11. COWARDICE

THE TALE OF SEVEN KISSES (11)

FOREWORD

Cheese

THE TALE

The thing about this death nuisance is it was neither hot nor cold. The poet had sauntered away, I think he sauntered, from the tone of his thoughts it seemed like that’s how he moved, maybe languidly.

“Carry on!” repeated the voice, “we can’t have moping and self-pity here! When I worked for the admiralty I saw men flogged for less, and flogged hard, I can tell you!”

“But carry on where?” asked Cyril, “there’s not much here, nowhere to go, just … this...” If he’d had hands he would have waved them to indicate the nothing around him, which was all he was aware of. And it made sense to him if, being in the middle of nowhere he was to wander off to the middle of another nowhere and neither nowheres were anything he might perceive with anything.

“You let them flog men?” asked a pretty voice, “master … sir...”

“Mary Ingott?” asked Cyril, and for the first time he knew a name without being told it. It was as if a thread of knowledge had oozed like a tiny stream from the she that was Mary and had entered the awareness of he, who was Cyril Boniface. He was proud of the achievement, but who was Mary Ingott if she wasn’t Gwennie?

“Be quiet, Mary,” ordered Samuel Pepys. Then his nothingness frowned at Cyril, “or Gwennie as I think you know her,” he added.

“I won’t have it!” snapped Mary or maybe Gwennie, “if people can fight fires big enough to eat a city and maybe get badly burned doing it to save their fellow man, and then natural fear making tremble on board a warship when they’re obliged to go to war, with guns blazing all around and cannon blasting the night with a foretaste of hell, why should they be flogged as cowardly because of that fear, and not praised as saviours? I’ve met them, sir, whom I despised in life and now worship in death, I’ve heard their tales, Master, and felt the shadow of their scars...”

“I said, be quiet Mary!” re-ordered Samuel Pepys, “it was nothing to do with me! I was an office man, a signer of papers, a man who was tasked to turn his back on the less than savoury… I never hurt a man’s flesh myself! I never condemned one to pain or sometimes even death!”

“You did that?” asked Cyril. “You hid behind a pen and a diary and claimed innocence? I’ve heard some cowards justify their cowardice in my time, but that! How can a man go to his grave knowing he does things like that! And to heroes too, who mayhap saved his flesh from fires?”

“There was nothing heroic about fighting the mighty fire that greedily ate a chunk of London,” snarled the diarist (I think it was snarled though it may have been any verb really, gnarled, anything like that, and it didn’t even have to rhyme or make a smidgen of sense to anyone except me), “yet there was great heroism in shooting a Spaniard or knifing a Frenchie! Sneaking up behind a foreign back and doing it, silently in the night, like heroes do.”

“Or sneaking to a bed behind your good wife’s back and penetrating a maiden?” almost sneered Mary, “and me, I was that maiden and you were the slave-master who had me! And I loved it at the time, for I didn’t know the truth behind the man.”

“This is putting a quite interesting angle on a moment in history,” interrupted Cyril, “your diaries, sir, recount your fondness for the fairest sex, but going to a bed behind your good lady’s back, that is cowardice, sir, and of the worst order! And the centuries may have flowed past, but your words still flow, old now, hackneyed maybe, but a whisper from the past. And men read them sometimes and laugh at the antics of the man who was foolish enough to keep a diary!”

“A man had to seek his pleasures where they were,” snapped (or napped, rapped, capped, whatever the verb might have been, rhyming or not,) Samuel. “If a man, a real man, spied an ankle that stirred his heart, and just an ankle, sir, a flash of sweet fair skin above a dainty slipper, only that and not a bosom or a length of shining hair, and it is there in front of him accompanied by an inviting wink, then he just had to do what nature told him, or burst his trousers! That, sir, is a given!”

“And that is your journey through history, is it?” asked Mary. “We’re in another place now and you cannot write your own fancies here, can’t take a quill in your hands and write words that justify anything, least of all your carnal lusts… and to think, I was one of those you conquered, one of those you lusted after, one of those you… penetrated … with more than words! But back in life you did just that, put down on paper your greed, and people have read it and come to know it down the ages, even though centuries have passed!”

“And that, sir, is true cowardice!” said Cyril, liking the wench and wishing he knew more of her.

She saw his liking with whatever organ it is that amorphous drifting clouds use to see with, and she sidled up to him.

“Your Gwennie,” she whispered, “the one you lust after but somehow can’t manage the right words, like good men rarely can. I knew her.”

He was shocked. How did this lovely shadow of a girl know anything about the bookish woman from the flat below his? How could she?

“It was when I saw her and fell down to the cellar below to my doom,” whispered or cackled or shouted the lovely Mary, “it was like she fell along with me, and you heard it, because, dear kindly sir, she was me and I was she! And you said you heard us fall, she and me, and felt in your heart a wonderful sorrow that she might have hurt herself, but it was me who died and not she… So you, sir, were a gentleman and there was never a coward who was a gentleman, not in that world and certainly not in this… whatever this is.”

“Heaven or hell?” asked Cyril out of politeness.

“Neither!” snapped Samuel, “there are no such realms, despite the lies told by the damned good book that ruined all our lives!”

“But there is, sir,” whispered (shouted? Lied? Fornicated?) Mary, “for you and I are in it, sir, and Cyril here who searches eternity for his Gwennie. This very moment in this very nowhere is Heaven and that is for me, and it is hell, which is for you. For you have to live, sir, with your gigantic assortment of faults and I have to treasure my perfections!”

“Because,” sighed Cyril, “you are my Gwennie.”

She might have grinned back at him, or spat, or made carnal love, and winked or something back at her.

“Move on!” snapped the diarist, “for Heaven’s sake, move on! I’ve had quite enough of such pontifications, and you’ve ruined my favourite memory from life when this Mary here clutched me so tight and licked me so hard I feared for my sanity!”

“Or Hell’s sake,” sighed Mary who was Gwennie, or Gwennie who was Mary, or both.

© Peter Rogerson, 20.03.20