‘Why don’t you,’ she said, as she saw me peering and sniffing at the discoloured sleeve, ‘take it to old Nick?’
‘Old Nick’s got enough to do, surely, without troubling himself with dead man’s wear. Why, he may have the man entire and all without the encumbrance of clothing.’
Though, even as I said it, I considered that if Francis, the meek and inoffensive Francis, were destined for the undying bonfire, then which of us should escape a whipping for our sins? None, my masters, none.
‘Not him, you fool,’ said Nell fondly. ‘Not that old Nick.’
‘Nor young Nick neither,’ I said.
‘Nor you neither, you fool.’
‘Who then?’
‘Old Nick off Paul’s Walk,’ she said.
‘That one. Oh.’
‘You know him?’
‘Never heard of him. Who is he?’
And here my Nell came over coy and simpering so I guessed that this man was someone she had to do with in the way of business, the business of giving pleasure in her case.
‘He is. . he does. . mixtures. . preparations. . compounds. . in his shop. . under the counter. . They say that he. .’
At this point my Nell whispered in my ear a secret concerning this individual, old Nick, and our glorious (but ageing) Queen. What she said is too dangerous to commit to paper but, if it were true, it might shake the foundations of our state, like all gossip.
‘Can you introduce me?’ I said. ‘To your old Nick, not the Queen.’
Cartographers are accustomed to make Jerusalem the centre of this earthly world. But if they considered more carefully they would put our capital in the place of the holy city, for my money. And of all the places in London the very navel is Paul’s and, to be more precise, Paul’s Walk. Here is all of Britain in little, the gulls and the gallants, the captains and the clowns, the cut-throat, the knight and the apple-squire. Here the lawyer parades in front of the idiot, the money-lender walks with the bankrout, and the scholar accompanies the beggar (often one and the same in our poor fallen world). Here will you see the ruffian, the cheater, the Puritan, and all the rest of the crew. Why, you may even glimpse the odd honest citizen. Paul’s Walk is a babel. One would think men had newly discovered their tongues, and each one of them different from any other. To my country eyes it appeared still a little shocking that such a worldly buzz, such a trade in flesh and metal, filled what was meant to be a sanctified place, the nave of a great church. I said as much to Nell.
‘Religion is good for business, Nick. Devotion makes men randy.’
I remembered the noises of my parents on a Sunday night after my father had given what he considered to be a specially fine performance in the pulpit. Perhaps she was right.
Now, late in the afternoon after the play, we made our way through streaming Paul’s Walk, avoiding the peacocking clusters of the gallants, the reefs of the ne’er-do-wells. The men, I noticed, appraised my Nell, slyly or brazenly. Some of them might even know her. Some of them undoubtedly did know her. I did not like the idea of this.
We made our way across the churchyard and to a shop squeezed into a corner. It was the dingiest apothecary’s I’d ever seen.
‘This is the place?’
Nell didn’t reply but pushed open the door. The light outside was strong and it took some moments for my vision to adjust to the gloom indoors. I hadn’t had much to do with apothecaries since my arrival in London Perhaps I bought with me something of the countryman’s distrust of new-fangled city remedies, as well as a suspicion that coney-catchers were to be found not only on the exterior in Paul’s Walk.
Old Nick’s place didn’t hold out much promise. The shop had a squinting slit rather than a window, and little light was allowed in. Wooden boxes and earthenware pots were strewn on lop-sided shelves and the smoky walls were hung with sacs and bladders of animal and vegetable origin. Overhead a stuffed alligator swayed slightly in the draught from the door. I say that it was stuffed, but I believe that at two or three moments during what followed I caught it twitching its tail out of the corner of my eye. On a clear space of the wall behind the counter had been chalked various cabbalistic signs together with pointed stars and overlapping circles and, imperfectly rubbed out, a detailed drawing of a lady sporting a great dildo. There was a smell in the shop, not a completely agreeable one.
‘Hello,’ Nell called, and then after a pause, ‘Nick?’
Silence. The alligator’s eye gleamed in the gloom. I noticed that other impedimenta hung from the ceiling: a couple of large tortoises, a shaft of bone with a saw-like edge, a scaly tail (doubtless a mermaid’s), a kind of tusk (a unicorn’s for certain).
‘This is a waste of time,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what we were doing here anyway. The place made me uneasy.
‘Wait,’ said Nell. ‘He will come when you call him.’
‘Yes,’ said a voice from the corner.
I looked towards the sound. I could have have sworn that the corner was empty when I first surveyed the grimy room. A figure seemed to come together out of the gloom, to assemble itself from patches of light and dark.
‘I always come when my Nell calls.’
The man who shuffled forward was very old. He looked like a plant root or stem that has been hung up in some dusty corner and forgotten. Despite his age his voice had a sweet, almost youthful quality, but it set the hairs on my arms bristling.
‘This is also Nick,’ said Nell to the apothecary. ‘Master Revill, that is.’
‘Call me Old Nick,’ said the old man. ‘That is how I am known.’
I made a very slight bow.
‘He wanted to meet you,’ said Nell.
‘But now he is not so sure.’
I, by the by, had said nothing.
‘Did you recover your ring?’ said the apothecary.
‘It was as you had said,’ said Nell. She turned to me, eager to convince. ‘I lost that ring — you know the one I mean. I came to Old Nick and he was able to tell me where my ring was. He reads his secret book and shuts himself away all in the dark and then he tells me that my ring is in the corner of Jenny’s room, hidden in the dust.’
Probably because he’d put it there himself, I thought.
‘Master Revill is thinking that if I knew where your ring was, then it was because I had placed it there.’
‘No, no,’ I said too quickly. ‘I am lost in admiration at the skill of your friend, Nell.’
‘Master Revill needs convincing,’ said Old Nick.
He spoke slowly and his words spread in soft, sticky pools.
‘And you tried the remedy?’ he said to Nell. He was obviously establishing his credentials with me, through her. ‘Plantain, knot grass, comfrey-’
‘ — and powdered unicorn’s horn, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Nothing so fabulous,’ said the old apothecary. ‘There is no magic here, merely a newt’s liver and sliced snakeskin. But it worked, Nell, it worked?’
‘Oh, I am a new woman, sir,’ said my mistress.
I felt angry and jealous. What was this? I knew nothing of Nell’s dealings with this man — and if anyone was in a position to make a new woman of her. .
‘But Master Revill still needs convincing?’
‘Why should you trouble to do that, sir?’ I said. I’d made a mistake coming here. Why had Nell brought me to this dingy shop? ‘I am only a player, a poor jobbing player, no gentleman, not worth the trouble of convincing.’
‘How is Master Wilson’s mother?’ said Old Nick.
‘Who?’
‘You are standing in Master Wilson’s shoes, I believe, while he is away attending to his mother, who lies sick. For as long as he is absent and in Norfolk you will work with the Chamberlain’s Men.’
This time the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. But then I considered: Nell and this old man were. . acquaintances (I wondered what payment she’d given him for revealing the whereabouts of her ring). What more likely than that she’d told him something about me?
‘You didn’t tell me that, Nick,’ said Nell to me, reproachfully. And this, I now remembered, was true. Nell had the notion that I had been taken on by the Chamberlain’s more or less for good. I had not made clear the true state of affairs, for I wanted to impress. So she couldn’t have told her friend Old Nick what she didn’t know. . therefore the apothecary must, surely, have other sources of information.