I love you. Wherever in the wide World my Journey takes me, that love will be with me.
Billy
The next day was market day in Plymouth, and the gulls knew it. There were clouds of them hanging over the town ahead of him, and he had never seen such screeching raucous creatures in the sky before. The silent clouds of starlings over the woods of Stanton St. John would soar away from such a racket. It was only the first of that day’s marvels.
The old tin-man’s packhorse raised its sad eyes up to the gulls, but seemed incapable of surprise after so many years of trudging the ancient ridge road from Tavistock that fell down from the treeless edges of the moor into the punchy self-confident little town below. Half a dozen half-empty sacks of tin weighed down the spine of the old horse. The old man himself didn’t look up from the cold, damp dirt below him. He had kept his eyes on the road for much of the journey, unsteady on his ancient feet as he was, but he still fell down three or four times a day, in a flurry of pagan curses and foul-smelling clothes. He was too old to be doing this journey, it occurred to Billy. He was the oldest human Billy had ever seen. He was perhaps fifty, almost two decades older than Kate’s father.
The road had been descending for some time, and below the gulls Billy could see the compact walled town, a church spire climbing up almost to touch the bellies of the birds which squawked their welcome. Although the ground remembered it was October, maintaining autumn’s damp, it was a dry day for so late in the year, essentially clear, and down the hill and over the roofs of the houses Billy could see the unfamiliar vertical sight of masts. The wind brought a new smell into his nostrils, a cold, fresh, salty smell. There had been a forewarning of that sharp tang the previous day, but now it came on hard and strong. Plymouth sat at the edge of the whole world, and the scent of it brought the world sharply into focus.
He felt profoundly excited. He felt like crying. He felt sick.
He touched the side of his face again, the place where Kate had kissed him, two weeks before. “For luck,” she’d said, and now he said it again as he walked past the first houses, on the edge of the town. “For luck.”
Luck had been a constant companion these past few weeks. He’d traveled more than a hundred and fifty miles from Oxfordshire, sleeping in fields most evenings, occasionally taken in by a well-meaning farmer’s wife with perhaps the trace of an old sparkle in her eyes. Finally, he’d skirted the north side of the moor and had reached Tavistock, where he’d met the decrepit tin-man.
Kate’s father had been adamant—stay away from the towns, and don’t go near Dartmoor on your own. If you do, you’ll die. And yet the only way into Plymouth from the north was along the edge of Dartmoor and through Tavistock, breaking both of Kate’s father’s admonitions. So Billy had been relieved when the tin-man had approached him in the inn and told him about ancient paths known only to farmers and tin-men. He spoke like that, too: “ancient paths known only to farmers, young ’un,” as if his every utterance was to be written down within a Celtic myth. Billy had grasped the chance, even though these “ancient ways” turned out to be no more than the main north–south road into Plymouth which had been tramped up and down for centuries past.
In any case, Plymouth hadn’t been designed for those arriving on foot. Plymouth sat on the water, and was only notionally attached to the rest of the country behind it. If you didn’t have a way of getting there by boat, well then, Plymouth had little time for you. If you weren’t traveling by water, really, what sort of a person could you be? In recent decades, Plymouth had been the stage for dozens of epic encounters, between England and France, England and Spain, England and the Hanseatic League, England and anyone with a ship full of treasure who thought they could slip by the hungry chancers of Devon and Cornwall without at least a nibble of piracy. Fowey, westward down the coast, was the home of a more vicious collection of thieves and smugglers. In Plymouth the chancers dressed well and cloaked themselves in mercantile respectability. Like London, the town was run by and for its merchants. Its aldermen were cut from a particular swashbuckling cloth, and looked longingly (and greedily) out across the ocean, out to where the Spaniards and Portuguese were busy carving out empires and hollowing out mountains of gold and silver. It was from Plymouth that the English followed them, and it was back to Plymouth that the plunder of countless acts of derring-do had begun to return.
Billy and the tin-man (no boat, but a trusty packhorse) entered the town through Old North Gate. There were men at this gate writing down the names of those who entered and left, and he felt a momentary tug of fear (avoid the towns, said Kate’s father again urgently), but the old tin-man grunted at the men and Billy was waved through, apparently as someone the old man would vouch for.
Once inside the walls of the town, everything changed. Rows of houses started to bunch up like young men in an alehouse, and the spaces between these rows of houses started to organize themselves into something like paved pathways. These are streets, Billy realized. Streets like they have in Oxford itself.
And as these streets and rows of houses began to crowd in, Plymouth rose up to meet Billy’s eyes and ears and nose. It was a whirl of shouting voices, human and animal smells, and blurry-bright magnificent colors. Having spent the last few days with only the sounds of the moor to keep him company, and the swaying rattling of the packhorse and the tin-man, the torrent of sensation was overwhelming. Now there were people everywhere, a river of humans scurrying down to the Market Cross to indulge in the passion of all Englishmen and Englishwomen: the buying and selling of stuff.
Everywhere he looked, money was changing hands, and if not money some other item of exchange. People swirled around the street. If you sniffed the air, it smelled of deals.
Billy turned toward the tin-man to ask directions, but the man was gone, along with his packhorse, and Billy whispered a farewell under his breath, along with a quiet Polish Ave Maria, like his mother had described his father doing.
A woman heard him whisper the little prayer and glanced at him curiously. Plymouth-dwellers were notoriously alert to the presence of spies in their town, and with a fresh Protestant queen on the throne Roman Catholic homilies rather stood out. But he smiled his charming smile and her face melted, as faces (particularly female faces) generally did around young Billy Ablass. He was a fine-looking young man, tall with dark hair and pale, smooth skin. His teeth were whiter and straighter than they had any business being, and his blue eyes (inherited from his Slavic father) were crystal-clear.
He’d now reached the Market Cross itself, and he stopped for a moment. His heart was still racing with the richness of the experience, but the Ave Maria and the woman’s smile had quietened his mind somewhat. He needed to get to the Mitre—that was the alehouse Kate’s father had told him about, the place where he’d find the captain. Normally, Billy would not have been remotely concerned about asking for directions, but the paradox of these crowds had already hit him: he felt alone and very obviously out of place, and for a moment imagined all the faces of the crowd turned to him, the stranger from far away.
And there she was again, the woman he’d smiled at, coming back into view behind a horse, so he smiled again and approached her.
“Excuse me, ma’am. I’m searching for the Mitre, if you would know where that would be.”
Her smile remained, but it was puzzled—his accent was unplaceable. Not Devon, certainly. Somerset, perhaps? Dorchester? Surely not as far as Oxford!
“And why would a handsome young thing like you be looking for the Mitre?” she said, determined to keep him in conversation for a while. Her rich Devon vowels made her seem impossibly exotic to Billy, her accent even stronger than that of the farmer. Her seductive tone might have given him pause, but Billy didn’t hesitate to roll out his learned-by-heart story.
“My uncle Jack is a brewer, from Abingdon. He wants to sell his beer in Plymouth, and has asked me to visit the local alehouses to see if they might be prepared to sell his fine ale. I’m to talk to
them all. Starting with the Mitre,” he added hurriedly, afraid she might direct him to another tavern.
He’d remembered the fictional details, and felt a small lift of pride. The woman was smiling even more broadly now, as if he’d just told her the finest joke this side of the Tamar.
“Well, quite the man of business, aren’t we?” she said. “And all the way from Abingdon? Why, you must have been traveling for weeks, young fellow. The Mitre’s in the street down there, toward the harbor.” She pointed to a gap in the buildings that surrounded the Market Cross. “But you’ll have no joy with your uncle’s fine ales, which I’m sure are the nectar of the gods themselves, judging by his fine nephew. The Mitre’s run by old Coakley, and that nasty old bugger will only sell ale from Devon. He makes a point of it.”
He thanked the woman, who laughed again at his formality before continuing on her way.
He looked at the houses she’d pointed at, and they were (again!) the most opulent things he’d ever seen, their leaded windows glittering in the unseasonal sun. In one of the open windows, a gorgeous young creature sat watching the crowds below and combing her long red hair. He took no joy in her appearance, because she reminded him of Kate, and of how long it would be before he saw her again. She noticed him, though, and for a moment she imagined eloping to Exeter and heading for the golden pavements of London with the gorgeous, serious-faced stranger.
He struggled across the stream of market traders and visitors, and walked down the street the woman had indicated. It was a small, crooked place, smelling of shit and cows and, within and above the other smells, the mysterious scent of some foreign spice that lent all the other odors an impossible glamour. There were still people here, so many people, but in the shadows they stopped being faces and voices and turned into presences. Up ahead, a gaggle of shadowy men stood outside one of the buildings, and above them swung a childishly simple picture of a bishop’s mitre.
The men outside the inn ignored him as he pushed through them, and Billy thought in passing that this was the first time he’d deliberately touched a stranger and been ignored by him in return. Half a dozen strangers, at that. Another new sliver of experience. Perhaps he was already a changed man, even after so little time.
He passed through a low-arched doorway and, to his surprise, emerged into a small open courtyard with a cloister down one side and a staircase at the end, beneath which was a door. It didn’t look like any inn he had ever seen before, but he headed for the door and went inside.
Within there was a genuine gloom, one that reminded him of the local alehouse back at home on a winter’s night when the fire was on and a few candles served to light the room. But this gloom was not particularly cozy; indeed, there was something church-like about it. In one corner a man sat on his own with a few candles and a massive pewter beer-jug, an open ledger in front of him. The man seemed to give off his own light, or rather to be reflecting and amplifying the light from the sturdy candles in front of him. He wore an amazingly impressive ruff on top of something possibly more alien than anything Billy had seen thus far—a purple doublet with gold stitching and brass studs, each the size of a sheep’s eye and each polished, so that the man looked like a map of the stars. He was the most impossibly exotic human Billy had ever seen.
Billy approached what seemed in the gloom to be a bear cleaning a huge earthenware jug in front of a new-looking hatch in the wall. A man, of course, but a man so huge and so hairy that Billy could not get his first impression out of his mind, that the landlord of this place was a huge Russian bear with a thick mane on its head and a beard hanging down from its impressive jaw. The man’s massive fat hairy fingers moved surprisingly delicately over the jug. He didn’t look up at Billy.
Billy found it took some courage to speak to him.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for someone, and was told I might find him here.”
The hairy man said nothing, but something about the way he moved his head indicated that Billy could at least carry on speaking.
“I’m looking for John Hawkyns.”
At that, the hairy man looked directly at Billy. He was interested now, although Billy sensed this might not be for reasons entirely beneficial to him.
“Yer lookin’ for John ’Awkyns, are ye?” said the man. His accent grated on Billy’s ears. It was harder and harsher than the sandpapered-down warmth of Oxford. He’d not heard anything quite like it before. Even the old farmer hadn’t sounded like this. Letters were dropped from the beginnings and ends of words, and the whole thing sounded chopped and mangled and turned in on itself. Aggression seemed to be the cable that strung the words together.
“Yes, sir.”
“And why would ye think Mr. ’Awkyns would want ye to find ’im, eh?”
Billy wondered if he would get anywhere with this beast of a man, but then another voice cut in.
“Now, now, Coakley. Mr. Hawkyns can decide such things for himself.”
After the harsh rasping of Coakley, as Billy now guessed the hairy giant to be, this new voice was rich, elegantly polished, and sardonic, and even without turning Billy knew it must come from the glamorous man with the candles and the ledger. Billy turned to look in that direction, and saw the stranger was smiling, almost rapturously, at him. He preceded his next utterance with a theatrical wink toward Billy.
“Really, Coakley, I don’t know how they are wont to do things in London, but here in the Queen’s Harbor of Plymouth we like to make young strangers feel welcome. Particularly such well-put-together young strangers. Pour the boy a drink and get him to come over here.”
Coakley smirked as he poured beer into a pewter jug, and handed it to Billy with a leer. “Sip i’ slowly, stranger,” he muttered as he handed it over. “Few too many of these and ye’ll find yourself tied to a mainmast. And no’ in the regular way, if you ge’ my meanin’.”
Billy did not get his meaning, but didn’t say so, preferring instead to adopt his newly learned attitude of polite caution in the face of strangers saying inexplicable things. He took the ale and walked over to the man with the ledger and the splendid clothes, who was still smiling at him with an expansive, welcoming ease. Everything about the man oozed splendor and munificence, and something about him made Billy think of the young girl brushing her hair in the window of the expensive house.
“Sit down, young fellow, sit down,” said the rich man. “Now. I do know this John Hawkyns whom you are seeking. What would you have him speak to you about?”
That smile remained in place, and the hands were folded on top of the thick, heavy leather ledger. The studs in the man’s doublet flickered like beacon fires on the hills above Plymouth, warning of encroaching danger.
“I’ve a letter for him, sir.”
“Really? How tremendously exciting. So let’s see this letter, my lad.”
Billy reached inside his jerkin. For half a second he could not feel the letter and an impossible world of failure opened up, a world in which he returned to Stanton St. John with nothing, with no money at all, and Kate’s father lost the tenancy of the manor farm and left the village, taking Kate with him, and Billy roamed the country, a worthless serf, away from Kate and away from his dreams of money and all that came with it. But then he felt the corner of the thick parchment, pulled out the letter, and stopped.
The stranger was staring at Billy, his smile now smaller but still there, his head tipped back slightly and his eyes almost closed, like a cat waiting for a mouse to jump.
“Can you smile, sir?” the rich man asked, suddenly, before Billy had a chance to show him the letter.
“Smile?”
“Yes, dammit, smile. I’d like to see you smile. If I were to say that Coakley here was a London man and came here to avoid three different women who mystifyingly wanted to spend their lives with him, would that make you smile?”
Despite himself, Billy did smile. The man’s easy, arrogant charm was so beautiful to observe, while being so patently lethal.
“My
God, you do smile, sir. Exceptionally so.” But Billy stopped smiling immediately. He felt something cold in his gut, and found that he had some steel inside him when it came to matters of negotiation. He kept a hold on the letter.
“If you please sir, I’d rather give the letter to Mr. Hawkyns directly, sir. The man who gave it to me said specifically that I should give it to Mr. Hawkyns and only Mr. Hawkyns.”
The man’s smile was still in place, but its personality had changed. The nose had pinched, the eyes compressed. He now looked like he might bite Billy’s head off and spit it into his beer.
“You have a bloody nerve, boy. I say give me the letter and I’ll give it to Hawkyns.”
“And if you please, sir, I say that in all conscience I cannot, having been instructed to give it to Mr. Hawkyns directly.”
The rich man leaned forward, the hands rising together and the index fingers pointing directly between Billy’s eyes. His eyes were flat and dangerous.
“Young men from the country arrive in Plymouth all the time. And young men disappear as well . . .”
“Now, now, enough, Tregarthen. Leave the lad alone.”
Another man had emerged from the gloom of the inn and had placed his hand on the shoulder of the first. Although he spoke quietly, and had emerged as if from smoke, his presence changed the room. The atmosphere of threatening bonhomie disappeared. Undercurrents vanished. Billy relaxed, despite himself.
“Get me a beer, Coakley. And another for this pillar of the community Tregarthen. Now, this letter, lad.”
“Mr. Hawkyns?”
The man nodded as he sat down, and his natural authority was such that without a qualm Billy handed him the heavy precious letter which he’d husbanded so carefully on the journey from Oxfordshire. Billy watched Hawkyns as he read the letter. The man wore a doublet and a ruff like the man he’d called Tregarthen, but where the other’s clothes were all ostentation and show, Hawkyns’s outfit was relatively subdued but still, deliberately, very expensive. Even to Billy’s untrained bucolic eyes, his clothes were obviously much more costly than those worn by his comrade. This was a man who dressed not to influence or to impress, but to dominate and to control. His hair was dark and cut short, his dark beard pointed in the Spanish manner, his nose long and straight. Hawkyns’s eyes were almost black, as far as Billy could detect here in the gloom of the Mitre. The candle glittered in them as he read the letter.
The English Monster Page 3