Alms for Oblivion (2 page)

It wasn’t anybody from Philip Henslowe’s company.

I wasn’t about to be offered a new job.

There was nothing for me to turn down.

“Hello, Peter,” I said.

“Nick. I knew it was you. I heard your voice downstairs.”

Peter Agate gestured awkwardly at my meagre furnishings as if it was
his
room and he was apologizing for the inadequacy of our surroundings. Like the stooping posture, this tentative
gesture was typical of him.

“You were the last person I expected,” I said.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you – if you were expecting someone else.”

“Not at all. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I wouldn’t usually be here at this time of day.”

The absurdity of my earlier speculation – that my visitor was from another acting company, come to tempt me to greater things – rushed back on me. I was glad of the dimness of the
room, since Peter couldn’t witness the warmth that now spread across my face. It might have been embarrassment that caused me to repeat, “Not at all.”

And I moved towards Peter Agate and wrapped him in my arms and he responded by wrapping his around me, with a sigh of relief, I think, at discovering that his old country friend Nick Revill was
still his friend in the very different circumstances of the city.

After we’d released each other we stood back. Like true Englishmen, we were a little uncomfortable at renewed friendship.

“Your landlord was good enough to allow me to wait up here. I hope you don’t mind.”

“My dear fellow,” I said in a magnanimous fashion and then, thinking better of this, modified it to, “Dear Peter . . . you’ve given him stuff to think on for weeks. He
couldn’t wait to tell me that I had a visitor.”

“He asked if I was a – a player,” said Peter. I thought I detected an odd catch in his voice and wondered whether he was insulted by my landlord’s speculation.

“Oh, Master Benwell loves plays and players. He loves the
backstage
aspect of things. He will talk to you for hours about it. But you didn’t give anything away? Not even your
name?”

“Just being cautious, Nick.”

I regarded the tall, shambling figure in front of me. He looked no different to my eyes, no different in outline anyway. I wondered whether I seemed different to him.

“What were you going to do? Wait for me until I came back?”

“I suppose so.”

“I might have been hours.”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“Don’t say sorry,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said again.

“The same old Peter,” I said. “Another apology and I shall kill you.”

This rough speech was a way of trying to reassure him that everything between us was as it had always been – although we hadn’t seen each other for, oh, more than three years.

He laughed, mildly.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m here?”

“Not yet. Any question like that is swallowed up in the pleasure of seeing you once more.”

True, I hadn’t yet started to wonder at his presence in London, in Southwark, in Dead Man’s Place, in my room – I was genuinely pleased to see my old Somerset friend again, no
lie – but of course as soon as he mentioned it, I did start to wonder why he was here. There was a pause.

“You have a London gloss, Nick. You have acquired manners. Address.”

“You’ll find me the same country lad underneath,” I said.

Another pause.

I sensed that Peter had something to say, probably a story to tell. At the same time I recalled the reason why I’d returned to my lodgings.

“I normally wouldn’t be here, only I forgot my scroll – my part in the play we’re practising.”

I reached across to the rickety little table where my few possessions were piled and took the rolled-up papers.

“There’s a rehearsal I must attend immediately,” I said. “Otherwise Burbage will use my guts to tie his points.”

“That would be Cuthbert?”

“No, it would be his brother Dick. But you’re well informed.”

“For a country lad.”

“Town or country. Most Londoners know of Dick Burbage, but not so many could name Cuthbert. He’s more behind the scenes. Which is where I ought to be now, if you’ll forgive me.
We shall talk later.”

I made to go through the door then stopped and considered.

“If I were you, Peter, I wouldn’t want to spend two or three hours shivering in an ill-lit room. There’s an ale-house nearby. The Goat & Monkey. A players’ place, if
you don’t object to that. Martin Bly’s the landlord.”

I said this, I must confess, not only because I was thinking of my friend’s comfort but also because I wanted to show off my familiarity with the neighbourhood. I almost added, in
reference to his drinking at the good old Goat, ‘Put it on my slate,’ before reflecting that patronage can go too far. (Also I was reflecting on that little debt of mine.)

“Thank you, Nick,” said Peter. “I have no objection to a players’ place, none at all. I’ll try it.”

I gave him a couple of directions, making them pretty precise on account of the weather, and said I’d join him in the tavern as soon as I could. As I paced speedily through the fog in the
direction of the Globe, hoping that I wouldn’t have been missed yet, part of my mind was occupied with the question of exactly why Peter Agate had quit his home in Somerset and suddenly
appeared in London.

Like me, Peter came from the village of Miching. Or rather he came from outside that spot, a place once lovely, now blighted. He was lucky in being a little removed from the village – as I
had been lucky. The memory of that early spring morning returned, its terrible flavours and colours hardly diminished. That bright morning when I had run down towards my birthplace, fear taking
tighter and tighter hold of my guts.

I saw myself, as if from the outside, leaping over stones skidding on the downhill path, rounding blind corners, the dead silence of the village masked by my panting breath and the blood
thudding in my ears. I’d been absent, trying to get a position with a troupe of players, a hopeless excursion, nothing came of it (except that my absence saved my life). While I was away the
plague struck. My father and mother, the parson of the village and his wife, died. So did most of the rest of the village. I don’t know how many exactly. I didn’t stop to find out. After
I witnessed my neighbours’ bodies being forked into a common pit, after I saw the red cross splashed on my parents’ door, I ran and ran. I spent that night shivering and weeping on some
open high ground above the Bristol Channel. I almost caught my death of cold.

But I wasn’t the only survivor from our hamlet. The Agates were the wealthiest family in Miching, living in a residence that maintained a proper distance from the village folk. Their manor
– called Quint House – was set apart, on a place where the ground rose. The parson and the squire and the schoolmaster stand out even in a modest village, by reason of their education
or their rank and riches. It could be said that they cling together, having no true equals among the other inhabitants. In particular the parson may well cling to the lord of the manor when the
parish is in the gift of the latter. Peter’s grandfather, also called Peter, had been the patron of Miching parish. Many years before, he had bestowed the living on my father. In turn my
father often bestowed compliments on old Peter Agate. In my hearing he many times called him a good man, a pious man. My father meant what he said. For one thing, old Agate was dead by then and
there was no advantage in flattering him. And for another, my father despised the idea of flattering. So, if he said grandfather Agate was pious, it was the simple truth. I never knew old Agate but
I formed a mind-picture from my father’s description, of someone with a stern, unyielding face and a manner to match. A bit like my father, I suppose.

And, just as in most villages the parson, the squire and the schoolmaster consort with each other, so their offspring are expected to play together. In Miching we had no schoolmaster –
though my father occasionally took that part – so squire and parson made an elevated society of two (although everybody knew who occupied the higher rung on the ladder). Peter and I were
thrown together from early on. He was the sole boy in a family of girls while I had no living brothers or sisters. We even looked a little alike, I suppose. We stayed friends as we grew up,
although never so close as in those boyhood years. On countless summer evenings I had made the journey down the slope from Quint House, never thinking that the world needed to be any bigger than
the few dozens of acres which separated church and manor.

The Agates’ distance from the village was life-preserving, as it turned out. The plague’s a funny thing. Its dragon’s-breath will strike down everybody in one dwelling and
leave a neighbouring one unscathed. So it was with the Agate place and its occupants.

It wasn’t until a month or so after I’d fled from Miching that I discovered that the family of my friend had survived. It was perhaps remiss on my part, even cowardly, not to have
enquired after them but I’d assumed they were dead. The end of my own parents seemed like the closing of the book of my past life, one which I had no wish to open again.

I was in Bristol but ready to depart for London, there to make my fortune. And like every young man off to make his fortune in a capital city, I was sure I’d soon be rich and famous and,
the next moment, just as certain I’d soon be dying – of hunger and poverty, or after a violent attack by robbers – in a ditch in the city suburbs. It was in one of these gloomy
moods that I encountered Peter Agate in a tavern by Bristol docks. We met like ghosts, each thinking the other dead.

After we’d recovered from the shock of seeing one another we exchanged stories, speaking in quiet and hesitant tones as if imparting secrets. Unlike me, Peter had been at home when the
plague came calling. He had no idea how he and his family had escaped the common fate of the common folk a small way down the hill. True, a handful of the villagers hadn’t been affected
either but the Agate household was preserved whole and entire, down to the humblest servant. They’d lost some of the field-workers, though, and this was the reason why Peter was in Bristol,
hiring hands on his father’s behalf. He told me something which I didn’t know and which shook me a little. It was that my father had, like me, been absent from the parish when the
plague struck. Unlike me, though, he had not been abroad on a frivolous errand but staying at a remote farm, tending to a dying man. While he was away the pestilence took possession of Miching.
Hearing this, he could have chosen not to return. But he did return. My mother was still there, of course. So were all his parishioners. When they died, so did he.

After Peter finished his story, I sat in silence for a time. Then I ran swiftly through my own narrative. Perhaps I was a little ashamed at my flight from Miching, compared with the way Peter
had continued to stay on there, compared with my father’s courage in returning.

Still, all that village life was behind me now. I was going forward not back, forward to a new life in London. To be a player, I told him. Going to fortune or to ruin. (Strange that I never
considered a middle course, involving neither.)

We stood for an instant that spring evening outside the waterside tavern, saying farewell. The air was cold but there were still some gleams in the sky. My earlier gloom had lifted. I’d
felt my spirits rise as I described to Peter my planned pilgrimage to London and its playhouses. I had already fallen in with a gaggle of Bristolian carters who were setting off eastwards at first
light. I might accompany them as far as Trowbridge. After that I was ready to take whatever travelling companionship fortune threw in my way. As for Peter, since he had concluded his father’s
hiring business he might have returned to Miching straightaway but I think he meant to try what Bristol had to offer by way of diversion for a day or two. He seemed fired up by drink to try his
chances in a big town. Me, I had my ambitions set on an even greater town. We clasped arms about one another, briefly, awkwardly, as if we were going to tussle like boys. I don’t think we
ever expected to see each other again.

And now here was my childhood friend come to London. Come, it seemed, to see Revill. Naturally I couldn’t help wondering why.

These speculations occupied my mind as I threaded the foggy thoroughfares to my work-place. Few people were abroad on this unhealthy morning. The fog was so dense that the white flank of the
Globe loomed up in front of me quite unexpectedly. But I brightened up to see it, like a sailor sighting the cliffs of home. I made my way quickly inside to the tire-house, which was the
costume-room and the only indoor area large enough to hold the whole company of players, if in rather crushed conditions. We were there not for a full-scale rehearsal (that would have taken place
outside on the stage) but for what Dick Burbage called a chamber practice, an early run-through of unfamiliar material. In any event, we were not performing this piece in the Globe playhouse at all
but in a different venue, perhaps a more select one, as I shall shortly explain.

As soon as I walked into the smoky, damp-smelling room my good cheer evaporated. There was a hush.

“Oh, Master Nicholas,” said Dick Burbage. He was standing like a schoolmaster on a little dais to one side of the room. This was his customary position when he supervised a
rehearsal.

“Dick?”

“In your own good time.”

“I am ready,” I said, brandishing the scroll which contained my part.

“You may be ready, but are you sorry?”

“Sorry . . .? Oh yes, sorry for being late.”

“Did you get lost in the fog?”

There was some laughter at this from a few of my fellows, a combination of pleasure at my discomfiture and relief that they weren’t dancing on the end of Burbage’s tongue.

“In the fog? Why, was I
missed
?” I said, laying a little stress on the last word. Oh, the sword-like flash of wit on a damp, foggy morning (and for the second time too). There
were a few belated groans and jeers as the joke penetrated. Personally I considered that it was worthy of taking its place beside one of Master Shakespeare’s lesser puns, almost worthy.