Poor Tom's Ghost

by Jane Louise Curry

  Jo raised an eyebrow. “Inspiration, my dear. I had a brainstorm after I saw you two off and went along to the hardware shop to buy a light bulb for a belated experiment. It turned out that the electricity had been on all the while. The lights were either burned-out or had no bulbs at all. The water’s not having been shut off should have made us suspicious that dear Aunt Deb’s protégés had left us their electric bill as well, but when none of the lights worked, I never gave it a second thought. Anyway, after I switched on the hot water heater, Pippa and I waltzed out to buy a second-hand electric cooker. We settled on an oversized beauty that is now installed in absurd splendour in that shambles of a kitchen downstairs. The beds and lampshades and linens were simple. I rang Heals, and they made this morning’s delivery.”

  “I got to sign for them,” said Pippa with satisfaction, “and showed where everything was supposed to go. Then I made the beds.”

  Tony left off toying with his chicken and smiled faintly at that. “A good thing, too, sweetheart.” He sighed. “I think bed’s where I should be after all. Might as well give up tryin’ to fight it. Sorry to be the spectre at the feast, and but Jemim’ll forgive me, won’t you love?” He scraped his chair back unsteadily.

  “Of course, Tony.” Jemima’s earnest blue eyes followed his progress down the steps into the front room. When he was out of earshot she rose purposefully. “I’m going down to the Apprentice for a little bottle of cognac, Jo. That’s flu, all right. Once it’s laid him flat he’ll not be able to keep anything down, but a teaspoonful in a glass of hot water helps to see you through that. It’s an old jungle remedy my missionary granny taught me.”

  “I wonder if there’s anything Jemima doesn’t have an answer for,” Jo murmured as she excused herself in turn. “I’d better go up to be sure Tony’s all right. You two clear the plates, if you will. There’s some fancy cheese downstairs on the kitchen table if you’d like something more than fruit for dessert.” She drifted down into the front room quite calmly, but a moment later her quiet footsteps could be heard taking the stairs two steps at a time.

  Roger fumbled at his second orange, pulling off the peel in ragged patches. “So, Pips,” he said nervously, wrenching his mind away from the comings and goings upstairs. “If Jo and Jemmy were poking around in a lot of musty old books and papers, what did they turn up? Alan said something about a ‘New House.’ In a burial record. Was this house the one?”

  “I guess so. They were awfully excited,” Pippa said. “They didn’t explain what was so special, though. I think it’s supposed to be a secret from Tony, because they said if Alan found out anything it would make the best birthday surprise ever.”

  Roger looked at her blankly. “But his birthday was January.”

  “When I had the measles, remember? And the birthday party got called off. Well, they were laughing about having a surprise party instead of a housewarming. This Sunday, maybe. A big picnic for a zillion people to celebrate the house and Tony’s play and everything.”

  Roger was uneasy. “What did Jo find to get them that steamed-up?” He reached across to Jemima’s vacant place to pick up Alan’s dog-eared notebook and flip through the pages.

  “It’s here somewhere.” Pippa slipped from her chair and crossed to the old staircase. A length of clothesline had been looped across to close it until the upper railings were back in place, but the lower steps had been scraped and washed clean of the long years’ grime and put to use as temporary shelving for a toolbox, cleaning materials, and a stack of papers and library books. From one of the books Pippa drew a thin sheaf of notes paper-clipped together, and pulled loose the top sheet to bring and place in front of Roger.

  Roger laid Alan’s notebook open face down on the table, picked up the slip of paper, and read the first entry twice over before its significance leapt out at him:

  1603 Eureka! Parts illegible because of the damage at the time of fire, but the following appears under

  26t December. Buried in the church with a knell of III for the monthes of his lyf, Christopher, infant son of Thomas Garland, pl … r and Katherine, of New House b…… rsondige

  Could “pl … r” by some wild, wonderful freak be player? Thomas Garland rings a bell somewhere. And the blank-blank-rsonidge is obviously “by the parsonage.”

  Could this have been north of the church instead of west where the present rectory is?

  “Can you tell what all the fuss was about?” Pippa paused in tossing grapes to Sammy to ask, “What could he have played at that was so great?”

  “Not games,” Roger said numbly. “They called actors players.”

  “Honestly?” Pippa was delighted. “Like Tony! That would be the best unbirthday surprise ever, wouldn’t it? Do you suppose Katherine was an actress like Mama? I’ll bet she was.”

  “There weren’t actresses back then,” Roger said distantly. He reached once more for the spiral notebook. “I suppose they thought it would be immoral somehow. Anyway, boys always played the women’s parts.”

  “Boys?” Pippa was astonished. “I’ll bet they felt silly”.

  But Roger scarcely heard. He had turned to the last pages of Alan’s notes, to the name that had flicked by in the moment before Pippa handed him Jo’s scrawled note.

  The heading read Thomas Garland, with the note:

  “Not much known outside of scraps from parish registers, Revels accounts, legal documents, &c., &c. Boiled down it amounts to:

  Born 1576 (??) in Kilburn (?).Mentioned in the list of Choristers of St. Paul’s when their theatre reopened in 1587. Would have been 11. In 1590 pamphlet attacking the Children of Paul’s was probably the Tom Long-stamps, the Kylburn swadder’s son who “struts it calflike in his spangles and setts the silly ninihammers all a-sigh.”

  In the ’90s when the choristers’ theatres were closed down must have been acting somewhere & doing fairly well, for in 1600—appears as one of the sharers when Henry Evans leased the fencing theatre at Blackfriars for the Children of the Chapel Royal.

  1601—appeared for the first time with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men—in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.

  1602—married Katherine, daughter of Henry Purfet, a clockmaker in Kingston-on-Thames.

  1603—when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were reorganised as the King’s Men, Garland paid Burbage £80 to come in as sharer when the number of shares was increased—but the King wanted his own man Laurence Fletcher in. G. may have been promised the next vacancy, as there seems to be no record of the £80 being returned.

  In fact, no further record of him at all. Irons suggests he may He have been the player in Dekker’s tragic tale of the young man found dead of the plague at the Blue Pump. John Taylor the Water Poet included the Blue Pump in his 1630 list of taverns, and Rendle’s Old Southwark says it was once called “Poor Tom’s Last Refuge” (!!)

  Roger turned the page slowly. And there it was.

  T.G. could be related (brother?) to the Jack Garland who in 1600 is one of the boy players in Evans’s Chapel Royal company at Blackfriars.

  J.G. seems to have been involved in scandal of the 8 children kidnapped to be players. Not clear how. Turns up as apprentice (his brother’s?) with the King’s Men in 1602, probably 13-14 then.

  Nothing in theatre histories to connect T.G. with Isleworth, but other members of Shakesp’s company did move out that way—to Mortlake (Phillips), Brentford (Lowin), & Cundall at some point to Fulham.

  “Roger? What’s the matter?” Pippa asked. She pushed Sammy firmly away and came round the table. “What is it?”

  “Old Alan’s found us another ghost, Pips.” Roger tried to sound jaunty but it came out in a shaky whisper. “Me.”

  Pippa refused to budge from Roger’s side for the rest of the evening, and when it came time to go upstairs he was secretly grateful. Jemima had been given his new bed in the little downstairs room; Alan when he came would have a camp bed downstairs; and Pippa’s room was already crowded with its bed and animals or Roger wou
ld have smothered his pride and set his camp bed up there. He was left with the master bedroom willy-nilly and was absurdly, ashamedly thankful when Pippa appeared in the doorway in her pyjamas with the canvas roll and metal legs of her own camp bed in her arms. She calmly set about putting it together in the dressing-room alcove and shook her head firmly when Roger objected that she was leaving an excellent and un-slept-in bed for that canvas sling. “It’s too scary to be all by myself,” she said stubbornly. She was actually asleep not five minutes after wriggling down into the sleeping bag.

  It was not so easy for Roger. He took a long, warm soak in the bath, pulling the plug and towelling dry only when Jo’s sharp rap on the door brought his father’s illness and his own helplessness in the face of it flooding back. He half dressed again, and in the bedroom unrolled his sleeping bag on the floor and sat with his back against the fireplace wall—sat, and picked over the pieces of his frightening puzzle one by one.

  Perhaps there was no ghost at all. Not, at least, in the way Pippa meant, in the familiar sense of an unquiet spirit haunting an unhappy place. For how could the house itself have a ghost? The house he had seen had once been real—there was the old staircase to prove that—but it was a thing, and things did not have ghosts. Tony—and he—had not gone sleepwalking through the ghost of St. John’s Wood when it was still a wood, but in the place itself. By some strange shift past and present there had run together, overlapped even, so that Tony had walked in both at once. “How” hardly mattered. Sleepwalking, waking, or dreaming, it was the same. Tony had gone all the way, past Tyburn to the City, and only half come back. He had neither heard Tom Garland’s grief nor seen his house as it once had been, yet he had been drawn into the shadow where the two times touched. And still was there, fast slipping out of reach. This flu—if it were flu—left him no defences. And me? I’m all defences, Roger thought bitterly.

  Oh, yes. He, as much as his father, had been claimed by the old tale that had left so much pain in Castle Cox, but he was too much on guard against surprise and change and loss, too intent on sidestepping the shadows that fell across his path, backing away from what he feared like a wary, wild animal, to be caught. Listening in the hallway at Hamilton Terrace that morning he had heard his father say just that: like a wild animal. And Tony? Tony was on guard against nothing, no one. Curious, generous, careless–loving–and short-tempered, he met everything head on. Roger envied that blind innocence and yet … and yet because of it his father had fallen headlong into the old tale.

  Pippa made a comfortable little noise in her sleep and, turning, nestled down like a curled-up kitten. Watching her from what felt like a great distance, Roger felt an unaccustomed surge of feeling, unreasoned and overwhelming. “I love you, Pips,” he whispered. “I really do. Jo too.”

  But Jack had hated Katherine, Tom’s “Kitten.” Hated and meant to be rid of her. Meant to be at the centre of Tom’s world again no matter what the cost. And so he did a dreadful thing.

  And Roger, caught off guard at last, sat in a shaft of moonlight and remembered.

  I haue shot my arrowe ore the house

  And hurt my brother

  JACK GARLAND CUT A NEAT SLICE FROM the loaf he and little Bob Somercote were sharing and topped it with a slice of cheese. Bob still worked on the chicken-back, as if the bird would yield up another morsel or two to perseverance. Bob was twelve, but slow to learn his graces. Jack watched his busy, greasy progress for a moment with distaste but then was far away once more, rapt in a fantasy that made his dark eyes gleam and his breath draw tight and shallow.

  Katherine dead. Dead of the plague and already buried. It was possible. He had not thought there would be so much sickness outside the City and Southwark, where last week near two thousand had died. Yet here at the Lion the tables and benches were still half-empty at the tag-end of suppertime and the air was full of uneasy rumours: too many Cits come west trailing infection after them, more houses fresh-marked for quarantine each day, and Isleworth worse than Brentford and Twickenham together. Yes, it was possible. Katherine tumbled into a wide, shallow grave, her long blonde hair cut off and sold to stuff a mattress…

  “Jack, leave off!” Bob’s whisper was a hiss. “Or we must pay for the table too. The host has the look of a thundercloud about to burst.”

  Coming to himself, Jack saw that in his daydream he had stuck his knife deep into the oaken trestle and pried up a heavy splinter. He met the landlord’s narrowed gaze across the room with a flushed, blank stare, pried a little harder, and then let the splinter snap loudly home. He wiped his knife carefully and sheathed it, turning back to his bread and cheese and ale. As he turned, his eye was caught by a wineglass raised in salute from a bench by the open window.

  “Who are those?” Bob asked. “I’ve seen ’em at the playhouse, ha’n’t I?”

  Jack shrugged and took a long, thirsty swallow from his tankard. “The fair bearded one in green silk is Harry Cliffe, a law student at the Temple or one of the Inns of Court. The others too, I think. A time or three they bought seats on the stage and played at being rude and lordly. They’re naught but pint-pots.”

  “He looks to catch your eye. What’s the harm?” Bob asked in an eager undertone. “If you’ll at least be civil, I’ll play sweet-ten-and-bashful. We’ll diddle ’em into paying for our supper.”

  Jack gave him a cold stare. “Wipe your chin, you greasy little apple-squire. If ever my coin won’t stretch to my supper, I’ve credit here. They know Tom.” He made that a sign to the drawer, who was busying himself collecting empty ale-pots, and that unfortunate went scurrying in search of the host.

  “I’d best go,” Jack said. “The furnishings and clothes for the tour’ll be loaded by now and will be coming up from the Globe before long with the mid-tide. I mean to be home before Tom, and you’d be wise to go be sweet-and-bashful with Mistress Lowin before old John comes home. And remember, you pudding-brain: we didn’t go scavengin’ in empty houses. We walked to Putney, took the ferry, ate too much, and then slept until dusk in the Bishop’s orchard. Agreed?”

  The landlord, fetched by the drawer, appeared to give the boys their reckoning, and Jack carefully counted the three shillings from his purse. When the man was out of earshot once again, he added, “And you mind your step with Cliffe, or you’ll have your ears trimmed. He’s an Essex man, but if he’s here, he’s lodged with the Earl of Northumberland at Syon House. His mother, ’tis said, was connected with the Percies, so he’s some sort of kin.”

  “Oh,” Bob said, subsiding. “A large pint-pot.”

  Jack laughed as he rose and shouldered his leather travelling box. “Just so. I’ll see you next week at Mortlake when it’s time to set off for Oxford. Mind your ears!”

  Jack did not hurry. He was tired and, allowing for the tide, there was no need. He should reach New House an hour or so before Tom came. It was a lucky chance that early that morning he had overheard Mr. Lowin’s remark to Mr. Phillips that “young Garland ought to come to me till Monday next, give his brother some time with that pretty wife. I’ll mention it to Tom.” So he most probably had, but not in time. For soon after—as soon as it was clear that the stage furnishings and costumes for the tour would not be packed for loading by ten, in time for the strong mid-tide flow—Jack and his box had taken off with Bob and left the work to the others. Tom would never dislodge him once he was comfortably settled in, and Katherine was too soft-hearted to be anything but kind and welcoming.

  Perhaps she was, but there was no comfort in that. It was for her that Tom was pouring every penny that he made into the newly-finished house at Isleworth. His share in the Blackfriars theatre had been a profitable investment, and now that he’d been promised the next vacancy among the sharers of the Globe he spoke more and more often of wanting children, and of the pleasant country-village life to be had on the edge of a great estate—as if he would happily give up their lodgings in Bankside and spend the whole of the year out here at the edge of the world! It was hard en
ough in plague-time, when all who could went into the country. How could he think of leaving the noise, the surge of life, the smells for good? For this chirruping of crickets and lowing of cows? How could he?

  Only, of course, because his Kitten liked it. In Southwark respectable grocers and housewives and schoolmasters had to rub elbows with rogues and doxies and rufflers. In Southwark, two or three poor souls from the White Lion or the Bench Prisons were hung each day from the street-gallows, offal was thrown in the stinking ditches, and church-going landlords made tidy profits from the Bankside bawdy-houses. Pretty little Kate from quiet Kingston hated it. Well, he hated quiet Kate and the soft, aching, doting way Tom looked at her and had no time for any other if she were there. He’d scarce said three words in a row to Jack these weeks past beyond those to do with work—a fencing lesson given, or a song or speech for Jack to learn—and it was all for mooning over Katherine, sent safe away from the plaguey town to New House. At least Katherine would not have him for long: a scant week only, thank heaven. Plague may have closed the playhouses, but players must eat, so on Tuesday next they were to leave from Augustine Phillips’ at Mortlake on the first leg of a tour that would take Hamlet, The Merry Devil of Edmonton, The London Prodigal, and three other plays to Oxford, Bath, Shrewsbury, Coventry, Cambridge, Ipswich, and towns between.