The Skull and the Nightingale

by Michael Irwin

  The following morning I was likewise devoid of inspiration or energy—but not of will. I settled myself to my labors as staunchly as any carpenter or bricklayer—those labors in my case consisting of the preparation and composition of a letter to my godfather. It occurred to me that my plight was not unlike poor Quentin’s: we had equally, if to different ends, been made slaves to the quill. As a preliminary I grazed here and there in the endless pastures of my newly purchased Clarissa.

  It came as a relief to me to be interrupted by a visit from Cullen.

  “I allowed you a full day in which to recover,” said he, dropping into a chair and splaying his long legs. “Tell me the story of the masquerade. Whom did you see? Whom did you swive? And how came you by that scar I see peeping from beneath your wig?”

  I gave him a loose and partial account of the evening, pleading my increasing tipsiness and uncertainty.

  Matt expressed surprise: “You are a man of few virtues, Dick, but one of them has always been a hard head for liquor. You must surely have been drinking like a camel.”

  “I enjoyed my share, as may be imagined, but as for quantity nothing remarkable. The quality was perhaps unusual. Crocker hinted that the punch was brewed stronger as the evening wore on.”

  “Then he might have had a bacchanal on his premises by the end of the night?”

  “And so perhaps he did. To say the truth I’ve given little thought to what may have taken place after I left. But I fancy that the antics of the monkey sobered many.”

  “Including Mrs. Ogden, by your own account. Good God, Dick, you fell from the masthead. Do you live to fight another day?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “It seems that you injured your head in the fall.”

  “No: that wound came from a later skirmish.”

  Reluctantly I told him of my ill-advised attempt on Mrs. Deacon. Matt laughed so hard that he all but toppled from his chair. I had to make him stifle his guffaws lest my landlady should hear them from below and guess what was passing.

  “You may well laugh,” I said when he was sober again. “But the whole venereal enterprise is an absurdity. How do you make shift yourself ?”

  Matt’s face contracted into a rare frown and then relaxed again into a grin.

  “If the truth must be told—which God forbid—my present remedy for the itch is a humble one: an informal contract with a maidservant. I would have nothing to report to an inquisitive godfather but ‘Thursday evening: we did it again.’ ”

  “Then you should sympathize with me, who must have a story to tell and a commentary to write, whether I have spilled or no.”

  “You’re well paid for your pains, Dick: you’ll get no pity from me. But what do you plan to tell the old Spectator at this point?”

  “Nothing about Mrs. Deacon—you may be sure of that. As for the rest, I have a double strategy. Sarah’s parting words will be rendered milder, so that it will still seem possible that I can advance my cause. And you will have seen that I have a great column of Clarissa here. I plan to divert the old weasel into the intricacies of deception and pursuit, and away from the crude pleasures of insertion.”

  “But is not insertion his favorite theme?”

  “I hope the case is not so simple. He is eager to put an eye to the bedroom keyhole, but he affects to despise what he sees. I must muse with him over the contradiction. And in the time thus gained I will try to resume the siege of Mrs. Ogden.”

  When Matt had gone I set about composing my letter. The attempt to describe my intentions had served to clarify them: soon I was writing quite briskly. I made my account of the masquerade fitful and dreamlike, with the emphasis almost wholly upon my pursuit of Sarah and Kitty Brindley. Generally speaking I was faithful to the facts up to, and including, the entry of Trinculo. It seemed necessary, however, to alter the terms of Sarah’s eventual rebuff. After consideration I decided that she had said: “Mr. Fenwick—you threw me into confusion. I have gone too far—I have gone too far.”

  Having finished the narrative, I attempted a modulation into a breezier vein:

  In short, at half-past eleven your godson was very hopefully situated, with Miss Brindley reserved for his immediate pleasure and Mrs. Ogden having heartily compromised herself. Then that confounded monkey was somehow set loose, and these gains were thrown away. But I must blame myself. If I had been less frantically concerned to find Mrs. Ogden once more, I would have offered her no opportunity for second thoughts and would have enjoyed a night of pleasure with Kitty.

  Kitty, I fear, is now lost to me—but perhaps her attractions were beginning to grow thin. Concerning Sarah, I remain hopeful. Having thrown her into confusion once, I may hope to do so again; and if on this occasion she went “too far,” there must be a chance that she can be persuaded to go further. It may even be the case that I can resume my attempts during her husband’s forthcoming absence.

  Taking a hint from your observations, I have been looking again at the letters of Mr. Lovelace. I suspect there is a limitation in his general strategy. He sees his campaign solely as a series of advances or “encroachments”—a term used repeatedly by both the lady and himself. In short, he is the active party, while Clarissa is passive, a fortress under siege. My own hypothesis is that in such cases the woman feels herself to be equally an active agent. If her resistance can be represented to her as aggression, she may, in contrition, instinctively falter. I hope Mrs. Ogden is now regretting her cruel change of mind and may therefore be unwittingly ready to take the half-step back that will allow me to advance once again.

  Lovelace’s philosophy is open to question at several points. He takes pride in his powers of contrivance, even seeming to construe them as an aspect of his virility:

  What a matchless plotter thy friend! Stand by and let me swell!—I am already as big as an elephant: and ten times wiser! Mightier too by far! Have I not reason to snuff the moon with my proboscis?

  Yet for all this hyperbolical manliness his ingenuity is exercised upon a victim whom he has imprisoned, and whom he is eventually obliged to rape. His vaunted cunning has been exhausted by persuading Clarissa to run away. The rest is rant.

  What is more remarkable is that he values this plotting more than its object:

  More truly delightful to me the seduction process than the crowning act—for that’s a vapour, a bubble.

  Later he puts the point yet more strongly:

  What is the enjoyment of the finest woman in the world to the contrivance, the bustle, the surprises, and at last the happy conclusion of a well-laid plot. For all the rest, what is it? What but to find an angel in imagination dwindled down to a woman in fact?

  If the “angel in imagination” did not prove to be “a woman in fact,” no “happy conclusion” would be possible. But there is a further contradiction. Not merely does he, in Shakespeare’s words, make the service greater than the god: he extols the service while denying the existence of the god. The close of each amorous campaign, a mere “vapor” or “bubble,” will confirm, yet again, the senselessness of the endeavor.

  Yet I can after all see some perverse sense in his claims. The consummation which he so belittles serves to color all the enabling circumstances that precede it, if only in terms of metaphor. He soliloquizes when writing to his friend, Belford:

  Lie still, villain, till the time comes—my heart, Jack, my heart!—It is always thumping away on the remotest prospects of this nature.

  Here, as often in Lovelace’s letters, the heart is clearly a proxy for an external organ. More surprising is another metaphor in this kind:

  Thou hadst the two letters in thy hand. Had they been in mine, the seal would have yielded to the touch of my warm fingers, and folds, as other plications have done, opened of themselves to oblige my curiosity.

  We two have remarked on the way in which one may elevate animal consummation by adducing images from
nature, from art, from the moon. Lovelace shows us that process in reverse. Anticipation of the physical act can touch with eroticism every step taken toward it.

  I admit that a further fallacy remains. If pursuit and conquest are validated reciprocally, then the experience itself is mysteriously annihilated.

  After all, however, Lovelace’s inconsistencies are surely every man’s inconsistencies. In the heat of desire logical contradictions seem immaterial. If the whole multifarious business must eventually be compacted into a few moments of animal sensation, a culmination absurdly incommensurate with the emotions and activities that have brought it about, then it may indeed be that the Thing Itself is to be glimpsed only indirectly, as by means of a series of mirrors, mutually reflective.

  Whether that is indeed the case may perhaps be confirmed or refuted by the outcome of our present campaign, concerning which you will shortly hear more from

  Yours, &c.

  By the time I was spinning out these latter paragraphs I scarcely knew where I was heading or what I was talking about. What mattered was that I should provide Mr. Gilbert, as he read my words in his distant country house, sufficient material to exercise his mind and his imagination. My immediate ambition was simply to secure myself a respite. I dispatched the letter with relief.

  The following morning I myself received both a package and a letter. In the former there was no message of any kind—only the bangle that I had bought for Kitty. I knew now, with a sudden sad rush of warm recollections, that my liaison with her was indeed at an end. The letter was a brief one in anonymous capital letters:

  IF MR. FENWICK WALKS ALONG MARGARET STREET ON TUESDAY NIGHT AT TEN O’CLOCK HE MAY LEARN SOMETHING OF INTEREST TO HIM.

  Chapter 21

  That anonymous invitation I could not refuse. Whatever the outcome, here would be a tale of some sort for Mr. Gilbert. In any case mere curiosity would have driven me to seek an answer to the puzzle. The most probable explanation was a joke of some kind. If that were so, I would need to be wary of making a fool of myself. But what could be achieved by luring me to Margaret Street? A graver possibility had occurred to me: perhaps Ogden, guessing at my interest in his wife, had hired a couple of Bravos to break my bones. But I had confidence in my own prowess. Margaret Street was a peaceable thoroughfare. I would arrive early, to spy out the territory, and I would wear steel.

  Meanwhile I could use the intervening Monday to disentangle my affairs a little further. There was to be a carousal at the Black Lion: if I attended, I was likely to meet Nick Horn, and could learn how matters stood with regard to Kitty Brindley.

  In the short time since the masquerade I had more than once felt hot rage against Nick. Had he not sneakingly spirited Kitty away, behind my back, knowing her to be my property? But it was a mood I could not sustain. If I was indeed Kitty’s protector, I had failed her. Nick had even done me a favor of sorts by coming to her aid. What might have passed between them since I scarcely wished to know, but felt it necessary to find out.

  When I arrived at the tavern the entertainment was already well advanced, as evidenced by the loudness of the laughter. A grinning booby of a fellow was being roundly abused for having relieved himself from the window overlooking the street. It was Horn who came to his defense, scrambling onto a table to be better heard:

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Be reasonable. George Edgar has done no more than we have all done in time of need. If a man has to piss, then piss he must. The king pisses. Our Savior Himself pissed many a time.”

  The claim produced uproar. John Herbert mounted another table to bawl a rebuke:

  “Horn, you are worse than Edgar! You have shamed us! We are disgusted.”

  There was more cheering and jeering, but Nick, always in his element when attempting provocation, shouted down the shouters:

  “Those who object profane our religion. They reject the Incarnation. God took residence in a human body: of course He pissed like the rest of us.”

  “Animal!” roared Herbert. “Such physical matters are not to be contemplated.”

  “Not to be contemplated?” cried Nick. “The Scriptures demand that we contemplate blood and wounds and physical resurrection.”

  A random voice shouted: “But could He have changed his water into wine?”

  Here the exchanges subsided into blasphemy, one sot suggesting that Christ could have wrought an internal miracle and filled the apostles’ cups direct from his pintle, while another claimed to be capable of performing this very miracle on his own account, and offered to provide a demonstration. Amid the tumult Horn caught sight of me, jumped from the table, and pushed his way across the room.

  “You may be looking for me,” he said, more sober than I would have guessed.

  “I was.”

  We went halfway down a flight of stairs, away from the din. Nick looked wary, as though he feared I might seize him by the throat.

  “We have business to discuss, Mr. Horn.”

  “Not business, Dick—not business. Let me tell you what passed. I chanced upon Puck, weeping, and spoke to her from a kindly impulse. She said that you had promised to take her away long before, at midnight, but that she had seen you since, warmly engaged with another lady. So I stripped off my beard and escorted her chastely to her lodging.”

  “Then you took no mean advantage of the situation?”

  Nick looked at me with some hostility.

  “You are hardly entitled to ask—but I did not. I have a high regard for Miss Brindley and would do nothing to cause her unhappiness. But if you ask whether I hope to improve upon this encounter, the answer is yes. I infer that your own artillery is directed elsewhere.”

  I had no ready reply, and could hardly stand upon my dignity since there was none to stand on. At last I said, stiffly and unwillingly:

  “I behaved badly that night. Please convey my apologies to Miss Brindley. She had every right to feel wounded. I still think fondly of her, but I cannot claim the right to trouble her again.”

  Horn stared at me as he took in my words.

  “Are you suggesting . . . ?”

  “I am suggesting that you make the most of your chance. But be kind.”

  “You need have no fear, Dick. I worship the lady.”

  He shook my hand with an earnestness most unusual in him. Lacking words, I nodded a response before slipping away in no very cheerful frame of mind.

  I approached Margaret Street by way of a dark alley, my hat brim pulled down to my eyes. Though I moved like a thief, my blood was up: it was a relief to be taking a physical risk after the many weeks of fabrication and pretense. I had not felt so fiery since leaving Rome the previous year.

  Although no moon was visible, it was one of those nights in which a certain luminosity seems to be suspended in the atmosphere. Turning the corner, I could make out nearly the whole length of Margaret Street. Between small leakages of light from some of the houses there were patches of deeper shadow, but as I watched and waited I saw no sign of movement anywhere. Only when a distant clock struck the hour did I venture forward. I walked along the street at a steady pace, staying close to the center to avoid ambush—but I heard no footsteps save my own. I reached the far end, near Mrs. Kinsey’s house, without seeing a soul.

  Pausing there, I heard a whisper: “Mr. Fenwick!”

  I turned, with my hand on my sword hilt, to see a cloaked figure emerge from the shadows. As it drew near me the hood was thrown back to reveal the face of Sarah.

  Bewildered, I spoke in a low voice:

  “Have you run away?”

  “Of course not. I am staying with my aunt and have crept out.”

  “You run a great risk—” I began, but was interrupted.

  “We cannot talk here. Follow me.”

  At the corner of the street was what seemed to be a rear entrance to Mrs. Kinsey’s property. Following Sarah through
a gate, which she locked behind us, I realized that we were in a high-walled courtyard. She led me toward a shape I dimly discerned to be a landau, with the covers down. In a moment we had climbed inside and were sitting together in complete darkness. I pushed my hat and sword to one side of me: Sarah was on the other.

  “I needed to talk to you,” she whispered. “Here we will not be disturbed.”

  “Is this your aunt’s carriage?”

  “No, no—my husband’s. He leaves it here because it is rarely used.”

  It smelled powerfully of musty leather. Seated beside Sarah, I could have reached out and touched her, but made no move for fear of making a false one. The initiative was entirely hers. She spoke again, very low:

  “This carriage is like a confessional. I can talk more freely when I cannot be seen.”

  “I am listening.”

  “My last words to you—at the masquerade—were foolish. Insincere. I find it hard to regulate my conduct. If I behave naturally, I go too far in one direction; if I behave as I think I ought, I go too far in another.”

  After a pause she resumed, whispering close to my ear:

  “The masquerade was a wonder to me. It haunts my mind. You have traveled and attended great receptions. I have known only life with my aunt. That and my strange marriage. The masquerade was a new world. I could see a hundred lives.”

  She broke off, panting slightly. I sat motionless, conscious of sounds alone.

  “My life has been so cautious—one day like another. Some people—even some women—dare to take risks. Why should not I be one of them?

  “Dressed as Diana, I was a different person. In darkness I was a different person—I am a different person. When you kissed me I was a different person. Why should not these other selves be allowed to live? What stifles them? Nothing but habit and fear and propriety. Is not propriety a kind of murder?”

  She was panting once more, from sheer force of feeling. By now I could apprehend her as a dark shape in a slightly thinner darkness. Her cloak had fallen against my thigh.