I remembered that Case had seemed watchful yesterday evening while we were leaving the Middle Temple precincts, but I could not see how this would make him want our company. Unless…
My thoughts were interrupted by Jack’s tugging at my sleeve. He cast his eyes upward. We were standing in the shelter of what I later learned was called the aftercastle. There was a figure half protected by some housing at the far end who I assumed was the helmsman. But there was another figure by the railing at the near end, and he was staring at Jack and me, very intently, as if wondering what we were doing on the boat. He was dressed not like a mariner in a jerkin and slop-hose but well wrapped up in a cloak while his head was enveloped by a hood. Nevertheless, I sensed his eyes boring into us. After a moment, he turned away towards the stern of the boat.
‘Who was that?’
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘We must confront this doctor.’
Jack and I clattered down the steps and burst into the great cabin. There was no sign of Dr Case, but the door to the little inner cabin was ajar and, spurred by our anger and the sound of someone clearing his throat from within, we crowded to the door, which opened outward. The physician was half sitting, half lying on the bed, knees drawn up, a large book balanced on them. He looked up as if annoyed to be disturbed. The cabin was compact but the items in it — a bed, a stool, a chest that could double as a table — were neatly arranged. There was a casement window a couple of feet from the end of the bed. Perhaps the captain enjoyed waking up in the morning and seeing from the comfort of his bed the waters the boat had just crossed over. More than the furniture, it was the casement that gave an odd domestic note to this chamber, as though it was inside a cottage and not aboard a seagoing vessel.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Jonathan Case. ‘I am glad to see you have recovered from last night’s potations. It was impossible to make you stand up, let alone walk, indeed almost impossible to rouse you both. I thought players had harder heads. We might have, ah, deposited you on Botolph’s Wharf before we left but, considering the state you were in, I’m not sure you would have still been alive by daybreak. And even if you had been allowed to go on living, you would have been deprived of any items of value you were carrying, any items at all, in fact.’
This was all true enough. There are human rats on the wharfs as well as animal ones. But it didn’t satisfy me. I felt my anger sparking afresh, as Case delivered this meandering speech from the comfort of his bed. He was showing no ill effects from the previous evening, and the suspicion grew that he had plied us with drink while being abstemious himself.
‘So we had to take you down to the hold to sleep it off,’ he added. ‘No room in here. Yet you were better off in the hold than you would have been in the mariners’ quarters in the fo’c’s’le. Very squalid across there.’
I wondered about all those little sleeping nooks in the cabin which Case had demonstrated to us the previous evening, but there were other, more urgent protests to make.
‘Dr Case, you must tell the captain, tell your brother, to put into shore straight away so that we can disembark.’
‘Speak direct to my brother yourself,’ said the physician. ‘He is the captain, as you say. But I can imagine what his answer will be. Time and tide wait for no man…’
By now I felt almost murderous towards Case. Jack must have sensed this, for he put out a hand as if to restrain me.
‘Dr Case,’ said my friend, ‘I realize that we have brought this on ourselves, Nick and I, by being stupid enough to get blind drunk on board last night. But our company was sought by you, very pressingly, and we are your guests. Yet we are reluctant guests. Indeed, we have a livelihood to earn on land at this very instant-’
‘And you will be fined a shilling if you are late for rehearsals. Gentlemen, I will do what I can. We will likely have to put in for fresh water before we reach France and you may be put ashore then. Since I am partly responsible for where you find yourselves, I will write a letter to old Dick Burbage explaining the circumstances and pleading for you. I cannot say fairer than that.’
I wasn’t mollified, not at all. I did not like the idea of slinking back to London, bearing a letter which must make us look like a couple of greenhorns carried off to sea by mistake. I visualized myself tearing up the letter to ‘old Dick Burbage’ and scattering the pieces to the winds. Jack Wilson and I weren’t likely to lose our posts and nor would the King’s Men be seriously inconvenienced by our brief absence, since they were adept at filling holes. And even members of the leading company in the land are not obliged to behave well at all times; a few have found themselves in clink or disgrace for worse reasons than ours. Nevertheless, Jack and I would be the butt of plenty of jokes. Oddly, this was almost a more dire prospect than being ferried willy-nilly across to France. Better to pretend that we were voluntary absentees from our work.
Gravesend
In the event we never got to France. We never got further than Gravesend, which turned out to be appropriate, since one of our party was to meet his death there. The day, which had begun bright and sunny, turned foul. Black clouds massed overhead and rain swirled everywhere, obscuring the view of both banks. A vicious east wind snaked down the river. Far from going forward, we seemed at times to be going backward or not moving at all. Water was everywhere, above, around, below, and — most alarming of all — spurting freely through the decks and topsides (which I gathered was the name for the parts of the vessel that were above the waterline). At any moment I feared we might be overturned, although the sailors on the Argo seemed to regard the storm as little more than a spring shower.
Piercing through the noise of the wind and rain was the sound of the shipmaster’s whistle whenever Colin Case summoned the mariners to a particular part of the boat. He left it to a heavily bearded boatswain, whose name was Bennett, to issue most of the orders. This gentleman bellowed out instructions concerning topmasts and main courses. Every command was pushed home with the demand that the men do it yarely. It was all Greek to me — apart from the ‘yarely’, which is sailor-speak for ‘quick’ — but the men went at it like monkeys, tugging at ropes, climbing up masts, lowering the sails and cursing their heads off… cursing most of all.
Jack and I spent the day clinging to ropes or any fixed object on the deck, receiving our ration of oaths if we were in anyone’s way and sometimes when we weren’t. Some of the sailors not only sounded but looked threatening, carrying poles with hooks for some obscure nautical purpose. I observed that Henry Tallman, the black-garbed man, was still on the boat. We might have gone back to the great cabin, which is where Tallman and the shipmaster Colin Case spent some of their time, but neither Jack nor I had much desire to keep company with our fellow travellers, especially Dr Jonathan, whom I held responsible for our plight. Besides, the rocking of the boat stirred me up to fresh bouts of sickness — even though I could’ve sworn that not a particle of anything solid remained in my guts — and I preferred to suffer without unnecessary witnesses.
We tried taking shelter in the hold, where the wine barrels were stored and where we’d been deposited the previous night, but there was something about being shaken about in the dark that was worse than remaining out in the open. I also believed we weren’t alone down there. There were rats in the hold, scuttering and scurrying, but also a human presence. A dark shape in a corner. A mariner, perhaps, or another unfortunate individual being carried away from his homeland. I thought of the hooded figure I’d seen on the afterdeck, and I shivered from more than the cold and wet alone. Jack saw — or sensed — this individual, too, so to the deck we returned. To face the wind and the rain, a combination which reminded me of Feste’s song at the end of Twelfth Night — ‘the rain it raineth every day’ and all that — and caused me to wonder whether I’d ever again see my companions in the King’s Men, so low did I feel.
In the late afternoon we put in at Gravesend, where the river grows less wide and looks out to Tilbury on the northern side. Now I decided that, however unpleasant the bad weather, I preferred it a thousand times over to blue skies, since it had compelled us to put in at a port whereas, otherwise, we might have anchored offshore or by some desolate marshy stretch.
It took us some time and trouble to moor. The rough waters meant that we slammed into another boat as we were docking, or rather the other boat slammed into us. The jar threw Jack and me to the deck. It was a herring buss, I was told, also coming in to moor. The boat was smaller than ours, but with a great bowsprit. Canvas was stretched on hoops arching above the main deck presumably to protect the fish catch.
If I thought I’d heard enough of sailors’ curses before, I realized that it was as nothing to the torrent that swept between the Argo and the fishing boat as the men on each vessel struggled to push away from the other with staves and those vicious-looking hooked implements. Finally, we got ourselves clear of the herring buss and securely tied up to some mighty stakes that stood near the Gravesend wharf. A couple of precarious planks were stretched across the void between the bulwarks of the boat and the dock-side. Below was the turbulent river.
Speaking as if he had done us a favour, Dr Case said we would be able to return to London on the morrow. Of
