Philip Gooden - Sleep of Death

I must have stood there for some minutes, long enough anyway to count a dozen bodies being offloaded. At one point one of the burial-men looked up and caught sight of me standing at the mouth of Salvation Alley. He did not attempt to warn me away or to alert the others to my presence, he merely returned to his dismal forking of bodies into the pit. I was none of his business. He was none of mine. I turned about.

There was one more thing I had to do before leaving Miching. Following the back lanes, I came out by my father’s church. The tower stood square in the morning sunshine. The doors were open but I did not look inside. Beyond the church, and the graveyard was the house of my parents, the largest in the village. Picking up speed and throwing a sidelong glance at the house as I went by, I saw what I knew I would see: that my father and mother’s door too was crossed in red. And yet I did not falter but kept on. At the boundary of the village I turned aside from the road that would have taken me up the hill again and past the place where John the sexton was sitting. Instead I traced out a grassy path that ran alongside a stream. It was where I had often fished and bathed as a boy. Eventually I started to run, Then I ran, and ran, and ran.

Later, much later, a thought came to me that, had my father still been alive, I might well have told to him. It was the desire, the itch, to become a player which had saved my life. Without my profitless trip into Bristol to join Dorset’s or Northumberland’s Company, I would undoubtedly have been kicking my heels in the village when the plague came to Miching, thus ensuring that we all kicked our heels in unison.

I wondered what my father would have said to this instance of divine providence. But I already knew the answer: God had preserved me in order that I should do something. I had been saved from the plague for a purpose, and, in his eyes, that purpose was not playing.

‘What?’ I said.

‘I said,’ said Nell, ‘do you often think of them, your parents?’

‘I was remembering them now.’

‘I think of mine too,’ she said. ‘Even though I do not know what they looked like.’

I drew her closer as she snuffled. She could be sentimental at times. And this is also a trait I have noticed in her, and girls like her. Their exposure to the sordid world, its cut and its thrust, has in some curious way softened as well as hardened them. They will shed tears over an injured animal, if it be small and young — though they still attend the bearpit, if only because it is a good place for trade. They will sometimes imagine that they would like a baby to fuss and cuddle — but if one comes by accident they are quick enough to farm it out and the more ruthless ones are prepared to abandon or kill it, because a new life puking up in the corner is bad for business.

‘How’s life over the river, in your grand house?’

She was slightly envious, I think. As she spoke there was a loud cry from a room down the passage, followed by a series of low laughs and dull thumps. For the life of me I could not have said whether these signalled delight or despair. Probably both, in which case the delight of the man most likely hinged on the despair of the woman.

‘Better to be over the river than in the stews of Southwark,’ I said, cocking my head in the direction of the sound.

‘Some men like the ladies to cry,’ she said. ‘And they pay better if they do. You should not believe everything that you hear.’

If my Nell was sometimes child-like she was also, at times, very old. And now she was obviously indignant at the aspersions I had cast on her district and place of work, because she went on, ‘You would not think that life was so much better over there from the number of fine and mighty citizens who cross the river almost daily to visit us. These gentlemen seem to prefer it over here to keeping company with their wives, in their grand houses.’

‘That must be because their wives don’t give them what they require.’

‘Some do say that,’ said Nell, ‘and it is true that I’ve seen high-and-mighty women from the other side of the water who look cold enough to piss hail. Hard enough too. But I prefer those men who make no bones about their needs. Whether their wives give them what they want or no, they still require more.’

‘A straightforward fuck, yes.’

‘There’s honesty in appetite.’

‘Who said that, Nell? I’ve heard that said before.’

‘You did.’

‘When?’

‘Does it matter? In the bed-time. When else do we talk? You see how I treasure your words. I’d write them down if I could write.’

‘I could teach you, to read and write. I did offer.’

‘You prefer me ignorant.’

‘Not so.’ But my denial did not ring true even to myself.

‘Anyway, how much more could I charge if I was able to read and write? Would it be much? I think not.’

‘There’s honesty in appetite,’ I repeated (apparently). ‘Very well, I suppose you remember too what I was doing when I uttered these immortal words. . if we were in bed?’

Of course, I said this to draw her on. But it was true that she had a loving memory for my slightest words and actions, and was able to recall scenes with an accuracy that would be the envy of many a player. This hoarding-up of our encounters was deeply flattering.

‘We were in bed in old mother Ransom’s. . and you had just. . let me see. . no, I was about to do. . this. . I think. . or was it that?. . it must have been one or the other.’

‘The other will do splendidly,’ I said.

After a time I said, ‘Nell, these gentlemen who come across the river so often-’

‘What about them?’

‘Have you been visited by any of the Eliots? Sir Thomas, or his brother Sir William — though he is dead now — or his son, also William? Sir Thomas, perhaps? He is a grave sort of man.’

‘And his dead brother is another sort of grave man, I suppose,’ said witty Nell.

‘Oh Nell, you do not need to learn to read and write,’ I said, kissing her left nipple.

‘They are mostly grave men at first. You may be surprised, Nick, when I say that they do not all give their names. Or if they do it is as likely to be Tom as it is to be Dick or Harry. And there are many of them.’

I did not like to think of this.

‘It is the Eliot household you are staying in?’

‘Yes. Sir Thomas has recently married the widow of his brother, Sir William.’

‘So she is some crabbed bitch and he’s likely to be scuttling across the Thames to get his end in over here.’

‘No, she is not crabbed.’

‘She is a young widow full of juice then?’

‘Nor young neither. But she has some charms.’

‘Oh Nick, I see. That means she has many.’

‘Somewhere between my some and your many,’ I said, though an imp of honesty compelled me to add, ‘In truth I hardly know Lady Alice.’

‘But would like to?’

I kissed her other nipple. But Nell was not to be distracted.

‘And her dead husband, Sir Something, he was old and she wore him out?’

For some reason I found the idea, unthinkingly as she had said it, offensive. ‘No, of course not.’

‘Because she’s a lady? That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done for him — in the bed, I mean.’

‘Nell, this is all imagination. Not everything comes back to the bed.’

‘You said that it did once, in the end.’

‘He died in the spring,’ I pressed on, determined to lay the facts before her. ‘He was found in his orchard. He had gone there to sleep and when he had not returned to the house by the early evening his wife grew anxious and sent a servant to look for him.’

‘These rich women never do anything for themselves.’