‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
Rose nodded. ‘That is all right. You are tired. And other things. You will sleep in the boys’ room.’
‘The boys’ room?’
She explained it was called the boys’ room because there had been two brothers – Nat and Rowland – but they were both dead. Nat had died of typhoid when he was twelve, and poor baby Rowland had died of a mystery cough before his first birthday. This led on to an explanation of how their parents were dead too: their mother had died of ‘childbed fever’ (a common thing back in the day), a month after giving birth to Rowland, which explained the baby’s frailty, and their father had died of smallpox. The girls seemed quite matter-of-fact about it all. Though apparently Grace often woke in the night, having nightmares about little Rowland.
‘See,’ Rose said, sprinkling salt on my shame. ‘Plenty of sorrows to go around.’
She took me into the room. There was a little square window about the size of a portable television from 1980. (When I lived in a hotel in São Paulo in 1980 I watched a lot of TV. It made me think of the small square Hackney window.) The room was spare and modest but the bed had blankets and even though the mattress was stuffed with straw I was so tired that the queen’s four poster itself wouldn’t have seemed any comfier.
I fell on the bed, and she pulled my shoes off and she looked at me, and the motherly sternness she had displayed before melted away and she said softly, as if to my soul itself, ‘It will be fine, Tom. Rest now.’
But the next thing I knew it was the dead of night and I was sitting up in bed awake from the sound of my own scream with a fat full moon outside the window and my whole body was shaking and I could hardly breathe. Terror was flooding into me from every side.
Rose was now there, holding my arm. Grace, behind her, yawned sleep away at the doorway.
‘It is all right, Tom.’
‘It will never be,’ I said, half delirious.
‘Dreams are not to be believed. Especially the bad ones.’
I didn’t tell her the dream was a memory. I had to try instead to deny the reality of what I knew and dream up a new one, as Tom Smith. She sent Grace back to bed and stayed there beside me. She leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. It was just a peck, but a peck on the lips was not just a peck.
‘What was that for?’ I asked.
I could just about see her smile in the moonlight. It wasn’t a flirtatious smile. It was a plain, matter-of-fact one. ‘For you to have something else to occupy your mind.’
‘I am not sure I have ever met someone like you,’ I said.
‘That is good. What point would my life have, if there was a duplicate?’
There was a tear in her eye.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘This was the bed Nat slept in. It’s strange. The space where he was being filled again. That’s all. He was there, and now he isn’t there.’
I saw she was hurt, and for a moment I felt selfish in my own grief. ‘I can sleep somewhere else. I could sleep on the floor.’
She shook her head and smiled. ‘No, no.’
Breakfast was rye bread and a small cup of ale. Grace had some ale too. It was the one drink people could afford that they knew wouldn’t kill them. Unlike water, of course, which was basically Russian roulette.
‘This is my house,’ Rose explained, ‘and the lease has passed to me now my parents have died. So, so long as you live here, you must live by my rules. And the first rule is that you will pay us what you owe, and after that you can pay us two shillings a week as long as you stay here. And help us fetch the water.’
As long as you stay here.
It was quite a nice prospect, having somewhere I could stay indefinitely. And the cottage was a sufficient home. Dry and clean and well aired and smelling of lavender. A bunch of lavender, I now noted, stuck out of a simple vase. There was a fireplace for when the weather became cool. The cottage was a little larger than the one in Edwardstone, with separate rooms, but the same level of care was taken to keep everything as clean and tidy and well scented as possible.
And yet, the offer of indefinitely staying there – if that is what it was – made me feel sad.
I had the sense, even then, that there could be nothing permanent in my life from now on.
You see, at this point, I didn’t know things were going to change. I had no understanding of my condition. It had no name. And I wouldn’t have known even if it had. I just assumed that was it. I was going to stay looking this age for ever. Which you might think would be quite joyful but, no, not really. My condition had already caused the death of my mother. I knew I wouldn’t be able to tell Rose or her sister about it, without putting them at similar risk. And back then, things changed fast, especially if you were young. Faces changed almost with the seasons.
‘Thank you,’ I told her.
‘It will be good for Grace, having you here. She misses her brothers greatly, we both do. But if you cause any mischief – if you bring us into any disrepute – and if you refuse to pay’ – she held the moment like a cherry still to be swallowed – ‘you will be out on your arse.’
‘In a ditch?’
‘Covered in shit,’ said little Grace, having finished her ale.
‘Sorry, Tom. Grace is her name, not a description.’
‘Shit is a fine word,’ I said diplomatically. ‘It is quick to its point.’
‘There are no ladies in this house,’ Rose said.
‘And I am no lord.’ Now wasn’t the time to tell them that I was, however, technically a member of the French aristocracy.
Rose sighed. I can remember her sighs. They were rarely sad sighs. They always had a sense of this is the way things are and how they are going to be and that is perfectly fine about them. ‘Good. Well, today is a new day.’
I liked these two. They were a comfort amid the silent howl of grief.
I wanted to stay. But I didn’t want them to be in danger. They couldn’t be curious about me. That was the main thing.
‘My mother was thrown from a horse,’ I said, from out of nowhere. ‘That’s how she died.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Grace.
‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘Very sad.’
‘That is what I dream of sometimes.’
She nodded. She may still have had questions but she kept them inside.
‘You should probably rest today. Restore your humours. So, while we go to the orchard you can stay in the cottage. And tomorrow you can go and play your lute and bring us money.’
‘No, no, I will pay my debt. I will earn some money today. You are right, I will go into the street and I will play.’
‘Any street?’ asked Grace, amused.
‘A busy one.’
Rose shook her head. ‘You need to be in London. South of the city walls.’
She pointed. She showed me the way.
‘A boy playing the lute! They will rain pennies on you.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Look, the sun is out. There will be good crowds. It might give you new things to dream about.’
And the sun shone through the window and lit her face and strands of her brown hair turned gold, and for the first time in four days my soul – or what I used to consider my soul – for the smallest sliver of a moment felt something other than insufferable torment.
And her little sister picked up her basket and opened the door and the day streamed in, a slanted rectangle of light working its alchemy on the wooden floor.
‘So then,’ I said, as if I was going to say something more. And Rose caught my gaze and smiled and nodded as if I just had.
London, now
It is three in the morning.
I really should be in bed. There are only four hours left before I have to be up for work, for school.
Yet, realistically, there is no way I am getting to sleep. I switch off the Discovery Channel documentary about Ming, the five-hundred-and-seven-year-old clam, which I was watching on the
computer.
I am sitting here staring at the screen. It probably isn’t very good for my headache to be doing this. But I am resigned to it now. It is the curse of the alba. A kind of altitude sickness, but of time, not height. The competing memories, the jumble of time, the stress of it all, made these headaches an inevitability.
And then, of course, being threatened at knife point hadn’t helped. And seeing Anton among the boys had unsettled me.
I go on the BBC and Guardian websites. I read a couple of news articles about fracturing US and Chinese relations. Everyone in the comments section is predicting the apocalypse. This is the chief comfort of being four hundred and thirty-nine years old. You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don’t learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People’s minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.
After reading the news, I go on Twitter. I don’t have an account but I find it interesting – all the different voices, the squabbles, the arrogance of certainty, the ignorance, the occasional, but wonderful, compassion, and watching the evolution of language head towards a new kind of hieroglyphics.
I then do what I always do, and type the names ‘Marion Hazard’ and ‘Marion Claybrook’ into Google, but there is nothing new. If she is alive, she isn’t using either name.
Then I head over to Facebook.
I see a post from Camille.
‘Life is confusing.’
That is all it says. It has six likes. I feel guilty about how rude I was to her. I wonder, as I often do, if it is ever going to be possible to have anything resembling a normal life. Looking at Camille made me want that. There was an intensity to her that I could sense and relate to. I can imagine sitting next to her on a bench, watching Abraham. Just sitting there, in the comfortable silence of a couple. I haven’t wanted such a thing for centuries.
I shouldn’t do anything, really. But I find myself pressing ‘like’ on her update, and even adding ‘C’est vrai’ as a comment. The moment I comment and see the words there with my name beside them I think I should delete them.
But I don’t. I leave them. And I go to bed, a bed Abraham is already asleep on. He is whimpering in his sleep.
For years now I had convinced myself that the sadness of the memories weighed more and lasted longer than the moments of happiness themselves. So I had, through some crude emotional mathematics, decided it was better not to seek out love or companionship or even friendship. To be a little island in the alba archipelago, detached from humanity’s continent, instead. Hendrich was right, I believed. It was best not to fall in love.
But recently, now, I was starting to feel that you couldn’t do mathematics with emotions. In protecting yourself from hurt you could create a new, subtler type of pain. It is a dilemma. And not one I am going to solve tonight.
Life is confusing.
That is all we really know, I think, and the thought keeps repeating like a musical motif as I slowly fall into sleep.
London, 1599
Bankside, in those days, was made up of liberties. A liberty was a designated area outside the city walls where normal laws didn’t apply. In fact, no laws applied. Anything went. Any kind of trade could be plied. Any entertainment was allowed, however disreputable. Prostitution. Bear-baiting. Street performance. Theatre. You name it. It was there.
It was an area, essentially, of freedom. And the first thing I discovered about freedom was that it smelled of shit. Of course, compared to now, everywhere in or out of London smelled of shit. But Bankside, in particular, was the shittiest. That was because of the tanneries dotted about the place. There were five tanneries all in close proximity, just after you crossed the bridge. And the reason they stank, I would later learn, was because tanners steeped the leather in faeces.
As I walked on, the smell fused into others. The animal fat and bones from the makers of glue and soap. And the stale sweat of the crowd. It was a whole new world of stench.
I walked past the bear garden – called the Paris Garden for some reason I never knew – and saw a giant black-furred bear in chains. It looked like the saddest creature I had ever seen. Wounded and unkempt and resigned to his fate, sitting on the ground. The bear was a celebrity. A major draw of Bankside. ‘Sackerson’ they called him. And there would be many times I would see or hear him in action over the coming weeks and months, pink-eyed, clawing dogs from his throat, his mouth frothing with rage, as the crowd roared in cruel and fevered excitement. It was the only time the bear ever seemed alive, when it was fighting off death. And I would often think of that bear, and that pointless will to survive, through whatever kind of cruelty and pain life chose to throw in his direction.
Anyway, on that first day, I had followed Rose’s directions but I did not necessarily feel like I had come to the right place. It was far enough away from the noise of the soapmakers, though not as far as I would have liked from a shit-smelling tannery. There were some people milling around. There was a woman in green, with a blackened tooth and coarsely powdered face, staring at me with some curiosity as she leaned against the wall of a stone building with a painted sign depicting a cardinal’s hat. This, as I already suspected, was one of the many brothels in the area. The busiest, it turned out, with a flurry of trade at any time of day. There was also an inn. The Queen’s Tavern. It was one of the more pristine buildings in the area, although its clientele turned out to be at the filthier end of the scale.
There was an open space in front of this pub and the brothel, a rectangle of grass where people hung about, and that was the spot where I decided to stand.
I took a deep breath.
And then I started to play.
There was no shame in music. There was no shame even in playing music. Even Queen Elizabeth herself could strum the odd instrument or two. But playing music in public – in both France, and here in England – was something you didn’t do if you were from a noble background. Certainly you didn’t do it on the street. For the son of a French count and countess to be there, playing music in the least salubrious part of Bankside, would have been something of a disgrace.
And yet, I played.
I played some French chansons my mother had taught me and people walked by and raised the occasional eyebrow. But throughout the day my confidence grew and I switched to English songs and ballads and I quickly acquired an audience. Once or twice, someone in the audience even threw a penny. I had seen from the other performers that the thing to do was to take around a hat at regular intervals – much as buskers still do today – but I had no hat, so I went around after every couple of songs with my left shoe, hopping around, which the crowd seemed to enjoy as much as the music. The audience was a strange and intimidating mix of watermen and hawkers and drunks and prostitutes and theatregoers. Half heading from the tenements to the south and half – the half more prone to losing pennies – from across the bridge. It may have been because of the gawping crowd that I found I played best when I closed my eyes. At the end of the first day, I had made enough to pay for the basket of fruit. By the end of the week, I had paid for a new basket.
‘Don’t get ahead of yourself, Tom Smith,’ said Rose, stifling her smile, eating the hot rabbit pie I had bought on my way home. ‘You still have your lodgings to pay for.’
‘Can we have a meat pie every day?’ asked Grace, her face decorated in pastry crumbs. ‘It’s a lot better than stew and shitting parsnips.’
‘Parsnips do not shit, Grace.’
‘And better for you than parsnips too,’ I told her, recounting the wisdom of the day. ‘You’d never catch the queen or a nobleman eating a parsnip.’
Rose rolled her eyes. ‘We are not noblemen, though, that is the thing.’
To them I was just Tom Smith from Suffolk and t
hat was how it would have to stay. And besides, I knew I would never be a count. I would never live in a fine house again. There would be no manservants for me. My parents were dead. France was a hostile world to me. I was a street performer in London. Any airs above that station would only lead to trouble.
I had duly paid my first two weeks’ lodgings by the following Tuesday. And from that moment on, I was an equal in the cottage, and part of the family. I felt, in short, like I belonged, and I tried my best to ignore the future and the problems that might come. While singing a madrigal to a large pre-theatre crowd or watching Rose’s cheeks bloom with colour, mid-laugh, I could imagine that I was happy.
Grace wanted to learn how to play the lute so one night I began giving her lessons. Her hand hung over the strings like a spider dangling from a roof. I repositioned it, so her fingers were parallel with the length of the instrument.
She wanted to learn how to play ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘The Sweet and Merry Month of May’, two of her favourites. I was a bit worried about teaching her ‘Greensleeves’. As with much of the popular music throughout history, ‘Greensleeves’ was a wildly inappropriate tune for a child to know. I wasn’t that worldly wise at that time but I was wise enough to know that Lady Greensleeves was the standard insult du jour for promiscuous women. Her sleeves were green because of all that outdoor sex she was supposedly having. But still, Grace was adamant, and I didn’t want to burst her innocence in the name of protecting it, and so I obliged her with lessons. She was quite hard to teach, wanting to run before she could walk, but we persevered with each other. We played outside on midsummer’s eve and I turned to see Rose watching us from the window, smiling.
One evening, around the beginning of autumn, Rose came into my room. She was tired. She seemed different. A bit muted, a bit lost.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘A million little things. No matter.’
There was something I felt she wanted to tell me but didn’t.