The Black Book by Thomas Middleton

THE BLACK BOOK.

No sooner was Pierce Pennyless breathed forth, but I, the light-burning sergeant, Lucifer, quenched my fiery shape, and whipped into a constable's night-gown, the cunningest habit that could be, to search tipsy taverns, roosting inns, and frothy alehouses; when calling together my worshipful bench of bill-men,<14> I proceeded toward Pict-hatch, intending to begin there first, which (as I may fitly name it) is the very skirts of all brothel-houses. The watchmen, poor night-crows, followed, and thought still they had had the constable by the hand, when they had the devil by the gown-sleeve. At last, I looking up to the casements of every suspected mansion, and spying a light twinkling between hope and desperation, guessed it to be some sleepy snuff, ever and anon winking and nodding in the socket of a candlestick, as if the flame had been a-departing from the greasy body of Simon Snuff the stinkard. Whereupon I, the black constable, commanded my white guard not only to assist my office with their brown bills, but to raise up the house extempory: with that, the dreadful watchmen, having authority standing by them, thundered at the door, whilst the candle lightened in the chamber; and so between thundering and lightening, the bawd rose, first putting the snuff to an untimely death, a cruel and a lamentable murder, and then, with her fat-sag chin<15> hanging down like a cow's udder, lay reeking out at the window, demanding the reason why they did summon a parley. I told her in plain terms that I had a warrant to search from the sheriff of Limbo. How? from the sheriff of Lime-street? replied mistress wimble-chin (for so she understood the word Limbo, as if Limbo had been Latin for Lime-street); why then all the doors of my house shall fly open and receive you, master constable. With that, as being the watchword, two or three vaulted out of their beds at once, one swearing, stocks and stones, he could not find his stockings, other that they could not hit upon their false bodies, when to speak troth and shame myself, they were then as close to their flesh as they could, and never put them off since they were twelve year old. At last they shuffled up, and were shut out at the back part, as I came in at the north part. Up the stairs I went to examine the feather-beds, and carry the sheets before the justice, for there was none else then to carry; only the floor was strewed with busk-points,<16> silk garters, and shoe-strings, scattered here and there for haste to make away from me, and the farther such run, the nearer they come to me. Then another door opening rearward, there came puffing out of the next room a villainous lieutenant without a band, as if he had been new cut down, like one at Wapping,<17> with his cruel<18> garters about his neck, which fitly resembled two of Derrick's<19> necklaces. He had a head of hair like one of my devils in Doctor Faustus,<20> when the old theatre cracked and frighted the audience: his brow was made of coarse bran, as if all the flour had been bolted out to make honester men, so ruggedly moulded with chaps and crevices, that I wonder how it held together, had it not been pasted with villainy: his eyebrows jetted out like the round casement of an alderman's dining-room, which made his eyes look as if they had been both dammed in his head; for if so be two souls had been so far sunk into hell-pits, they would never have walked abroad again: his nostrils were cousin-germans to coral, though of a softer condition and of a more relenting humour: his crow-black mustachios were almost half an ell from one end to the other, as though they would whisper him in the ear about a cheat or a murder; and his whole face in general was more detestable ugly than the visage of my grim porter Cerberus, which showed that all his body besides was made of filthy dust and sea-coal ashes: a down countenance he had, as if he would have looked thirty mile into hell, and seen Sisyphus rolling, and Ixion spinning and reeling. Thus in a pair of hoary slippers, his stockings dangling about his wrists, and his red buttons like foxes out of their holes, he began, like the true champion of a vaulting-house,<21> first to fray me with the bugbears of his rough-cast beard, and then to sound base in mine ears like the bear-garden drum; and this was the humour he put on, and the very apparel of his phrases: "Why, master constable, dare you balk us in our own mansion, ha? What! is not our house our Cole-harbour,<22> our castle of come-down and lie-down? Must my honest wedded punk here, my glore-fat<23> Audrey, be taken napping, and raised up by the thunder of bill-men? Are we disannulled of our first sleep, and cheated of our dreams and fantasies? Is there not law too for stealing away a man's slumbers, as well as for sheets off from hedges? Come you to search an honest bawdy-house, this seven and twenty years in fame and shame? Go to, then, you shall search, nay my very boots too; are you well now? the least hole in my house too; are you pleased now? Can we not take our ease in our inn, but we must come out so quickly? Naud, go to bed, sweet Naud; thou wilt cool thy grease anon, and make thy fat cake." This said, by the virtue and vice of my office I commanded my bill-men down stairs; when in a twinkling discovering myself a little, as much as might serve to relish me, and show what stuff I was made of, I came and kissed the bawd, hugged her excellent villainies and cunning rare conveyances;<24> then turning myself, I threw mine arms, like a scarf or bandoleer, cross the lieutenant's melancholy bosom, embraced his resolute phrases and his dissolute humours, highly commending the damnable trade and detestable course of their living, so excellent-filthy and so admirable-villainous. Whereupon this lieutenant of Pict-hatch fell into deeper league and farther acquaintance with the blackness of my bosom, sometimes calling me master Lucifer the head-borough, sometimes master Devillin the little black constable. Then telling me he heard from Limbo the second of the last month, and that he had the letter to show, where they were all very merry; marry, as he told me, there were some of his friends in Phlegethon troubled with the heart-burning; yea, and with the soul-burning too, thought I, though thou little dreamest of the torment then complaining to me of their bad takings all the last plaguy summer<25>, that there was no stirrings, and therefore undone for want of doings: whereupon, after many such inductions to bring the scene of his poverty upon the stage, he desired, in cool terms, to borrow some forty pence of me. I, stuft with anger at that base and lazy petition, knowing that a right true villain and an absolute practised pander could not want silver damnation, but, living upon the revenues of his wits, might purchase the devil and all, half-conquered with rage, thus I replied to his baseness: "Why, for shame! A bawd and poor? why then, let usurers go a-begging, or, like an old Greek, stand in Paul's with a porringer; let brokers become whole honest then, and remove to heaven out of Houndsditch; lawyers turn fee-less, and take ten of a poor widow's tears for ten shillings; merchants never forswear themselves, whose great perjured oaths a'land turn to great winds and cast away their ships at sea, which false perfidious tempest splits their ships abroad and their souls at home, making the one take salt water and the other salt fire; let mercers then have conscionable thumbs when they measure out that smooth glittering devil, satin,<26> and that old reveller, velvet, in the days of Monsieur,<27> both which have devoured many an honest field of wheat and barley, that hath been metamorphosed and changed into white money. Pooh, these are but little wonders, and may be easily possible in the working. A usurer to cry bread and meat is not a thing impossible; for indeed your greatest usurer is your greatest beggar, wanting as well that which he hath as that which he hath not; then who can be a greater beggar? He will not have his house smell like a cook's shop, and therefore takes an order no meat shall be dressed in it: and because there was an house upon Fish-street-hill burnt to the ground once, he can abide by no means to have a fire in his chimney ever since.