Nothing Like the Sun - Anthony Burgess

by Burgess, Anthony

  ‘Whose men are doing it?’

  ‘Oh, you could say the Queen’s.’ He giggled. ‘I have ordered the coach. Come.’

  ‘I have but the final couplet of this sonnet——’

  ‘Oh, that can wait. We must not miss the beginning.’

  WS felt foolish, as he often did, trundling in the rich coach westward from Holborn, four greys prancing before. Curtains were drawn to keep out the peering mob as well as the sunlight that would burn off Harry’s pallor. He pulled an inch of curtain aside. There were crowds scurrying west, roaring, chewing bread and bits of garlic sausage, some armed with bottles against the summer drouth, the plebs, the commons, the mob. ‘It seems to me,’ he said slowly, ‘that we are going to Tyburn.’

  ‘Ah well, it was not possible to keep it from you for long. Tyburn today puts on a very special spectacle. Robin is puffed up as a pigeon, and rightly. He is shown to be right and the Queen admits she was wrong. Her little ape of a physician that everyone knew had received a great jewel from Spain. And those two that were sent to win him over. Well, there will be no more treason from any of them.’

  ‘You should have told me,’ said WS bitterly. ‘I do not like to see these things.’

  Harry laughed. ‘Little innocent Will. He who makes Tarquin leap on Lucrece and everything the filthy world could dream of happen in Titus. Well, you cannot separate so your dreaming from your waking. If you would indulge the one you must suffer the other.’

  ‘I will not look.’

  ‘You will. You will drain it to the dregs.’

  They moved with some difficulty over the cobbles of the narrow street with its toppling shops and houses; they could hear the confusion of the horses’ feet, the crowd jeering, feel the coach jostled. The coachman lashed out at those who came near enough to scare the horses or finger the gleaming brass and polished harness; the footmen shouted abuse. There were cries of pain and growls, but the underdog remained under. At Tyburn they drew the curtains back to let light in and the vision of a grim holiday crowd that sweated and squinted under the light. Here was a whole clutter of noble coaches, on some of which the gaily and richly dressed had climbed to the roof or ousted the footmen from their seat; the soberer citizenry sat, more soberly, inside their sober coaches. All waited.

  ‘That is Robin over there,’ said Harry, dismounting. ‘It is his day of triumph.’ Well, so it was. It was Essex who, some four years back, had employed Lopez as his agent, for Lopez knew better than any in England what went on in both the states of Iberia. But Lopez had given his news first to the Queen, then to Essex, and Essex, monger of old information at court, had been laughed at. Then came his malice towards Lopez, his accusations, and more derision from the Queen; more, the Queen’s rebuke: so Dr Lopez was buying strong poison with Spanish gold, was he, bent on assassination? The poison was in silly and naughty Robin’s own mind, not in the medicine-chest of the Queen’s own little ape of a Jew. And so four years of hard and malevolent work, culminating, on a bright June day, in this. ‘Triumph,’ repeated Harry. ‘I will go over to him.’ Essex and his toadies were drinking wine and laughing, their raiment gay in the sun. ‘Do you stay here and shut your eyes to it all.’ And he grinned.

  There was the tree. Crouched on the platform the hangman’s assistant was securing a plank with busy hammer. The hangman himself, masked, with brawny arms folded, strutted like Alleyn, an Alleyn that needed no glory of words. The eternal kites wheeled above in the pure and blue and crystalline air, as yet unpolluted by men. From afar came a roar. The hurdles were approaching, dragged over dry ground, raising a coughing dust. One of the draggers, with a toothless idiot’s face, greeted friends from a black and panting mouth. There were jeers, men spat on the still figures roped to the hurdles, a young woman in front of WS began to jump, partly to see better, partly in a kind of transport of expectancy. Children were lifted on to parents’ shoulders. Some further hangman’s assistants brought, severally, a great metal bowl and four steaming kettles. There were cheers as the near-boiling water was jetted, splashing, into the bowl. One kettle-carrier made as he would pour a scalding stream over the spectators nearest the tree; they retreated in a scurry, screaming their laughter to his grin. The hurdles had reached the end of their journey. And now——

  That is Noko. What is his name? Noko, no, Tinoco. A foreign and heathen name. He is to be first. And now this Tinoco, a dark and shivering man in a white shirt, had his shirt stripped from him as he was roughly untied from the hurdle. The hangman presented his knife, new-sharpened, new-polished, to the sun; the mob went aaaaaaaah. Called the hangman, it was yet not his office to fix the long thin neck into the halter; the first assistant must do that. Tinoco, stumbling, falling with fear, and all to the crowd’s laughter, was made to mount the ladder, rung by slow trembling rung. Behind him, behind the gallows itself, the hanger waited on a narrow crude podium, a platform mounted on a platform. He was a young man, muscular; his mouth opened in some ribald pleasantry to his victim as he secured the hempen noose about his neck. And then WS could see the lips of the victim moving, as in prayer; the trembling hands sought to join in prayer, but could not. Of a sudden the noose was tightened; over the momentary inbreathed silence of the crowd the choking desperation of the hanged could clearly be heard. The second assistant pulled the ladder away sharply. The legs dangled a second but the staring eyes still blinked. Here was art, far more exact than WS’s own: the hangman approached with his knife, fire in the sunlight, before the neck could crack, ripped downwards from heart to groin in one slash, swiftly changed knife from right to left, then plunged a mottled fist inside the swinging body. The first assistant took the bloody knife from his master and wiped it with care on a clean cloth, the while his eyes were on the artistry of the drawing. The right hand withdrew, dripping, holding up for all to see a heart in its fatty wrappings; then the left arm plunged to reappear all coiled and clotted with entrails. The crowd cheered; the girl in front of WS leaped and clapped; a child on his father’s shoulder thumb-sucked, indifferent, understanding nothing of all this, the adult world. Blood poured and spurted richly, the sumptuousness of heraldic bearings, glinting as the sun struck. And then (for the rope must be used again) the noose was loosened, the ruined body upheld while blood poured still, the tautness of the rope made slack again. The hangman threw the heart and guts into the steaming bowl, freeing his arms from the incrustations with quick fingers, drying them then, unwashed, on a towel. The crowd moaned its pleasure, its continued excitement, for were there not two more victims to come? The hangman was handed a hatchet, squat and dull compared with that quick artist’s instrument but sharp as it cracked through bone for the quartering — the head, the limbs. A gaping torso was upheld a moment, then all these pieces of man were thrown into a basket.

  Next came Ferrara, gross and heavy, the flesh shaking on his bare black-haired chest as he was lifted, his three chins wobbling to the crowd’s pleasure, his eyes rolling like those of some insentient doll. Here was comedy, a sort of Kemp. Ferrara squealed like a swine, going No no no no nasally as he was thrust up the ladder, groaning dismally from his belly’s depths as the noose went about his no-neck. This time the hangman was a second’s fraction slow with his knife; Ferrara was dead already as the point pierced. But there was a great fat heart, crammed like a goose’s liver, dripping treason treason treason; the entrails were endless, an eternity of pink sausage; the crowd was a-roar with delight at the comedy of the fatness of the chopped limbs.

  And here, at last, was the crowning course of the rich dinner. Dr Roderigo Lopez, Jew, Machiavel, small and black and mowing and chattering like an ape. Let him not be granted the least dignity in his dying: strip all off. There is a fair-sized thursday for thee; mark, he is like all foreigners for the appurtenances of lust. Lopez prayed aloud in a high screaming voice, in an outlandish tongue, his own. No, it is to the Devil he prayeth, for is not Adonai the foreign name of the Devil? And then, in ridiculous foreigner’s English:

  ‘I love
de Kvin. Ass mosh ass I loff Zhessoss Krist——’

  The crowd split their sides with laughter but were, at the same time, most indignant: this naked foreign monkey praying, saying the Holy Name in his nakedness, screaming, with that smart filthy rod, of his love for the Queen. Despatch, but not too slowly. And then, in articulo mortis, his body spurted, but not with blood. Parents, shocked, covered the eyes of their children. Draw, draw, draw. The hangman’s hands reeked. Then he went with his hatchet for the body as he would mince it fine.

  As he had been foretold, WS watched all, drinking this sight of blood to the dregs. Then, with shocked eyes (shocked as if he looked in a mirror), he saw Harry laughing, miming that he was to go off to drink with his triumphant friend Robin, that he, Will, might proceed homeward in the coach. He was trundled off, numb, as to his own execution. The crowd was sated, spent, purged, cleansed, splitting up into decent family groups proceeding to the quiet of their houses.

  WS awoke from a dream of Paris Garden, roughly jerked. There had been blood of yelping dogs that the bear mauled growling, a screaming ape riding a dog but caught by dogs and ravaged and gluttonously eaten, a little boy that a bear chased crying with the claw-marks on his head just about to well purple. Paris Garden was Paradise Garden, home of sweet innocence: so it was revealed to him in his sleep. It was Harry who pulled him awake, Harry drunk and laughing, sweet innocence holding a candle in a silver sconce. ‘And so, old dad, how was’t then? Didst like the free show from the Lord’s box?’ He placed the candle on top of the press. Dewy, irresistible, made by God before God made morals, he bounced on to his poet’s bed, straight from Paradise Garden, unbuttoned. But WS could resist him tonight. He pulled the coverlet over his head, shivering, saying:

  ‘I am weary. I am in pain.’

  ‘In pain. Thou wilt be in pain. First the hanging, then the disembowelling.’ He laughed softly. ‘We have been with wenches tonight. But not in Islington, nay. Thou wert right about the alewife of Islington. And we were with these wenches and then I thought of my old dad here all alone.’ He took a handful of the hair of the head of WS, silky and long still at the back, scanty above the brow. He tugged.

  ‘Leave me. Let me be. I am in pain.’

  ‘Aye, as I wished. And now in more pain.’ And he tugged again. WS writhed up to seize the hand that tugged. He said:

  ‘There are times when I can feel nothing but hate. Hate and despair.’

  ‘Aye, let us have hate. Hate only, without despair. Hate hate hate.’ His nails were long; he dug all five of his free hand into the bare chest of WS. ‘Let me claw out what is within.’ And the five nails clawed down in a slow raking motion. WS yelled in momentary agony and seized this hand too. He held both delicate lady-hands in his, squeezing, saying:

  ‘An I am not to be left in peace I had best go find lodging in some tavern.’

  ‘Ah no, thou’rt to stay. I, thy lord, give this order.’

  WS weakened, as he always must. And now Harry became a bold aggressor.

  ‘To die, to die.’ The act of dying would come later and, with it, as WS bitterly foreknew, a consummation of intolerable self-disgust.

  V

  ‘I SAID IT WOULD COME TO THIS. All along I said it. Yet you would not have it so.’

  Harry screamed and threw the book to the floor. It was a thin book, ill-bound, the cover already coming away. WS, calm, in many ways glad, picked it up. It was an anonymous poem called Willobie His Avisa or The True picture of a modest maid and of a chaste and constant wife — anonymous, but he could guess who had written it or, at least, was behind the writing of it. It was not weighty enough for Chapman, slim stuff; belike he had sold the theme to some drunken hack, master of arts. It was sure of good sales. WS turned and turned the pages to a hunk of prose, as indigestible as cheese-and-black-bread:

  ‘… HW being suddenly infected with the contagion of a fantastical fit, at the first sight of A, pineth a while in secret grief, at length not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend WS who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion …’ It was not quite right, any of it, but there was a pea of truth beneath the mattresses of verbiage. The story was of a true and beautiful alewife, innkeeper’s wife he would say, resistant to all onslaughts on her virtue. Who could HW be but Harry Wriothesly? And, to fix the identity of WS, there were sly nudges at the player’s trade: ‘… see whether another could play his part better than himself … sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player … at length this Comedy was like to have grown to a Tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that HW was brought unto …’ And here, surely, something more direct: ‘… the divers and sundry changes of affections and temptations, which Will set loose from Reason can devise …’

  ‘You can expect talk now,’ said WS, putting the little book down on the table by the casement. Outside the plane tree was yellowing. The swallows twittered in loud companies. Another autumn, a sere fall, but now perhaps the end of his servitude. Not of friendship, no. He felt himself as close to this lord as to a son, as to himself. But the end of hugging, of that secret love that June’s frenzy and self-hatred had seemed to quell. He thought it must be so. As for Harry, he was more openly busy now among the Queen’s Glories. WS twisted the knife in further. He said:

  ‘My lord Burghley will be told, doubtless.’ Harry gave a maniacal smile, saying:

  ‘Oh, my lord Burghley knows everything. My lord Burghley has issued a table-thumping threat.’

  ‘Threat? When was this?’ For WS had been busy, these last weeks, with other matters, player’s matters.

  ‘I am given my last chance. Either I marry dear Lady Liza, God curse her poxy face, or pay the penalty. And the penalty is by way of a damages, for my guardian’s ravaged heart and the time wasted in waiting by this pocked bitch.’

  ‘A penalty? Money? You must pay money?’

  ‘Five thousand pound.’

  WS whistled in Stratford tradesman’s vulgar astonishment. ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘Oh, I shall find the money. It will not be easy. But I will pay ten times that rather than mingle my bare legs with hers. I refuse to marry.’

  WS spoke carefully. ‘You may, if all I hear is true, be hurled still into marriage against your desire. Love is pleasant, but nature sees that it will have consequences that are naught, or little, to do with love.’

  ‘Do not paste your own past on to my future. Because you were forced into marriage by the baring of a fat belly——’

  ‘Yes? Great lords are different from Stratford glovers?’

  Harry went to the wine-table and poured himself a beaker of the bloody ferrous brew of Vaugraudy; he liked it; these days he was growing faint ruby with it; he did not offer any to his friend.

  ‘I do not think you should speak so to me,’ he said. ‘There are times when I feel I may compass mine own disaster through over-much familiarity. Not through disobedience to them that are set over me but through mine own free behaviour with—— Ah, it is no matter.’ He drank thirstily.

  ‘You have never had cause,’ said WS, ‘nor will you ever have cause to complain of any indiscretion of mine. I never took you tavern-haunting. I sought to discourage your Islington venture with a trick. I would never be so foolish as to place myself in a posture that could earn just rebuke. We are friends when we are alone, and when we are in company I am as tame an adjunct to your house as Master Florio. And now I cease to be that. This book tells me what to do.’ He held Willobie His Avisa in both hands, as he would tear it. ‘You need five thousand pound now, you say. Would that I were in a position to let you have it. It is not right that you mortgage ancestral land. I go now to seek the way of substance, and that lies not in pretty poetry. When we meet again it must be more as equals.’

  ‘You cannot make such equality,’ said Harry with a sort of foxy sneer. ‘You will never earn yourself an earldom. Earldoms are not earned in playh
ouses or by the buying of flour against famine or by the foreclosing of mortgages. Degree remains and may not be taken away.’ He poured himself more wine, but this time he offered a cup to his friend. His friend shook his head, saying:

  ‘I foresee a time when gold will buy anything. Gold already rules this city. I foresee a time of patched nobles seeking alliance with dirty merchant families. As for myself, my way up leads to the estate of gentleman. For you, the way up can lead only to disaster.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I say no more now. But let us consider the example of my lord of Essex.’

  ‘I will not consider his example nor anybody’s,’ said Harry in a sudden passion. ‘I will not have country nobodies speaking of great lords as though they were subject to the rule of ordinary men. Play with your plays and leave state matters to statesmen.’

  ‘So my lord Essex is no longer merely a soldier and a courtier but a statesman too? And what is the next step?’

  ‘I think,’ said my lord Southampton, ‘you had best leave now. And take that filthy book with you. No,’ he said, ‘I will read it again. We shall meet this evening when perhaps we are both more in our right minds.’

  WS grinned at that. ‘Alas, my lord, I have other business. Player’s business. But tomorrow I shall be much at your service if you would wish to come to my lodging. See, I have writ it on this paper, the house and the street. Bishopsgate is not far from Holborn.’

  Harry threw the book once more, this time at his friend. The cover that had threatened to come away now did so; it was a piece of cheap and unskilful binding, not the work of Richard Field, that other ascending Stratfordian.

  FAR from the river now. North of the divers fair and large builded houses for merchants and suchlike. North even of the City Wall and the fair summer houses north of the wall. Good air in Shoreditch. The Theatre a finer playhouse than the Rose. Burbage as good a man of business any day as Henslowe and an old player too, though, from what I see, of no great skill. But his son now, his son promises, this Richard. He may yet go further than Alleyn. Is that Giles Alleyn from whom old Burbage got the land of Ned’s kin? It may be so. In ’76 it was. A lease of twenty-one years. A mere patch with rank grass and dog-turds, even a man’s bones they say. A skull grinning up at surveyors. And now a fair playhouse. Twenty-one years, let me see. To ’98, which is but four more. Will this Alleyn renew? Were I he I would not. But it is the men more than the playhouse, sure. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It hath a fine ring. Richard Burbage, John Heminges, Tom Pope, Harry Condell. As for Will Kemp, is that right? We have ever been together, two Wills. But he harks back to the old way, the ways of leers and the extempore fill-in for lines forgot or unlearned. He is somewhat too bawdy and he deems himself to be above the supererogatory fripperosities of poetlings. Yet will he draw them in. It is the drawing-in that is needed, blood and murder (well, it is there, it is the world, I would be what the world itself would be) for this Dick Burbage, for Kemp the low laughter of Launce’s dog pissing against the heaven-posts. To get money from all, from the little lords too, scribbling my conceits on their waist-tablets. Now the Admiral’s at the old Rose have still more an inn than a house built expressly for plays, yet have they a repertory — Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine, Guise, oh many. And mine also, Harry and Titus and The Shrew and that botched pseudo-Plautus and. It is a matter than now of working fast between now and Christmas. Waste naught, take all. If a poor Jew doctor remains their posthumous villain, why then — Christophero gratias — they shall have a Jew and set in Machiavellian Italy withal; and Italy will do for this warring family play (well, there is Brooke’s poor poem as a base) which is also of Harry’s friends the Danvers brothers and their war with the Longs. Aye, Montague will come into it, which is a name of the Southamptons. There is also LLL for comedy.