Mask of Night (13 page)

“That is St Martin’s,” said Susan Constant. A true town-dweller, she knew the character and whereabouts of each bell.

“The church at the crossroads?”

“Yes, at Carfax.”

She paused on the shadowy path.

“Is there something wrong?”

“Wait.”

In a moment another bell rang out from a slightly different quarter. As with the first ringing there was an excited, jerky note to the sound.

“But that’s St Mary’s,” she said. “The great church in the High Street. I knew it.”

“What’s happening?”

“A dispute, most likely.”

She set off down the path at a brisker rate. We threaded through the alleys by which we’d emerged on to the walks until we were once more on the public ways near the town centre.

The church bells continued to toll irregularly but from underneath that sound came a buzzing, like a thick cloud of insects, which grew louder as we approached Carfax. I knew what it was long before we arrived on the scene. I’ve lived in London too many years not to recognize the sound of honest citizens smashing up property, battering each other about the head, and generally behaving in an excitable fashion.

In London it’s usually the apprentices versus the rest of the world. But this is Oxford, and they do things slightly differently here.

It was dusk by this point and there was a haze of chimney smoke about. Enough light remained to show a confused mass of individuals heaving itself backwards and forwards over the place where Cornmarket runs into Carfax. Susan Constant and I stopped at the nearest corner. The pushing and pulling of the crowd might have been a game – with each group set on preventing the other from reaching the opposite side of the street – but, if so, it was a particularly vicious, lawless game. I saw sticks and staves being brandished in the half-light. Undetermined objects flew through the air. On the fringes of the shifting group some people were tussling on the ground.

The bell from the tower of St Martin’s, which stands to one side of the Carfax crossroads, clanged above this scrimmage of bodies, almost drowning out the yells and groans and oaths. At a little distance two women were tugging on a man, one at each arm as though they meant to divide him down the middle. Right in front of us a young, soberly dressed fellow ceremoniously removed his tufted cap before lowering his head like a bull and charging at an older gent. The young head hit the middle-aged belly, and both men over-balanced and fell down, winded.

“A dispute, you said,” I said to Susan. “Is this an Oxford dispute?”

“Town and gown will never agree,” she said. “Any occasion serves for a quarrel.”

“Town and gown”. I’d heard that expression several times since we’d been in Oxford. It didn’t take much to detect the uneasy relations between the students of the university and the town-dwellers. They were obvious in the insults or taunts – or in the simple, glaring looks – exchanged across a street. But this was the first time I’d seen hostility break out into open violence. From the resigned, almost amused way in which Susan referred to the scene, it appeared to be a not unusual occurrence.

“And the bells are calling them to arms?”

“St Martin’s alerts the citizens of the town while the bells of St Mary’s summon the scholars. You wouldn’t have to stay very long in this place, Nicholas, before you become familiar with the clangour of those two.”

It wasn’t difficult to distinguish between the two sets of bells, the graver tolling of St Mary’s being just audible beneath the more jangling note of the Carfax church. Equally you could tell the difference between the two sides, since the students were mostly younger than their opponents and some of them were wearing their academical gowns. There was something a little comic in seeing the scholars whirl about in the dusk like tattered bats – but also (to a person like me with an innocent belief that learning should bring polite behaviour in its train) something a little shocking.

“I thought they used their heads for thinking with, not as battering rams,” I said.

“They’re a turbulent crew.”

“The townsfolk?”

“The students.”

I observed that she was watching the scene with close interest. Most women of her class will steer clear of trouble in the streets. But Susan Constant, hearing the warning bells, had headed directly for the source of noise and tumult.

We were standing at a safe distance from the conflict, or so I thought. But at that moment a missile came arcing through the gloom and bounced near our feet. Instinctively I jumped back and an instant later hauled Susan out of harm’s way. The object, round and solid but with dints in it like a cannon ball, rolled after us as if in pursuit. Susan bent down to examine it. She picked it up and laughed.

“It’s a loaf. Look, a very stale one. This is an economical fight. You throw only what you can’t eat.”

“It might have been a stone though,” I said.

“Worse, it might have been a piece of offal.”

“Stand further back in any case.”

She shrugged off my restraining hand, and let the hard loaf drop to the ground, although for a moment she looked as though she was going to lob it back into the fray. Here was a woman who knew her own mind. Well, if she wanted to stand within the range of loaves or stones, so be it. I might even have left her to it. But the way back to my inn and shelter lay through the middle of this rampaging mob, and until things calmed down I had nowhere else to go.

I looked out for the bull-headed student and the older gent but they had merged into the swaying crowd once more. In their place was an even more ill-assorted couple. A few yards away, a tall young man in student garb was being struck about the head by a squat woman. She wasn’t using her hands but some elongated object which I couldn’t identify. The student was holding up his hands to ward off the blows. With each blow from the improvised weapon, the woman delivered an unfavourable opinion on her opponent, an opinion which carried clearly above the clanging of the bells and the noise of the mob.

“You craven codpiece!”

Thwack!

“You stupid student!”

Thunk!

Now where had I heard that kind of language before?

Ah yes . . .

Just as I was about to say something to my companion along the lines of “Isn’t that the woman . . .?”, Susan Constant stepped forward and yelled out on her own behalf.

“William! Will Sadler! Nurse Root!”

The man and the woman stopped what they were doing – which was cowering and striking, respectively – and looked at Susan. Recognition came simultaneously to everyone. I didn’t know the young man but the squat woman was Mistress Root, the Constants’ old nurse. She lowered her striking implement and peered at her victim. In the background the crowd continued to swirl about like demented dancers but this couple was standing downstage, as it were.

“William Sadler, is it you?” she said.

“Mistress Root, it
is
you,” he said. “I thought so.”

This was an odd way to go about things: to exchange names after exchanging blows, even if the blows had been going in one direction only.

“Why didn’t you say, you silly student? You know I cannot see well.”

“I was too busy defending myself from your weapon.”

“Weapon, William Sadler! This is a simple stockfish. It’s not even fresh. You cannot claim to be hurt.”

In the gathering gloom the matron held up an item which might well have been the dried cod to which she was referring. Speaking for myself, I didn’t know whether it would be worse being slapped around the head with a fresh wet fish or an old dried one – although no great harm was likely to occur in either case – but Mistress Root spoke with a certain authority in the matter. Who would dare to contradict her?

“This is a fine battle,” said Susan Constant, speaking for the first time since she’d called out the names of the student and the old nurse, and at the same time kicking at the round loaf with her foot. “A fine battle if it’s being fought with loaves and fishes. Perhaps they will miraculously multiply.”

The student laughed at this, a barking laugh, a single “Ha!” Plainly he had not been much injured by the stockfish.

“What’s the cause of all this?” I asked, acknowledging Mistress Root with a tilt of my head.

The question seemed to cause the three of them further amusement.

“You might as well ask why a cat and a dog spit or snarl at each other,” said Susan. “Are you all right, Will?”

“Who is this individual?” said the student, not bothering to answer the question.

While the battle raged on, Susan Constant introduced us as calmly as if we were supper guests.

“It is Nicholas Revill, a member of the players who are here to entertain our families. Nicholas, this is William Sadler, the man that my cousin Sarah hopes to marry.”

“Ah, Master Revill,” said Mistress Root. “You helped me when I was wounded. I remember you.”

“And I you, madam.”

“You are to play in
Romeo and Juliet
?” said William Sadler.

“And other things besides,” I said.

“Where is your nice young friend, the other one who bore me up when I was wounded?” said Mistress Root. I noticed that she was still holding the dried fish in what you might have called the half-cock position, ready for the next enemy.

But before we could get involved in a chat about the niceness of Abel Glaze and the plays which the Chamberlain’s were scheduled to perform and other conversational diversions, we were interrupted by a new stage in the Carfax brawl. The shouting had been growing louder, the bells clanging more furiously, and the miscellany of objects flying through the air thicker. Among all this tumult the blare of a trumpet suddenly erupted from one side, like a fanfare played off stage. Oh, just like a real battle, I thought (not that I’ve ever been present at one of those).

Automatically we turned in the direction of the trumpet sound. Coming up the High Street behind us was as finely dressed a group of men as I’ve seen outside the court of Queen Elizabeth. They were illuminated by torches held by attendants on the fringes of the group. The smoky light flickered across faces that were grave and wrinkled, and bodies that were mostly stooped and shrunken. But their robes! Bright green robes, sky blue ones, deep blood-reds. It was as if so many flower-beds had decided to get up and go walking about in the middle of the night. The Chamberlain’s tire-man – fussy Bartholomew Ridd who had charge of our players’ costumes – would have gone into ecstasies over such a display of finery.

I didn’t have to be told the identity of these gents. This was the walking majesty of the University, the heads of the halls and houses and colleges, accompanied by their torch-brandishing escort. One of that escort, standing to the fore, was clutching a brass trumpet, while another grim-faced one toted a great pole-ax. Others carried staves as well as the sooty torches.

“The bulldogs, by God,” said William Sadler.

I couldn’t see any dogs but was willing to take his word for it.

Then from the opposite corner, from the road which emerged into Carfax by St Martin’s church, entered a second body of men. They weren’t as gorgeously dressed as the first bunch but they too carried the stamp of authority. That is, they were middle-aged or worse, had serious expressions and were kept company by their own armed, torch-carrying attendants. The man in the lead was wearing regalia which glinted in the light, and I guessed that he was the mayor of Oxford. These were the leading citizens of the city, therefore, the aldermen and burgesses, part of whose commission would be to ensure that the civil peace was maintained and that any offenders against it were duly punished.

Both groups halted warily within a few yards of each other. For an instant I wondered whether they, or more likely their escorts, would come to blows as well. But they were respectable beings, conscious of their dignity, to say nothing of the unblemished glory of their robes. They were here to stamp out the flames not to blow on them. The four of us – Mistress Root, Susan Constant, William Sadler and I – were uncomfortably exposed almost in the middle ground. I noticed that William Sadler half hid his face in his gown. I too felt obscurely ashamed, although I’d come late to this fight and had taken absolutely no part in it.

Awareness of the presence of these two groups of oldsters seemed to spread quite fast among the tussling crowd. People who’d been tumbled on the ground picked themselves up, with an attitude suggesting that they’d fallen over by accident. Some individuals on the edges started to melt away into the darkness. All at once the air, which had been thick with oaths and groans, with sticks and flying bread (and probably with flying fish too), turned still and empty. Even the wild tolling of the church bells subsided until, with a final clang, it halted altogether. Then the two sets of attendants moved, as if by a single command, into the heart of the rapidly dissolving mass. The grim fellow with the pole-ax passed close by me.

“Come on!” someone hissed at my ear.

It was William Sadler. He pulled at my doublet.

“What about – ?”

But Susan Constant and the old nurse had already vanished.

I started to follow Sadler as he sped off in the opposite direction, away from Cornmarket and down the street known as Southgate. We weren’t alone. Other figures were doing their best to make themselves unobtrusive in the gloom. From my little experience of London misbehaviour, I know what you ought to do when faced with authorities carrying big sticks. It is simple. You take to your heels. The authorities probably won’t be too particular about who they lash out at, and they have all the licence of the law on their side. In this case there were two sets of authority, town and gown, and so a double chance of getting beaten about the head.

We hadn’t been going for more than a few moments when a bell began to clang out once again. This time, instead of the excited jangling which had summoned students and citizens to the Cornmarket fray, it was a steady, insistent beat.

“The curfew bell,” said William Sadler.

I allowed myself to be directed by him. What did I know of Oxford and its peculiar customs? Perhaps anyone caught out on the streets after the curfew had tolled would be hung, drawn and quartered by bulldogs, or pressed to death under thousands of books.