Upping and Downing
1660, Week 3
This week began far too early, with the ceaseless howling of a cantankerous canine keeping me unhappily alert as Saturday night bled into Sunday morning. My day of rest thus became a battle to remain awake, and my brother John didn’t help by bringing me his speech to proof-read.
That’s not to say John’s speech was drowse-inducing. Far from it. If anything, my brother hadn’t made enough mistakes to challenge my probing eye.
John did manage to drag me out of the house a little, to hear a service about the blessing of the bells of the Church of Rome. That woke me up a little. Annoyingly, though, the bell used by the bellman must have felt jealous of its Roman cousins, because it seemed extra loud when he later stood outside my bedroom window to announce the hour of one in the following morning…
With such a disturbed start, I was not in the kindest of spirits for much of this week. It didn’t help that my Lord and employer Mr Downing seemed somewhat on the spirits. On Monday, he visited my office to announce that he would soon be heading to Holland – and, out of the ether, asked if I would go with him.
It was an extraordinary proposal not at all typical of him, and I hesitated to give my response. He gave me two days to consider it, and consider it I did – mostly with the aid of wine.
On Tuesday, my Lord Montagu had charged me with taking his son Edward about town, and in a Kinsington tavern we learned that the Earl of Chesterfield had killed a doctor’s son in a duel. The Earl had since fled to Holland, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I should take this story as an auspice.
However, I couldn’t decide whether it was an auspice for me to stay or to go. In the end, though, it mattered not, because I received a summons to Mr Downing’s bedside, and the Holland offer appeared to have left his mind completely.
Mr Downing wasn’t in bed due to any absence of health, by the way – that just happens to be his preferred meeting venue. If he could conduct all his meetings in bed, he would. He even once told me of a vision in which he saw a perfect world where everyone could look through a window beside their bed and talk to anyone else they chose, who would also be in their beds.
Myself, I could not think of such a world as perfect. What mass woes would befall our nation’s health if we never had to leave our houses to meet? We would go stir mad from speaking with one another without smelling much more than our own odours or enjoying the pounding of our hearts from the visit’s walk.
Perhaps such madness had already befallen Mr Downing, though, since the Holland offer hadn’t merely vanished from his mind. It had been replaced by his excitement at having secured me a job as a Clerk of the Council. He proclaimed this as if it were a favour to me, though I guessed it was largely so he himself no longer had to pay my wage…
I feared that all was settled thus, and my fears were further compounded when I met the other Clerks of the Council for drinks at Marshes later that day. They all seemed to know that my assignment to their office had been proposed at the behest of Mr Downing.
By the end of the week, though, even that proposal had clean abandoned Mr Downing’s mind. Instead, he did bitterly chide me for not giving him notice that some of his appointments had been cancelled. I had in fact tried relaying that information through our porter, who had returned to me saying that Mr Downing had not been at home – however Mr Downing insisted he had been home at the time the porter claimed to have come by.
So someone was lying, and I know business sense dictates that it was the porter. Perhaps common sense too, since Mr Downing absence from home would have required him to leave his bed…
Alas, the week’s turbulence didn’t end there – for although no further word of me switching to the Council emanated from Mr Downing’s lips, I was later accosted at Marshes by Clerk Cooke, who grievously accused me of trying to steal his job, and would not be convinced by my insistence of innocence.
And so I head to bed now, wearied by the week, and praying that no hound or bell keep sleep from restoring my wit…