“Why Pinky, riding jades.”
“I guessed. You want you should take a pox? You want the sweating tub they should treat you with?”
“Pinky my sweet,” he said, “know you not a jade's but a poor horse?”
“Which ain't all's a jade,” I said back.
“Methinks, my loyal Jew,” he said I remember once particular, “will't correct my native tongue? Why, Pinky, I do say I was riding jades, and so I have, for I'm all so riding-sore I scarce could mount another and if it were proferred me.”
“Now it's gleeks.”
“Better than you know, Pinky,” says he to me. “But think you on it an' you'll discover a pun keen as any heard in the gentlest house nor 'pon a London stage!” Gleek puns he made when I tried to make him cease with the lace-mutton harlots always. “Go to, Pinky,” he'd say to me. And, “What's to drink? Give me to drink, sweet Pinky, for a long ride raises a great dust which thereafter, an' if it engenders naught else, provokes a great thirst!” Always the gleek.
Which he even claimed he once shtupped a lady from Court, a Maid of Honor from Queen Bess, which I don't know if it's true or not, which I'll say of later.
Which is then the second main fault, from drinking. A shikker, a drunk, a toss-pot, a fap my Will Kempe was! The worst. Which it is I think it was killed him at last, when he starb in my arms lying in the dirty wattles on the floor for a pallet, from his tippling. Anything he'd swill, always. Anywhere.
In the tiring house backstage to dress in his motley for performance, in the Hell under the stage trapdoor where only stage properties and playactors to play ghosts and sprites should be—how many times, plenty if once, I seen him on the sly eating kissing comfits to sweet his breath so persons shouldn't know he was quaffing before and also during performance!
Wherever, the meanest stews in Southwark, any tavern you could tell was from the latticed windows and the sign of the bush, you could find Will Kempe in his cups, pip out the English say it—he liked always the open room where the Tom Tapster kept a fire for the damp cold, standing close to keep my Will's reckoning on a notching stick or the doorjamb, so many pints and quarts at so many pence, our gelt from our purse he squandered like some noble gallant on his drink, the shikker!
And he also didn't care from what he swallowed. Rhenish or Flemish, brown and white bastard the sweet wine from Spain he drank, burned sack or dry, the Welsh metheglen made from bees' honey, wort and malmsey and muscadel, Flap-Dragon, church ale, beer he'd dip hot toast in the froth, anything TomTapster stuck a dirty mulling poker in, even the caudel they give sick children to drink Will Kempe drank also! Sealed quarts he liked because the mark showed it was full measure, and the two-quart pottles, no bottom to him he didn't have!
Even aqua ardens he drank, spirits, the usquebah he drank that only the lowest Irish would—the shikker!
Such a man to pierce a hogshead and pip out fap drunk he was. And plenty times if once it was me, Pincus Perlmutter, found him senseless with staggers at the sign of the bush behind latticed windows, too fap to sing a catch nor dance a turn to pay his reckoning notched on Tom Tapster's stick. My purse, ours, it was paid his pints and quarts and me carried him home, worried some cutpurse brigands would come in the dark with a bodkin to stick us in the ribs, all the time he's mumbling at me leave off, calling me meddlesome Jew and arrant knave for the trouble I'm taking with no London Watch with halberds and lanterns near to make us safe in the night.
7