The Pilgrim (11 page)

Uncle Roger and I wrote each other once a month. At the beginning of February, I asked him if I could return to the Hempstead and resume useful and wholesome work with his sheep. Roger and Wells both entreated me to remain in London; the woolen business was bad because of the rapid decline of the price of cloth. This was the result of the great preparation for war between Protestants and the Papists in most parts of the Continent. The twelve-year truce between Spain and the States of the Low Countries had ended. The German Protestant princes stood ready to defend themselves against the Emperor. Europeans could no longer afford to buy high-quality English cloth. Our merchants had piles of unsold stock on the quays. They bought no more cloth from the clothiers across the country, so the clothiers ceased producing and let their workers go.

Uncle Roger wrote, “The streets of Winterbourne are crowded with idle woolen workers living on charity and poor relief.”

I thought of Goodwife Stone carding, John Johnson at his loom, and Robert Hayman raising the cloth's nap, who were now living on charity and poor relief.

Wells wrote that my investment in his business at present earned me only one pound per annum. My income was thereafter diminished to thirteen pounds a year.

Seeking to feel some emotion, I took leave of work on three wintry afternoons and went to Blackfriars Theatre, where I saw three plays by the late William Shakespeare:
The
Tragedy
of
Othello—The Moor of Venice
,
As
You
Like
It
, and
The
Tempest
.

Rigdale said, “Mark me! Going to the theatre will lead you to sin. Plays nourish idleness, and idleness doth Minister vice.”

For a few hours, on those afternoons, I inhabited the imaginary worlds that the poet had drained of Christ and filled instead with ravishing poetry. Noblemen occupied stools upon the stage. When the play was over, they with small cost purchased the acquaintance of the pretty boy actors and took them away.

Toward the end of
The
Tempest
, an actor wearing a false grey beard declaimed, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded by a sleep.” The beauty lodged in the words of the verse consoled me. The sensation lasted but a moment. And then I re-awakened to my desolate life.

At the end of March, the Devil tempted me to revive my somnolent sensibilities by watching bear baiting on a Thursday afternoon in a ring at Paris Garden in Southwark. Rigdale said, “No godly Christian would see poor beasts rend, tear, and kill others for his bloodthirsty pleasure! And although they be savage animals to us and seek our destruction, yet we are not to abuse them for His sake, who made them and whose creatures they are.”

A bear with little pink eyes pursued one of the mastiffs, while the other five dogs pursued the bear. One dog clung with his jaws to the bear's left front leg, and the bear bit him through his neck bone and got free. Another dog clung to the bear's belly, just above his private parts. The bear sat up and, with a front paw, struck the dog's left shoulder. He would not relinquish his hold. The bear ripped open the dog's breast with his front claws. I glimpsed the dog's beating heart. The drunken spectators cheered.

Then it was all biting and clawing and yelping and barking and howling and roaring in the ring. The bear tossed the dogs, one after the other. They shrieked and whimpered. When the bear was loose once more, he shook his massive head, spattering his viscous, bloody slaver in the air. The three remaining dogs leaped on him again.

Caring not if the bear lived or died, I took my leave, went to a nearby tavern, and became drunk.

• • •

I could not abide London while the whole population joyously celebrated St. Bartholomew Fair on the twenty-fourth of August. So, like the two years previous, I saved my money and, with Appletree's permission, returned to the Hempstead in Winterbourne for that selfsame week.

My aunt Eliza's left eye was covered by a cataract. I recited to uncle Roger the metaphor I had gleaned from
The
Tempest.

He said, “I once dreamed that I died, but I remained aware that my swelled body was rotting. My eyes shriveled in their sockets, and my jawbone fell off. My shankbones showed through my putrefied flesh. I thought, one moment more of this, and I'll go mad. Then I was alive again.

“My restored body was drifting in the night sky towards a certain star that I knew was my soul. I heard a voice, resounding throughout the heavens and earth, saying, ‘In the end, the soul cometh to meet itself.' Then I awoke. Such is the stuff I'm made on.”

Tom Foot, as the bailiff of husbandry, had sold one hundred and fifty of my uncle Roger's sheep. Foot had a surfeit of out-of-work woolen workers who wanted to be hired as day labourers in harvest. With uncle Roger's assent, Foot had lowered the wages of the five men he had hired from sixpence to four pence a day.

There was a local drought for the second consecutive year. Since the previous year, the price of wheat had risen from twenty-five shillings the quarter to forty-five shillings. Uncle Roger said, “With God's help, I will be a rich man.”

Herewith, what I learned from my uncle Roger about Winterbourne:

Item.
The previous September, a constable, the churchwardens, and overseers of my father's old parish had been given powers to purchase, erect, or procure a suitable building to be used as a workhouse for setting poor and idle persons on work. The cost of the above was to be paid for through rates assessed and collected in each parish in town.

Item.
The said officials had done nothing except appoint a governor who chose another constable to search out and apprehend persons to be punished with fetters and a moderate whipping.

Item.
Six people in the town recently died of the plague.

To occupy myself, I reaped, bound the sheaths, and gleaned and winnowed the meager crops with the other day labourers in harvest for a paltry four pence a day.

One evening, after winnowing the south field with Esau, I asked him how he felt abut giving the testimony that had condemned his friend Peter Patch.

He said, “I rejoiced in doing my Christian duty.”

At supper, uncle Roger told me, “Patch's whole body shivered, shook, and trembled in the cart beneath the gallows. His teeth chattered. He cried out, ‘Kiss me! For Christ's sake, somebody kiss me!' But no one did. The ewe was hanged first, and then it was Patch's turn. It took him a long while to strangle.”

Tom Foot said, “Your face is exceeding pale, Master Charles. You need a dram or two of Aqua Vitae to bring some color back into your cheeks.”

We walked to The Sign of the Bull, where we each drank two drams. A young whore smiled at me and sat down at our table. She had a dimple in her left cheek. Her name was Grace Orchard; she was Foot's friend. She also drank two drams of Aqua Vitae and said, “Good sirs, I am hungry. I have not eaten all the day.”

I bought her a mutton pie. She smiled at me again; I was beguiled by her dimple.

She said, “My mother and I were wool carders who lived in a cottage in South Street. There was not enough work for both of us, so I left home and became a maidservant to a rich farmer named Long Snooke who freely held a farm of eighty-three acres near Hazelbury Bryan.

“I was begotten of a child by him, and he turned me out of doors, calling me a very lewd girl. I was delivered of dead twins in a ditch and became a vagrant. I wandered from parish to parish. I slept under hedges by the road. Last winter, I was arrested for stealing wood worth ten shillings, but the magistrate freed me when I showed him that I had taken but a few rotten roots and green furzes.”

She smiled again, and again I beheld her bewitching dimple. Then she said, “You may have me for a shilling, sir. Tom will tell you that I am well worth it. Tell the gentleman, Tom.”

“In faith, she is.”

“The chamber upstairs hath a feather bed. You can rent it for us from the tapster for another shilling.”

I gave the upstairs door a shove. Grace set her candle on the stool by the bed. I watched her put off all her clothes. She put my shilling in one of her shoes and blew the candle out.

I committed fornication in the dark. For a few minutes, on a fetid feather bed, the Devil fully roused me to life.

• • •

Immediately upon returning to London, I confessed my sin to Rigdale.

He said, “I warned you that going to the theatre would lead you to perdition.”

“You did. I remember. It hath done so.”

“I fear that hell, destruction, and death everlasting will be your fate. Yet ask yourself this: do you still believe in God and accept the principles of Christian worship?”

I said, “Yea and nay; sometimes yes and sometimes no.”

I henceforth fasted upon every Sabbath and read Scripture. I was confounded by the text from Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things.” I am confounded by it still.

Then the Devil came down in great wrath upon me. For well nigh a year, he came unto me in my chamber almost every evening and drove me into the streets or into inns or brothels to seek out comely, young whores. I often drank myself to sleep. Sometimes, half drunk, I went for a walk with the intention of getting a breath of fresh air. I averted my eyes from the street walkers but always found myself in some inn, looking for a comely, young girl who was for sale. Whenever I saw one, Sarah's veiled face came to my mind, and I ran away.

But I returned like a dog to his vomit. The Devil frequently led me to the brothels in Spital Fields, beyond Bishops Gate, and Whitefriars. Night after night, I sat in their parlors for hours without speaking. Then the bawd in a stew in Shoreditch said to me, “Don't be shy, sir. Choose one of my pretty lasses and enjoy yourself.”

I went into a bedchamber with a comely lass and put off all my clothes. A babe wailed from the cradle in a corner. The girl said, “My darling Susan is awake and hungry. I must needs nurse her, or else she will keep crying and spoil your sport. Will you wait, sir? It will not take long.”

I put on my clothes and hastened home. With every subsequent sunset and the coming of the dark, the Devil tempted me, and my resistance to him grew more and more feeble. At length, in February in the year of Christ 1622, I said to Rigdale, “It is only a matter of time before I again surrender to the temptation to fornicate. I have decided that it is a greater evil to live and sin against God than to kill myself. Therefore I will kill myself. But how? Not by hanging. I could not abide that. I will buy a musket and shoot myself in the mouth. I have given the matter much thought. I will prime and load the piece, light the match, stand upon a stool with the butt upon the floor between my bare feet, thrust the muzzle against the back of my throat, and pull the trigger with my big toe.”

Rigdale said, “Join me instead in a new life. Come work with me in a plantation that will soon be established in New England. It will be comprised only of men, so you will be free of the temptation to fornicate. I am going there so that I may at last preach the Gospel without a licence and, with God's grace, awaken slumbering regenerate souls to their heavenly destiny.”

He told me that a member of his church, a former ironmonger named Thomas Weston, had been the treasurer and guiding spirit of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London. In 1620, Weston and his Company had established for profit a settlement of Separatists in New England called the Plymouth Plantation that would trade various and sundry cheap goods with the Indians for beaver skins and hewn timber.

My beloved father, in his heart of hearts, was a Separatist. He believed that the Church of England was no true church because it was a national church governed by the hierarchy of archbishops, and their courts and canons, and thus far removed from the primitive Church of the Gospels. He would have thanked God to see me settled in New England.

Rigdale said that Weston had severed his connection with the Merchant Adventurers, with the idea of establishing a second settlement in New England solely for profit.

He said to me, “A beaver pelt from the Plymouth Plantation sells in London for eleven shillings! Eleven shillings for one pelt! And the timber! A single pine balk fifteen foot in length from New England sells here for one pound, five shillings, and sixpence. We'll be rich!

“This morning, I signed a contract with Mr. Weston to serve as his plantation's joiner for one share of the expected yearly profit together with five pounds, three shillings in money. I am to bring my tool box.”

Weston said to me, “Rigdale says you are a scrivener for attorney Henry Appletree, whose chambers are in Westminster. Appletree represents Edward Williams, the merchant owner of the good ship
Swan
which I recently hired from him for sixty pounds a month, together with a bond of eight hundred pounds.”

I said, “Yes, I know. I copied the contracts. The
Swan
is a seaworthy vessel. As I recall, it hath a burden of ninety tons.”

Weston said, “I would like to hire you as scrivener for my new enterprise. You will sail on the
Swan
with the other men I hire. You will list the names, occupations, shares, yearly wages, and other particulars of the labourers. Also, of all supplies and their purchase costs that are loaded in London upon the
Swan
. I would pay you the same as Rigdale: one share of the expected profit, together with five pounds, three shillings in ready money.”

“How many shares are there in all?”

“Forty-four.”

I said, “I will be your scrivener for eight pounds a year in ready money and one share of the expected profits.”

“I will pay you seven pounds a year.”

“That's what Appletree pays me. You will pay me eight.”