The Pilgrim

by Hugh Nissenson

  I said to the Rev. Barstow, “My solace is that while Robin was dying he was full of Christ and fit for heaven.” I could not abide thinking of him writhing in flames with a burst stomach and steaming guts.

  Upon the third of February, I began repeating Robin’s symptoms, viz., fever, vomiting, &c. I was laid upon the bed wherein he had died and was joined, within a two days, by Ben, who was laid upon coverlets on the floor. Doctor Troth tended us. We each gave off that sweet smallpox smell. My aunt Eliza nursed us. She fetched me the cracked looking-glass. About the fifth day, my bumps became pustules, sharply raised, round, and firm; each felt like a goose-shot stuck beneath my skin. They oozed a liquid the color of honey. My eyelids swelled so I could not see. I heard Ben say, “Hear me, my God! Let me be dead rather than blind!”

  Doctor Troth prescribed fourteen drops of laudanum apiece that we drank between six and seven of the clock in the evening to assuage the agitation that came upon us every night. The laudanum sorely constipated us.

  We spake together. Ben told me that his father had burned his childish body with ratsbane, spearwort, and crowfoot. He earned two pounds a year together with livery and an additional amount for meat and drink. He hoped the maid servant named Catherine would tend his garden after his death, and once cried out in his sleep, “Runcible peas!”

  Awake, he said, “I am saved!”

  And I said, “I am damned.”

  The long and the short of it is that Ben died and I survived, disfigured. I did not have the courage to gaze upon his face nor to look upon the reflection of mine own in the mirror. I wore a black-and-white enamel mourning ring upon the little finger of my left hand. My grief stole my faith. I wrote a little poem:

  My grief stole my faith

  And sneaked away.

  I cannot trace the thief.

  His track of tears

  Hath faded from my pitted cheek.

  By the grace of God, my aunt Eliza went unscathed. I gave her the carved, oaken chest she coveted; not from gratitude, but out of apathy. Uncle Roger told me that I owed him two pounds and four shillings for the sufficiency of firewood, victuals, drink, and Doctor Troth’s ministrations and medicines during the last weeks. I promised to repay him upon the settlement of my father’s estate in the Ecclesiastical Courts, which would be four months hence.

  We went through my father’s effects—his feather bed, pewter plate, candle sticks, &c., which Roger considered were worth some thirty pounds. Together with ready money and the debts owed to him, I would inherit over fifty pounds. Roger was grateful that I had given my aunt Eliza the oaken chest and offered to remove its estimated value from the money I owed him, but I refused. I did not care about the above. I did not care about anything.

  I impassively thought of the multitudes of us predestined damned souls who, since before time began, wait upon God to be born unto this earth, only to live a while, then die and burn in eternal hellfire.

  A week thereafter, I bade farewell to my father’s former servants and returned with thirteen pounds to Cambridge to complete the Michaelmas term.

  I wept when I walked through Cambridge’s Trumpington Gate. The Head Porter of Emmanuel lowered his eyes from my pitted face. I wept when I stepped into Robin’s bare chamber—his father had preceded me—and again, when I saw the leafless walnut tree in the Quadrangle. I could not walk the streets wherein Robin and I had strolled without weeping. A soldier, bearing a pike upon his shoulder, stared at me upon the corner of the High Wand and Penny Farthing Lane.

  In the end, I gathered all my possessions and returned to the Hempstead. I told my uncle Roger that I had left Cambridge for good, and he said, “Play the man, Charles! Play the man! Resume your studies and become a Minister, as was our design.”

  “I cannot. If you will have me, I am here to stay until I come into my inheritance.”

  “You may, but you have much disappointed me. Though, I confess, I am glad to save the forty-five pounds a year you were costing me at Cambridge to make something of yourself. Well, you may live here, as you will, for as long as you like. I will feed you from my own table and give you a feather bed to sleep in. All I ask in return is that you keep my accounts, like your father did. Will you do that for me?”

  “I am interested in earning money. And my father taught me well how to reckon your accounts. Pay me three pounds a year—and I will see to them for you.”

  He said, “I will pay you two. You are after all a novice, and a mistake on your part can cost me much.”

  “Pay me two pounds, ten shillings.”

  “Done!” he said. “But I will not pay you in addition as my servant in husbandry. Will you serve me as a common servant of husbandry for no fee?”

  “I will not. You will pay me what you pay Jacob and Esau.”

  “Charles, my lad, we are very alike. We both value words. Words and money. Yes, like me, you are a shrewd yeoman who knows the value of a shilling! You would have made a goodly master of Hempstead! But, alas, it was not to be. Tom Foot is now my heir and my bailiff of husbandry. You will have to obey his commands. He is a forward knave who drinks too much, but your aunt Eliza thinks of him as her son—the one she could never have. She takes all things in good part but being barren. She bears great sorrow in her heart for being barren.”

  “Uncle, I well nigh forgot: I heard the Head Porter of Emmanuel say, ‘He came home like a cuckoo in spring.’”

  He said, “A good phrase. Why then you are a cuckoo! Welcome home, cuckoo! ‘He came home like a cuckoo in spring.’ Good! I will remember it. But that nice phrase cost me dear. Think on it! Forty-five pounds this year alone!”

  • • •

  Here will I spill my soul. I had no power to turn to the Lord. I was nothing but a mass of sin. I was scared of the dark, wherein I was stalked by devils.

  I was sorely tempted to run my head against the wall and brain myself.

  It was ploughing time. After a day’s labour, I accompanied Foot to The Sign of the Bull, wherein we each drank a bottle or two of muscatel and ate a loaf of bread and a cluster of raisins.

  On my solitary walks upon the Downs. I tried to decipher the song of the skylark, and the clustered bellflower, buttercups, and clovers in the south meadow, but they did not appear to me as ciphers writ by God. They were merely birdsong and flowers—nothing more; the plough was not His pen.

  My aunt Eliza gave me a drink of hollyhocks, violet leaves, and fennel decocted in ale. She said, “This may purge your melancholy. I know of melancholy; it hath come and gone with me since I have known that I am barren. I ate artichokes and prayed for five years to conceive a child, but to no avail. And even when my melancholy goes, I fear it will return. I fear so even now, though it hath been four years since I last suffered from the affliction.

  “Drink the decoction,” she said. “And here are two shillings. I have bidden Tom to fetch Doctor Troth. Consult him. He hath helped me.”

  I told Doctor Troth everything—everything!—and cried out, “I have crucified Christ anew! I am damned.”

  He said, “You are not damned! Remove that thought from your mind! Yours is the broken and contrite heart which Scripture tells us the Lord will not despise. Yours is the poor spirit on whom the Lord pronounces His blessing. Yours is the affliction whereof the spirit of God is called the comforter.

  “Remember, the Devil is likewise a spirit and an effectual worker through corporeal means—in your instance, the humour of melancholy which runs in our blood. The humour of melancholy is an apt instrument for Satan both to weaken our bodies and terrify our minds with fantastical ideas. What will not a possessed man conceive? What strange forms of bugbears, demons, witches, and goblins? Why do witches and old women fascinate and bewitch children? Answer me that! Because of the power of Satan!

  “In your spiritual and corporeal battle with him, do not play the milk sop. Be of good courage. Stru
ggle with Satan and love God.

  “Because melancholy blood is thick and gross, and therefore flows easily, I shall open your vein—the middle one of your left arm, here—and draw off ten ounces of your blood. The middle vein links together head, liver, and spleen, and as melancholy is seated in the brain, bleeding you from there will do the most good.”

  This being done, Doctor Troth said to me, “Mistress Wentworth here knows the diet you must follow and will prepare it for you. Things that are wholesome and meet for melancholic folks. Eat only what she serves you; drink her decoctions and only a little ale with your food, for liquor greatly aggravates melancholy. You must abstain from drinking wine or strong spirits.”

  “Henceforth, I will.”

  “Good! Now harken unto me. Over the years, these are what I have found are most effective against melancholy. First, exercise thyself, frequently and heartily, with violent labour, even though Hippocrates forbids it. For I have discovered that in this instance he is wrong.

  “Next, and most important: the world, as you know, is composed of opposites—God and the Devil, light and dark, wet and dry, &c. The humour of melancholy, for example, is cold and dry, that of choler, fiery and moist. Taken together, opposites make up the whole of everything. Therefore, act the opposite of what you feel. You feel vile, useless, and unworthy, therefore constantly do something that makes you feel good, useful, and worthy in God’s eyes.”

  My aunt Eliza, who was standing by my bed, said to me, “That is why I nursed you and Ben, even though I was terrified of the smallpox. It made me feel good, useful, and worthy in God’s eyes, as Doctor Troth said, and doing thus, when I can, keeps my melancholy at bay. The Lord judged me right to do so, for He spared me from catching the disease.”

  I was always in pain between my breasts—as if a great weight were pressing thereon. I suffered palpitations and, like my late father, shortness of breath. I lived in fear, never free, resolute, or secure, and always anxious without reason. Either I was unable to sleep or slept away the day. My aunt Eliza said that both were caused by the melancholic dryness of my brain. My uncle Roger roused me to work, and I exhausted myself with vigorous labor.

  I searched for another occupation on the farm that would make me feel useful and worthy, but found none. One day, I watched Hal, Patch’s sheep dog, throw a big black ram that had challenged the dog for supremacy over the ewes. Hal ran along the ram’s flank, shoved against his shoulder, and as it turned to butt, threw him down. Hal then led the flock away, returned, and with a pull on the black ram’s shoulder wool, set him upon his feet again. I laughed for the first time in months. Patch stood by playing upon his shepherd’s pipe. The air was filled with his music.

  In June, my uncle hired five shearmen. They, Patch, Jacob, Esau, Foot, and I washed Roger’s flock of two hundred fifty-one sheep in his dammed-up stream with a gravel bed, by the pen. We plucked the foul and loose wool from about their udders, while Patch examined their legs and hooves. It took half a day to drive all the sheep through the washing pool. An old ewe, distressed that I had washed her behind the ears, placed her two front hooves upon my breast and shoved me over backwards into the water. I laughed again.

  We spent three days shearing the sheep. We sorted them first, letting the young lambs go. We then sheared the ewes that were still suckling. The rams were done apart. Rooks and magpies picked over the sheep for maggots. Patch carried a small box of Stockholm tar to treat blow-fly, maggots, and broken skin. He smeared on the tar and sang the old song:

  A shepherd on a hill he sat,

  He had his tar box and his hat

  And his name was Jolly-Jolly Watt.

  In the late afternoon of the second day, a ewe caught her right foreleg in a hole and broke it. Patch slashed her throat with a pair of shears and wept; his tears ran down the sides of his nose. He walked with me into the midst of some green-winged orchids growing in the west meadow and said, “That ewe whose throat I just cut was very like the darling I buggered near the honey tree. I cannot help myself. Whenever I spy a frisky and comely ewe, with a long, thick, soft, and curly fleece, the Devil stretches my yard.

  “Goodwife Barret hath a charm for me, a special something wore upon a string about my neck. I know not what. But it costs ten pence. Can you lend me the money until New Year’s Day? Goodwife Barret also tells me I must say, ‘The Lord is my shepherd,’ thrice, whenever a comely ewe catches my eye. But I must needs have ten pence, sir. Could you find it in your heart to give me ten pence?”

  “Here you are, sirrah.”

  “Why, thank you sir, thank you! I am once more in your debt, sir.”

  After the shearing, the five hired shearmen, my uncle Roger, and the rest of us at the Hempstead fell to quaffing ale and eating much mutton, bread, and clotted cream. I drank but one pot of ale.

  The shorn fleece was given over to five hired maid servants in husbandry, who rolled and sorted them according to quality in the wool-chamber and packed it into one and one-half woolpacks. This labour took the women three days. They finished on a cool evening. A fine mist hovered above the warm woolpacks. Patch piped a mournful tune. As weary as I was, I could not sleep and lay awake till dawn.

  My aunt Eliza served me suppers meet for my melancholy. Thrice a week I ate calf, wether mutton, and rabbit stew.

  My uncle Roger’s flock yielded one and a half standard sacks of good quality fleece, weighing three hundred and sixty-four pounds, which we brought three loads in his wagon to Winterbourne and sold them to John Wells, the young clothier in Howard Street, for twelve pounds. We came to an agreement at The Sign of the Man at Arms over two bottles of sack, of which I drank one cup. Wells had recently inherited his business from his deceased father and was seeking a partner to invest in it.

  On our way home, my uncle said to me, “I love you, my lad. It pains me to see you moping about. I will lend you fifty pounds without interest if you invest it in Wells’s business. Making a profit always makes me merry. It might do the same for you.”

  I hired my father’s attorney, Mr. Dashwood. He and Wells’s attorney prepared the contract. On Friday morning of the following week, I became Wells’s partner. He was a plain, honest Christian. For my investment of fifty pounds, he promised me a return of at least three pounds a year when he had sold his cloth. I bought wool from the local farmers, learned to drive a wagon, and took the wool to our women labourers in their cottages to be carded and spun. I paid them for their work and then brought the spun yarn to be woven into cloth by men in their homes. I delivered the woven cloth to the fulling-mill on the Frome, wherein it was washed, shrunk, and tentered. The finishing of the cloth was done at Wells’s. He had the cloth dyed by the town dyers.

  I have related the above in detail because I rejoiced in witnessing the honest labor that fed and clothed sixty-nine Christians and their families. I watched Goodwife Stone carding, John Johnson at his loom, Robert Hayman raising the cloth’s nap, &c. My work was essential to them and eased my soul. I was no longer stalked by devils.

  With the ten pence I lent him, Peter Patch bought a charm from Goodwife Barret that would calm his passion for ewes. The charm was a dried ram’s pizzle, which he wore about his neck on a string. It smelled of sorcery to me. Goodwife Barret also bade Patch to recite the first verse from Psalm 23—“The Lord is my shepherd, &c.”—whenever he spied a frisky ewe, with long, thick, soft, curly fleece.

  It rained every night during the first week of November. When the sky cleared for a few hours, a blazing star appeared in the southeast. About the same time, there were many reports of wars between England, France, and the Low Countries. The Reverend Styles preached in a sermon that the comet foretold that the End of Days was at hand. The battle of Armageddon between Protestants and Papists—Christ and Antichrist—had begun, and it would soon end with the Second Coming. It was reported that there was a great stir in Bohemia about choosing a king, whom we hoped would be a Pr
otestant. That might have helped to make a Protestant Emperor in Germany.

  In January, we heard that there was a very great Armada provided and gathered in Spain for England. It was reported to be greater than the one in ’88. But God was with us, as you know, and nothing came of it. Yet we all felt in Winterbourne that the Last Days were upon us. The pastors of Winterbourne’s three churches called for three days of mortification and fasting. I felt overjoyed at the imminent coming of the Last Judgment. Soon I would know whether I was damned or saved.

  Wells sold his cloth in December to a traveling buyer for a London cloth merchant. The price of cloth had risen—I earned four pounds and three shillings. Thereafter, I laboured all the day about the farm. Once, upon a frosty morning, I spied Peter Patch, wrapped in his ragged cloak, driving his flock. Icicles hung from his beard; tufts of fleece stuck to his hair. When it snowed, he and I drove the sheep into the steading next to the barn and packed them tight to keep them warm.

  Tom Foot was oft drunk but was able to manage the Hempstead. Patch’s sciatica was worse. He hobbled on his left leg and leaned upon his forked staff to help him walk. My uncle Roger’s hair and beard had turned grey, while his long mustache remained brown. Aunt Eliza, like myself, was most melancholic during the autumn and winter.

  She said, “I hate the long, cold nights, wherein I am exhausted by sadness, but the Devil keeps me awake till dawn.”

  We mated the sheep in May and June. Then we washed and sheared them and sold their wool to Wells. I returned to work with him in Winterbourne. Lambing would be in October. The little lambs were born in hovels and lambing pens. We reared the lambs in the Hempstead farmhouse for the Christmas market. Patch stopped milking the ewes at Lammas to let them grow strong and ready for the rams in the autumn.