‘That depends upon the date,’ I answered after some deliberation.
He informed me that it was, as near as he was able to determine having lost a day or so himself, the last week of October in the year Sixteen Hundred and Seven. This would seem to indicate that I have been suspended here for almost two years now. While I was struggling to absorb this notion, Captain Pouch (such is his name) continued with his prattle.
‘Did you know, Sir, there is something in your eye?’
‘Yes, I did. Unless I am mistaken, it’s a lump of coal.’
‘What an encumbrance. You have the Captain’s sympathies. Pray, what of these pale, bony spikes that thrust up from your skull? Were you afflicted with these monstrous growths in life?’
‘No. That is birdshit.’
Made disheartened by this cataloguing of my mortal ruin, I attempted to direct the conversation elsewhere, asking my companion how he came to find himself moored in such dismal straits.
With bile and indignation rising in his voice, he launched into a grim tirade upon the world and its injustice. ‘Aye, now there’s a question! How does Pouch come to be here, that did no wrong save stand up for his birthright as an Englishman? Tyranny, sir! Cruel tyranny and the designs of despots laid the Captain low, as they would lay low all who strike for Justice!’
Here I made encouraging remarks, revealing that I, too, had fallen foul of an oppressor in my stand for liberty. This newfound kinship seemed to warm his heart (wherever that affair might be; in Thrapston or in Oundle) and he went on with fresh vigour.
‘Then in faith, Sir, you are Captain Pouch’s brother in adversity! He was a simple man, Sir, once, that lived by Newton-in-the-Willows, near to Geddington, where is the cross of blessed Eleanor.’
‘I know the place. Go on.’
‘Pouch had another name then, Sir, and was contented with his lot, but it would not be so for long. There was a serpent nestled in the Captain’s Eden, poised to strike.’
‘The tyrants that you spoke of earlier?’
‘The same. A family of skulking thieves that had with their ill-gotten wealth seized land so that the good folk thereabout were left with only scrub on which to grow their food! Worse, while those same good people huddled on their scraps of grass, the scoundrels saw fit to erect a great, vainglorious edifice, the sight of which would surely tread those good folk’s spirits further down into the mire!’
I knew a sudden sense of great foreboding as to where this narrative was headed. As I’d told him, I knew Newton-in-the-Willows well, and not without good reason.
Timidly, I made an interjection. ‘This great edifice you mention: would it be a dovecote?’
‘Then you know the massive, ugly thing? Aye, a gigantic dovecote! Did you ever hear such vanity? As if it were not bad enough they had already seized our village church, St Faith’s, and claimed it as their private chapel! One day, when this insult could no longer be endured, the Captain rallied to his side one thousand men and swore they would tear down the hedges raised about the family’s enclosures.’
‘This would be the Tresham family?’
‘Aye! You have heard of them?’
‘Remotely.’
Every Sunday prior to my father’s house-arrest we’d gone by coach to Newton-in-the-Willows. Each time, as we crossed the Barford Bridge, my father would recount the story of a ghostly monk said to reside there by the River Ise who, in the dead of night, would ride with travellers part of their way only to vanish further down the road. Each week I’d shudder at my father’s tale as if I heard it fresh.
Kneeling there in the strange pale marble-coloured light that fell down through the windows of St Faith’s, I’d bow my head and pray. As I remember, in the main I would entreat Almighty God that as we rode back over Barford Bridge we should not find we shared our carriage with the disappearing monk. On more than one occasion it occurred to me that my prayers and my presence in St Faith’s served no good purpose save averting supernatural danger brought upon me solely by the route that I must take to church each week. It seemed to me that if I simply did not go to church then both myself and the Almighty might be saved considerable time and effort. I would struggle to suppress such thoughts for fear God would reward this blasphemy with, if not yet a visit from the monk, then something worse. However, though this sacrilegious notion would persist I was not, as it turned out, struck down by the awful supernatural punishment I feared.
Mind you, with hindsight . . .
After church, if there was time before our dinner was prepared, I’d go with Father to the dovecote that to me seemed big as heaven, filled with crooning, fluttering angel white. When I was young, I did not make the nice distinction that there is between the commonplace dove and its Pentecostal counterpart, believing at the time my father kept a flock of Holy Ghosts.
Perhaps he did. Perhaps that is the reason I have not been brushed by that celestial wing. Perhaps there are no more outside captivity.
Beside me, cutting through my reverie, the head of Captain Pouch continued with its diatribe against the monstrous Tresham family, recounting how he had inspired his thousand followers by telling them that what he carried in the pouch about his neck (from which he drew his name) would be sufficient to repel all enemies. Thus reassured he’d led them, whooping to the hedgerow barricades where they had wreaked some little havoc for a while before the local gentry and their mounted followers, incensed, arrived upon the scene to trample and disperse the rabble.
It would seem as if beyond that point the Captain’s memories were vague. The hour when he was led out to the gallows was still clear to him, though mercifully he recalled but little of the hanging or the quartering that evidently followed.
I asked him if he knew how fared the family he so despised, to which he answered with some glee that early in the year my father, Thomas Tresham, had been taken sick to bed and soon thereafter passed away.
So. Dead, then. That great granite boulder of his head rocked forward for the last time. Finally released from the frustrated pacing of his grounds that had become his prison and set free into the company of other martyrs. Now, no doubt, he knew the date of the Creation to the very hour. No doubt by now he understood the Lord’s bewildering passion for the number three and was ecstatically employed correcting angles for the angels as they laboured on some annexe of their own tri-cornered paradise.
Done with his tale at last, Pouch seemed to think that it would only be good manners to enquire as to my own, though this was clearly only by way of politeness and not any interest that was genuine. The Captain did not truthfully have room in him for any grand, heroic story save his own. That said, he was persistent in demanding my account so he might not be thought a bore.
‘Come, let the Captain hear now of the noble struggle you yourself endured that led you to this sorry place. What is your name, Sir?’
After but a moment’s hesitation, I responded. ‘Charlie.’
‘And your crime?’
‘I cried “Down with the King” while in a public place.’
Throughout my life, I’d learned the ease with which I might slip skilfully behind that bland evasive mask that would avoid unpleasantness. Now there was nothing left of me but mask, this talent had become more simple yet in its accomplishment.
Time passed. Before the sunset, which I know by its faint promise of impending chill, there was some nastiness.
I’d heard the birds land, two or three of them with heavy thuds, and had the time to wonder briefly at their presence after they had failed to pay a visit for so long, when Pouch began to scream, thus answering my queries.
Mercifully, I was not made to bear this miserable cacophony for long, since at approach of dark the carrion flew home to roost. The Captain had fared well as these things go, with but an eye and one lip gone, although to hear him moan and whimper you would think the sky had fallen in. In fairness, I suppose I have had longer to grow reconciled to our condition.
r /> Other than the utterance of an infrequent sob, he did not speak again ‘til halfway through the night when, in a trembling voice, he started to describe the stars that he could see through his remaining eye; their number and their cold, indifferent majesty.
I squinted round my lump of coal, and yet saw nothing.
‘Is this Hell?’ he whispered. ‘Are there stars in that place? Is this Hell for Pouch?’
I have considered more than once what manner of theology might be applicable to where we find ourselves. It seems to me that, in accordance with my father’s strange numeric scheme of things, there are three possibilities: firstly, it may be that this is Hell after all, but on some other sphere and not beneath the ground as one might readily suppose. My second notion is that in my own case, it may be I am regarded as a traitor by the Gods of Protestant and Catholic faith alike and, being caught between two camps, am simply left to moulder here by both. The third and, given due consideration, the most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.
At dawn the birds (crows by the sound they made) came back and took the rest of Captain Pouch, since when I fear the fellow is sunk deep within some horror-stricken trance. He has not voiced a word.
I hear the children singing, somewhere far below, and hope that they might hurl another rock of coal to furnish me a second bright black eye, but they are set on other matters. As the words of their refrain float up to me, I know the work they are about and, in my sudden comprehension, am become almost as moribund as Pouch.
‘Remember, remember,’ they sing; they command. ‘Remember, remember . . .’
We’d meet to drink, there in my father’s triangular lodge. Bob Catesby, Guido Fawkes, Tom Winter and the others, talking young men’s talk and vowing we would see the day when Catholics would bend no more beneath the yoke of Protestant oppressor. Once we hiked upon a pilgrimage to Fotheringay Castle, north of Oundle (where, if he might be believed, the Captain’s bowels are currently interred). We saw where Good Queen Mary kneeled before the block and rendered up her soul to God, her head hacked off with nothing less than three ungainly blows, whereon her little dog ran out from underneath her skirts and would not leave her side.
Though I do not recall who first proposed the scheme, I fear it was myself, though inadvertently, who set the whole disaster into motion. Drinking in the lodge, I had commenced a passionate account of all the slanders and injustice that had robbed my father of his freedom; almost bragging in a curious, underhanded way, as if the glamour of the elder Tresham’s dire misfortune might thus be transferred to me. Alas, I was too eloquent, and had not finished my account before my drunken comrades were up on their feet and swearing that this monstrous calumny should not go unavenged.
I thought that it would be forgot once we were sober, but the notion of some great revenge for Father and the Catholic masses as a whole had somehow stuck. Fuelled by hot Sack and righteous fervour, soon my comrades had decided that we must not only strike a blow of protest: we must undertake to do no less than sound a clarion call that would awaken all who placed their faith in Rome to glorious insurrection. We ourselves would bring about the great deliverance of our faith!
Having witnessed all that had befallen Father for much lesser sins against the Realm, I had by this time grown afraid, and counselled them that this mad plot might mean the ruin and not the rescue of this island’s faithful, but my counsel lacked conviction, as the counsel of a mask will ever do. When they began to speak of causing conflagrations at the seat of Parliament itself, I knew I did not have the courage to keep faith with them, yet by my very nature nor was I equipped to openly refuse and seem a coward. What was I to do? My face became in time opaque and still, where nothing could be read.
The night has come once more. Pouch was mistaken in his estimation of the date. It is November. From across the fields beyond the town a scent of woodsmoke taints the air, and in the relic of my wits I have a picture of the red sparks rising up to crowd the stars. What is it fans the flames of passion in a man? What promise was it that led Fawkes and Catesby on, or that inspired the thousand men of Captain Pouch?
Here, I recall the Captain’s words as to the matter kept there in that pouch draped by young John about his neck, which would repel all foes. It seems to me as if that hidden talisman must surely hold the secret kindling of all noble causes or rebellions and, despite his current woeful state, I cannot restrain my curiosity.
‘Pouch? Captain Pouch?’ I hiss. ‘Wake up, Sir. I’ve a question I must ask of you.’
He moans and swivels slightly; tilts from side to side. When he replies, his voice is soft and dazed. He seems to know not where he is. ‘I am John Reynolds. My name is John Reynolds and I cannot see.’
I have not patience left to entertain such ramblings, and my entreaties grow more urgent. ‘Tell me, Pouch, what is it that you keep there in that bag about your neck? What is the source of power that hurls a thousand men unheeding ‘neath the horses of their foes?’
His speech is slurred and bubbling. ‘The pouch?’
‘Aye, Sir. The pouch. What is within the pouch?’
Some moments pass, and now he speaks: ‘A small piece of green cheese.’
‘And that is all?’
He does not venture a response, and no more can I draw a solitary word from out his shredded lips. Well, then. There is my answer. There’s the grail men leave their sweethearts for and follow even in the jaws, the smoking throat of War: a small piece of green cheese. How bitter, then, when first we catch the rancid scent of what we fought for.
On that sour November night two years ago, when Catesby rushed into the Ashby gate-house pale and breathless while we sat in wait for news, it was already plain the plot had been betrayed. Fawkes had been seized from ambush, whereon Catesby and four others had come back from London running relay on their fevered horses to announce the dreadful news.
Some of us thought, in desperation, to head off to Wales and there was even wretched, hollow talk of firing up Welsh Catholics to make our mis-timed revolution a success, though in our hearts we knew we were all as dead men. The rest of them went West, eventually killed in flight or captured and then put to death by hanging, quartering and burning. For my own part, I sat weeping with my father there at Rushton Hall and waited for the King’s men to arrive and take me to the Tower. They knew where I would be. I’d told them in the letter that I wrote my brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, just the week before.
At least in payment for my treachery they spared me public execution, leaving me instead to die after a lingering eight-week illness in the Tower. While I was thus incarcerated, gaolers would delight in giving me each detail of my friends’ demise. A story of this nature stays with me: one of the luckless crew — not Catesby, Fawkes or Winter; one I did not know so well — was taken to his place of execution and beheaded, then cut into four. Lifting the head to wave it at the mob, the axe-man cried, ‘Behold! A traitor’s head!’
At which the head replied, ‘Thou liest.’
I have since wished that I might share a basket with a head that had such spirit, or yet rest beside him on some ossuary shelf, but it is better it should never be. With nothing else save face to show, I could not face him.
Somewhere in my dark, the children sing above the roar and crackle of the flames. Before they sang for us or raised their bonfires to support our effigies, they’d burn a doll to signify His Holiness the Pope, and prior to that no doubt some earlier sacrifice back unto that primordial Monday, that first fire.
The burning and the song are one. If I gaze hard with the black jewel that is my only eye, I see the spit and flare of it, away there in the centre of that cold, wet coal where is my night. It was my friends they set alight, not I. I was denied that last deliverance, to be consumed within that timeless bright that is in truth one single b
laze decanted down across the aeons.
The tongues of heat and brilliance surge and leap and cast their shivering light within the sockets of the mask, so that the shadows quake and seem to give the face expression where, in truth, there is no such expression, nor was ever one.
Angel Language
AD 1618
I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.
I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.
Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.
So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.