Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  Most of that country was open common, but here and there was a hawthorn hedge seen dimly either side the road, soft-grey under the hoar-frost, with now and then the breath of a group of steers uprising on the far side. Trees loomed now and then like ghosts. There was hardly a sound except the ringing of our horses’ hoofs on the frozen highway.

  We came before long to a gibbet that was used for signpost where a road turned southward, and from there on, perhaps because the gibbet lent a melancholy hue to thought reminding us how cold it was, we let the beasts trot, cuffing our ears and clapping hands to make the blood flow, (Although Harvey is credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood — which he announced in 1619 — there is plenty of evidence, as for instance in Shakespeare’s plays, that long before that time the blood was commonly understood to circulate. (See Julius Caesar III i and Coriolatius I i.)) wishing that the struggling sun might suck the mist.

  And of a sudden my horse shied, so unexpectedly that I was hard put to it to keep in the saddle. I almost unhorsed Will by bumping into him.

  A man had come spurring from behind a hayrick set close to the road where there was a wide gap in the hawthorn hedge, and no rail, or else the rail was broken, or perhaps he had removed it. He drew rein nigh on top of us and I could see his pistol-muzzle — that and his mare’s head, not much more, for the fog was thick.

  “Buy your lives!” he bawled out.

  I knew his voice. I recognized his mare’s head. I bethought me of dry pistol-priming. Also I was envious of Will for last night’s victory, and minded to persuade him there were times and places where my prowess might surpass his.

  Priming nerved me, but my sword came first to hand. I was at the fellow, point first, sooner and more sudden than he looked for. He drew trigger and the flash and the report scared Will’s ill-humoured horse into the ditch, but the bullet missed me, though I felt the wind of it. The next the fellow knew my point was at his throat and my left hand had his mare’s head by the bridle.

  Then in turn he knew me. “Halifax!” he muttered.

  “Jeremy Crutch,” said I, “that name of yours rings ominous! Belike you’ll need a pair of crutches if I break your bones! Is this your gratitude for what my father did?”

  “Unhand me,” he answered, and there was more than disappointment in his voice. He felt shame. “Had I known it was you and your crony you should have passed and never seen me.”

  I took his sword and, grasping it between thigh and saddle, passed his rein over my arm, not having all that confidence in men’s professions that had wrecked my father.

  “I expected two of the Earl of Leicester’s men,” said Jeremy. “Such capons travel well lined.”

  “All that desperate?” I asked. “You’d better rob the Queen’s men. She might send to bid the Lord Lieutenant do his duty, but the Earl would clap a hundred riders after you for saucy interference with his pig-stye cleaner.”

  He laughed. “Let come a thousand,” he retorted. “They should never find me. There is a ship in Plymouth Harbour, ready to weigh for the Spanish Main, and my mother’s cousin sold me a place on board and one quarter of a sixty-fourth share, but it took all the money I had. A purse or two, to buy my share of liquor for the ship—”

  “You might have sold this mare,” I answered, eyeing her. She was a beauty. “Be you minded, Jeremy, to walk to Plymouth?”

  “No,” said he, “for by the rood I’d rather hang! I’ll give you better though.”

  With that he put his hand inside his leather jacket, squinting down his sharp nose at my sword-point, for I trusted him not at all.

  “There was mention of this last night,” he said, and pulled out something in a leather pouch, of a size to lie snugly on the flat palm of the hand. “I risked my neck for it,” he went on, “and you heard what Titus Bellamy said about its owner putting a high value on it. ‘Od’s blood, I would liefer have a purse of money, gallow’s risk and all! Have it. It has brought me ill-luck. It may serve you better.”

  I took it, hardly looking, needing one hand for my sword and both eyes for Jeremy’s face, although Will Shakespeare had dragged his horse out of the ditch and was standing near. Will had drawn his hanger, but I had my doubts that he could use the weapon half as well as Mistress Bellamy had used a toasting-fork.

  “Now let me go,” said Jeremy, “and I will make all haste to Plymouth.”

  But I saw that Will’s horse had been lamed by falling in the ditch — a sorry beast, more eager for oats than work, and one that I doubt not had lazied many a league through knowing that Will’s compassion was his weakness.

  “You are like to miss your ship, Jeremy,” said I, “for you have lamed the lazy beast that you shall ride. Get down off the mare and change saddles.”

  He made a wry face, offering me money rather, so that I knew it was a lie about his wanting to buy liquor for the ship. I quoted to him Will’s words concerning knaves who measure kindness by its weight in coin, and then, discovering I lacked Will’s gift of making words fit circumstance, I changed my argument:

  “If I spare the hangman trouble, as my father already did once in your case,” said I, “I think the hangman will hardly thank me, since he needs bread like the rest of us.”

  Whereat he got down and began to change the crupper buckles, his mare being smaller than Will’s sorrel; however, I bade him leave the bridles as they were, his being the better and its bit more suited to the mare’s mouth.

  Then I took away his powder-flask and bullets, but I let him keep the empty pistol to shoot Dons with on the Spanish Main, assuring him that the Dons would live an hundred years apiece unless he practised to aim straighter. As for his sword, it was more like a butcher’s knife than any proper weapon, so I gave that to Will Shakespeare, for use if he should go to sticking beeves in Smithfield.

  Then I bade Godspeed to Jeremy, he needing it, or the devil might set the hangman on him after all. And when we had watched him ride away on Will’s lame horse, toward the crossroad where the gibbet was, we rode on toward London, I well satisfied with having repaid Will the tavern reckoning. It pleased me mightily, and I began to whistle “Mary Ambree, which was a tune much favoured at the time.

  Will said nothing until I piped a false note — something he endured less meekly than the bruise he had from falling in the ditch.

  “That’s a sharp wind, Will! Save it for the Puritans!” he said then, sucking at his teeth as if he had just bitten a sour gooseberry. “You have made an enemy. Why whistle up the devil with a witch’s discord to avenge him?”

  “Enemy?” said I. “I spared a rascal, though the law of England would have let kill.”

  “Leave law to lawyers,” he retorted. “Those have made trouble enough without your aid. You shamed a rogue, and he will bear so dark a grudge against you as shall gnaw until he thinks he does God’s service by ridding your soul of its body some dark night.”

  “Then would you have killed him?” I asked.

  “He should have had my purse,” Will answered. “God knows, there is not much in it — yet enough, maybe, to buy a laissez passer from a thief.”

  I mocked him at that for a lack-spunk who would spare a louse for fear the louse might call him to account. I said that shame, and plenty of it, was the proper physic for whatever remnant of a soul a cut-purse had.

  He answered: “Are we preachers, Will, and ride we two to London to beg benefices, greedy for the burial fees and tithes, proposing to ourselves to live in dread of hell-fire while we prate about a sour-swill Heaven?”

  “Give him back the mare then!” I retorted angrily.

  “Why, how so?” he answered, smiling. “I am not offended that you took his beast, for faith! he staked it on the play of destiny and lost. But did you wisely when you stripped his self-esteem and left him naked to the frosty winds of conscience, that will freeze a merry fellow’s soul until it better fits a caitiff’s rind? You might have had the rogue’s mare and his goodwill with it.”

  �
��Sweeter his spite than his love!” I retorted. “Do you choose your friends among the highwaymen?”

  Whereat he told me the old nurse’s tale about the fox and sour grapes — a silly enough fable, since a fox eats meat, nor never have I seen the fox that would as much as sniff up-wind for cabbages or any other fruit, were it ripe or out of reach or not.

  “All life’s a mirror,” he went on, his hand upheld as if he were an actor and the whole world watching. (He could mock at angels like a small boy stoning geese and yet I think he seldom spoke but that he felt his words were being written in the Book the Angel of the Judgement keeps.) “The men and women we behold are but ourselves as we ourselves might be, should other influences sway us. Would we change the image? The grimaces that the glass throws back at us are answerable (In the English of the period — capable of answering — obliged to answer.), patterning their apish twistings to a moment’s mood. And as a woman sets a bauble in her hair to grace the poor reflection that she sees, and, smiling at the erstwhile unadorned, beholds her mirror smile again, so all earth changes at a merry fellow’s bidding. Look you how you pasture leaps out of a mist and sparkles its responses to the sun! A fair example yields more harvest than a gallows-tree, Will Halifax. The whistling urchins start the birds a-singing in the very shadow of a hawk’s wing.”

  Who could answer him? The man had music in his marrow and it flowed forth to a tune that made the hearer dumb, so, whether he were right or wrong, he seemed to have the right of it. He did not rant, as did the strolling players I had seen in Brownsover, when we boys all played truant at the price of caning and helped afterwards to pelt the players out of town. The player who could rave the loudest was the most admired, and the first, too, to be smeared with rotten eggs when the burgesses gave the whole troupe marching orders (as they said, because plays were an offence to morals, but, to tell plain truth, because they took too much money at the door).

  But Will spoke honiedly, as if the import of his words were not in need of bellowings and windmill posturings to lend it weight. He spoke as to an universe (yet just as he had talked to Mistress Bellamy), seducing it to share his views by seeming to uncover to, the hearer’s mind such thoughts as secretly had lain there.

  Nonetheless, he made my vanity shrink small in me, and that is discontenting of a frosty morning when a man rides hoping to win fortune for himself. I drew the little leather package forth that Jeremy Crutch had parted with, and opened it, thinking to change the flow of talk into a shallower channel wherein haply I might hold my own.

  Inside the bag there was a small flat box with what I took for golden hinges, though it may be they were brass. The wood was harder than my nail’s edge, lacquered with a sort of carmine-coloured glaze as smooth to the feel of a finger as windowglass. There was a knob to press on, causing it to open like an oyster, and within was silk, more yellow than the rarest gold, whereon there lay a little figure of a demon, marvellously wrought of green stone, smooth and soapy to the touch of my hand.

  It was a comic gimcrack, making us both laugh, although I thought of witchcraft on the instant. It had the trunk and features of an elephant, and yet the posture of a seated man, withal fat-bellied and seeming to ooze benevolence. (The Hindu god Ganesha) Before he had more than glanced at it Will pulled out his purse and offered to buy the thing.

  Whereat when I had quoted to him in contempt of money his own words, he offered me the mare instead, which led to bantering, he saying that the better of the morning’s bargain had not forfeited his right to trade again that day. I told him he should not be reckless, since the catechism teaches frugal living, but he answered that the catechism is the solemn and unlovely censure of the men who wrote it seeking to restrain in others generosity that they had lacked themselves.

  I let him hold the thing, he turning it to make the sun’s rays glimmer on the green stone, showing cloudy depths in it like shoal-water off the Devon coast in summer, and revealing all its skill of workmanship. He sighed at last and gave it back.

  “There, pouch it again, Will,” he said, “for I have seen too much.”

  Thereafter for a while he rode in silence, turning something over in his mind, his forehead bowed, now frowning and now smiling as he moved his lips — in the way, it might be, that his father used to taste ale at Stratford. (Shakespeare’s father’s first public office was that of ale-taster.)

  Presently he spoke as having strained the essence of his thought through judgement’s mesh until its flavour suited him. He hardly looked at me. He might have been addressing crowds imagined in his mind and seen with inner eye:

  “There is a virtue in a woman’s eyes,” said he, “that, looking, lures into a lover’s soul until, though he be earthy of the earth, he will acquire him wings and soar up in an empyrean of such fiery ambition as shall purge his soul of dross. Yet he may look too long into that mystery, and too much see. Though Daedalus flew safe, incautious Icarus, greedy of attaining, winged into a realm where the increasing fervour of the orb of day o’ercame the very strength that lifted him and he was flung into such seas as swallow all who have not modesty.

  “And so, as Homer sang, none other shall accomplish; though the frog-like singers swell themselves in emulation of the bull, they burst, nor leave more reputation than a shrunken bladder and a wind gone back to vacancy the fouler for their use.

  “Such skill of handicraft, such mastery of medium and tool he had, who wrought that bauble, that I grow as green with envy as the stone is fashioned. Never envy aided. It is cankerous, ungodly rust that eats imprisoned virtue from a tempered blade, consuming and all viler for the stolen feast. That gimcrack stirs me marvellously, Will, for there was magic in the hand that wrought it such as lifts a veil and lets us glimpse a moment’s godliness.”

  His speech was like an angel’s, though I write it lamely. Memory be blamed. He made me set such value on the thing as superstition fastens to an heirloom and my mind went roving amid tales of talismans. I felt that gimcrack was a key to merry fortune.

  And in truth, that morning, now the sun had sucked the mist away, was such as I have never seen except in England, with the hoarfrost sparkling and the crisp air breathing life into a man, the hedgerows soft-grey underneath their covering of rime, and all such weather as I fancy, breedeth kings — and men, too, to go earth glorious where jewelled grass in movement caught the sun: sailing forth and flout them in their teeth!

  It was a magic morning. We began to sing, we two; for Will’s moods were as changeful as our English weather. He could take the baritone and carol that against my booming bass until the horses ambled with a rare will and the frozen blackbirds chirruped back to us.

  And he could make a song to any olden tune — such foolishness as lovers sing or nurses put the children off to sleep with, until we wearied of an air and Will set new words to another.

  CHAPTER THREE

  How Halifax and Shakespeare lodged at Roger Tunby’s house near Cheapside.

  WE slept that night at Oxford, at the Crown Inn, kept by a merry man named Davenant whose wife, I thought, was as like to lose her heart to Will as Mistress Bellamy had been. But Davenant had not been married over-long, so that his wife was foremost in his mind as yet and there was nothing to arouse Ann Hathaway’s jealousy — not that time.

  After supper Will called for my gimcrack to amuse them, and he wove such tales around it as put all the chapbook writers out of countenance. I vow there never was such tongue as Will’s, nor such imagination — no, nor such a voice to pluck at heartstrings, conjuring a sudden smile from tragedy and cloaking laughter with the mask of grief, until we knew not whether we should laugh or cry.

  And so to bed at midnight, sheeted, nor no extra penny for the laundry, thanks to friend Will’s entertainment.

  So well we liked the Davenants, and they us, that we would have dallied at Oxford but for the shallowness of our exchequer, which persuaded us to journey on to London in one day, by way of Uxbridge, where it was market-day, and a host of people
. There, because all men were in fear of horse-thieves, there being a ready market for stolen horses in Antwerp, we earned enough to pay for the bait for our own mounts by standing guard over about twenty others while their owners did Sunday errands; and by that means there entered a thought into Will’s head that served him to good purpose later.

  We lingered not long by the triple tree of Tyburn, where felons hung in chains from all three beams and great ravens perched above. There was an inn nearby, with benches from which whoever chose to buy ale at a penny more than custom might watch the hangman do his work.

  Will grew gloomy, I remember, at the sight of that grim fruit on Tyburn Tree.

  “Heaven looked on,” he exclaimed, “nor took their part, nor pitied them!”

  And so, nigh sunset, to the house of Roger Tunby, where I made bold to expect such hospitality as oftentimes my father had received from him, and he from us (for it had been my father’s wont to entertain such reputable merchants as might come to Warwickshire from London).

  Nor were we disappointed of good victuals, though the old chuff put the two of us to sleep in one bed and had us send our horses to a baiting stable, where we must pay the reckoning. But as it transpired later, that was fortunate, although at the time I thought a pox on such a starving tyke of a niggard host.

  Old Tunby had been used to buy his wool in Warwickshire, and had made for himself such a name for honest dealing that he had as good as a monoply without paying fee to the Crown. But growing old, and too fat to endure the journey, he had not been seen in our parts for a year or two, so that I hoped he might not have heard the scandal of my father’s death. But London has long ears.

  The old man bade me welcome and accepted Will as being friend of mine; but even his apprentices could see the spice of hospitality was lacking and that he no longer thought it a privilege to have a Halifax of Brownsover beneath his roof, but thought the cat now jumped the other way. He made short work of telling me it had been common talk in Paul’s, and in all the taverns, these many days, how my father had slain one of the Earl of Leicester’s followers and himself had been slain by another.