by Robert Nye
That windmill was a brothel then. (In these emasculated days, I believe that it has been converted into a department of the Civil Service.) The brothel madam’s name was Nightwork. Mrs Jane Nightwork. No doubt that was not her real name. Doit said she was of noble birth, from the wrong side of John of Gaunt’s cracked blanket, and that she had turned whore only out of love of what it is that women lack. Her pander was her husband, old Nightwork, also known as Willy Wee, on account of his unusually short weapon. Doit said that Jane had once appealed to the Star Chamber to have her marriage annulled, on account of her husband’s shortcomings, and that this was where her parentage had been betrayed at least to the members of that secret enclave. Old Nightwork, you see, protested a great deal when the Star Chamber demanded that it should be allowed to pass judgement on his prick, and it was finally agreed that he might be permitted to conceal himself behind a screen, with a hole cut in it, through which he was to poke his peter for the benefit of the court. Now, according to Doit, old Nightwork was no fool, and he went straight to Jane’s father, John of Gaunt, and told him what was being proposed. John of Gaunt was very worried. For a lunatic. Getting rid of an illegitimate daughter is no joke, and if the Star Chamber annulled Jane’s marriage then she would be back on his hands. Gaunt agreed, therefore, to stand in behind the screen for old Nightwork. Gaunt had a prick like a sceptre and when he stuck it through the hole there was absolute silence. Save from Jane herself. Who whispered, ‘Daddy!’ And fainted.
Doit’s story. I don’t believe it. I knew Kate Swynford, who was John of Gaunt’s mistress for thirty years, and his wife for two, and she told me that his equipage, while adequate, was nothing out of the ordinary.
Whether by old Nightwork or not, Jane had one son, a namby creature called Robin, that used to suck its thumb all day counting his mother’s earnings. One for the rook, one for the crow, one to die, and one to grow. Jane was the only member of the family who worked, by night or by day. In the case of my slack friend Shallow it was overtime all the time.
Yet she could not get rid of him. Jane Nightwork could not abide him, but she could not get rid of him. He got her into towering fits of rage – or, at least, she had to pretend to be angry with him, chasing him round the rafters of the windmill with a whip made of bramble.
Poor floppy Shallow. He yelped and ran, ran and yelped, his shirt flapping over his silly shanks, his tail between his legs. That was the trouble. His tail would not, did not, COULD not stand up – and a dangling lamb’s tail was no sight to show Jane Nightwork, who must have had the quickest rump in Christendom and thighs as accommodating as the whale’s maw. I believe she was really furious with him in the end. Her arm ached, she told me, from hitting him and hitting him and hitting him until he spilt his seed. And then it was just a miser’s drop or two, and on the mill floor, where it did her no good, and displeased the woodworms.
On the night I’m telling you about, there were three of us went out to the mill, to visit Mrs Nightwork. Myself, friend Shallow, and Frank Pickbone.
Our genial hostess gave us plenty of sack to drink, and there were little custard cakes besides. I had imported a bushel of my wonder-working figs from Dorset, from my ghostly father the giant of Cerne Abbas. We all munched handfuls of these to supply and refresh our champions for their task in the tourney ahead.
Jane Nightwork was some thirty years old then, no more, a sweet white English rose – even if already well-sniffed. Her body was delicious in every part. Her hair was dark, her eyes grey, her arms long, her legs well-fleshed and shapely. She had a most sensual and determined chin. She sang to us with a guitar. She chose that oldest of whore’s madrigals, the acrostic which Eve first sang to Adam, when she twigged he would be more fun than bananas:
C ome live and love with me
U nder the greenwood tree!
N onny nonny nonny no!
T arradiddle me below!
The evening passed very merrily. When Pickbone lay down with the lady under the starry coverlet on the great bed, there was a sort of spice of amiability and friendliness in the night air. The stars smiled down on us. The moon beamed, despite the fact that she was out of reach of the windmill’s arms. I remember this vividly. The night’s warmth. Diana’s blessing light.
I was all for dicing with Shallow while Pickbone had his time. Then we could take it in turns with Jane, who was always willing. Indeed who was always hungry for what she called a good rummage. Meaning several men at once, in separate orifices of course.
But Shallow tossed the dice down a rat-hole in his excitement.
The great bed squeaked under Mrs Nightwork under Frank.
Shallow tiptoed to the door.
‘I want to watch,’ he said.
They let him.
For myself, I observed the placid disposition of the constellations above St George’s fields. There was Orion. There Aquarius. I remember now. This encounter took place on the very day the tailor Badby was burnt in his barrel at Smithfield. Looking at Hercules in the night sky, I had that image in my head. Hal lurked there too, or strutted (rather) in his studded shoes. His lips like a lady’s purse. Flesh burnt into ashes. Threepence a day.
‘NOW!’
It was Robert Shallow. Pickbone and Jane had arrived at their conclusion, and the lady amiably made room for the newcomer in her bed. Shallow rushed in, where Fastolf (knowing Frank Pickbone’s notions of cleanliness) would have feared to tread.
But whatever it was he did, it did not please Mrs Nightwork.
There was a scream.
There was a smack.
There was a spindly thump as Shallow fell out of the bed. He was clutching his middle.
Jane stood over him, stark naked, a stick in her fist. It was Pickbone’s stick, snatched up from the mill floor. Her eyes flashed. She was furious.
‘Jack! Frank! What’s he got there? Examine him!’
I stepped forward light-heartedly, still suspecting and supposing some kind of joke. But then I saw Shallow hurriedly trying to hide something out of reach of the light of the lantern. I grabbed him by the waist and turned him upside down.
Pickbone punched him.
Pickbone tickled him.
Something clouted out of Shallow’s grasp and clattered to the floor.
‘There!’ cried Jane triumphantly. ‘What is it?’
I held it up.
‘A cucumber?’ I suggested.
‘A puppet?’ said Frank.
‘A cudgel?’ I said doubtfully, fingering the thing.
Jane shrieked three times. Her grey eyes were on fire with indignation.
She started belabouring Shallow’s upside-down bottom with her very capable hands. Then with Pickbone’s stick.
‘That’s for trying to get it up me!’ – Thwack!
‘That’s for tricks that could’ve killed me!’ – THWACK!
‘That’s for practically ruining my trade for life!’ – THWACK!
Now, damn me black, but the boulevard or thoroughfare which Mrs Nightwork referred to as her ‘trade’ was in fact so broad and easy and well-worn by travellers that I think a cart and horses could have been driven up inside it, turned round, and brought out again without touching the sides. Men had been known to get lost in those regions for days on end, and emerge at last laden with treasure left by previous explorers and marauders.
All the same, poor Shallow’s artificial assistant did look singularly terrible and spiky.
‘But – it’s – Italian!’ I heard him gasp, between blows on his bum.
‘I’ll Italian you!’ cried Mrs Nightwork. ‘I’ll give you Italian dildoes! What you mean by your Romish tricks with an honest English whore!’
We were then treated, Frank Pickbone and I, to the spectacle of the same honest English whore heartily flagellating the exposed posteriors of Mr R. Shallow the law-student with the aforesaid foreign dildoe as her weapon.
I have to say that it did more for him than it ever did for her.
In the end, she
shoved it right up his end.
This whole exercise left poor Shallow pleased enough, if somewhat dazed, and quite unable to sit down. He succeeded finally in lying on his belly and cooling his arse with cabbage leaves soaked in sack. Thus, the idiot fell asleep and was soon snoring his head off.
It takes all sorts to make an orgy.
Luckily for us, the beating had given our lusty Jane an appetite for more practical amours. We absorbed the remainder of the sack, and sweated it out again with a will. My will mostly. Jane mounted me the way a cow on heat goes to it with a bull.
That was the night we counted our way round the constellation of the Bear, or Charles’s Wain. For each star up there we had to give Mrs Nightwork a shooting star down here, Pickbone or myself. And although I have no need to boast of it now, I record the plain truth that the crowning and best-shot last-shot star was mine, not Frank’s. He dropped out, spent, half way up the left flank of the constellation. Jane at that point got her second wind. As for me, with my balls and my belly full of Mr Wiclif’s lovely lollardy figs, I stayed the course all night, without dissent or schism, and with no need of assistance or inspiration from poor Robert Shallow’s Italian ambassador.
Chapter Thirty-Five
About correspondences
4th May
It is said (by Scrope, that miser’s git, who else?) that I ought not to have devoted such a day as Holy Cross Day to telling you about Shallow’s Italian dildoe.
I say: I am building a house, and I know my trade.
I say: John Fastolf is a master mason, and each stone has its place in my design, and I know where I am putting them. I have to quarry. I have to axe. I have to chisel. I have my hammers (Scrope will be one of them too, before these Days are out, you bloody wait and see!). I have my mallets and my saws, my chisels and my bevels and my compasses. By God, I have my nippers and my scissors too, and I know how to use them! Do I bother you with scaffolding, or talk of my considerable hoisting appliances, which are necessary since the weight of my life is not to be measured in tons? There is so much of it. I assure you, Reader, that the inductive process of my Acta allows for no accidents or blasphemies. Take that greatest of houses – I mean, the Cathedral which was built two hundred years ago at Chartres, to house the Blessed Sacrament and a portion of our Lady’s dress. There is a very great mystery in that building, which your eye may miss. It is this: that the windows with their pictures which you see from inside when the light falls through them match in no obvious way the statues which you see about and over and around the doors in corresponding places from outside. It is not a case of stone and stained glass being the same, or telling similar tales. Not at all. The correspondences go deeper! The whole place – as I understand it – was built to reveal the truth of the revealed religion which is our Christian faith. And as that religion has two parts – has come to us in two halves – in the Old Testament and in the New – so you will find at Chartres, if your eye and mind go deep enough, that what on the inside is some dark allegory from the Old, on the outside is blazed forth publicly with all the risen and illuminated truth of the New. St Augustine said that the Old Testament was just the New Testament covered with a veil. Such a house as Chartres is designed to show you how that veil was lifted by our Lord.
Does this old reprobate seek to justify his obscenities by comparing them to Chartres Cathedral? I hope that he does not. I hope you do not think I do. I mean only to suggest that there are truths and parallels and correspondences in the world, which the masons who made Chartres knew about, for the place is a book for those with eyes to read. And that there are other truths and parallels and correspondences in a man’s life, which the man himself may know about, and which I trust to place before you in this book.
I juxtapose fact and fiction.
I make a cosmos of my days in my Days.
The vox mundi speaks here, as well as the vox humana.
SO – when you allow me my mortar and bonding, my corbels and capping stones, my gablets and jambs and quoins and plinths, and all the scontion and spalls, the templates and voussoirs and tympanum of my book, will you permit me also my most necessary gargoyles? Only inferior masons suppose your gargoyle to be a detail. Sometimes the gargoyle is the point.
But all this talk is so much tooth-chisel work …
To answer Scrope:
Holy Cross Day commemorates that 3rd of May when St Helena – or, more precisely, her agents – found the True Cross on which our Lord was crucified. Enemies of the faith say that because the Church calls this day the Day of the Invention of the Holy Cross, it implies that St Helena’s agents must have duped her, or that it was some other cross, or that they did indeed ‘invent’ it – make it up. My tutor Ravenstone could have improved their understanding. Invention of the Holy Cross is from the Latin, invenire, to find or discover. And I take it that I shan’t need to remind posterity that St Helena was as real as you or I, the mother of the Emperor Constantine.
Talking of Constantine, there is also the matter of Constantine’s Cross. That is a different story – though, again, it depends what you mean by difference. I am concerned to show you likenesses where you see opposites. On his march to Rome, then, Constantine saw a burning cross in the sky. It looked like this:
Since today we have the services of Fr Brackley, you can take that shape as infallibly accurate. The Latin means, of course, By this conquer.
Then, the night before the battle of Saxa Rubra, Constantine dreamt a dream and saw a vision in his dream and was commanded to inscribe that cross above and the selfsame motto on the shields and purple banners of his soldiers.
He did.
They won.
The monogram, now Fr Brackley reminds me, is
Thank you, father.
May none of your sins be little ones.
What balls! What bluster! What cock! What blasphemous obfuscation and braggadocio! – Yes, I can hear you. Reader, I read your mind. But now let me add my one little stone to the pattern, to the tracery, to the architecture, so that the arch of the story of our night at the windmill in St George’s fields is quite complete.
On Holy Cross Day, so I have heard, in the churches of the Byzantine rite, and most especially in the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, there is a great feast celebrated, which feast is called the Exaltation of the Cross. Round here, in Caister, all through Norfolk, throughout England, we order it otherwise. The children go running through the streets, carrying stinging-nettles, and they flog each other with them.
Holy Cross Day is Sting-nettle Day, madam.
Vinces in hoc.
Chapter Thirty-Six
About the best meal which Sir John Fastolf never ate
5th May
Sad tripes from the cook Macbeth. So bad I fed them to a dog, and the dog died. A plague of tripes. My mother’s spiders would have spurned these particular tripes. Turned up their noses. Do spiders have noses? How else would they breathe? Or sneeze? Or express contempt? Female spiders sniff. Your male spider has to be damned quick. The female likes to eat him after copulation. No time for a bit of sadness after coitus in the spider world.
What a pity Worcester is away in Wales looking for St Nectar’s bloodprints. Our William likes his tripes. He could have eaten all those fetid offerings of Macbeth’s, and thereby passed to his second course and just desserts in the world to come.
Spiders spin only on dark days.
Bad food brings good food back to mind. The best meal I never ate was the meal served at the coronation banquet of King Harry IV, alias Henry Duke of Bedford, alias Duke of Lancaster, alias Earl of Derby, alias Bolingbroke. (He had that last name from the castle he was born in, at Bolingbroke, in Lincolnshire.) Not to be confused with the astronomer Bolingbroke, who is supposed to have made wax necromantic dolls for Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, and who was hung, drawn, and rather unnecessarily quartered at Tyburn.
King Bolingbroke was crowned in the Abbey Church of Westminster on a Monday – the 13th
day of October, in the year of the King of Glory 1399. Hal walked in front of him, bearing the Curtana, that naked, pointless sword which is carried before all the kings of England at their coronation, signifying the execution of justice without rancour. (It’s also called the sword of Edward the Confessor, since he started such executions.) The coronation Mass was said and sung by Thomas fitzAlan, Archbishop of Canterbury. The sacred oil used for the anointing is said to have been given by our Lady to St Thomas Becket, when he was in exile at Chartres.
I say is said to have been given because I have my doubts about the provenance of that particular oil. I know for a fact that Bolingbroke’s head became infested with lice immediately after fitzAlan had poured the holy oil upon it.
Bolingbroke had a thick red matted beard. He looked a bit like a fox. Compact. Bad conscience made him something of an insomniac towards the end of his life, and his struggles to get to sleep weren’t much assisted by his habit of wearing his crown in bed. The best thing I can think of saying about him is that he did increase Mr Chaucer’s pension. The worst thing I can think of saying about him I shall not say, but the second worst thing is that he patronised Mr Gower.
The coronation over, lice and all, the new-born King Henry IV gave the customary banquet. Except that having come to the throne by unusual routes, he had obviously decided to make the customary banquet uncustomarily magnificent.
I regret to report that I was not invited. This was hardly an oversight on Bolingbroke’s part. By Monday the 13th of October, in the year of the King of Glory 1399, I had not yet even made my mark on history by marking Skogan’s head. Nor had I met Prince Hal, and the other princes.
No – thank God – at the time of that banquet I had other things on my mind and in my hands. If you want to know, I was in a hayloft out the back here, keeping company with my sweet Ophelia. That was the day she discovered the delights of having my penis in her mouth and masturbating herself at the same time. She came when I came, and she swallowed the semen. Afterwards, she tempted me to tickle her anus with some straws—