The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Year Eight, Page 30

  He poured himself a drink. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Should I throw the bottle in the river?”

  I don’t think he liked my wine. He sort of nibbled at it and put the cup down. “King Polycrates of Samos was the richest man in the world,” he said, fixing his eyes on a point about a foot over my head. “Aware that his good fortune made him a likely target for the jealous resentment of Heaven, he took his most valued possession, a gold ring that had belonged to his father, and threw it in the sea. Two weeks later, a fisherman caught a particularly fine turbot, so fine that he couldn’t bring himself to sell it, but instead took it to the palace as a gift fit for a king. When they opened the fish, they found Polycrates’ ring in its belly. The very next day, the king took sick and died. Moral; it’s not that easy.”

  I frowned. “All right, I’ll send for a priest. Presumably they’ve got established procedures—”

  Master Decker grinned at me. “That would be an interesting conversation,” he said. “‘Excuse me, reverend father, I bought a devil in a bottle but I don’t want it any more.’ If you want to get yourself burnt alive, there are easier ways, and ones that don’t reflect quite so badly on your friends.”

  He had a point, of course. “A display of sincere repentance—”

  “You could try that, I suppose.” He scratched his ear. “Though what you’ve got to repent of, I’m really not sure. I mean, you haven’t done anything wrong. Repentance when you haven’t actually sinned cannot be sincere, and insincere repentance is vanity and a sin in itself.”

  He gets on my nerves sometimes. “So what are you suggesting? I should just put the bottle on a high shelf and try and forget about it?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said gently, “because I can’t think of anything intelligent or sensible to offer you. Just because I can see the glaring errors in your ideas doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve got any better ones. But yes, I suppose that would do as well as anything else. We pray, lead us not into temptation, but it’s a request, not an order. And that fact that we ask Him not to do it suggests that He’s capable of it, and from time to time He does. I’m guessing that the point of this exercise is for you to sit staring at that bottle for a year or so and not open it.” He spread his hands in a rather silly gesture. “That’s just my guess. I could be wrong. I never even took holy orders, so what do I know?”

  “Do you think I imagined the whole thing?”

  He nodded. “That would seem to be the most logical explanation,” he said. “But who knows? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  Helpful as ever.

  ~ ~ ~

  Later that evening, a boy hammered on the door. His face was black with soot, and he stank of smoke.

  “Come quickly,” he said. “The theatre’s on fire.”

  I walked rather than ran. If you think about the design of a theatre, it’s really just a short chimney. Sure enough, by the time I got there, it was a quarter acre of fallen timbers and ashes. I stood for a while gazing at the mess, and then it started to rain. A bit late, but at least it would damp down the cinders and keep it from burning down half the city.

  I regard myself as a moderately sensible man, which is why my bow has so many strings to it you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for a harp. Besides; in a good year, the theatre makes money, in a bad year it loses everything it made the previous season. I could afford the loss of that particular asset; in fact, in the long term I’d be better off without it. More of a hobby than a business, really, or so I told myself, over and over again, as I stared at my bedroom rafters.

  It won’t end there, I told myself. This is just the first act.

  If my life was a play, I wouldn’t buy it. Who on earth would want to watch such a load of old rubbish?

  ~ ~ ~

  Master Allardyce came to see me.

  “You’re going to love it,” he said. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s the play I was born to write. You know how sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and ask yourself, what’s the point, why does anyone bother, why do we put ourselves through all this misery and aggravation? Well, now I know. This is why. You’ve got to read it. The first scene starts off with—”

  I stuck a bread roll in his mouth. He stared at me for a moment, then took it out. “What?” he said.

  “You haven’t been following the news, have you? My theatre burned down.”

  He looked at me as though I was talking Portuguese. ““What?”

  “Burnt to the ground. Nothing left but ash and rubbish. Sorry.”

  He frowned, like a reasonable man struggling to keep his temper. “Well, when’s it going to be rebuilt?”

  “It isn’t. I can’t afford it. I’m out of the play business. Sorry.”

  He didn’t say, ‘don’t be stupid’, but his eyes did it for him. “For how long?”

  “For good. Permanently. You’re talking to the wrong man. I can’t help you. Sorry.”

  He breathed in slowly through his nose. “But you’ve always been so—I mean, you keep badgering me to write stuff, if it wasn’t for you I’d have packed it all in years ago and gone back to the brickyard. You can’t just give up.”

  I shrugged. “Yes I can. If the truth be told, I never made any money at it anyway. I’ve been subsidising the Muses in this pig-ignorant town for eleven years, and now I can’t afford it any more. I’m sure you’ll find someone else. You really are a very talented writer, on your day, though you really do need to think about the audience a bit more. And cut down on the classical allusions, if I were you. All that stuff went out with Hieronimo.”

  Now he was staring at me. “Don’t you even want to read it?”

  “Not particularly,” I said. “After all, like I just told you, I’m not in the business any more.”

  “But it’s fantastic. It’ll change the whole way you see the world.”

  “In that case, definitely not. I’m quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much.”

  “You could borrow a theatre.”

  He obviously had no idea. “No,” I said.

  “At least let me tell you the story. It’s brilliant. There’s this rich man, or he might be a duke or a prince or possibly a scholar, though we’d have to be careful about blasphemy if he’s a cleric, anyway, there’s this rich, powerful man, and the Devil comes to him and says, are you happy? And the man says—”

  “Let me stop you there,” I said. “Kit Morley—”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that,” he said irritably. “The man says, yes, I’m perfectly happy, I have everything I could possibly want. And the Devil says—”

  “Besides,” I went on firmly, “devils and damnation and demons in bottles are completely used up and worn out, they’re last year’s shoes, you couldn’t get an audience in Cheshire, let alone in Town. Look, why don’t you go and see Pip Anslow? Stick in a girl dressed as a boy and a funny dog, he’ll bite your hand off. Nice man, Pip.”

  He looked at me. “Demons in bottles?” he said.

  ~ ~ ~

  I have many strings to my bow. Strings break.

  Take, for example, the barque Alexander, carrying sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine from Venice. I owned a third of her. I like to think that the third I owned wasn’t the bit that was riddled with teredo beetles, and therefore it wasn’t my fault. Sank, with all hands, somewhere off the coast of Gascony, on a clear blue day with just the usual amount of wind, taking with her a quarter of my value. My heart bleeds for the sailors and their widows, mothers and orphan children—I’m sincere about that, because my uncle was a sailor, and of his bones are coral made, and the misery it caused in our family isn’t something I’m ever likely to forget. I winced and cursed and felt quite sick for a while for my money, but only until I realised how trivial my loss was compared to theirs, and how lucky I was, and how wise my uncle had been not to take me with him when I begged to go. So much
to be grateful for.

  There was also, I have to say, something of a feeling of this-isn’t-really-happening, even though it palpably was; as witness the rain-sodden cinders in Southwark, or the sworn deposition of the master of the Tiger, who watched the Alexander go down with his own eyes. Even so; it felt too structured, if you see what I mean, too dramatically necessary. If it was the plot of some play, I’d approve—you can never make anything too obvious for the average theatregoer, I always say—and therefore, since it wasn’t a play, it felt all wrong.

  I’m a businessman, after all. My destiny is controlled by wars, shortages, droughts, famines, mild winters, royal marriages, good harvests, pirates, excessive rainfall, outbreaks of plague, the exchange rate of the ducat against the livre Tournois on the Rialto, and the latest fashions in characterisation, ruffs, and blank verse; not by malevolent influences in bottles. Not that I’m an atheist or anything like that, perish the thought. But I don’t feel the need for absolute or monolithic evil, Evil as a name in a cast-list, Evil as chorus or protagonist (enter Evil left, bearing a candle), in order to make sense of the world. I think a million small buggerations make up what looks to the casual, distant observer like Evil, the way a swarm is made up of a million small, individual bees. And all the world is not a stage, and all the men and women are most definitely not merely players; God isn’t a playwright, there is no audience, and most of all, there is no moral. Trust me. I know about these things.

  ~ ~ ~

  So, naturally, I went looking for Master Cork.

  He lodges—I don’t know why I find this so surprising, but I do—with a respectable glovemaker and his family in Blackfriars. I suppose it’s my assumptions showing through—I assume all his wares are fakes and cheats, apart from the few that are accidentally honest, like the Saxon ring; therefore I assume that he would live among thieves, gulls, whores and coney-catchers, in some ghastly hovel with bloodsoaked rushes on the floor. Typecasting. Master Cork, on the other hand, thinks of himself as a basically honest merchant and so chooses his address accordingly.

  “Let go of me,” he said, with an effort. “I can’t breathe.”

  I felt mildly ashamed. I have to say, in spite of everything I’m still rather more Welsh than I care to admit. Also, if a man can’t breathe, he can’t tell you things.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, letting go of his throat and twisting his left arm behind his back until I heard the joints creak. “Let’s start again. Where did you get the demon in the bottle?”

  “What? Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that. Who did you buy it from?”

  You can tell when a man’s used to being beaten up. He knows when to go limp. Comes with practice; I’m sure it’d all come back to me if I needed it to, like swimming or milking a cow. “Nobody,” he said.

  I sighed. “Loyalty is admirable,” I said, “but I do really need to know.”

  He screamed. They’d have heard it downstairs, sitting round the table for family prayers. If my lodger screamed like that, I’d come running. “I didn’t buy it from anybody,” he said. “Really and truly. It’s just a bottle. I washed it out, put a new cork in and sealed it with wax. It’s a fake.”

  I was so taken aback I nearly let go of him. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying, I’m confessing. It’s a fake.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is. And I’ll give you your money back, I promise, just please let go of my arm.”

  “I didn’t give you any money,” I reminded him. “Where did you get the bottle?”

  “I don’t know, do I? Westminster,” he amended, as I applied a little more pressure. “I fished it out of the mud. All right?”

  That didn’t sound right. Scrambling about in the mud on the banks of the Thames for flotsam is a recognised profession, if a little overcrowded, but Master Cork didn’t strike me as the type. “You bought it from a mudlark,” I amended.

  “What? Yes, maybe. I can’t remember. Really I can’t remember,” he whispered; you know when it really hurts, because they go all quiet. I slackened off a bit. You can’t lie when you’re in that much pain. You simply haven’t got the mental energy to be inventive. “You bought it,” I repeated.

  But he shook his head, much to my amazement. “No, I remember it now. I was walking up from the ferry, and I saw it, sticking out. I wrapped my handkerchief around my hand and pulled it out. It’s a nice bottle.”

  You don’t contradict a statement that made the pain stop, not unless you’re perfectly sincere. “Was there anything inside it?”

  “Mud.”

  “Anything else? A scrap of paper?”

  “No. It was full up with mud, so I washed it out. That’s all. I promise.”

  I sighed and let him go. He sprang away from me across the room, bounced off the wall like a tennis-ball, fumbled under a pile of dirty washing and pulled out a dagger, which he waggled about at me as though the handle was red-hot. I ignored it. “One more time,” I said. “Feel free to tell the truth, if you haven’t already done so. You found the bottle in the mud, at Westminster, near the ferry.”

  “Get out,” he said. “And don’t come back. This is my home.”

  The way he said it made me feel bad. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go now. If you remember anything else about it, anything at all—”

  “Get out.”

  I shrugged. I had a feeling I’d lost a friend. I turned—a calculated risk, but not much of one—and reached for the door-latch. Then I stopped. “That’s rather nice,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Go away.”

  I picked it up. “Florentine leather,” I said. “How much do you want for it?”

  “Three shillings.”

  “Give you a shilling for it.”

  “Two and sixpence.”

  I put the money down on the table and closed the door behind me.

  ~ ~ ~

  When I got home, there was a letter for me. Its contents came as no surprise.

  I’d put the bottle in the woodshed, buried under a pile of green logs. I took it to my study and pulled the cork. Nothing happened.

  I frowned. “Are you in there?” I said aloud, and felt rather foolish. Then I took the bottle and threw it in the river.

  ~ ~ ~

  I owned the freehold of the Southwark house; I’d swapped it with my lord Devereaux for a copy of the Book of Job, in Job’s own handwriting, with tear-stains, and the sword of Alexander the Great. Freehold property doesn’t come up very often in that part of town. The sale proceeds very nearly cleared my debts. My lord Burley bought my collection, which covered the rest. I walked out of his house owning one pair of shoes, cork-heeled, very good condition; paned round hose over cannions, a linen silk doublet, linen shirt and capotain hat, and three shillings and fourpence in money. I looked no poorer than I had forty-eight hours earlier, which only goes to show.

  As I saw it, I had two options, both of which involved walking. One; I could walk to Wales, to my home, where I still had family. They would not be pleased to see me. They would probably put up with me for a little while, if I was prepared to make myself useful around the farm. After that; well. People have always outnumbered opportunities in Wales, by a factor of about twenty thousand to one. That’s why I came to London, where the ratio is much kinder, three or four thousand. Or, option two, I could walk as far as the river.

  There were arguments on both sides. On the one hand, the Almighty has fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. On the other, there was no chance those shoes were going to last me all the way to Penygavont. I weighed up the merits of both sides, and figured that I was clearly in the Almighty’s bad book already, so one more faux pas wouldn’t really matter.

  In the end, I compromised. The Thames, after all, is a long river, and it rises near Cirencester, which is the direction I’d be going anyway. I set off walking; and just this side of Greenwich I stopped and did what you’d have done, being so much more sensible and level-headed than I was at tha
t moment; I sold my cork-heeled shoes and with the proceeds bought two pair of clogs, a buff coat, and a wool blanket. Not that I’d committed myself either way, you understand. But if I’d gone much further, I’d have ruined the shoes and nobody would’ve bought them.

  ~ ~ ~

  Master Allardyce once started to write a play about a man who couldn’t make up his mind. There were some good lines in it, but I told him, the audience aren’t going to be interested in someone like that, they’ll have no patience with him. Indecision isn’t a heroic virtue, nor is prevarication, so I prefer to call it keeping my options open. Which I did, all the way to Marlow.

  Don’t know if you’ve been there; it’s all right, I suppose, if you have a horse to ride and money to stay in inns. It’s not much of a place if you’re footsore and hungry; the same goes, I imagine, for Venice, Constantinople, or the gorgeous cities of Cathay. In Marlow I spent my last farthing on a loaf of stale bread—it’s so much cheaper stale, and toasted on a bit of twig over a roadside fire, you don’t really notice the difference—and took that as a sign that I really ought to stop wavering and come to some sort of a decision.

  About three miles out of Marlow there’s a bridge. Nothing special, but you could jump off it if you were so inclined, or if it’s raining you can sit under it and not get wet, for free. Now a buff coat is a fine thing, very warm and proof against brambles, but once it’s sodden with rain it stays sodden for days, unless you dry it over a fire, in which case it turns stiff as a board and you can stand it up on its own, like a suit of armour. True, there comes a point when you no longer notice how wet you are, and a man in a bath (or a river) is perfectly comfortable and he’s wet all over. But suffice to say I’d had about enough. I ducked under the bridge, and I wasn’t overjoyed to find that I had company.

  “There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  I didn’t recognise him at first with his face pink, but the voice was unmistakable. “For crying out loud,” I said, and started to back away into the rain.

  “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Sit down. I’ll light a fire.”