Alms for Oblivion (7 page)

“Nicholas,” she said to me on this occasion. She always called me Nicholas these days, never the familiar old Nick.

“Yes?” I said, poised between abandoning her bed and the chances of another (free) session.

“Nicholas, do you know the meaning of
bona roba
?”

“It sounds like Latin, or Italian perhaps.”

“I have been so described,” she said.

“Oh good,” I said.

“It has a handsome ring, hasn’t it? He termed me a
bona roba
.”

“He?”

“A particular individual.”

“A fine piece of skirt, it must mean.”

“I believe so but I prefer the original.
Bona roba
.”

“Soon you’ll be talking in tongues, Nell.”

“I have another word for you. What about
quaedam
?”

Quaedam
. Now, I knew that this was a learned sort of way of referring to a whore, one of Nell’s profession. It meant no more than ‘a certain woman’ or
one of
those
. It wasn’t so much respectful, but more sneering, in my opinion. But my friend seemed pleased enough, to judge from the way she was preening herself.

“Another description? From the same man who described you as a
bona roba
?”

“The same
gentle
man, yes.”

“And I am not a gentleman, Nell?”

“You are a player.”

I ignored the implicit insult and said, “I’m not going to change trades to suit you, but what would you have me instead? For the sake of argument.”

“What would I have you? Oh I don’t know . . . perhaps a lawyer.”

“So that’s it! You are consorting with those fellows from the Inns across the water.”

I meant the nests that the lawyers had built for themselves around Holborn and Whitefriars. It was a guess but one of those guesses that are certain things, and her next words showed I was
right.

“Better than those that you consort with in
your
inns – I mean the Goat & Monkey and the Knight of the Carpet. And most of my trade is from the other side anyway,
I’ll have you know.”

No chance of another bed-session with her now. She stiffened next to me and all but shoved me off her couch. It was irritation – and a touch of jealousy – which kept me going.

“It’s a lawyer, is it, Nell?”

She said nothing and, lawyer-like, I took her silence as an admission of guilt.

“Tell me, is he young and springy, or old and vile with sagging dewlaps and gallow’s-breath?”

“He is clever,” she said finally. “Oh yes, and he is not old or vile or the other things besides. He has a liquid tongue.”

“A
liquid
tongue?”

“Which he does not waste on groundlings in the pit, spouting other men’s cheap words. He is clever, I say.”

This slur on players (and incidentally on playwrights) was too much.

“Clever enough to negotiate with you for fee-simple? With that liquid tongue. Or is it fee-tail? Or free tail?”

By now I was out of her bed and struggling to fasten up my points and be on my way. I was surprised at my own anger. That she should instal another in my place as her favourite! Something told
me that this was exactly the situation. Call it an ex-lover’s intuition. To be free with her in her bed – and for free! I would have preferred a rich old man, preferably an impotent
one.

There was not much logic in this response, but when did logic, love and lust ever go together hand in hand? I might at any time have walked away from
her
and felt justified in doing so
– we had largely walked away from each other already – but that she should walk away from
me
like this! And with a young lawyer!

“Well,” I said at the door of her little chamber, “I will leave you to your friend and his fines, and recoveries, and statutes, and recognizances – and – and all
his other dusty stuff.”

And I shut the door hard so that I couldn’t hear what, if anything, she said in reply.

It was a very brief fit of temper because, once I was outside Holland’s Leaguer and walking towards where the road crossed Gravel Lane, I had nearly calmed down. A brisk wind was coming
off the river. I almost thought of going back and apologizing to Nell.

But of course I didn’t go back. Hadn’t been back since.

All of this – this
scene
– had taken place a couple of months earlier at the beginning of the autumn season. Naturally, when it was announced that the Chamberlain’s
Troilus and Cressida
was to be rehearsed and performed at Middle Temple, that nest of young lawyers, I was curious as to whether I would encounter her new paramour. But I didn’t know
which Inn he was a member of – there were four of them altogether – and even if I had known the Inn, then I still had to locate my rival among many dozens of students. I could hardly go
around these well-born gentlemen and ask which of them had acquaintance with the trulls of Holland’s Leaguer. (For sure, the answer would run to a fat figure, students of the law being as
human in this respect as any other young men.)

You may think it very strange that I was ready to accept Nell’s entertainment of many Londoners in the way of business but that I should grow aggrieved when she seemed on the point of
giving away a portion of her heart. Her heart, which I had thought all mine. Well, if it was strange what of it?

As I lay in my own bed with Peter Agate snoring heavily at my side on his thin mattresss, I reflected on Nell’s message about fines and recovery.

‘A recovery would be fine.’ Was this her way of signalling that she wouldn’t mind seeing me again? Was I to recover her, and re-cover her once more? And then all would be fine?
Was she using the legal terminology to remind me of our little quarrel over her lawyer friend and to turn it into a joke? If she was still averse to players, who did no more than spout other
men’s words like gargoyles, then she’d made an exception to my friend from Miching, hadn’t she? He was only an apprentice player and yet she’d given him a free turn in the
bed, if he was to be believed. (I did believe him.) Perhaps players were back in favour with her. Perhaps her lawyer friend, he of the
liquid tongue
, had fallen into disfavour. I swiftly
constructed, in the confines of my head, an episode in which Nell had given him his quittance. Or perhaps it was the other way about and he had given her hers . . .

Something in me warmed towards Nell as I lay in the darkness. I sniffed at my fingers, disagreeably scented from snuffing Benwell’s rancid candle. Well, I wouldn’t hurry to recover
her, but in my own good time – say in a week or so – I’d stroll across towards Paris Garden and Lord Hunsdon’s old manor house, just to see how the land lay with my
friend.

B
ut the next day something different came to trouble me, apart from Peter Agate’s connection with Nell. It was to do with another old friend,
the playwright Richard Milford, and a little piece of work which he’d contrived. A dangerous little piece, as it turned out.

How about this for a plot?

There was once a Duke of an Italian city, somewhere with the name of Malypensa. Duke Ferrobosca was a tyrant who ruled with a rod of iron. He killed his enemies and then had waxwork effigies
made of them to tease the dead men’s families. This Duke Ferrobosca had a duchess. But then he took a fancy to a younger unmarried woman called Virginia who would not capitulate to him. So he
determined to make her his next duchess, thinking that if she would not be wooed with words she might be won with wealth.

The only problem for Ferrobosca was what to do about the woman who would soon be his last duchess. Of course – and why didn’t he think of this before? – he would have her
killed. So Ferrobosca hired an assassin called Vindice. What he didn’t know was that Vindice was the brother of Virginia, and furthermore her lover. Yes, sister and brother were passionately
and incestuously in love. This was Virginia’s real reason for spurning the Duke.

Vindice the assassin therefore had every reason to reject the Duke’s murderous commission and to keep the original duchess alive, in order that Ferrobosca couldn’t get his hands on
his sister. But, naturally, Vindice did not wish to reveal the true state of affairs between himself and Virginia, nor did he wish to have his reputation as an honest, reliable assassin compromised
by an apparent inability to do the job. In addition he needed the money. Therefore he must kill – someone. Fortunately, there was a spare body at hand. Vindice knew (in the Biblical sense) a
loose woman named Sostituta who bore a passing resemblance to the original duchess. Now, his amour with Sostituta being long since over, Vindice, villain that he is, contemplated murdering
Sostituta and presenting her body to Ferrobosca in a dimly lit room, putting the cash in his purse and making an exit before the imposture was discovered. Meantime he had warned both the original
duchess and Virginia to make themselves scarce while this trick was being played.

So Vindice murders Sostituta . . . displays the body to Duke Ferrobosca in that dimly lit room . . . purses up the cash . . . and makes his exit. All is going according to plan.
Unfortunately
, the dead Sostituta has a lover who is a Cardinal of the Church, and therefore a powerful man and a vengeful one too. Now this unholy Cardinal, Carnale by name, finds out
what’s been happening and he decides to . . .

Well, you get the picture – or the stage-play, which is what it is. I haven’t the time to detail other aspects of the piece, like the severed limbs made of wax, the dance in the
lunatic asylum, the poisoned nightshirt, the bleeding head, and the torn-out heart. It’s a tragedy of a rather ridiculous sort and it all ends in tears, with a pile of mangled corpses,
comprising the guilty and the innocent. Comprising just about every character in fact. The last ones to die are Virginia (the tainted heroine) and Vindice (the not insensitive villain), with words
of undying love on their lips. This is the most affecting part of the action, even if my eyes stayed dry. Indeed the love between brother and sister, sinful though it is, is well suggested
throughout.

This play, called
The World’s Diseas’d
, was written by the aforementioned friend of mine, Richard Milford.

“It’s a good title, Richard,” I’d said to him. “It captures the spirit of the thing. You have painted a sick world.”

“I merely show mankind his face in the mirror, you know,” said Richard. He might have been talking about a species quite distinct from himself.

Richard Milford had made great strides since his early association with the Chamberlain’s Company. He came from near the town of Warwick, the same part of the country as William
Shakespeare, and it was sometimes said that he was treading in the master’s footsteps. His first play, the first to be performed at least, was
A Venetian Whore
. I’d caught him
out in a little bit of borrowing here, since I’d come across a similar piece in the manuscript-chest at the Globe playhouse and we fell out over this sharp practice.
¹
But the borrowing went undetected by anyone else, it seemed, and
A Venetian Whore
was mounted to general acclaim. This success seemed to open a creative vein in him. He
speedily drafted a play about a murder in a garden (this one was all his own work, he assured me) and he even brought out a volume of poems called – with artful simplicity –
A
Garland
. Richard was possessed by literary ambitions and he knew that an enduring reputation was to be gained through verse, especially lyrical lines about love and transience, rather than
through the more ephemeral effusions of the stage.

We were on good terms once more, the rift over
A Venetian Whore
having long since closed. He was a friend, although I could never take him entirely seriously – or not as seriously
as he took himself.

Either because he trusted my judgement and sought my approval or perhaps because he wanted to prove that the work of his hand was truly the product of his brain, Richard was in the habit of
presenting me with early copies of his most recent pieces. So it was that I’d seen a ‘foul paper’ copy of
The World’s Diseas’d.
I knew it was genuine. The foul
paper was the earliest stage of finished composition, before the material was sent to a scrivener to make fair copies, and this one was covered with sufficient splotches and crossings-out to attest
to the author’s struggle to express himself. Anyway I’d read this piece many weeks before the Chamberlain’s were due to present it on stage. At least I assumed that our Company
was going to do it, Richard having established himself as something of a favourite with our audiences. But Milford told me that one or two of the seniors were doubtful about the new play. They
didn’t like the incest in
The World’s Diseas’d
and considered that it might be offensive. Richard was baffled.

“After all, the brother and sister in my piece are punished,” he said. “They die in the end.”

“So does everyone else,” I said.

“Of course everybody dies. It’s a tragedy.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“It is rather that Master Burbage and Master Heminges object to the fact that my Vindice and my Virginia are without conscience in their love.”

“Your lovers don’t say ‘sorry’ often enough.”

“You have hit it, Nicholas. I might have a brother and sister fall in love and couch together as long as they constantly lament their sinful state. However they don’t, rather they
enjoy it.”

“Indeed, they seem somewhat earthy characters.”

“Oh come on, you know that audiences like nothing more than a spot of filth. Which is just what the shareholders object to. They’re getting old.”

“But it is the better part of the play, the brother-and-sister love,” I said.

He took this for more of a compliment than it was.

“Thank you, Nicholas. I knew I could rely on you, with your ear for true feeling and real poetry. We men of taste must stick together, you know. Even if Burbage and Heminges don’t
appreciate my work there are others who do. But you say ‘the better part’ – does that mean that there are aspects of
The World’s Diseas’d
which you consider to
be, ah, not so good?”