William Shakespeare — Chapter 3: An erased marginal note in a late-century ledger — Novella Movement 2

A scholar's chamber, night. Shelves crowded with ledgers gone soft as moths. Upon a bracket above the desk hangs a small globe of clouded crystal, wound about with threads of copper wire, which stares upon the room and does not blink. DOCTOR ASHFORD sits alone, a ledger open before him, its margin scored and scraped away.

ASHFORD:
Here is the leaf—and here the hand that scarred it,
Some clerk of ninety-nine, now dust and debt,
Who wrote a name, then thought the better of it,
And rubbed it out as though the ink could sweat
Confession from the page, and so destroyed
The very thing it meant to keep concealed—
For look: the vellum's face is pitted, cloyed
With scrapings, as a wound too roughly healed.
What was the name? What sin did it accuse?
Whose ledger-debt, whose bastard, whose disgrace
Made some poor hand so tremble it could lose
All nerve, and gouge a person from a place?
I cannot say. The letters are all fled
Into the white that swallows up the dead.

[He turns to the crystal globe.]

O watching-glass, thou eye that never sleeps,
Thou toy some Paduan glazier wrought for coin,
That stares upon my study and that keeps
(They say) a memory of all men join
Within thy sight—canst thou not turn thy stare
Backward as well as forward, and unmake
The dark that swallowed what was written there?
No. Thou dost only watch. Thou dost not wake
The past, but pickle only what is now,
As I do pickle grief within this breast,
Watching what's present, powerless to allow
The buried thing to rise and be confessed.
What use is sight, if sight can only see
The hour it's born in, not what used to be?

Enter FETTLE, a threadbare fellow with an ingratiating stoop.

FETTLE: God give you good even, Doctor, and God give me better fortune than yours, for you look as a man that's lost a shilling and found a sermon. What, poring over dead men's scratchings at this hour? A man might catch his death of dust.

ASHFORD: Fettle. I did not hear the door.

FETTLE: Nor should you, sir, for I am softer than a debt collector's conscience, which is to say I make no noise at all till the money's due. [Aside.] And this old fool hath money, though he wears it thin as his own hair. [To Ashford.] What's this you study? A ledger? Lord, a ledger's but a graveyard writ in figures—so much owed, so much paid, so much never to be paid at all.

ASHFORD: There is a name here scratched away. I would give much to know it.

FETTLE: Would you so. Would you give, say, three crown to know it?

ASHFORD: You know the name?

FETTLE: I know a man who knew a man who scratched it. Which is near enough to knowing, in my trade.

ASHFORD: What is your trade?

FETTLE: Finding things that other men have hidden, and losing them again for a fee, if the first fee runs dry.

ASHFORD: That is no trade. That is thievery with a softer collar.

FETTLE: Call it what you will, sir—a rose parboiled is a rose still, though it eat less sweet.

ASHFORD: Who erased the name?

FETTLE: Who's asking—you, or your little glass egg yonder that never blinks? I've heard tell such toys remember faces. Does it remember mine?

ASHFORD: It remembers only what passes now. It cannot reach into the year that made this wound.

FETTLE: Then it's a watchman that arrived after the robbery, and a fine watchman that makes.

ASHFORD: Speak plainly. What do you know?

FETTLE: I know that some men scratch out names to save their necks, and some to save another's, and some for pure spite, as a cat will claw a cushion for no cause but that it can. Which was it here? I cannot say without I look closer—and looking closer, in my trade, is never free.

ASHFORD: Name your price.

FETTLE: Five crown.

ASHFORD: You said three but a moment past.

FETTLE: The moment's past, sir, and prices rise with moments, same as debts.

ASHFORD: You are a rogue.

FETTLE: I am a merchant of memory, sir, in a world where memory's the dearest thing there is—dearer than gold, for gold you may forge, but a true remembrance, once erased, no smith can hammer back.

ASHFORD: [Aside.] And there's my fear entire—that what is scraped away outlives its scraping, festering unseen, while what is watched is only what's to come, and never what has been. [To Fettle.] Here's your crown, upon your word you'll speak the truth of it.

FETTLE: My word, sir, is worth exactly what you pay for it—no more, no less, and never on the house.

ASHFORD: Then let us see what devil's bargain buys,
For truth delayed is still the dearer prize.

[He beckons FETTLE to the table, and unwraps the parchment.]

ASHFORD: A tail—an initial—speak it, man, what letter?

FETTLE: Patience, patience, truth's a shy wench, she'll not come running for one candle's worth of wooing. [Aside.] Though in troth I read naught here but scrapings, and could call it G or J or the Devil's own signature, and this old scholar none the wiser, so long as I speak it slow and frown as men do frown at Latin.

ASHFORD: You frown. What is it frightens you?

FETTLE: Nothing frightens me, sir, save empty pockets and full graves, and I have known both. But this—this is a small thing, a paltry thing, not worth the crown you've paid nor the candle we've burned upon it.

ASHFORD: How mean you, paltry? I have built upon this wound a tower of conjecture—murder, debt, some daughter's ruin, some lord's bastard hid from an angrier lord—

FETTLE: And I have built upon it three crown and a good supper, which is more than the wound itself is worth, for here's the plain truth, sir, ungilded: 'twas a butcher's bill. The clerk of ninety-nine owed for four hogs and a barrel of small beer, and being a proud man and a poor payer, he scratched his own name from the debt column so the reckoning should show no debtor, only a debt unclaimed, floating masterless as a ghost ship. That's your murder, sir. That's your ruined daughter. A man ashamed of hogs.

ASHFORD: [a long pause] A butcher's bill.

FETTLE: A butcher's bill, sir, God rot my honesty for telling it plain, when I might have spun you gold from it and charged accordingly.

ASHFORD: [rising, moving to the window, half to himself]
O monstrous jest that heaven plays on thought—
I dressed this scar in silks of tragedy,
Gave it a voice to scream what it screamed not,
And made a ghost of some poor debtor's fee.
So do we all: we find a wound, a gap,
A silence in the page, and pour therein
Our own most secret fears, until the map
We drew of others is the map of sin
We carry in ourselves. The clerk was shamed
Of hogs and beer, no more—yet I did dress
His paltry blush in murder's cloth, and named
Him guilty of my own imagined mess.
What is a scar, once opened to the light,
But mirror to the eye that reads it right?

FETTLE: Well said, sir, well said—though if you'd said it first I'd have charged you less for the telling. [Aside.] Still, I've my three crown, and a fool's philosophy costs him nothing further, which is the best kind of philosophy there is.

ASHFORD: [turning to the crystal globe] And thou, that watched us bargain in this room—
Thou'lt keep this pettiness as thou wouldst keep
A murder, with no more and no less doom,
No judgment in thy glass, no cause to weep
Or laugh at what thou seest. Thou dost record
The rogue, the fool, the scholar and his shame,
All leveled to one flat and watching word:
"It happened." Neither pity nor blame.
Some future hand, some scholar yet unborn,
Shall find thy memory and scrape at it,
Shall wonder what dark thing here wears the horn
Of guilt, and never know it was a debt for meat and beer, and one man's peevish wit.

FETTLE: Meaning no disrespect, sir, but that's a very long way of saying we've both wasted a candle on a hog.

ASHFORD: Say rather, Fettle, we have learned this night
That every silence hides a smaller thing
Than what we fear—yet fear, in its own right,
Makes silence loud enough for truth to sing
False notes therein. The ledger's healed its wound
With scraping; I have healed my fear with jest;
And that small glass above us, cold and round,
Shall scrape in turn, when we are dust, the rest—
Some later fool, come prying at this hour,
Shall find our talk preserved, and know no more
Of why we spoke, than I knew of the flower
Of malice that I thought this margin bore.

FETTLE: Then here's my counsel, sir, offered gratis, which is rarer from me than snow in August: burn the ledger, smash the glass, and sleep sound, for the dead keep better secrets than the living ever paid to learn.

ASHFORD: I'll keep them both—the ledger and the eye—
For scars, once known, teach more than scars concealed;
And though the name was nothing, by and by
I've learned what dread in nothing lay congealed.

FETTLE: Then good night to you, Doctor, and to your hog-shamed clerk, and to your little glass that watches all and judges none—God send it never learns to judge, for then we're all undone.

[FETTLE exits, pocketing his coin. ASHFORD remains, closing the ledger slow, the crystal globe unblinking above him.]

ASHFORD: The page is closed, the candle gutters low,
The crime was small, the fear was all I know.