i) to see if I needed anything;
ii) to know if I would take supper with her and her mother that night (an invitation, she was careful to tell me, not extended to any old lodger);
iii) to find out whether I’d recovered from the runs after said supper;
iv) to tell me the house was haunted (it was — by her);
v) to request a light (for her candle had blown out on the stairs and she was left darkling);
vi) to ask me to investigate the curious noise in the corner of her chamber.
On each successive visit she revealed a little more of herself by a careless disarray of day- or nightwear, beginning with scarlet shoulders and proceeding by way of ruddy breasts to hints of the fiery pit down below. I knew that it was her mother who had set her on, because the daughter kept me in conversation at my door as her eyes swung about, waiting for the ordeal to be over. Give him five minutes trying to catch sight of your nipples, Mistress Ransom had said, and see if he doesn’t succumb to those ripening blackberries. She was too genteel or too unpoetic to express it like that, but there would be an understanding between mother and daughter as the former artfully rearranged the latter’s stays, ties and laces before sending her up the stairs. Alas, the goods that she was displaying had lain much too long in the sun. I pitied Little Ransom, saw her as a sacrificial cow to her mother’s matrimonial plans, but a cow nonetheless.
The crisis came when I went to her chamber to investigate that curious sound in the corner. Before I could even get near the dark (and silent) corner, she launched herself on me, hugely afire, and I went down before the smoke, flame and stench of her cannon. But, like Falstaff at the battle of Shrewsbury in our author’s play of Henry IV, I considered that discretion was the better part of valour. I played dead, or asphyxiated. I lay limp. Poor little Ransom lay on top of me like an army that has overrun its adversary, only to find that the enemy has disappeared. She needed some trophy to take back to her mother to prove that she had indeed occupied my position. A consummation devoutly to be wished. A promise of marriage made in hot breath and blood. But all her rummaging and groping couldn’t produce a spark, and at length she was forced to retire, whole and unwounded. We avoided each other’s eyes. I was still sorry for her, and angry at the mother who I knew had set her on. I made one or two references to Madam Ransom, and stews and houses of ill-repute, in her hearing. She got the point. The daughter’s attentions ceased. But I earned the mother’s undying hostility, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she needed the couple of shillings rent a week she would have booted me into the street.
And now I gazed down into Ship Street, suddenly melancholy. Post coitu omne animale triste est. . as the poet says. The evening sun rested on the roofs opposite, and caused me to squint. If I had craned out I would have been able to see the river, but I was Adam-naked and anyway saw the river frequently enough. Down below I could just glimpse my landlady taking the evening air, with her nose tilted up, as if she were too good for this world, possibly too good for any world. Lounging in the street opposite was Nat the Animal Man, so called because he made a tiny living from dropping into taverns and imitating a horse’s whinny, a cat’s purrs. For a penny he would do you a tormented bear surrounded by the yapping dogs in the pit, the climax to the whole battle proceeding from one man’s mouth. I have even heard him mimic the strange cry of the camel which one pays to see in that house on London Bridge.
I stepped back from the window and felt Nell’s hand on my shoulder and her breasts in the small of my back. She rubbed herself against me, then squatted down to pee in the jordan. What our author might have termed the Old Adam I felt rise at what I saw, and no doubt at the aroma too of our mingled wastes. And when Nell saw what I felt, my hoisted sail, a pleased expression tugged at her full lips. The object of many men’s lust, and of the affection of a few, she reserved her love for me or so I thought. I put this down partly to my natural attractiveness but also to the fact that she came from the same part of the country as I. We were country lad and lass in London, both engaged in diverting the citizenry with our arts. I returned to my bed, a little small to accommodate the both of us but so much the better for any purpose apart from sleep. Too late I saw what Nell was about to do.
‘No!’
‘What’s wrong? No one can see.’
It was true that she was standing near the window without a stitch on. The lower part of her body was shadowed. The declining sun set her fair hair ablaze. Probably she could have been seen from the houses over the way. I wasn’t bothered about that. Her left arm was extended over the edge of the window. She was holding the jordan, delicately tipping its contents into the street. Sleepiness or the mistaken belief that no one was down below had caused her not to check or shout the customary warning. I heard the dribble of the emptying pot, I saw the golden liquid catch the evening light. I heard the noise of my landlady. The shriek as she felt the wet descent, the scream as she realised what it was. I shut my eyes. I heard a donkey’s bray, and realised after a moment that it was Nat the Animal Man, taking pleasure in Mistress Ransom’s discomfiture, and most probably in mine as well, after his own fashion.
A City Pleasure, which was composed by one Master Edgar Boscombe (a name not previously known to me as one of the literary adornments of our stage), is a simple business. You know the story, or one similar to it. A young man from the provinces comes to London with his sister, looking for pleasure and edification. They are duped and gulled, but retain a curious integrity. The pleasure of the city is to ride them until they drop. They return home, sadder, wiser and poorer — only to discover that they never were brother and sister. They may marry; and they will marry. That was as much as I gathered from my eighty-five-line acquaintance with the drama. Unlike Hamlet I had never seen A City Pleasure through as a spectator. I played John Southwold, a citizen with ambitions to become an alderman and therefore I had to talk pompously and unplainly. There was no love lost between the players’ companies and the City authorities, who were as much our enemies as the Puritans, and would have closed us down if their writ ran on this side of the river. So we seized any opportunity to take the piss, and I played the would-be alderman with satisfied self-importance.
The congregation in the afternoon was large, though not as large as for Master WS’s Hamlet the previous day. I was preoccupied. My excitement at becoming one of the Chamberlain’s Men, even if only temporarily, was overshadowed by the pressing need to find fresh accommodation. After Nell had emptied our piss over Mistress Ransom last fine evening, the landlady appeared at my door, still dripping and distinctly out of sorts. Nell was hiding under the bedcovers. Gallantly, I took the blame, along with my notice to quit. So it was goodbye to my pale landlady and her fiery daughter. For that relief, much thanks.
I could hardly put up with Nell at her place of work (videlicet a brothel), although she offered this, slightly reluctantly and in a spirit of contrition. There were, she said, holes and corners in Holland’s Leaguer where I might shelter for a few days. But I did not, in truth, like to enquire too closely into the manner in which Nell earned her keep, and to be near her daily busy self would turn me into the hungry innkeeper forced always to see his meat eaten by others.