The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Forty-Five Pickleherring's peep-hole

I've this hole in the floor of my room. I'm not complaining. I cover it with my Ovid, so no one knows. That's not the Ovid that Mr Shakespeare gave me, with his signature on the flyleaf. Just Golding's English translation, you understand.

The hole's not big, but it's big enough to see through. I have a perfect view of the bedroom below.

I like watching the whores through my peep-hole.

My greatest interest is not to watch them being fucked, but to watch them dressing. I like to see their tricks before the mirror. It's all their little secrets I want to know - the faces they turn on themselves, not the faces they make up for others. Their primping, their pricking, their painting, that's what I enjoy.

I snuff out my candle and I settle down to watch them. The hole's half-hidden by a rafter. They don't suspect a thing.

There's one girl in particular I like watching. She's the one who fetched me up the speckled egg. She has long, dark hair and a little snub nose like a button. She's not beautiful at all, though her figure's good and slender. Small white bubbies, nicely rounded, very firm, like those eggs hard-boiled and warm with the shells just peeled off and a sort of dew upon them.

This dark one's my favourite. I think that she's new to the game. She's very young, and sweet. If I press my nose into the hole I can almost smell her perfume. But I don't do that much. I prefer to look.

Why I think she's new to the game is not just because she's so young. Some of these girls start very early - before they're fifteen. I'd not be surprised if this little tart is about the same age that I was when I jumped down off that wall to meet Mr Shakespeare. But, as I say, it's not only youth that makes her seem innocent. There's this awkwardness about the way she moves. She's much more shy and tentative than the others.

When I watch her at work on her face in the glass, my favourite, you can see her trying to imagine what she does to men. She turns her head this way and that, and pulls and twists her hair across her cheeks. She throws her head back, and gives little gasps. She's showing herself what she looks like when they fuck her. Sometimes, her mouth made up, she kisses her own image in the mirror, leaving a carmine smear and a cloud of breath. She likes to flirt with the girl in the glass, hiding her eyes with a fan or with her fingers and then peeping. It's all very provocative, I can tell you; not least because she's like a little girl trying on her mother's things.

There's something that maddens my senses about this one girl. I don't know what it is, but she seems shy and gentle. She has little blue veins just over each temple. Her nostrils are like those of an animal that finds its way by scent. I'd love to press my thumbs to her eyes when they're shut tight, just to feel her heart beating and the secret thoughts that leap there. But I don't want to hurt her. I would never hurt my beauty. There's something exquisitely virginal about her, although she is a whore. Like Marina in the brothel in Pericles.

Last night I saw her strip off her clothes to look at herself in the mirror. She was all alone, so she thought, but old Pickleherring was watching. She looked at herself in the mirror, my little egg girl. It was plain she is in love with what she sees.

Why not? Who could blame her?

She played with her own nipples. I watched them harden. They pricked out from her bubbies like tiny pink thorns. You'd think a whore would be weary of hands on her breasts, but not this girl. She smiled at herself in the glass, and she sighed with self-enchantment.

Some whores will wear their night-rails in the street. Not my little favourite. Last night she tried gown after gown just to see what best suited her mood.

I knelt in a trance of delight, my eye pressed to the peep-hole. I saw her dress herself in silks and damasks, thin tiffanies, newfangled cobweb lawns. I watched her take each garment off again. I could hear the crisp crackle of some of them, as she put them on, as she took them off, and the soft swish of others.

Nothing satisfied her, quite, when she consulted the effect of it in her pier glass.

My favourite's final choice was a boisterous foamy farthingale. It made her look for all the world like a little mermaid coming up from the depths of the sea. She rose up and down on the balls of her feet, though, once she'd got it on, and trotted about to listen to it rustle on the floor-boards.

She looked perfectly adorable in that.

Her dress on, my girl goes and changes her stockings. She's always a goose-brain, doing silly things like this, back-to-front things, all draggle-tail arsy-versy. But, of course, I adore her the more for such ways. And it was delicious seeing her legs with that dress rucked up.

She sat down on the side of the bed to adjust her black garters. Then, with a squeal of vexation, the vixen tore them off. I was pleased to see her go and select a white pair from her drawer. And my pleasure was complete when she stretched out each leg in turn to draw them on up her plump little thighs, smoothing her sheer silk stockings as she did so, patting and pampering the garters in place, with a thrilling little wriggle of her haunches.

Madam, you're wrong if you think I want to fuck this sweet, delightful creature. Just to watch her, myself unseen, that is enough. In fact she's far too exquisite to be fucked. There is something infinitely gentle about her, and what I feel for her is the kind of tenderness and wonder one might feel for a spiderweb all sparkling with morning dew, an intricate simplicity not to be touched without destroying it.

Only, of course, this favourite young whore of mine is also infinitely more appealing to the senses than any spiderweb!

I love watching her when she doesn't know I'm there. I love watching her when she doesn't know anyone's there. When she thinks she's quite alone, and so perfectly natural.

All I want is to be as close to her as possible.

I would like to be her comb.

I wish I was her dress.

Best of all, how I'd love to be my child-whore's silk stockings!

Well, reader, there you have it - the secret erotic life of Robert Tiresias Pickleherring Reynolds.

Old Mr Pickerel: his wholesome whoreson pleasures.

I never meant to put that in my book but now I have I shall not cross it out.

And having put it in, it occurs to me to observe that my watching the young whore through this peep-hole is perhaps a perfect emblem of this art of biography in which I am involved for the rest of the time. What is the biographical act but a species of spying? You participate in a life you cannot share. You take part offstage in a play that is none of your making.

Besides, it is only fair that if a biographer tells you the unpalatable and the disagreeable things about the life of his subject (as, in the name of truth, he must), then he ought to be prepared to tell you about his own unpalatables and his own disagreeables. I make it a rule for all who follow me in this new art. Procopius and Suetonius should have done no less. When a man wants to spit at life, he should spit in his own face, first.

Watching my perfect little whore at her toilet is like writing about Mr Shakespeare. It's her private face I want to know, not the tricks that she turns for others.

I have never yet watched her being fucked, though sometimes I have listened. It sounded as if she was laughing. I stopped up my ears.

If I ever do watch while she's fucked, I'll tell you about it.

There has been, at all events, a moral outcome. Feeling good after last night's rapt observance of my darling, I stumped up this morning and paid Pompey Bum the rest of his rent. I used a guinea that was in today's box, a guinea given to Mr Shakespeare by a whore. It was Lucy Negro who gave Mr Shakespeare that guinea. Why she gave it to him I do not know. So I have no story to tell you about that guinea. I cannot tell you a tale I do not know. (Other biographers, please copy.)

Having been moral, and paid the money I owed, I had my reward not in heaven but here on earth immediately. That whore must be my good angel. A good angel in dainty white garters! Whatever she is, Pickleherring's day was made when Pompey Bum called out to the girl, addressing her by name as he passed her on the stair.

She is called Anne.