His Last Fire (4 page)

E
ELS

H
e called for eels.

She came immediately. ‘How do you want them?'

‘Pie, with currants. Or pitch-cock. Stewing takes too long.'

‘Nutmeg, Jamaica pepper.'

‘Just how I like it, Elizabeth. Ah – she is alone the Arabian bird.'

‘Cruel! To remind me of my one night as Imogen.'

‘… the gods made you

Unlike all others, chaffless!'

She banged the door on his croak of a laugh, the famous hoarse voice. Yet he loved her as well as needed her. He'd always needed women, loved the ones he had. Two wives and now the girl. Richard Yates, comic actor, unequalled as Shakespeare's clowns. 1796, his ninetieth year, loved a girl of twenty-seven. And why not?

He thought with greed about eels. Stewed needed good gravy: claret, anchovy, lemon-peel; collared was for big conger, fennel. She could broil them with butter and oyster pickle but best would be pie, snuggling in hot butter paste. He'd remind her of the cockney in
Lear
putting eels in the pie alive: ‘she knapped ‘em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cried ‘Down, wantons, down!' She wouldn't laugh.

He picked his long handsome nose. Though short he was lean, remarkably fit, Cruickshank said. Still some teeth; hair thin beneath the wig. But he knew she longed for a young body fresh as a daisy. Not that she was unkind. She feigned.

He had been good to her. Took her in after the fire at the opera house in her rough linen practice jacket; flattered her shallow talent; arranged her one appearance in
Cymbeline
; paid her well as housekeeper. Willed her the house, joking of his ‘manacle of love'. It was only right he should ask for a little pleasure. That she dance with him when he was lively, felt a Harlequin coming on, he'd say. He could still step, if not so fine, so fast. That she warm his bed. King Yates. Down, wanton, down. Her hands like hot butter paste.

He dozed. Dreamed he was Fielding's miser Lovegold. How they'd applauded!

‘In short, Lappet, I must touch, touch, touch something real.' He'd fondled the word ‘touch', raising its temperature to an unexpected explosion of feeling. How they'd roared!

Touch, touch. Real. Eels. Woke at her arrival.

‘No eels, Richard. None. I've bought you a flounder.'

‘
What
?'

‘He'd none left.'

‘No
eels
? What could be easier this time of year? The river's stuffed with ‘em from Hammersmith to Kew. I've not asked for sea-fish.' He pulled her sleeve, gripped her wrist.

‘Sit on my knee, you fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta.'

‘I'm not hot, Richard, and I'm wearing blue as you can well see. There were no eels. You needs must eat flounder or else cold beef for dinner.'

‘Cold wench in blue silk. I'll have eels!'

‘He said the catch was small; they sold instantly.'

‘Whoreson caterpillar! Bacon-fed knave! Reasons as plenty as blackberries.'

‘Calm yourself. Your face is turning red. I met Thomas. Your nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Yates. Waiting outside the house again. He always tells me of his five children, the baby on the way. He disturbs me, Richard.'

‘A poor tale.'

‘Your brother's son. Great nephews, nieces.'

‘I won't have brats running about the house.'

‘He's hard-pressed.'

‘So he tells you. An officer in the royal navy is paid, you know. I played my patriotic part in '61. Wrote plays, Elizabeth.
The British Tar's Triumph over M. Soupe-Maigre
. Here's the manuscript. What a title! Comedy of course. You weren't even born. Besides, our Thomas sells paintings, daubings of ships in Gibraltar Bay. Or firing off in the estuary.'

‘He says their rooms are cramped.'

‘Do you want me to leave
him
this house? Fools. Fishmongers. My wastrel brother. Mother always preferred me; couldn't abide his whining ways. Thomas, his mincing offspring, a starveling, cat-skin, dried neat's tongue, bull's pizzle, stock-fish! Oh for breath to utter.'

‘Richard, your age! This cannot do you good.'

‘What more? It's all here. I have not forgot a word. Would that I could say it to his face: you tailor's yard, you sheath, you bow case, you vile standing-tuck!'

‘You'll fit yourself to death!'

‘'Tis not due yet, my girl. Go again. Go further. Don't return without them. Or else bring the lawyer. I'll write a new will.'

She shook her hair, banged out again, her peachy skin flushed.

The first one had blushed like that. He's not thought of her in forty years, that strange soft down. Can recall only her roundness of face, the feel of her skin. She left him rich.

He'd cast around, lost without a woman. Not that it was hard. Women throng to a widower. Anna Maria was twenty-two years younger; she needed his standing with Garrick. It was his pinnacle – Drury Lane. Fame aflame in a thousand tapers. Crowds shoving to get in. She envied him his comic ways. To hold the audience between finger and thumb, feed them gestures, jests, antics till they wept with laughter.

But stately, majestic she had to be tragic. He coached, encouraged, married, loved her. And she supped from him, supped, supped until she grew to her own height. The great roles became hers: Desdemona, Cordelia, Imogen, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, Isabella, Medea. She could only impress; could not unbend to comedy. Except in bed where, freed from her costume's drama, hair piled high to terrify, Electra became Birmingham lass.

She was loyal: dismissed flatterers, adulterers. She was no Mrs Robinson. Secretly he admired her acting less than did the public. Too much violence in her rage, ice in her disdain, stature in her revenge. She stalked about the stage; worse, tottered, flumped. He knew how she should do it, but she would no longer be taught.

He who'd once longed to play Hamlet, was forever cast as clown. Emaciated miser, padded Falstaff, Pantaloon. Demand grew for her, fell away from him. The grander she became the weaker he, till it was she who commanded, he who obeyed. Her fine voice pealed through their house, an auditorium; she seemed to grow taller. She was the
grande dame
at all times, he her fool.

Widower again, along comes Elizabeth Jones, quite the opposite, obedient to his old man's whims for which he loves her. Pretty, occasionally petulant, of scant understanding. He'll keep her till his death, which he doesn't intend for a while. There's spirit in him yet, wit of which she comprehends little: only his friends recognise the sources of his speech. Keep her with good pay, flattery, the promised house.

But now he can't have eels for dinner! Old parts caper in and out of his head like demonic clowns goading him with
mots justes
. ‘I am provoked into a fermentation, as my Lady Froth says, “Was ever the like read of in Story!”' No eels! His life is a comedy.

The great parts could have been his. He'd had it in him to sit upon the ground like Richard, weep like Othello, howl like Lear. But they've lived in his head, on his shelves, breathed only as longings beneath the comic habit. Anna Maria drank his power. Died of dropsy. All that's left for him is to keep hold of Elizabeth, write his will five times, order dinner.

No
eels
! Can he believe her? Young thing, empty head under those black Welsh locks. Purchased because he couldn't live without a woman. She'll out to the starveling Thomas on the corner, he thinks, who'll perceive her glowing skin with his painter's eye. Her features delightfully tense with temper. His wife expecting their sixth. Irresistible. Where? Where? His blood heats. His eyes start. She'll bring him into the kitchen of course. Cook up eels together. They'll to it. The youthful body she wants. While I sit here. He fights a surge of sleep. His heart tightens, bites. Head beats its blood-knell. They'll to it while I nod. While I snore off-stage, a comic
vieillard
.

She returns later, tired, tetchy, her basket heavy with young eels, silver like those his mother cooked. Finds him still in his chair, his head on his arms on the table, the handwritten manuscript of
M. Soupe-Maigre
within reach. He is dead. In her fright the basket spills its contents round him, an ironic, fishy aura.

She scoops them up and tearful, sends the boy for Dr Cruickshank.

‘Mr Yates has had an apoplexy.'

‘I heard him rant and rave,' the boy says.

She darts about the room, unsure what to do.

‘Poor old man,' she thinks and immediately feels relief. No more running to his call, dodging his grasp, finding excuses to avoid his bed. Fumbling, tumbling.

The house is hers. He's shown her the will. Stafford Row, Pimlico! A fine address. She paces around, pleased, then nervous, as if pieces might each vanish at her look. Turns to see if Richard has woken up.

She'll have soirées, music, dancing. Invite whom she wants. She will be desired.

She thinks of Thomas Yates. He finds her attractive. But he desires the house more. Five, soon six children, weary wife. Richard had always scorned him; mocked her worries. Suddenly she understands that in willing her the house he's willed her Thomas Yates and family. She spins round to remonstrate, gasps, startled at the body. Sobs for a while.

Four months later a gun fires accidentally in the hands of John Sellers, one of two men she's hired to protect her from Yates's persistence. Thomas dies of his wounds. At the Old Bailey, Sellers gets six months and a fine of one shilling for manslaughter. Elizabeth Jones is acquitted of murder.

Richard would surely laugh at this comic turn for the worse. The chaffless Elizabeth will not be able to keep six children and their poor widowed mother from her door.

But that's to come. Now, before Cruickshank arrives, she wipes away the slime from where the fish fell. Eels! She takes them to the kitchen to use for funeral baked meats.

L
APLAND

T
he occasion was magnificent. A gala to celebrate
the King's recovery from madness. Attended by court, nobility, persons of distinction, women dazzling in white and garter blue, the oldest bearing purple trains.

Long tables laid in silver, the royal in gold, lit by forty two-branched candlesticks. Like reindeer antlers, thought Edward Gage, accompanying his father, a baronet close to the King. Two pages supported the old man when he stood. Otherwise, gouty, apoplectic, he sat peering irritably at figures shifting across filmed vision.

Supper was sumptuous, exceeding anything seen before in the kingdom. Twenty tureens of soup preceded all kinds of fowl: ducks, cygnets, green geese, young turkey, rails, chicken; with asparagus, peas, beans. These also came cold, boned, swimming or standing on dishes of jelly supported by paste pillars no thicker than a knitting needle. Crayfish pies, ham and brawn in masquerade, four foot high temples housing stories of sweetmeats, hothouse fruits fresh, dried, in syrup.

The wager surfaced on a swell of frivolity. Once royalty, the old and infirm had retired, dancing and social intercourse began. For Edward a familiar pattern: flirtatious teasing from tipsy women, sparring from men. Women resented his lack of desire for them; his fine bearing, generous income lost to books, collecting, obsession with dull, faraway places. Men resented the women's resentment. Remarks sharpened and flew.

‘If snowy wastes are so fascinating, dear Edward, why do you not go and live there?'

‘He would languish without his curiosities! He must touch and caress them every day.'

‘He prefers his collection to company, I swear it! He ignores us, even in our best attire,' shaking elaborate curls beneath her ‘God Save the King' bandeau.

‘I'd wager ten thousand pounds he'd prefer your company to some ice-cold, snow-capped Lapp woman!'

Gibing finally provoked. Inebriated, having drunk rather than danced, Edward agreed to the wager's ridiculous terms: return in six months with two Lapp women and two reindeer.

Days later his father died, he inherited the estate, had no need of ten thousand pounds. Yet he prepared carefully, packed cases of wine, spirits, salt, tobacco, jewellery, boarded the
Splendid
and sailed for Christiania and the wild North.

*

Letters home gave Edward's instructions for return in early November, within the agreed time. A large room was made ready for the Lapp women, who, it seemed, were sisters. Furniture was uncovered, fires lit, supplies of meat and fish ordered. Anticipation pulsed among his neighbours.

Edward was a mystery to his peers. His interests were not shared, thought more suitable for old men. At best he was comical, a useful butt, at worst irritatingly abstruse, aloof. Mrs Clavering, celebrated for youthful indiscretions, failed in her ambition to take him in hand.

Adored by his short-lived mother, he'd been a gentle boy, almost effeminate. He wandered the estate through bilberries and gorse-covered forts; collected birds' eggs, paying boys in tied cottages to bring more. Set them out tenderly. In winter months, after a pint of port, his widowed father abandoned attempts to remove him from the library. Oneiric hours filled Edward's mind with other worlds.

The baronet resolved to push his son out on the grand tour. Edward was delighted. Words, architectural plans, engravings became flesh, stone, heat, colour, Nature. He moped among ruins, sketched, scribbled. He learned how much to give for desired objects. Haggled. Took lessons in love from the Roman demi-monde; thereafter only found women desirable who laughed in a foreign tongue.

He bought the usual classical fragments, but travel and inexhaustible funds bit like addiction. He'd take a common thing, seek every variation: Japanese silk shoes, Pyreneean espadrilles, Indian wooden clogs, Moroccan leather slippers; funerary flasks and caskets from crude to exquisite; scores of coffee pots.

He loved natural objects made more extraordinary by human ingenuity: carved hornbill skulls, ivory powder horns, a geometrically perfect nautilus shell painted with the Spanish naval defeat of 1639; snuff boxes, cups, knife handles, rings of jade, cornelian, lapis, amethyst, nephrite; a tiny cameo of reindeer in pink agate. He built an extension to the library with countless cupboards, glass cases, batteries of drawers. Encouraged his servants to look and be amazed; never imagined collectors among them.

Edward's excursion to Lapland had been difficult within the wager's time-limit. It was summer when he arrived in Norway:
lack of bread, wine and salt in the far north mattered little in the exhausting beauty of the light. His gifts swiftly bought the two sisters from their father, such was the value of tobacco and spirits, gold brooches, bangles.

Demonstration of success completed the wager. On the Herefordshire estate with its mountainous backdrop, neighbours and friends saw picturesque reindeer nibbling last leaves beyond the ha-ha; found the Lapp sisters quite acceptable, their features almost delicate, figures shapely, clothed not in mephitic skins but dresses of coarse cloth, with belts, necklaces of silver and copper. The two women stood by timidly as Edward explained his hoard of Lappish artefacts, encouraged his guests to try morsels of dried fish and reindeer meat.

Perhaps there was disappointment at the women's pleasantness, their shy smiling. Two more decorative oddities in Edward's collection. The guests had hoped for signs of disorder, feculence, something more deliciously rancid.

Edward's obsession with Lapland had begun years earlier in his father's library where he'd found John Schefferus's
History of Lapland
on a distant shelf. The book, already antique, promised ‘
a new World di
ʃ
covered
' where lives were lived in hunger, cold, solitude. Edward already liked solitude. In the first year of his reading he tried all three, striking out in wintry Marcher dusk, shivering beneath rocks at midnight with half a game pie. His paltry stick fire died, the cold skewered his bones, he stamped and chanted a mesmeric declension:

Immel Immele Immela

Immel O Immel Immelist

Immeleck Immeliig
Immewoth

Immeliidh O Immaeleck Immaeliie

By the time of the wager swathes of Schefferus were
committed to memory; he knew well what deprivations to expect, what attitudes to anticipate. Anni and Mari were Christian. He could take them to church but they might need more; he purchased certain stones, drums with brass rings, deer's horn hammers for divination.

He'd read of the Lapps' ‘immoderate lust'; both sexes, all ages slept in the same hut. Blushing, he accused himself of accepting the wager because of it. Yet the Lapps also esteemed marriage, said the book, rarely violated it.

On the return voyage the sisters stayed below deck and for a week after their arrival wouldn't come out of their room, in which, Edward understood, his housekeeper eventually washed off smoke-grime. When finally they appeared, how charmed he was by their penetrating dark eyes, exotic smallness, broad breasts, slender waists, their childlike pleasure at his glittering gifts! That was how he wanted them, beautiful, innocent; to admire, to learn from.

Of necessity there had been a small exchange of vocabulary, though Edward was not a natural linguist. He was
albma
– a
gentleman
, he told them, Mari was
kiscardasche
– a
sister
of Anni, at which they giggled. He would be
wellje
– like a
brother
, he said, but they looked dismayed, speaking words of which he recognised none. He struggled to explain that they should sleep in beds, not on the ground, convinced them only by gestures. Under shaggy reindeer skins, according to household gossip, they slept naked.

He instructed his cook to lightly boil the reindeer meat kept in the ice-house (
jenga kaote
– ice shed: he was pleased with that). This satisfied Mari and Anni while it lasted; they rejected tasteless mutton, vegetables. Reported pulling at raw topside in one of the pantries, he bribed them with bracelets and smiles, understood their need, sent out a man to catch trout.

One of the reindeer had to be killed. By now it was summer: Mari and Anni placed strips of meat along the terrace balustrade to dry in the sun. Around the plinths of Pan, Bacchus, Mnemosyne and Jupiter in shepherd garb. In late afternoon crows grew bold. Dried meat was abandoned.

They foraged for berries in the kitchen gardens, annoying gardeners, delighting Edward with their pleasure and stained fingers. He explained to Cook how burying a dish of boiled strawberries in the earth was a hedge against winter. He wanted everyone in his household to learn.

Looking from his window on a wonderful July night, he saw Mari and Anni gather leaves below the terrace, lay out reindeer skins on them, lie down to sleep in the full moon. On subsequent nights, they moved to another patch of ground, speeding agilely over the grass with their leaf mattresses and skins.

Following the description in Schefferus, whose illustrations greatly excited the women, Edward helped build a tent, stretching woollen, linen, skins obliquely across poles, ramshackle but dry enough, with a smoke hole at the top. There they'd sit after a day swiftly sweeping the estate for fruit, embroidering winter gloves and caps with stars, flowers, birds, reindeer, knots, spangles of gold and silver thread. And there at the opening they welcomed Edward in, into the smoke-filled warmth.

*

Robert Sanders was small, brawny, unflappable, with practical ingenuity grown out of years of difficult employment by a woman of notoriety. At her death her daughter dismissed him with sorrow. He took another unusual post, helping Edward Gage with his collecting. Edward found Robert an excellent help-meet, common-sensical, unromantic, utterly unlike himself.

Tales of Edward's past poured into Robert's ear when he arrived, gossip, rumour which, though years old, shone with repeated telling, sparkled with semi-precious phrases.

It seems that Edward had fallen in love with two Lapp women.

For months he'd spoken of nothing else, courted the women with gifts, created a stir taking them about in his vis-à-vis, conducted them one on each arm to church, eaten their dried fish and meat. Was seen on his knees outside their tent chanting from a book in Lappish tongue. A sharp-eyed maid found the translation in his script. One verse, ripped from the rest, was passed from hand to hand of those who could read:

What stronger is than bolts of steel?

What can more surely bind?

Love is stronger far than it,

Upon the Head in triumph she doth sit:

Fetters the mind,

And doth controul,

The thought and soul.

An honourable man, not one to court scandal, what
could he do? Hardly marry both of them. Nor, as Christians, would they have agreed to it.

In others' telling, the tale was of lust not love. The naked, black-haired doxies bewitched him with their magic, reading the runes of their drum with its palimpsest of little figures drawn as if by fingers in blood; its jingling rings. They invoked spectres, demons in the wood and drew him in with their repetitive songs until he was no longer master of himself. The sounds that came from that construction of skin and twigs! Such laughter!

Whichever version he heard, the story-tellers agreed on one thing: mushrooms brought all to an end.

Edward's estate contained ancient woods into which as summer died the women moved their tent. Warmth lingered into autumn and gorgeous
amanita muscaria
burst up through the mould. Later, shrivelled stalks and caps were found on a sill in the hottest kitchen, but at first there was no explanation for the climactic event.

One night the women staggered up the stone steps as if drunk and collapsed on the terrace. From attic windows, from behind shutters, eyes stared, mouths gaped as the women's bodies twitched in convulsions then fell into deep sleep. The impatient went to bed. Edward was in his library, didn't know. Suddenly, stupefied but awake the women rose, made frenzied movements. Someone called Edward who now saw the women cavort, stretch their arms in wildness, step with enormous strides over tiny growths of lichen between the flags, crying out.

Soon after, the fly agaric was found, drying, ready to be swallowed. Edward made arrangements once again for travel to Lapland.

His public explanation was the Lapp women's homesickness. He must return them to the land for which they longed. Few believed him. For years stories entertained his neighbours and friends, sustained the servants. Yet most made an effort to hide their mirth when he returned after six months, aged, melancholic, increasingly irritable like his father.

He turned away from the north, travelled south and east. Robert, fair-minded, wise, made no judgment of the tales. He was pleased to travel, arrange, carry, organise Edward's comfort and his own. He picked up languages remarkably well so that even procuring was easy in foreign lands. Edward preferred two women, laughter.

The collection grew, its fame spread. Scholars visited though Edward was often alone with his curiosities. No one saw his nightly inspection of cribs, his gentle stroking of the Lappish carrying cradle like a small boat out of water.