Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  But we reached a great iron gate at last and rang a bell that tolled with a comforting mellowness within the lodge. The porter, with a glance at Berden, admitted us into a courtyard wherein horses stood, and servants at their heads, but we could hardly see them in the foggy link-light. A man came close to scrutinize us and I marked the Earl of Leicester’s badge on his shoulder. Then I recognized the fellow, and he me.

  “By the rood, it’s Will Halifax!” he exclaimed. “How do you like London, Will?”

  Before I could think of a retort to match his insolence he turned away and by the light about the porch I saw him enter the great house. Something about his manner of entering stirred dread in me. We waited, Berden having sent our names in by the porter’s underling, and it may have been half an hour, we standing between our horses for the warmth, before the Earl of Leicester came out. I knew him instantly. The link-light glittered on his gold chain, for his cloak was undone. He was followed by his master of the horse and several others. At the foot of the steps I heard him ask: “Where is the fellow?” He who had first recognized me pointed.

  The Earl mounted such a wonder of a chestnut horse as made the heart leap at sight of his movement. He rode toward me, until I could see his handsome face under the link that burned against the wall near where I stood.

  I wondered that the Queen could love him, as rumour proclaimed that she did, though he was the prettiest man in England, were the surface all. He looked too like a foreigner for my liking, and many a mean counter-jumper I have seen possessing the same manner of asserting gentleness where none was. He mistook his insolence for courage and his arrogance for brains.

  “How now, Master Will Halifax?” he exclaimed in his hectoring voice, scowling at me darkly. “You dare to mow foul faces at me, sirrah? I will have you well whipped for it! I’ll learn you to ape and grin at me because your brawling father drew his sword unjustified! Look sharply to your manners!”

  I forbore answering. A hot retort would have invited all his men to have at me, although I doubted he would dare to have me slain in Lord Burghley’s yard; but though I might have escaped a dagger thrust, I should at least have ended in the kennel with a broken head. He waited, hoping I would give him an excuse; then, since I did not, gesturing to show his scorn he rode on. But one of his followers, thinking me a block on which to tread to his own preferment, stayed to pick a quarrel.

  “Turn your face to the wall,” he ordered, “when his Grace the Earl of Leicester rides by! By the rood, your very glance is insult! ‘Od’s blood, you insult his grace by living!”

  I took a step toward him to discover whether it were spunk or vapour that inspired the fellow, who began to feel himself embarrassed by his loneliness, for the gate was open and the Earl and his party were cantering through. He reined away from me, but not soon enough to escape my answer:

  “Tell your master the Earl,” I said, “the next time he lets you fasten up his breeches, that if he fears the truth about himself as I look forward to the revelation of it, he may well mislike me!”

  It was a rash speech and Berden chid me for it, but I felt myself already high in Lord Burghley’s favour, and I was young in those days.

  “He will repeat that to the Earl, who will have you silenced with a dagger in your back,” said Berden.

  Then a servant came and ordered Berden into Lord Burghley’s presence. I supposed that I should go, too, but the servant said he had no orders to admit me. So Berden, with a nod to me, went in alone and I stood shivering with cold (not knowing until then how cold I was) and thoroughly dejected. I had imagined myself telling my own story, studying to speak with modesty and yet omitting nothing that should give a good conceit of me; for to tell truth I was vain of the night’s performance. I had imagined myself saying a good word for Berden. But I doubted Berden would accredit me with more than should increase his own repute. He was liker, at that, to damn me out of jealousy.

  I laid it to the Earl of Leicester that I was left there shivering And then gloomier foreboding fell, and something like terror in the yard, he having had time to accuse me to Lord Burghley, seized me. I perceived that caitiff Jaques, his head in bandages, his manner shrouding him in stealth, seeking to avoid my recognition as he crossed the yard. I tried to overtake him, but he mounted and I heard his horse go slipping on the cobbles through the front gate.

  It gave me no grief that his head was hurt. I would have loved to open up a wider crack, not doubting he had told such tales as should forever harden Lord Burghley’s face against me. I was heartsick to believe that he who stood first with the Queen should be so purblind as to credit a kernel in so foul a nut as Jaques. The fellow’s soul was on his face, all void of honesty. It was a foul pass that a Lord in Council should lend ear to that rogue and leave standing without in the yard the son of as loyal a knight as ever lived.

  And as I stood there, stroking the horses for the sake of the comforting feel of their faithful nuzzles on my cheek, there came a last thrust to my vanity that seemed to strike the very ground from under me and leave me outcast. Came a footman, heavy-eyed with sleep and surly that the errand took him outdoors in the murk, picking his way mincingly across the cobbles lest he soil his buckled shoes.

  “Are you Master Will Halifax?” he demanded. “Benjamin Berden sends word that his Lordship has no further use for your services to-night, and if it pleases you to tell what roof you will patronize I am to take the message.”

  I was too disgusted to return a civil answer. Likelier than not, I thought, they will inform the Earl of Leicester where I sleep, that he may pursue his feud and rid himself of inconvenience. They will use Jaques for a witness that I claimed a Queen’s commission when I had none. Failing the Earl of Leicester’s dagger, they will throw me in the Marshalsea. I answered, I would send word in the morning where I lodged, thus opening my mind to new perplexity; for the two seamen and Jack the ‘prentice were sitting against the wall, chins on their knees, not as wretched as I, because they thought me able to provide for them, but wet and cold and looking to me for comfort.

  However, the thought of them put new spirit in me, since it set me pondering how to rise to such a difficult occasion. Thought of Mildred’s purse, with money still remaining in it, brought her confidence to mind, which stirred in me enough lees of manhood to cause me to act steadfastly before my followers. I beckoned to them and they followed me out of the yard on foot, young Giles leading the horse, having chafed himself so sore against the saddle that the courage failed him to mount and try to ride again, although I dubbed him Sir Meacock; and the sailors swore that, being seamen, God had not intended them to ride, nor would they, not though Christ and a whole company of angels, or the Queen herself, should come and bid them.

  So we were a slow procession. And oh, the loneliness of London, with a grey fog melting into cold rain, and the drip of water from the eaves, and road-stones slippery with thawing mud, nor no friends, and a life’s hope spilled (I thought forever) on the thankless flags of a Queen’s minister’s front yard!

  Fear makes men see more devils than all hell could ever hold. Each moving pool of mist, each shadow between house-lamps, seemed to us to be the lair of murderers; my discontent had spread like a contagion and the others, aye, and the horses no less, shuddered at every sound as I led the way not caring whither, careful only to lead on lest they, overtaking me, should ask me more than I could answer.

  ‘Od’s misery! I ‘did not know whither to lead. I thought of Roger Tunby’s house and then I remembered how the old chuff was a suspect. Should I return to him and spy on him — my host who had done me a kindness? Should I warn him rather? That were tantamount to treason against the Queen! I knew not what to do, and I bethought me of making for the coast and Flushing, to lend hand in the Dutchmen’s quarrel with the King of Spain. With two good horses, two good seamen and a bright-wit ‘prentice-lad I thought I might be welcome.

  ’Twas the mare that saved us from I know not what calamity. The streets were all alur
k with wounded soldiers from the Dutch war, starving and in wait for any passenger worth stripping, afterwards to fight among themselves like animals for scraps of booty. There was not a dawn that year but that saw naked bodies lying in the street; and for reprisal they were hanging two — three dozen at a time on Tyburn Tree. We were running away from danger rather than in search of anywhere to sleep.

  But the mare remembered where I bedded her knee-deep in straw near Roger Tunby’s house. She picked her way by some inhuman sense toward that mews again. And suddenly, as I began to recognize the street, or thought I did, there came a shout, and a mass of darker fog than ordinary shaped itself into a group of men who rushed toward us. I drew sword and it was only by the grace of God that I did not kill the man who came first. I should have been the enemy of the whole world if fortune had not caused my mare to slip and stumble on a slimy cobble-stone and so turned aside my point that otherwise had slit Will Shakespeare’s throat.

  “Why, Will!” he panted, smiling. He was badly out of breath. “Such poxy welcome to a friend? Are you grown rich, that you cry ‘out’ on me, as Roger Tunby does? Or are you sworn for Flanders and seek practice ere you have at Parma’s infantry?”

  The men who were pursuing him turned tail when they saw us ready to defend ourselves. I jumped down from the mare and hugged Will, never realizing until that moment how inward we had grown toward each other.

  “Will,” I said, “I’d sooner this than pots of gold! You give me comfort!”

  “Echo it then. I need it, too!” he answered. “I have watched here at the risk of being cudgelled, hoping you might pity your dumb brutes and bring them back to the stable.! am like them, sans bed, sans supper.”

  I asked him if he had no money, for it seemed strange he was supperless.

  “Marry, yes and no,” he answered. “I am locked out like the house cat and imprimis for returning without finding you. Secundo, Tunby saw the housemaid smile at me, and such old bawds are ever puritans forbidding cakes arid ale because remorse had made them fearful of their latter end. Where bed we, Will?”

  He had left his purse with Tunby in the morning to be kept safe. I, too, had left my second-best suit, pistol and some other valuables in the house. So the old chuff had a magnet that must draw us to him. He could safely play the tryant. I would have clamoured at his door to force an issue, only there were now my three men to be bedded; and there came, too, the thought that if Roger Tunby were involved with Stiles it might be hazardous to visit him at that late hour.

  So there seemed nothing for it but the mews, where there was warmth at any rate for us and better comfort for the horses. We roused a sleepy hostler, and when he had helped us to clean and feed our beasts I made him fill an empty stall with good clean pea-straw, he protesting that his master Burbage was not an inn-keeper and would as like as not send him vagabonding the morning, nor new employment not be found so readily in London. —

  Whereto Will told him he was no worse off than his betters, and we lay down on the straw, all five of us. And for a while we talked, because sleep withstood our wooing, the seamen and Jack Giles adding their accounts to mine of our adventure and of the scurvy trick I had been played in Lord Burghley’s yard, I grumbling that we ought to look at princes and their ministers for example of such open dealing as should put us all in countenance.

  Said Will: “Whoever kept a book of all that princes and their ministers do, Will, were wiser if he kept it under lock and key — aye, wiser if he burned it, lest the angels overlook a page or two and drown the world in tears. That man unsecret to himself,” said he, “need never wonder if the world goes gossiping his priviest imaginations; and a prince has more need than the rest of us to keep his very left hand ignorant of what his right hand does. Marry, it were time to villify Queen’s ministers when we were sworn in of the Council and so privy to their needs. Our suitabler employment is to vex our spirits for the cozening of Tunby, who will else out-cozen us.”

  I cried a pox on Tunby, and the ‘prentice began telling us the reputation that the man had in the City — honest in some little matters but a rogue in great ones:

  “So that they trust him with a bill of wool, but they elect him to no aldermanship.”

  Heavy-hearted, I suggested we should get our odds and ends from Tunby in the morning and then set forth to the war in Flanders. But Will had no stomach for that:

  “I hear that Dutch maids are like plough-mares, big o’ hoof and quarter — and such full-moon faces as offended the Lord Harry when they brought Ann o’ Cleves to bed with. Fog, too, and we have enough o’ that in England. Wet feet, taxes and the plague — what need to travel farther?”

  So I spoke of deep-sea venturing, the sailors urging me with tales of gold and of decks all slippery with Dons’ guts, declaring that was God’s work for an Englishman. We fell asleep at last to dream of gold bars taken from the Dons, and of Dutch sea-beggars hove to in the Channel looking to steal honestly-won booty homeward bound, counting on the speed of hulls new sanded, whereas homebound English ships wore weeds like women’s kirtles from the warm seas and were easy to come alongside.

  “And though the Dons are brave, they’re easier to fight than Dutchmen, because the Dons crave glory, whereas the Dutch are like us English, on the sea for profit,” were the last words I remember, until whinnying of horses woke us after daybreak and we all went out to wash our faces at the yard pump.

  Later we held consultation in a tavern, where a good meal and a quart apiece of French wine stiffened us, and Futtok swore he would rather go to sea against the Dons and risk the Inquisition than take his chance of sitting in the Marshalsea with Stiles:

  “Because it irks less, masters, if a foreigner does cruelty, they being Papishers and ignorant, as it might be fish or animals. But to be shackled and starved and beaten by fellow countrymen would break the stoutest heart that lives.”

  However, Will Shakespeare favoured brawling in no sort, being minded there are gentler ways of growing fortunate. And he was owlish wise in that mood.

  “On the long straw of our discontent such grains of wisdom grow,” he said, “as, if we let them ripen, help us to avoid old errors. Go you, Will, in search of Berden. He will not provoke you too far, since he has judged your mettle, and you might snatch back that credit he has stolen from you. And he may not be an ingrate after all. Have you had proof of it?”

  He would go himself, he said, in search of new employment, liking Tunby not at all, but first he would get his purse from the old chuff, making the excuse to him that he would look for me all over London, nor knew how long the business might take. We would meet at the mews.

  Jack Giles the ‘prentice, having had a taste of venturing, vowed he would follow me now to the world’s end. But Futtok and Gaylord could not ride and were afraid of horses; furthermore, my horses needed rest; and I knew the reputation London had for horse-thieves, and for exchanging good horses for bad ones while the owner’s back was turned; so I arranged with Burbage for my two seamen to stay at the mews and muck out horse-stalls for their dinner and no money. (And a mean meal, they told me afterwards, it was— “worse than on a Queen’s ship in the days before John Hawkins did the victualling.”)

  Then I hired two horses from the mews and forth we rode, Giles and I, he groaning at the blisters on his hams and I not greatly wiser for the yesterday’s adventure. London in the rain was such a murk of wet and dirt as made a man feel old before his time. It was an indoors day, for gossiping in ingles, and the stench of house-trash rotting in the kennels made me homesick for the country smells and for the sight of hedge-rows. I had not an inkling where to look for Berden; but I thought of Paul’s, where all men met o’ mornings; and since the streets were half-empty because of the rain, Berden might see me if he were stirring.

  And presently the moody music of the street-cries, the housewives putting shawled heads through the windows, chattering, and the pedlars making tents of pitched cloth to protect their wares from the rain and the drip from
the eaves so entertained me that I rode on marvelling, not caring whether I were seen or not.

  “Hot codlings — who’ll buy hot codlings! — Onions — white St. Thomas onions! — Green brooms — new brooms! — Shoone — old boots — old shoone! — Steel and tinder-boxes — buy a light-oh! — Tinker, tinker! Pots and pans, oh, pots to mend! Knife-grinder — knives to grind! — A mouse-trap — buy a mouse-trap — catch ’em all alive-oh! — Any wood to cleave? — Oh, hot fine oat-cakes! — Whiting — smelts or whiting! — Any whitebait — Greenwich whitebait — all fresh!”

  Such a medley of appealing noises as aroused new humour, making the heart merry in despite of weather.

  I rode slowly along Fleet Street, where the prison stands, and saw the prisoners in shabby clothing begging from the passers-by through the iron bars of the entrance gate. Supposing they might fare ill when the weather kept the citizens indoors I watched a while, observing that the pedlars fed them, scraps of this and bits of that, perhaps not pitying so much as thankful not to be behind the bars — a fate that any man might share if debt grew deep and creditors importunate.

  A while I watched the market around Charing Cross and then turned back again toward Paul’s yard where men and women were crowding one another in the rain to watch a trained bear. Its owner had intruded the great brute into the covered pulpit in which the preachers hold forth on sunny days, to the crowd’s great satisfaction but to the scandal of Paul’s beadle and some officers who were crying sacrilege and scandal; so that what with the crowd trying to prevent them, and their indignant efforts to arrest the owner of the bear, who was a merry fellow well used to winning the crowd’s suffrage, there was much worth seeing and broken pates to laugh at.

  There Berden found me.

  “By the Saviour, I thought you lost!” he shouted, elbowing his way toward me and nigh pulling me out of the saddle, so glad he was to find me. I thought his manner over-demonstrative for such short acquaintance, so I drew on caution (not that the sight of his ugly visage did not make my heart leap).