After we married, Rose and I moved too. The reason for this was quite simple. The longer we stayed in one place, the more dangerous it became. Rose’s idea was to head further out, to one of the villages, but I knew of the potentially perilous consequences of this, so I suggested we do the opposite. I suggested we go and live inside the walls, go where we could disappear into the safety of crowds, and so we moved to Eastcheap, and life was good for a while.
Yes, there was rot and rats and misery all around us, but we had each other. The problem was, of course, that, although I was ageing, I wasn’t ageing at the same speed as Rose. She was now twenty-seven years old, and looked it. While I was, gradually, starting to look young enough to be her son.
I said to people I was eighteen, which I could just about get away with, at least at the Boar’s Head Inn, where I had started to play most nights of the week, but by the time Rose came to me and told me she wasn’t bleeding, and that she thought she was pregnant, I had already felt like I was endangering her. Anyway, it was true. And I had no idea if the news was wonderful or devastating. She was pregnant. We had hardly enough money to feed ourselves, and now there was going to be a third mouth to feed.
Of course, there were other worries too. I worried something would happen to Rose. After all, I had heard of so many women dying during childbirth that it seemed a wholly ordinary occurrence. So I kept the windows closed against the cold. And I prayed for God to protect her.
And, for once in my life, nothing terrible happened.
What happened was this. We had a daughter. We called her Marion.
I would hold her in my arms while she was still wrapped in swaddling bonds, and I used to sing to her in French to calm her when she cried, and it generally seemed to work.
I loved her, instantly. Of course, most parents love their children instantly. But I mention it here because I still find it a remarkable thing. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief, but in reverse, is one of the wonders about being human.
She was small, though. Obviously babies, as a rule, are small and delicate but back in those days the delicacy came with an extra edge.
‘Will she last, Tom?’ Rose used to say, when Marion was asleep and we watched her, seeking the comfort of her every breath. ‘God won’t take her, will He?’
‘No. She’s as healthy as a goose,’ I used to say.
Rose obsessed over memories of Nat and Rowland, her dead brothers. Any time Marion coughed – or even made any kind of noise that could be loosely interpreted as one – Rose would become ashen and declare, ‘That’s how it began with Rowland!’
At night she would watch the stars, not quite knowing what she was watching them for, but knowing that our fates – and the fate of Marion – were written on them.
All of this anxiety took its toll on Rose, who became very quiet and withdrawn in the following months. She looked pale and tired, and kept blaming herself for being a terrible mother, which she wasn’t at all. I wonder now if it was a form of postnatal depression. She was always up before it was light. And became more religious than she had ever been, saying prayers even as she held Marion. She lost her appetite, eating barely more than a few mouthfuls of pottage a day. She never worked now, or sold fruit at the market, as Marion had taken over her days, and I think she missed the company and liveliness of the time, so I encouraged Grace to come and see her, which she did from time to time, bringing baby clothes or calming ointments from the apothecary, along with her earthy humour.
We had lovely neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, who’d had nine children of their own, five of whom were still alive, and so Holwice – although in her fifties, worked now as a wool-walker at the watermill – had lots of childcare advice. It was the usual kind of stuff. Open the windows to ward away bad spirits. No bathing. A dab of breast milk and rosewater solution on the baby’s forehead to aid sleep.
But Rose thought all manner of things could endanger little Marion (and she was, always, little, which added to Rose’s concern). She would get cross with herself, or me, for instance, if either of us scratched our head.
‘It is a dirty habit, Tom. It could make her sick!’
‘I am sure it won’t.’
‘You must stop it, Tom. You must stop it. And you mustn’t belch around her.’
‘I didn’t know I did belch around her.’
‘And you must wipe your mouth after drinking ale. And be quiet when you come home at night. You always wake her.’
‘I am sorry.’
Other times, when Marion was asleep, Rose would just burst out crying for no apparent reason, and ask me to hold her, which I did. Often, when I came back from a night playing music, I would hear her tears as I entered the door.
Anyway, I don’t know why I dwell on this. This was only a matter of months. And Rose returned back to her old self by the end of summer. I suppose I am relaying it because it added to my guilt. I knew, deep down, that I was part of the strain on things. Rose had, of the two of us, been the strong one, the organiser and initiator, the one who always knew what was best to do for the both of us. And it was her strength that had, obviously, enabled Rose to marry me, knowing all that she knew.
But, out of sorts, her doubts rose up. Even if Marion survived infancy, and childhood, what then? What would happen when she looked older than her father? The questions, we both knew, would breed like rabbits.
I had a new worry too. While Rose stayed concerned that Marion would die, or otherwise overtake me, I worried with an equal intensity that she wouldn’t. What I mean is, I worried she would be like me. I worried she would be abnormal. That she would reach the age of thirteen and then stop getting any older. I worried that Marion would face the same problems – or even worse ones – for I knew (of course I knew) that women were the ones who had to die at the bottom of rivers to prove their innocence.
I couldn’t sleep at night, however much ale I had drunk (and the quantity was increasing at a daily rate). I kept thinking of Manning, still alive, probably still in London. Though we never encountered him, I often had the sense of him. I sometimes imagined I could feel his closeness, as if his malevolent essence was contained in shadows or cesspits or the single hand of a church clock.
Superstition was rising everywhere. People like, occasionally, to see human life as a generally smooth upwardly sloping line towards enlightenment and knowledge and tolerance, but I have to say that has never been my experience. It isn’t in this century and it wasn’t in that one. The arrival of King James onto the throne let superstition off the lead. King James, who not only wrote Daemonologie but also asked puritanical translators to refashion the Bible, was a boost for intolerance.
The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.
And so our fears grew. One night in the Boar’s Head, a fight started when a group of men turned on one of their members and accused him of devil worship. Another night I got speaking to a butcher who refused to take any pork from a certain farmer, on account that he believed all his pigs were ‘dark spirits’ and their meat could corrupt the soul. He gave no evidence for this but he believed it with a passion, and it caused me to remember the case of a pig in Suffolk that had once stood trial and had been burned at the stake on account of being a demon.
We never went to the Globe to see Macbeth, for obvious reasons, but it was no coincidence that this tale of politics and supernatural malevolence was the most popular and talked-about piece of entertainment at the time. I wonder, now, if Shakespeare would have been so kind to me. And if, in this new environment, he believed the death of Henry Hemmings had been justified. But I also had more specific worries.
There was a man at the end of our street, a smartly dressed man who read aloud emphatically enunciated dialogues from Daemonologie, alongside extracts from the Kin
g’s Bible. Also, by the time Marion was four, even our once kindly neighbours, Ezekiel and Holwice, were beginning to give me funny looks. I don’t know if this was because they had noticed I wasn’t ageing, or if it was more that the age difference between Rose and me was starting to look a little wide. She seemed a good decade older than me.
And even though we never saw Manning again, I would hear his name. Once, in the street, a woman I had never seen before came up to me and stuck her finger in my chest.
‘Mr Manning told me about you. He told everyone about you . . . They say you have a child. They should have smothered her at birth, to be safe.’
Another time, while Rose was out alone with Marion she was spat at, for living with the ‘enchanter’.
Marion, now a girl, was aware of such things. She was an intelligent, sensitive child, and seemed to carry a sadness around with her a lot of the time. She cried after that incident. And she would fall very quiet if she heard us talk, however quietly, about our worries.
Slowly, and for her sake, we began to change the way we lived. We deliberately made sure we were never out together. We tried to stop questions when they arose. And we managed it.
Marion, being a girl, and not being nobility, did not go to school. Yet we still thought it important for her to read, to be able to broaden her mind and give her places in her thoughts to hide inside. Reading was a rare skill, in those days, but was one I possessed. And, as I had grown up with a mother who could read (albeit in French) I saw nothing strange in the idea of a girl reading.
She was, it turned out, an extremely gifted and curious reader. We possessed only two books but she adored them. She could read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene by the age of six, and by the age of eight could quote Michel de Montaigne – I had an English translation of his essays that I had acquired years before at Southwark’s Wednesday market. The book was damaged – the pages unfixed from the spine – and I’d bought it for two pennies. She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’
‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?’
And she would give the tiniest nod. ‘I quote others only in order the better to express myself,’ she’d say, which was itself, I sensed, another quote.
Then one day she read something else.
You see, she sometimes went outside on her own in the morning to play. And one day she came in, while I was learning a new lute song – ‘I Saw My Lady Weepe’ by John Dowland – and she looked a little like someone had slapped her in the face.
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
She seemed out of breath. It took her a moment. She was frowning at me, with an intensity and seriousness that seemed beyond her age. ‘Are you Satan, Father?’
I laughed. ‘Only in the mornings.’
She wasn’t in joking mood, so I quickly added, ‘No, Marion. What would make you ask such a thing?’
And then she showed me.
Someone had scraped the words ‘Satan Resides Here’ on our door. It was a horrifying thing to see, but more horrifying to know Marion had seen it too.
And when Rose saw it she knew, absolutely, what needed to be done.
‘We need to leave London.’
‘But where would we go?’
That seemed, to Rose, to be a secondary question. She was resolute. ‘We need to start again.’
‘To do what?’
She pointed at the lute leaning beside the door.
‘People’s ears like music in other places.’
I stared at the lute. At the darkness of the small holes amid the twisting decoration of the wood. I imagined, ridiculously, a world inside there. Deep in the shell of the lute. Where some miniature version of ourselves could live, safe and invisible and unharmed.
London, now
I had brought my lute in for year nine. I am holding it, leaning against my desk.
‘This was hand-crafted way over four hundred years ago in France. The design is a little more intricate than English lutes of that period.’
‘So that’s what guitars used to look like in the olden days?’ wonders Danielle.
‘Lutes aren’t technically guitars. They’re obviously close cousins but a lute has a lighter kind of sound. Look at the shape of it. Like a teardrop. And look at the depth. Look at the back. It’s called a shell. The strings are made of sheep’s intestines. They give it a very precise perfect sound.’
Danielle makes a disgusted face.
‘This was the instrument once upon a time. This was the keyboard and electric guitar in one. Even the queen had one. But playing music in public was a bit vulgar so that was generally left to the lower orders.’
I play a few notes. The first bars of ‘Flow My Tears’. They seem unimpressed.
‘That was a big tune, back in the day.’
‘Was that from the eighties?’ wonders Marcus, the boy with the gold watch and the complicated hairstyle who sits next to Anton.
‘No, a little earlier.’
But that made me remember something.
I start to play a chord – E minor – and keep going at it in short stabs before switching to A minor.
‘I know this song,’ says Danielle. ‘My mum loves this.’
Anton is smiling and nodding his head. And then I start singing the words to the song, to ‘Billie Jean’, in a slightly ridiculous falsetto.
The class is laughing now. Some of them are singing along.
And then, because of the commotion, Camille and her class of year sevens, on their way outside for one of her French lessons on the playing field, stop to watch me. Camille opens the door to hear.
She is clapping in time from behind the glass. She smiles and closes her eyes and sings the chorus.
And then her eyes open and are on me and I feel happily terrified or fearfully happy, and now even Daphne is out in the corridor so I stop playing. And the kids release a collective moan. And Daphne says, ‘Don’t stop for me. There’s always time for a lute rendition of Michael Jackson at Oakfield. Love that song.’
‘Me too,’ says Camille.
But of course I already know that.
Canterbury, 1616–1617
Canterbury had been where many French Huguenots, people like myself and my mother, had settled. The Duke of Rochefort had indeed recommended that my mother move to either London or Canterbury, telling her that Canterbury – a ‘godly place’ – was very welcoming to outsiders seeking refuge. My mother had ignored that advice, seeking the quiet of Suffolk instead, and mistaking, fatally, quietness with security. But the advice had stayed with me.
So we moved to Canterbury.
We managed to find a warm, comfortable cottage, paying less in rent than we ever had in London. We were impressed by the cathedral and the clean air, but other things were a struggle. Not least, work.
No one paid for musicians in the inns and alehouses there, and there was no theatre work either. I resorted to playing in the street, which was only busy on days when crowds were gathering at the gallows in the market square.
Then, when the money became too tight (after all of two weeks) Rose and Marion, now nine, gained work selling flowers. Marion was such a miraculous musical Montaigne-quoting girl. I often spoke to her in French and she picked up the language, though Rose was a little bit uncertain about this, as if all this education was going to be another thing that would separate her from the masses and mark her difference.
Marion would sometimes walk around the room in circles, in her own world, humming songs softly, or making clicking sounds with her mouth to amuse herself. She often seemed somewhere else entirely and would stare longingly out of the window. Sometimes some invisible worry would crease her forehead that she would never tell me about. She reminded me a lot of her grandmother. The sensitivity and intell
igence and musicality. The mystery. She preferred playing the pipe (a tin pipe bought for tuppence at the market) to the lute. She liked music ‘made of breath not formed from fingers’.
She would play the pipe in the street. She would walk along playing it. I remember, most of all, a wonderful Saturday morning – with the sun brightening the world – when Marion and I headed into town to the cobbler’s to get Rose’s shoes mended. While I was talking to the cobbler Marion stood outside and played ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ on the pipe.
A few moments later, she ran in and held up a shining clean silver penny, as bright as day. She had a broad, rare smile on her face. I had never seen her so happy.
‘A lady just gave me this. I will keep this coin and it will give us luck, Father, you’ll see.’
However, our luck didn’t last long.
The very next day we were all out together as a family, on our way to church, when a group of teenage boys began mocking us.
They were laughing at me and Rose holding hands, and we stopped doing so, then looked at each other, ashamed of our shame.
Then our landlord, an old growling badger of a man called Mr Flint, started to ask things every time he collected the rent money.
‘Are you her son, or . . .?’
‘So, your girl can speak French?’
And, with grim inevitability, things descended from there. Gossip gained life here too. We began to inhabit a world of whispers and sharp looks and cold shoulders. It was easy to think that even the starlings were chirping about us. We stopped going to church, to try to hide out of view, but of course this stoked the embers of suspicion even more. And instead of scratching words on our door, they scratched overlapping circles into the tree outside our house, to ward off the evil spirits we were thought to associate with.
One day at the market a man claiming to be a witchhunter came up to Marion and told her she was the child of a witch, a witch who kept her husband young for her own pleasure. And then the man told Marion that she too, as the progeny of a witch, must be a demon.