The wheeze of his chest reminded him of his doctor’s advice and he closed the window, shutting out the smell and noise, and clambered down into the pen-scratched silence of his office.
Chapter Two
It was a wonderful city; at this time it was the most wonderful in the world, not in cleanliness, not in buildings, certainly not in spirituality, but in freedom. Great art had the liberty to flourish in the London anthill and Puritans were at liberty to try and stop it. A man could be a Catholic as long as he wasn’t a Papist, but on the whole England had found in Protestantism a religion that suited it and in Elizabeth a queen they could understand.
Despite the fear it was engendering, the threat of Spanish invasion was oddly congenial to the English, giving them a sense of nationhood and providing them with a ready-made national character. Cheeky, was how the English saw themselves, daring, inventive, backs-to-the-wall, nothing to lose, us against a hostile and inferior world.
Ambassadors to the English capital were amazed by the vitality of streets that were overcrowded and insanitary, by the cheerfulness of slums where just to drink the water was a death sentence. They were appalled by the crowds which shouted vulgar approval, and sometimes disapproval, at Elizabeth on her progresses, and the equally vulgar way she shouted back; it was disrespect, it was lese-majesty, it was some new thing being released out of the bottle of England which could never be squeezed back and which, unchecked, might infect the rest of the world.
Londoners were acrobats without benefit of safety net. They could work if there was work. They could starve if there wasn’t. Pursued only by equally enterprising diseases, they could grasp the ladder that dangled over their heads and with sufficient wit and ruthlessness, climb to the high wire.
With another sort of wit and another sort of ruthlessness those who didn’t do any of these things lived by robbing and tricking all the foregoing.
And if ever there was a sheep to be fleeced, it was the youngster with big green eyes and country dress wandering on a fine Sunday morning along the track which diagonally crossed the three fields belonging to Lincoln’s Inn.
His mouth lolled at his fellow strollers and the entertainment about him, at the puppet shows, the sweetmeat sellers and the fire-eaters, as widely as his cheap jallyslops hung on his thin legs. He gawped at a group of young law students whose souls had just been improved by a compulsory two-hour service at the round Temple church and were now being busily unimproved by a dice game with a pedlar. The pedlar was losing and on glancing up at the staring boy, he whispered with relief to his companions: ‘Here’s another gull for you to pluck, young gentlemen, ’stead of me.’
The students grinned wolfishly at the new bait. ‘Join us?’ they asked.
Timorous but fascinated, the boy hovered: ‘What’s that game then?’
The students stifled their delight. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Barbary, sirs.’ He beamed at their attention. ‘Just down from Norwich with geese and sold them at the Poultry and thinking I’d like to find my fortune in this city.’ He spoke with the updrawn sentences of an East Anglian which turned every statement into a question.
‘How much did you get for your geese, Barbary of Norwich?’
Proudly, the boy unwrapped a kerchief to show them the three nobles which nestled in its grimy interior. Well-born as the students were, they were none of them so provided by their fathers that they could afford to pass up a nice sum like three nobles.
Barbary was welcomed, hunkered down beside them, given a swig of ale and had the rules explained to him. Close to, he was even smaller and younger than he’d first seemed, perhaps not even pubescent; his wrists stuck out of his too-short jacket like chicken legs.
The pedlar sighed and got up. ‘Stakes too high for a poor working man,’ he said. ‘Good luck, lad.’ He tossed his dice into the newcomer’s hands. ‘Take these, for they brought none to me.’ He shouldered his pack and went his way.
The light summer clouds passed over their bent heads as the dice winked their eyes on the board and the nobles passed, as nobles should, into the hands of the nobility. ‘You’ve lost, Barbary.’
But they’d infected him. He snuffled and begged. He’d wager his jacket, his cap, anything that was his on one last throw.
The soft-hearted of the students was stern: ‘Take the goose trail home, Barbary, like the goose you are. London’s not for you.’
Still he whimpered and dragged from his none-too-clean neck a tarnished piece of wrought metal which ended in twists. ‘I’ll wager this, what a lady gave me.’
The thing was passed round. ‘It’s as base as he is.’ But the son of the royal assayer scratched it with his thumbnail, bit it, widened his eyes and said he would meet the wager with all that he had. The soft-heart refused to play and he was villified. ‘You’re a woman, Philip.’
Onto the board went the coin they’d come out with, the pedlar’s winnings, the three nobles and Barbary’s dirty necklet. ‘The first to throw two treys wins.’
The dice scattered in spotty variation. Barbary’s rolled out of his hand, rattled, teetered and composed themselves into a pair, a neat pair, each with three eyes.
The royal assayer’s son snarled. ‘Let me see those dice.’
But a figure panted up to them, shouting, and passed them at a run. It was the pedlar, and he was yelling: ‘Excuse me, gentlemen, but the bulldogs are loose.’
Bulldogs at Lincoln’s Inn went on two legs and were no less ferocious than the proctor’s dogs the students had left behind at university; no more than those dogs had done did these approve of students who were out of bounds without leave and who, moreover, were gambling. In a second four well-born rumps were heaving themselves over the back wall of their inn; Barbary, with his winnings, his dice and his necklet, ran in the direction taken by the pedlar, a man who seemed to know where he was going to judge by his corkscrew nips through alleyways and passages so small they could admit only thin persons. Barbary was thin; he kept up.
One after another they ran past Ship Inn and the fashionable drinkers who crowded it since the queen had given it to dancing Sir Christopher Hatton, but at the far end of Ship Lane fashion stopped. The playing of the minstrels in the Ship’s gallery faded, to be replaced by a silence into which the pedlar whistled a phrase of three notes.
Here, where upper storeys overhung the lane and turned it virtually into a tunnel, they were at a portal less exalted than Temple Bar, which was parallel to it some hundred yards to the south, but more selective in those it allowed through. It was a frontier post demanding a passport. The pedlar, by his whistle, had just displayed it. Those who sounded the passnotes went into a city secret from those who took the Temple Bar route. It was known to its familiars as the ‘Bermudas’, a place where magisterial writ didn’t run, where a system of roads, residences and cut-throughs served their users above ground much as the Roman catacombs had enabled the early Christians to evade their hunters underground.
A person might get into the system without sounding the passnotes, but it was doubtful if he would ever get out.
Hearing Barbary’s footfalls behind him, the pedlar turned, grabbed him by his jerkin and hauled him into a doorway.
‘Give.’ The dice, which had been specially made by a gentleman called Bird in Holborn, were handed over. So were the three nobles and Barbary’s winnings. The necklet was back in place and hidden under his collar. ‘Is that all? I reckoned them worth over four pound.’
The students had actually been worth nearer five, but Barbary didn’t mention the fact. The pedlar had his original investment and 100 per cent profit. He’d have to give 40 per cent of it to the chief of his Order and most likely he’d spend the rest on drink. Barbary, who disapproved of drunkenness, was saving him from inebriation. He didn’t mention that either.
‘What did you prig? And don’t tell me you didn’t, you little filcher.’
Various items which had once belonged to the four students emerged from unexpecte
d parts of Barbary’s clothing, a handkerchief, two quills, and two acorns.
‘Acorns?’ The pedlar cuffed him.
‘Oh yes,’ said Barbary, and his indignant irony was now in the London accent, ‘I could take them out and examine them, couldn’t I? Oh yes, they’d have liked that. I thought they was buttons.’
A casement opened over their heads. ‘Is that you, Wilkin?’ called a female voice. ‘Message from the Man for Barbary. He’s on the cart and wants a melter.’
‘Girl or boy?’ asked Wilkin.
‘Girl.’ Some items of clothing thrown down by the owner of the voice flopped over their shoulders.
‘Horse shit,’ swore Barbary. ‘I hate being a girl.’ But in the realm they inhabited a summons from the Upright Man was royal. ‘And don’t glim. Aren’t I humiliated enough?’
As the cap came off his head and a blonde wig went on it, and as a panniered skirt covered the jallyslops, the jerkin being replaced by a blue bodice, it wasn’t so much humiliation that bothered Barbary as the transfer from a male pocket to a female of a nice little tinderbox which had only minutes ago belonged to the avaricious son of a royal assayer.
The pedlar turned round to face a girl who, reverting to bare feet instead of clogs, was shorter than the boy had been and whose startling green eyes peeped out from fair curls in the essence of innocent femininity. ‘Give us a kiss,’ he said.
Barbary’s rosebud mouth uttered unfeminine phrases. ‘Where’s the Man?’ he shouted up.
‘Down Fleet Bridge by now. Hurry, he said.’
Wilkin the pedlar watched Barbary disappear down Grange Alley towards the network which would bring him out at Fleet Ditch, running with the speed of a boy but with the unmistakable hip movement and upheld hands of a girl.
‘Lucky he fell in with us,’ said Wilkin to himself, ‘or he might have become an actor.’
* * *
Among the continual entertainment provided by the streets of London the beating of a beggar ranked high, combining as it did the infliction of pain and an uplifting example to the worthy that the unworthy weren’t getting away with anything. The beggar tied to the back of the cart and being whipped by two constables as he stumbled in its wake was as unworthy as they came, a sturdy man in his prime whose back might be sprouting his own blood at each cut of the whip but whose facial scabs were daubs of pig’s or lamb’s blood. Connoisseurs of beggar’s tricks pointed out to the less well-informed spectators that the unsightly lumps which deformed the man’s neck and arms were of clay and coming off fast, as were his bandages. There wasn’t anything wrong with his lungs either; the man’s howls rose over the rattle of the cart’s wheels on the setts of Ludgate Hill, the laughter of the crowds as they paused to watch him go by and the jeers of small urchins running alongside him. The constables were as lusty as the beggar and laid on their whips with the energy of men who’d discovered more money in the beggar’s purse than they earned in a month.
Darting from between the legs of the spectators came a little girl whose clear treble voice dominated even the beggar’s shouts. She flung herself at the beggar crying: ‘Father, oh father.’ One of the constables threw her aside so that she fell into the road, but she picked herself up and ran on, her little hands pressing into steeples of prayer as she begged the constables to spare the man she called father. ‘Oh, I know he has fallen into evil ways, but he was a good man once.’ There was an obstruction of traffic at the top of Lud Hill, as there always was, and the child made good use of the pause, appealing to the constables and crowd alike: ‘He was wounded fighting in the Low Countries for our queen and has since lacked employment, oh pity him, good people.’
Tears splashed down her face and the London crowd, as easily moved to sentimentality as to anger, began to call out to the constables to whip the beggar more kindly.
‘He was desperate,’ called the little girl, flinging herself at the beggar’s waist and falling once more as, less roughly, the constables dislodged her, ‘for my mother is dead and he is the sole support of my little crippled brother and me.’ The little crippled brother was a melter’s classic and the younger constable paused in his whipping. ‘I didn’t know he had a crippled young ’un.’
‘They always have,’ said the older constable. ‘Get on with it.’ But he was affected by the crowd’s change of mood, if not by the wails of the child, and he wielded his whip with less enthusiasm.
Both the beggar and Barbary were estimating with the judgement of experts how much the beggar’s back could stand and at what point in the journey across London he would be disabled. There’d merely be stinging pain up to Cheapside, but by Poultry, where they’d be delayed by flocks of duck and geese, the hide thongs would be biting into muscle. By the time they got to their destination, the Tower, the laceration would be irreparable. On the other hand, the growing weariness of the constables’ arms would make them grateful for an excuse to ease up.
As they went round Paul’s churchyard to Paternoster Close, Barbary, keening with artistry, began looking out for a melter’s aid. They needed a clergyman, not a local prelate or canon – they were too bedevilled by London wickedness to have pity on its perpetrators. A nice, innocent out-of-town reverend was what was wanted.
As they passed opposite the north door of the cathedral the sounds of the city were quietened by a waft of vocal incense, holy, beautiful, the mighty Spem in alium being practised for the queen’s birthday Mass by Paul’s forty-strong choir. For a moment the universe in which Barbary circulated was set against another he did not understand. The strange words that always came into his head at such times dinned ‘Hug Adam, shun Eve’. He pondered for the hundredth time on their meaning, and his tears dried: to cry for real was one of the few things Barbary couldn’t do.
A jerk of the beggar’s head brought him back from wherever he had been, another directed his attention at a clergyman whose ruddy, surprised face and thick boots proclaimed him to be a provincial. Barbary ran up to him and tugged his sleeve: ‘The goodness in your brow tells me God will listen to your prayers for my father’s soul, though it has fallen into wickedness through ill fortune. Please sir, take pity on his penitence.’ Barbary’s fluency and accent proclaimed him a girl who had been brought up for better things.
The clergyman was a good aid. The appeal to his and God’s higher authority established a recollection of his own worth in a city which had part repelled, part fascinated and totally bewildered him. He trotted alongside the beggar. ‘Art thou penitent, my poor man?’
The beggar swore he was to such effect that the clergyman began remonstrating with the constables not to distract the man’s attention from penitence by too much whipping. From then on, apart from the occasional flutter of hands and a well-directed whimper, Barbary could coast. The constables grumbled that they were obeying a magistrate’s order, but the clergyman pointed out that he was obeying God’s, and the journey to the Tower was completed to the drone of the aid’s voice and at less than one whip-flick per hundred yards.
At Tower Hill the beggar was transferred to the pillory until dusk. A hanging and quartering the day before made a mere beggar in the pillory small beer and, apart from a desultory cabbage and four rotten eggs, most of those fielded by the brave, pathetic daughter, little was thrown at him. The greatest danger was in being bored to death by the clergyman’s preaching, which went on for the afternoon until he tired and strode off to do some sightseeing. Down in the river, where masts could be seen packed as close as rushes, the big ships sang their siren song to Barbary. ‘Hug Adam, shun Eve,’ they sang, and he began to wander towards them in a reverie until the beggar’s sharp: ‘Don’t leave me, daughter,’ called him back to duty.
He draped himself pathetically at the foot of the pillory and mentally counted the day’s gains. Apart from the tinderbox and his own profit from the dice game, he’d prigged a medal from the younger constable, an apple from a costermonger in Cheap and sixpence from the clergyman. ‘Good work, Barbary, my fine fellow.’
The streets began to clear towards dusk and they were alone. ‘You took your bloody time,’ said the beggar. With his staring head and hands pawed through the holes in the stock board he looked like a dog. In Barbary’s opinion that’s what he was.
‘Saved your fokking back, didn’t I? I was dicing some fish at Lincoln’s Inn for Wilkin.’
‘How much?’
‘Two pound and sixpence.’
The Upright Man entered his 40 per cent in his capacious mental ledger. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘and you make a good pretty dell.’ He ran a fat tongue over his lips. ‘Pity you ain’t.’
‘Fokking glad I’m not.’ All girls in the Order were handed over to the Upright Man when they were old enough for their first sexual experience, a procedure known as ‘breaking’, after which they became bawds paying 90 per cent of their earnings to the Man. There was no profit in womanhood, Barbary reckoned. Only the pox.
Behind them the Tower was closing down for the night, booming with the shutting of heavy doors, rattling with keys. Shouted commands indicated the change of guard, and a few men came strolling through the wicket for their night off, giving no more attention to the pilloried beggar than to the tarred heads which topped the high poles above him.
Barbary munched his apple and considered the heads that had been there for as long as he could remember and were now outlined like rotting poppies against the remaining August light. The barn owl which nested high up in the White Tower flapped heavily over the wall and perched on one of them to consider its night manoeuvres, giving the skull a grotesque helmet.
‘What’d they do, them heads, Abraham? To be topped like that?’
‘Traitors against Her Majesty,’ grunted the Man. ‘Earl Desmond and his men. Irish rebels. Fry in hell, the lot of ’em.’
‘Krap on ’em.’ Of the 12,000 words which the Renaissance had added to the English language, Barbary used most frequently those which had been brought in by Dutch sailors. Admiring the queen who had once been threatened with having her own head cut off but had sworn and wriggled and tricked herself out of danger, Barbary was hostile to anyone who wanted to endanger her again. In Barbary’s opinion, Elizabeth’s accession to the throne had deprived the Order of a useful potential member. In fact, only last week, his eye had been caught by a stall selling cheap plaster casts of the royal profile commemorating the forthcoming royal birthday, and he’d been so moved by patriotism that he’d stolen one.
The Pirate Queen Page 3