“Come,” he says, offering Mary his arm, “let us sit down. And please to remember to keep a sad face.”
“Why so?” Thomas says.
“Reputation, man.”
“And who shall report our mood?”
“Thomas, for a scholar you are most wonderfully ignorant of this world. You understand that all honor and reputation are matters of report, true enough. And you ask the proper question—who makes the report? To which I answer, for the sake of your education, not spies, not scholars, not poets or preachers. No, sir, reputation and honor are the prerogative of carvers and servers, scullions and stable grooms. They decide these things.”
Thomas, laughing, replies: “How, then, can we ever gain their favor?”
“I confess I do not know, Thomas. I have tried by every means, fair and foul, but my servants are imperious.”
Now all are seated.
“And now,” says Ralegh, “I must say an eloquent grace worthy of our friend, the absent Bishop.”
“I think you might have been a fine figure of a bishop yourself,” the girl says.
“Ha, girl! the Church is not my vocation.”
“Perhaps a Pope of Rome,” Hariot says.
“It is true that once or twice the idea of being an ecclesiastical shepherd crossed my mind. But then I met Bess and at the first sight of her I banished the thought forever. My own private bishop pointed to my true vocation as straight and proud as a soldier’s pike.”
“You will make the poor girl blush.”
“That was my intention, Bess. And, see, she blushes sweetly in the Throckmorton manner,” he says. “Now, good friends, pray bow your heads while I give thanks for all our many blessings.”
It is almost midnight, hours since the coach came. The table is cleared away and taken down, though there are still sweets and nuts, a plate of cheeses and a choice of wines. Candles burn shorter and the fire is an even glow. The chamber is warm. A lone servant dozes, sitting on a joint stool near the door.
Thomas Hariot has taught Bess’s kinswoman how to drink tobacco smoke from a pipe. And Thomas is sketching a likeness of the girl while she, her cheeks flushed from wine and her hair now in mild disarray, poses for him, puffing little clouds.
Propped up by pillows, Ralegh and Bess have made a sort of chair of the porter’s bed, talking in low voices.
“I fear we are wasting our time,” he tells her. “For I shall be pardoned and live to be a hundred.”
“I pray you are right.”
“Some old Roman—Seneca or Cicero, no matter—wrote that the best keepers of the vineyard are old men. A baldheaded lie if ever there was one. I promise you, Bess, that I shall grow ever more irascible, choleric, forgetful, long-winded, and foolish in my second childhood.”
“And I shall grow ever more happy.”
“No, you’ll nag and complain. You’ll drive me to sit in the chimney corner and pretend to be stone deaf.”
“I will not be tricked. I will know when you are pretending, as I always have.”
“After a while you shall ignore me there.”
“Oh no. I’ll watch you every moment like a cat and a mouse.”
“What can an old man do that bears watching?”
“I shall be watching when you reach out to pat the bottom of the scullery girl.”
“At one hundred years?”
“I know you.”
“Pure flattery, but I thank you for it. And so for your sake I shall try to give our scullery girl such a pat and a squeeze that she’ll squeal like a pig.”
“Then you shall be treated to saltpeter in your broth and will mortify your flesh with rigorous cold baths.…”
No mortification of flesh tonight. It was a fine supper. Noon dinner, while somewhat ostentatious for the benefit of the sheriffs, good city gentlemen both, and the Lord Lieutenant, had been contrived upon the spur of the moment, depending upon extravagance to offset absence of ceremony and makeshift service. But there had been a little time to order the arrangement of the evening meal, at its odd, late hour. He had been most exact in instructions to his servants and to the willing porter, who was most eager to please, not only for the sake of whatever reward he would receive, but because the remains, certain to be ample, would end in his own larder. Would feed his family for some days. Indeed could make a feast of a dinner for Lord Mayor’s Day. One to which he might invite some friends. So they might have proof that the station of porter has its special perquisites. There would even be enough leavings to pass on to the prisoners in the common jails brightening one day for them.
So goes the old chain of things which links us all together. A truth Walter Ralegh weighed when he ordered the food for his meal.
He knew he could not eat much himself. Of late he has thought there is much truth in the adage that has it that a man in his seventh age, under Saturn, time when food is the last of the world’s pleasures left him, provided he’s kept some teeth, will discover he can no longer distinguish the taste of meat and of bread, both becoming as bland and bald as beans boiled without bacon. Whereupon a man should shrug, sigh, and give up the world for good. But fears must have come and gone with fever; for the dinner was good and by the time Bess arrived, he had an appetite again. Still would not eat much, for fear of vapors and humors which might keep him awake or trouble his dreams.
The ladies also were sparing, having supped lightly at five o’clock.
Only Thomas awakened from thoughts to eat like a beggar on Easter.
Ralegh had arranged all well enough, allowing for the circumstances. A damask tablecloth was laid on the table, one worked and embroidered in illustration of the scriptural story of Susanna and the Elders. Napkins of linen worked with his crest, the Roebuck Proper.
Silver plate, plain, high-polished and smooth in the old fashion. For he does not fancy the fashion of engraved or enameled plate. One piece, however, for display, was enameled, bearing his arms—gules red with five lozenges cojoined in bend argent—and with it the martlet, the legless sparrow, signifying in heraldry’s language that he is the fourth son of the family; arms unextravagant, unchanged since the day the Queen knighted him, though many others added to their arms or had them changed in this free and easy time.
Silver spoons and keen-honed knives set in ivory handles.
The salt, not so tall as many, was of silver, sculptured to show Virtue, shiny, nude, high and firm of breast, flat and smooth of belly and loins, rich and round of thigh, standing triumphantly graceful atop the cringing female form—only a shade less desirable than Virtue herself—of vanquished Vice. Once there had been jewels in the navels of these allegorical ladies, but these were gone.
A still jeweled pepper box of gold, taken from the Madre de Dios.
For spices he had saved and produced a toy. Not so grand as Leicester’s silver ship, which is still the fashion, but specially made for him alone. A silver coach pulled by four horses and driven by a coachman, the reins and the whip of the coachman made of gold filament. By a cunning clockwork mechanism the wheels of the coach turn to send it along the table.
Bess never loved it, even when he had it made for her so many years before. She called it childish to spend such wealth on a mechanical jest. But he had kept it anyway, hidden it, even when he had been forced to put so much of his plate, his armor, and jewels in pawn.
And when at supper he set it running, showing how the coach could move the length of the table, even Bess had to laugh.
On top of a chest and on the plain table, whose cracks and scars were covered with another damask cloth, a few pieces of plate, the ewers and covered serving dishes stood, together with a row of gold-stemmed, gold-rimmed Venetian glasses, delicate, made of light and air.
Resting on the several joint stools, impressed and put into unusual service, were shiny copper vessels of cool water, fresh from the keeper’s rain barrel, to keep the wines chilled. The Canary was gone now. But he managed to provide an Italian white vernage, light and suited to his
taste; a clary with honey and ginger and pepper; and for Bess, so English in her love of sweets, the rich raspberry wine called raspes. There was also a bowl of hippocras, a taste he favored for the end of a meal, though merely a taste, its strong distilled spirits of wine spiced and flavored with white ginger, nutmeg and cloves, a bit of boiled and candied orange, some grains of pepper, and ample cinnamon.
They could choose, pick at, taste, from cold meat, hot fish, and fowl. A shoulder of mutton and a beef rump. One fried rabbit for each. Sweet and spiced marrow on toast. A fat hen boiled with leeks and mushrooms. A gelded, sweet and gamy, peacock of the Ind, most for the brave show of its feathers. Some lobster, crayfish, and boiled shrimp. A pumpkin, sliced and baked with candied apples. And, most rare and ingenious at this season, a salad of motley herbs and greens, with seasonless hothouse flowers to color it and, in the eating, to make the mind glad.
In his salad and, indeed, in the sauces Ralegh insisted upon fine-chopped chives, assuring them that though chives might indeed make them thin if eaten in excess, he had found there was no truth at all in the tale that chives cause hot and gross vapors.
And if he could no longer enjoy the services of his own skilled gentleman usher, his yeoman usher, yeoman of ewry, yeoman of cellar, server, and carver, etc., still he could direct men how to lay a proper table and serve it well enough. And he, as he was proud to prove, could carve as well as any carver in England.
Bess, of course, frowned. Her first thoughts being that here was her reckless husband, spending far too much upon the occasion. And to no good, reasonable purpose. Perhaps in part for the porter, for the servants, and through them, for the world’s vainglorious report that without any fear and trembling, he sat himself down to a sumptuous repast, somehow contrived, as if by the magic of old Merlin, here in a rude chamber which was, in truth, a prison.
Yet not, she would consider, in hope of good report. More likely its opposite. For he has always given that kind of offense. The pious would cluck their tongues and speak of Balthazar’s feast and, eyes rolling toward heaven, recall the Last Supper in its perfect simplicity.
Yet they would be few. And perhaps that was not his purpose at all.
Maybe he intended a good report, but as a kind of legacy, an inheritance worth more than all his remaining estate for herself and Carew. Unlike his father, Carew seeks to please others even to his own disadvantage. She has chafed against Ralegh’s stubborn lack of common tact. Which, she has sometimes felt strongly, added more faggots to the fires of the loneliness she had to endure. Had he courted favor more, she might have regained her right to rejoin the Court.
Perhaps this supper was a sort of apologia to her.
Yet she could not accept that proposition either. How many times he had told her in his satiric, teasing way that his death would be their bill of divorcement. That women being what they are, and widows being especially restless, he would not be cool as the clay he was buried in before she found herself a new man. And laughed at her protestations.
No, most likely, she concluded, her logic leaping from bottom of stairway to top “like a witch on a broom,” as he described her thinking, it meant none of these things. Rather it was demonstration, if any were needed, that he was the same insolent, swaggering boy of a man. Who knew no other way to live or to die. That he was even now unchanged from the man she loved first at a distance, then with an intimate mutual siege of chills and fever, in the Court of the Queen.
And this thought, the satisfaction of it was the assurance that if her choice had been foolish (if choice is ever a part of love), she had been right in her first understanding of the man.
Thus intuition of women put to shame all knots and gnarls and tangles of man’s vaunted reasoning. She always believed that. But it was, always, a pleasure to have her beliefs confirmed.
And so Bess was soon all smiles and merry during suppertime.
The girl, meanwhile, having joined this household to seek her future at its bleakest time, having just now come from the Broad Street house where the servants tiptoed as if in mourning already, and, their faces like turtles, worried on their own futures; hushed voices and probably sometimes the sound of sobbing from Bess’s chambers; the girl would have never seen or known him in such a mood as this. Would be eased that what had seemed certain to be a sad evening, a sadness she must share, was not to be so. Instead of the tedium of grief she found a festival. A glimpse of the life she longed for, not certain it existed outside of her imagination. Or if the sumptuous life which her country preacher, himself fallen from preferment at Court, had railed against so vividly as to plant roots in her fantasy, did exist, uncertain that she should ever so much as enjoy crumbs of that banquet.
Here in a prison chamber (so distant from her picture of rags, dirty straw, lice, and humiliations of jail, where sometimes in a warm bath of guilt she imagined herself paying for pleasures she had mostly imagined, the pain and shame a sort of pleasure to her soul, deliciously strong enough to shudder her flesh), here were only crumbs and leavings to be sure. But see how these things sparkled!
She could not, of course, seeing himself and Bess, imagine herself in their images. Being unable in youth, health, and ignorance to do so. Nor could she picture him as any more alive than old father Abraham. Could not picture them as ever having been full of green sap, clothed in the lovely bark of young flesh.
Could imagine almost anything else, imagination heightened by first taste and savor of good wines, of sauces strange to her tongue, colored with saffron, flavored by musk and ambergris and subtle receipts of spices. Almost anything except, of course, the truth. Or what he, in age and experience if not wisdom, took to be truth.
Seen by her, whether in steel glass of truth or tinted mirrors of fancy, he would always be an old man, scarecrow of old sticks and straw, clad in a fine dressing gown. She could not picture the truth of his wrinkled nakedness.
And thus could not conceive that he, old man, could see her as nude and shiny as the image of Virtue on the great salt or the embroidered Susanna of the tablecloth; could see all, though she wore more layers of clothing than Salome wore veils, from pink piglet toes, past ankle, sturdy calf—from country walking—soft, round, solid, smooth thighs meeting at a cunning portal rich with light-flecked, rust-colored, softest grass, fit temple gate for an old bishop to enter unbending mitered head and proudly to march from nave to altar while, invisible, a choir cried out a frenzied anthem, from her other lips.…
She could not dream that picture. And when and if she (as eyes and lips and walk betrayed she must) pictured herself naked and sumptuous in another’s eyes, then that other, whatever his form, would be like the similitude the clear water gave back to Narcissus. In truth merely herself rejoicing in being and possessing herself.…
Strange that I most old and purged, most weary, should feel the gnawings of desire. Perhaps as the fierce teeth of his frothing mad dogs tore flesh and tore from him screams of pain, poor Actaeon shivered with pleasure at the fading memory of Diana.…
He might have been ashamed. That the dying animal of flesh still tugged at leash and chain. But that would be another vanity. He found, rather, that he was lightly amused, enough for a smile, that even as he could still savor the pleasures of good food, so he could still imagine the pleasures of satisfied desire.
Must remember, he thought, to ask Thomas about this later. Thomas would know the natural truths of aging of body and mind. Though at the moment Thomas was wholly engrossed in no other study than the capacity of his belly. Probably had not eaten for a day or two. Not out of necessity, but forgetfulness. No one having sat him down to a table and put food before him.
Still, pleasures of company, food and wine, diversion of fine objects, even, amazing, the resurrection of the shabby ghost of desire, all these could only serve as the setting for the playing of a scene.
Let Ben Jonson and his collaborative rival, Inigo Jones, wrestle it out and settle whose craft is pre-eminent. Let them settle which one, poe
t or designer, should receive highest honor. Precedence aside, all things, costumes and decorations, winds and clouds, off-stage thunder and strokes of lightning, all these, and yes, all the words are well, are gossamer, ephemeral.
But, illusory or not, it remained for Ralegh to make a little play at dinner for them. And he was not able to do so like an English player, not able to speak the lines some poet had written, emended, decorated, and now vaguely remembered.
No, they must all play a scene more in the style of the traveling Italians. Whose art is to improvise words and actions according to one particular occasion and their own inclinations, directed only by mutual consent to a most general plot. Their little theater being, in an old man’s view, closest to and most like the theater of life itself.
These Italians had delighted him once. Even though for deeper pleasure he preferred the English stage. They delighted him in memory; for he had not seen them performing in many years, not since the time of the Queen, when, in 1602, Flaminio Curtesse came to play at the Court.
Well now, he must be his own author and designer. And he almost alone must play the parts of the Zany, Pantaloon, and Harlakeen. Must also be, more suitable, Gratiano, the Doctor, and that other one (what was he called? no matter now …), the swaggering braggart Spanish captain, full of outward fire and fury and effeminate inward fear.
Captain Spavento, that was the name! Of the fearsome and fearful, furioso, braggadocio, cursing and cowardly captain of Spain portrayed and well cudgeled by comic Italians who could defeat a Spaniard on the stage though they would flee him by land or by sea. Captain Spavento cut from stolen cloth of ancient Rome.
Curious workmanship of the mind. Which will allow a man to recall an insignificant thing. The same mind of the man who can sit by the muddy brook of memory, a very patient angler, and seek with skill and bait to fish up the lost name of someone once deeply loved or hated. And not so much as a tug or nibble on his line.…
Death of the Fox Page 49