The Skull and the Nightingale (14 page)

It has struck me before now as strange that the excitement of physical love, like the seemingly antithetical tedium of a stagecoach journey, intensifies the immediate experience, yet in retrospect shrinks it to mere generalization. So it was on this occasion. Once I had torn off my own clothes and snuffed the last candle, being almost burned by the hot wax on my fingers, the night became a compound of physical exertions and sensations, shifting shadows, groans and cries, caresses and clutches, a mingling of perfumes and rank animal odors. What I can recall with certainty is the moment of scalding pleasure when the ravening bird first plunged into the bush, and later Kitty’s scream as the eager spasm made me buck and rear like the victim of an electrical shock.

My mistress proved herself a demurely deft practitioner in all the amorous arts. After she had twice spent, with an ardor that seemed to leave her in a swoon, it was her skillful manipulation that roused me to a further and prolonged encounter.

I awoke in the small hours with a full bladder and a headache, still closely clasping my sleeping Dulcinea. Our bodies were slippery with mingled sweat. The amorous excitement that had exalted me the night before was entirely dissipated. It seemed to me that I was incongruously sharing a bed with a stranger. Becoming aware that my now shrunken member was gummed to her thigh by the dried residuum of vital fluids, I cautiously detached it. She did not stir, and we remained locked in a posture of intimacy no longer agreeable to me. With stealth I extricated myself till I could lie on my back, staring up toward the ceiling. Hot, itching, and calmly dispirited, I was unable to sleep again until I had resolved my disillusion into the following couplets:

The pleasures that in prospect shone so fair

Dissolve and vanish in the morning air.

How slight, how brief, the spell desire can cast:

The goal once gained, the rapture cannot last.

Th’ ethereal maid, who cost so many a sigh—

Alas, I view her with a literal eye.

Though goddess-like she seemed while yet half known,

She squeaks like Moll, she sweats like greasy Joan;

While I, self-cheated, bilked of heav’nly bliss,

Must plunge, forlorn, from that world back to this.

The lines have little merit, but they faithfully record my sense of weary discontent as I lay beside the sleeping Miss Brindley at dawn.

When we rose next morning I found little to cheer me. Where love is in the case, it may be that the closeness of minds and hearts overcomes all other considerations; but where it is not, and desire ceases to activate the imagination, the intimacies of toilet and chamber pot must be fatal to the fading ideal. I could still glimpse in Kitty, as in an altered perspective, the qualities that had fed my fantasy, but they now seemed to constitute but a trivial proportion of her personality.

Of course I contrived that we breakfasted and parted on amicable terms. I am not always kind, but I hope that, more often than not, I can behave kindly.

I record these reactions as I experienced them at the time, since I know from past encounters that a day or two of recuperation may alter my feelings and even my opinions. It is nonetheless the case that, though physically appeased, I returned to my lodgings disturbed by what seemed to me another application of the treacherous laws of compensation, satisfaction of the body conducing to dissatisfaction in the mind.

I will confide further as time passes and my animal spirits revive.

Yours, &c.

* * *

My dear Godfather,

Yesterday, acting upon impulse, I headed westward to join the crowds gathering for the latest round of executions at Tyburn.

Grim though the experience proved to be, it gave much food for thought. The throng which lines the route was animated by passions hard to interpret. There was exhilaration, made morbid by its presiding cause—the lust to witness death. There was gratification at seeing criminals suffer for their crimes: notorious malefactors are roundly jeered as they depart for Hades. In some cases, by contrast, a condemned man may be so popular, with parts of the crowd at least, as to be cheered to the echo.

Among the five prisoners to be executed today was the highwayman Jack Gardiner, who has won the hearts of the public through rumored acts of magnanimity and an escape from prison to rival that of Jack Sheppard. There was resounding applause for him, and his name was shouted out, as though in celebration. I had secured a station close to the scaffold where not long ago Lord Ferrers arrived in his own coach to be hanged in a suit of satin. On this occasion there was nothing but squalor.

The condemned men in their cart passed within a few feet of me, each with a noose already about his neck. It was hard to comprehend that shortly they would be men no more, but swinging carcasses. Gardiner sat erect, with a bold smile, waving to his admirers like a hero returning from war. As he drew opposite, he looked me directly in the eye and nodded, still smiling, as though tipping the wink to an old friend. It was uncanny to be in direct communication with a man about to leap off the edge of the world.

In contrast two or three of his companions appeared so drunk as scarcely to know where they were. It was as though the celebrated Jack Gardiner were the leading actor in a theatrical event. The other condemned men, and even the chaplain and the hangman himself, were no more than the minor performers needed to fill out the scene. There was a crescendo of cheering and jeering as the last formalities were completed at the scaffold. The ropes dangling from the victims’ throats were fastened to the gallows, prayers were gabbled, and a few parting words were spoken by each of the prisoners, inaudible in the hubbub. There came a defiant wave from Gardiner, who had the heroism to play out his role to the end, before the cart pulled away, amid a clamor of enthusiasm and lamentation, and the men were left dancing in air. At once their friends rushed forward to shorten their ordeal by dragging at their legs to break their necks. The men who had passed me but a few minutes earlier had been extinguished, and their souls, if any, dispersed.

Twenty-four hours later I am still shaken by what I saw. I find consolation in the thought that it is better to be shocked by such scenes than to remain unmoved by them.

I remain, &c.

I
continued uneasy at the extent to which my compact with Mr. Gilbert was encroaching upon my daily doings, my thoughts, and even my feelings. I had attended the party for Eckersley solely in search of epistolary topics and then found difficulty in concluding my account of it. It seemed that I was obliged to play oaf or prig. It was with misgivings that I had settled on the latter role.

The emotions I experienced at Tyburn had been similarly falsified by my intention to write about them. I had felt what I described myself as feeling, but in a dulled way, as at one remove, and had been in any case somewhat stupefied by the clamor and squalor around me.

There had been downright omissions from my description of the visit to Crocker. In conversation with him I had come to reveal more about my relations with my godfather than I had disclosed to anyone else save Sarah and more recently Cullen. I had spoken the more freely in that he had himself made admissions which I would have felt it a breach of confidence to pass on to my godfather.

“My habits of life,” he told me, “are shaped by a single determining consideration—namely that I am unlikely to live as long as a further ten years. So physicians have assured me. My father, whom I somewhat resemble in figure and constitution, died in his thirty-eighth year. The bulk that I am confined in, or consist of—depending upon your view of such matters—will soon overtax the pump that moves it—and so good night. This is an unfortunate circumstance, but all is not gloom. Laboring under such disadvantages, I conclude that I deserve consolation, and therefore feel free to indulge my tastes and curiosities and enjoy my life as long as it lasts.”

But it was in writing of my night with Kitty Brindley that I had experienced my greatest difficulties. Here was matter, I had thought, perfectly suited to my godfather’s tastes and curiosities—and after all it was only fair to give him what he was paying for. In truth I had performed and responded pretty much as I said. But I had been distracted, even in the heat of carnal acts, by the need to be aware of my own sensations. Later it had occurred to me to respond also to Mr. Gilbert’s stated uneasiness with the delusions of pastoral: only when I had returned to Cathcart Street did I cobble together my couplets of disillusion.

My conquest of Kitty had indeed left me with a sense of discomfort. The source of it, however, was no means merely physical. My knowledge that I was to lay the transaction open to my godfather’s prurience somehow tainted it. It was now clearer to me than ever that I could not endure to have my whole existence exposed to him in this way. I was confirmed in my resolve to inhabit two distinct narratives. The more superficial one, available to Gilbert and manipulated as necessary, could include Horn, Latimer, Crocker, in his public guise, and, for all my reluctance, Kitty. A second life, of which he would know nothing, would take in my friendship with Matt Cullen, the private face of Tom Crocker, and my pursuit of Sarah Kinsey. In
that
narrative I could be truly myself.

My dear Godfather,

Horn and I were strolling in St. James’s Park when we happened to pass Latimer and Lord Ashton, who were walking the other way. The trivial incident was pleasing to me for the intricacy of the responses it elicited. Lord Ashton looked quite properly blank, for neither Horn nor I have ever spoken to him. Latimer contrived to intimate, through the slightest of inclinations of the head and the ghost of a simper, that he knew us and was not too proud to acknowledge that he knew us, but that he was too preoccupied in serious conversation with a Minister of State to vouchsafe more than that. Horn and I correspondingly conveyed that we were gratified to see a friend of ours in such exalted company, but that we were, of course, too conscious of our own lack of consequence to think of addressing him. To our credit we were able to walk on till we were hidden behind a large tree before bursting into loud laughter at the absurd solemnity of the exchange. Later that same day we mocked Latimer unmercifully for his affectation. Serene as ever, he took our taunts in good part; the truth is that, thanks to family connections, he is a rising man. It may well be that in a year or two none of us will find anything in the least surprising or comical in such an encounter.

I myself mingled with the modestly mighty when paying a further visit to Lord Vincent. The best of my conversation, however, was with his cousin Mrs. Jennings, a witty lady of mature years. She told me that she knew you well some decades ago, and thought you a talented fellow, bound for a career in government. She was surprised, she said, that you were eventually content to withdraw into the country. You will, I am sure, remember her: she is the aunt of Mr. Thorpe, whom I have met at your house.

Today being fine, I paid my sixpence to be ferried once more across the crowded Thames—on this occasion to visit Greenwich. I was curious to see a remarkable invention of which you will no doubt have heard—the “camera obscura.” Let me describe it, in case you have not seen it in operation. In a dark chamber the spectator looks down at the surface of a small round table upon which is thrown, in miniature—through some contrivance of mirrors, lenses, and prisms—a reflected picture of some portion of the surrounding countryside. By the adjustment of a lever the scene may be shifted, so that in the course of a visit, one may successively see everything within the landscape that surrounds the building: the streets and houses, the open fields with their trees, windmills and sheep, the river with its busy traffic. Every movement is visible: the progress of a boat or a wagon, the swaying of branches, the fluttering of a flag. Here is reality transformed into a series of living pictures for your contemplation. The material world seems tamed by diminution. It is even possible to put one’s hand upon the table and, as it were, pick up one of the moving ships.

Yet this magical device is subject to a limitation, being dependent upon the brightness of the sky. As I was watching, half entranced at seeing the countryside of Greenwich spread out before me, it happened that the sun was covered by a cloud, with the result that the pictured scene subsided into grayness.

I ate at the Anchor, down by the river, and found myself reflecting about food in general. We human beings, together with cats, dogs, foxes, ferrets, and birds, are among the limited number of carnivorous creatures in these islands. Horses, cows, sheep, goats, and rabbits seem to manage very well without devouring the carcasses of their fellow creatures, but it does not appear that this dietary habit is associated with any discernible benevolence in their disposition. I would like this observation to lead me to some deep moral truth, but like most of my incidental speculations, it takes me nowhere. Perhaps Mr. Yardley could shed further light on the subject.

After the meal, urgently needing to make water, I found myself obliged to do so directly into the Thames. It struck me that under such extreme pressure a physical sensation was produced disquietingly similar to the amorous spasm. On the other hand, being somewhat intoxicated, I also found aesthetic pleasure in the innumerable sparkles of light in the arc of urine. There is beauty in all things, I piously concluded.