it, Ophelia behaved like a naughty little bear that was fallen into a tub of honey and has no intention of ever getting out again. She would not leave my bed. ‘Do that thing again, Jack!’ was all she kept saying. ‘Fuck me some more!’ – murmuring the words in her sleep, even when I had worn us both out with my love-making.

  After that, hey diddle dan, she came to my room every night that I remained at Caister.

  My mother and my stepfather Farewell never realised what was going on. I’m sure of that. They were too busy themselves, paying similar heavy dues to the great goddess of Love. No doubt their service was more intricate than ours – it was only later that I began to learn the more sophisticated ways in which a man can please a woman, and vice versa. But I swear that no other lovers, however experienced, could have gone to it more sweetly and generously and faithfully and tenderly and eagerly than I and my Ophelia. Her wide-eyed wonder extended to other parts of her body, you see. Sometimes I felt that her pretty little cunt itself was staring at me, staring at me, with a marvellous concentration, draining me dry of all that I could offer it. She was a dear, insatiable, and simple soul. She never complained of pain, not even that first time, and she never spurned or rejected me – even if I turned to her suddenly, in the woods, say, and pushed her down on her back in a pile of autumn leaves, and thrust away so that we ended up covered with leaf-mould.

  Once given a sight of my tool, and a feel of his force, Ophelia doted on it. She made me fuck her all one afternoon, in a swing which we had built together in an apple tree. There was a long trailing canopy, scarlet ribbons fluttering in the breeze. I remember the smell of honeysuckle and the light shining on fallen apples and Ophelia’s sharp, foxy tongue, which somehow got inserted in my nose at the moment of extremest pleasure. I remember the creak-creak-creaking of the swing, and the way the sky swayed outside as we lay afterwards, close-clasped in each other’s arms. The swing began to slow, dreamily to cease, to stop …

  ‘Jack!’ Ophelia whispered, her eyes sparkling with desire. ‘Fuck me again! Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me again, Jack! When I was a little girl I always liked a good swing on an autumn afternoon. And now I’m a big girl – well, there’s nothing like it in the world!’

  I obliged. I could always oblige that warm little open-eyed grotto which made me welcome in such a wonderful, wondering way.

  And so I was undressed of my suit of virgin white.

  And so I came to undress and understand myself for the first time.

  And Ophelia, sweet Ophelia, too.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  How Sir John Fastolf came to London, & his praise of London Bridge

  20th April

  The day dawned when I began to weary of Caister and even – for a while at least – of my adorable Ophelia. I was now sixteen, remember, and determined as only a boy can be to make my fame and fortune. My dead father had left me a little money and property. But this would not be mine until I came of age. Meanwhile, like many a young man before, London called me. I wanted to make my own way in the world. I put on my shoes which were so long and pointed that they needed jewelled chains to hold their toes fastened curled up to my knees, and thus fashionably equipped I set out for what I took to be the heart of the world.

  The day I went walking to London was a day when the hedgerows were brimming with berries and blossom, and the sky was alive with birds. The good earth smacked of pumperknickel bread. The air was like wine. Every door I passed seemed to give off a smell of cooking, as though you’d lifted the lid on a meat pie. Dogs barked. Larks danced. Bells rang. Lambs with knees dipped in coaldust skipped on the little hills. The rivers flashed. The trees were leaved with light. Windmills wove the wind.

  I walked with pilgrims and minstrels. Ladies in panelled carriages passed me on the roads, with knights accompanying them on horseback. There were jokers on stilts and men who hopped along to win a wager. Merchants and wandering friars. A party from the holy land of Walsingham. Musicians mendicant with their instruments, playing as they walked – rottes and gitterns and citoles, lutes and mandores, the psaltery, a damsel with a dulcimer, rebecs, humstrums with just the one string, pipes, shawns, and boys with bumbards and buzines and bugles. I always liked music, and counted it great good fortune to make my way to London in company with my own orchestra. A lad with a hare-lip taught me to play a kind of organ as we marched along – it hung about my neck, and I had to pump it with one hand and play it with the other. Up hill and down dale we came, tootling, thrumming, singing, and with a little dog that followed us everywhere.

  And when we came at last to London the streets, if not paved with gold, seemed to me all strewn with sunlight and black-patched with shadow in a way that I had never seen before. And the light on the underside of the bridges was a miracle.

  Ha! Ho! it seemed to my young eyes a magic city. Perhaps this was because I had delayed my journey to London, and had therefore the more starved an imagination to meet its sights and sounds. Perhaps it was because I made my pilgrimage on foot, walking the ways and roads from Norfolk, in my company of players and minstrels and friars and tinkers, and had the keener sense of occasion and achievement when I passed over the final hill and saw the place for the first time.

  For whatever reason, it was a homecoming to me. A homecoming to a place I had never before seen in my life.

  The streets were full of folk, full of bustle and noise, and colours. Apprentices ran everywhere –

  ‘Come buy! Come buy!’

  ‘Brooms!’

  ‘Hot pies!’

  ‘New shoes!’

  – it didn’t really matter what they were selling, it was all advertised as though it was at one and the same time a joke and a sacrament, a nonsense and the best piece of poetry in the world. Jugglers walked on their hands in the same streets where some mayor’s man strutted in his robes of scarlet, tipped with fur. There were plays in the churchyards. The day I arrived I saw a guild of fishmongers do Jonah and the whale! I stood and drank ale in the dusty street and laughed and clapped till the tears came to my eyes. O Gemini, London was my home. And its streets to me were poetry … its streets and markets and churches and palaces and inns … This was my litany now: London Bridge and Billingsgate, Tower Hill, St Saviour’s Southwark, Thames Street and the Temple Church, Charing Cross, St Clement Danes, Temple Bar, Holborn, Tyburn, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Smithfield and Clerkenwell, Aldersgate and Cripplegate, St Botolph’s and Bishopsgate, Fetter Lane, Shoe Lane, West Cheap, St Paul’s, Watling Street, Canwicke Street, Lombard Street and Cornhill, Guildhall and White Cross Street, Houndsditch, Westminster. My music.

  Not that I should make it sound
too glorious. The roads round London at that time were so badly kept that there was a tax on all carts and horses bringing merchandise into the city. I saw a carrier with so much tax to pay that he just handed over horse and cart to the tax collector, and went back to the country. The rates were a penny a cart and a farthing per horse, each way, coming or going; for a cart bringing sand, or gravel, or clay, it was threepence a week. Exception was made only for carriages and horses employed in the transport of food for the great. The great! More of those buggers later.

  If you ask me now what it was that most impressed me about London – what object it is that flashes upon my mind’s eye meaning London, I should have one answer and one answer only: London Bridge. I had never seen anything like it.

  Here was the river Thames, nine hundred feet wide, a vein in the heart of the greatest city in the world, and spanning it this marvellous construction, this noblest of bridges, eighteen solid stone piers, varying from twenty-five feet to thirty-four feet in thickness, confining the flow of the river to less than half its natural channel.

  Bad bloody engineering?

  Maybe. But it allowed for grandeur. It allowed for huge blocks of building on the Bridge itself, from one end to the other. Houses four stories in height, spanning across the passageway for traffic, which was as dark as a tunnel. Shops. And about the middle, on the largest pier of all, a chapel – sixty feet by twenty – built in the twelfth century, on two floors, and dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, called St Peter’s of the Bridge.

  A chapel on a bridge. I like the notion.

  Some say that without the presence of the Blessed Sacrament in St Peter’s, London Bridge would never have survived the dreadful fire on it in (I believe) 1212.

  The passage for traffic was like a tunnel, as I told you, but there was one clear space kept. And this was big enough to be a proper place for joustings and tournaments. Fighting, as well as trade and religion.

  Just a month or two after my coming to London, a Scot, Sir David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford, fell out with John de Wells, English ambassador at the Scottish Court, and challenged him to a duel, choosing London Bridge as the place of combat. Wells had been boasting of the superiority of the English. Lindsay offered to put all questions on that point to trial. With a retinue of twenty-four persons, he crossed the length of the kingdom, furnished with a safe-conduct from King Richard II, and the duel was fought in front of an immense crowd. I was there.

  The trumpet being blown and a handkerchief dropped, they charged at each other like demons, tearing their barbed horses with their spurs. Neither party was dislodged by the first breaking of spears. Yes, that first shock was so violent that their lances were splintered to bits – but the Scotsman stuck like porridge in his saddle. I remember the people in the houses crying out. ‘He’s tied to his horse,’ this grocer shouted. ‘That’s against the rules!’ Lindsay heard him. He leapt to the ground – he wore no heavy armour, just a quilted tunic – and then with one bound back up into the saddle without any assistance. The grocer was silent. Then he clapped. Lindsay charged at his opponent again. Again both spears were broken, but neither man fell. A third time – but this time the English knight was knocked to the ground. ‘He’s killed him!’ cried the grocer. But then Lindsay did an extraordinarily fine thing. Leaping to the ground, he went to his enemy, and cradled Wells’ head in his arms, until the surgeon came. The Scot remained in England for three months at the express desire of the King, and there was not one person of nobility who was not well disposed towards him. And myself and the grocer too.

  London Bridge will not fall down. That I know. That I am sure of. The world is mutable, but London Bridge will last as long as the world, even though the face of London Bridge may change with the changing world.

  Let me describe it again for you as it first met my eye when I was sixteen years of age and had just walked up from Norfolk.

  The first thing you noticed was the houses. Houses on a bridge. A street of houses. A bridge made of houses. They were four stories high, as I’ve said, and they had cellars in the thickness of the piers. When the people needed water they just lowered their buckets by ropes out of the windows and had it of the Thames. If a boat ran into a pier in the dark, and you were lucky, someone might throw out a rope and help you up. More often they’d just watch you drown. O citizens of London. And the Bridge people had the hardest hearts of all.

  The arches were narrow and hard to navigate. Flinty if you hit them. Massy. Any boat striking one of them, or one of the piers, was bound to be dashed to pieces, and collisions were not uncommon because of the sudden currents of the river. The Thames is full of whims.

  The Bridge had its own ways too. The houses were always half of them tumbledown, ruinous. Once I saw a whole block shift, hang forward drunkenly, and topple into the river. A man’s hat and a child’s hobby horse swept away towards the Pool.

  One of the arches of the Bridge – the thirteenth from the City side – was the drawbridge which let the big ships pass. The tolls were collected there. This drawbridge was also lowered and snapped shut in times of danger, to close the approach to the City. The gate at the end nearest the City was on the tower which wore the heads of executed traitors.

  The Jew’s eddy. When Edward I drove the Jewish out of England, in the year of the Truth 1290 – better look that up later, little Cyclops, I mean we’ve got to get some of our dates right – whenever that black year was, then, a party of the richest of them were making their way down Thames in a tall ship, when the master-mariner thought of a trick which would give him possession of all their valuables. Casting anchor, he rode in one spot until, by one of the river’s ebbings, his ship was on dry sand. Then he enticed the Jews to walk out with him on the sand, to stretch their legs before the long haul to foreign parts. But he led them more than a mile along the sandbank, and then nipped back to his vessel smartly when he saw the tide about to rise. The Jews lingered, unaware of the great danger. When they saw what was happening, and how they could not get back to their ship, they shouted out to the captain to save them. ‘Shout for Moses!’ says the captain. ‘He’s the only one who can help you now.’ They were all drowned, and the master-mariner returned with his ship, and the King was very pleased with him. You can still see what they call the Jew’s eddy – the disturbance in the river first caused at that fatal spot where the Jews were drowned – on the ebb-tide by the third pillar of London Bridge.

  I thought in those days that there was nothing as beautiful as London Bridge, nothing as wonderful, nothing as strange. Every arch was stone squared, and every one of them three score feet in height. It seemed to me – and still does – one of the wonders of the world. To walk on that street, beside those painted turrets, the silver Thames beneath your feet, the sails of the ships straining up river to the Pool, the flags streaming in the wind, the Jew’s eddy curling, the heads of the criminal dead dripping blood down in warning when you looked up against the sun – that was glory, that was power, that was a taste of dominion to come.

  Here I was at last in my natural habitat!

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The art of farting: an aside of Sir John Fastolf’s

  21st April

  To London then I came. Farting. Farting. Who’s farting? Who farted?

  Ah. Ho! Bussard. What! Hullo, Pigbum. I recognise that fart. I can anatomise it. My man John Bussard fathered that fart. There is a certain yellowness to that fart – a treacle-pudding ease – which I would know in a crowd of vapours. Not a spinsterish fart. A round fart, an amiable fart, a well-meant and fraternal fart, a fart of philanthropy. Smell that unselfishness! God’s teeth, a fart like that is practically an act of kindness. The good Samaritan gave off comparable fartings, who can doubt it?

  My man John Bussard is a master of farts, a bachelor of farts, a farter of the first odour. Few like him in Norfolk. In the world.

  Set it down, Mr Mandrake, certainly. Don’t be modest. Worcester’s lovely hand no doubt would not write it, could n
ot bring its pale self to chronicle such greasy particulars; but if a man cannot take pleasure in his servants’ farts at the end of a long and busy life what is there left for him to speak of on a day when memory is burdensome?

  I have been myself, in my time, a considerable farter of farts. I remember the great unequivocating fart which came from me, or which I addressed to the unworthy and no doubt ungrateful population of London, one morning early in my first sojourn in the city. It was on London Bridge. At dawn. Morning came sailing up the Thames like a great white-throated or white-chested galleon to the Pool. Morning was a sweet armada. As a matter of fact, there were ships that day, and it was a kind of minor armada. It was Joanna, the Queen of Navarre and her little fleet, coming up to London from Brittany. I saw the flags in the dim distance, and the sun spilt on the Thames like sperm as they drew nearer.

  Lord God! What a morning, what a day. I stood, my feet apart, on London Bridge. I took a deep breath, great glorious mouthfuls of the honey air. And the Queen of Navarre flowed through my legs, passed through my loins, streaming, where I stood. And as she went, as her armada left me for the Pool, I farted. Such a fart. A gull fell dead. It was an invocation. It must have been the nappy ale, and the oysters. I recall that fart had somewhat of an air of oysters, a brief reminisce of oyster-eating, about him. Once, I farted. Then twice. Then three times. Like a bugle. Like a trump. Like a clarion to welcome the Queen of Navarre to London. There was some little lady’s milliner on the bridge that morning, standing near me, rearwards of me, to windward. He took five paces backwards in the wake of my blast – and dived into the Thames for fear. Sir, I had a fart like Lucifer’s best cannon in those days. I could turn and fart an enemy into kingdom-come.

 

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