Читать книгу The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories - Darrell Schweitzer - Страница 8

TOM O’BEDLAM AND THE MYSTERY OF LOVE

Love is madness and madness is love, and never the twain shall part.

—Anonymous the Elder

Winter. London. Fifteen Hundred and Something-Something. In his bed at Whitehall, King Henry VIII dreamed of love, of lovely maidens who became his numerous queens, some of them now minus their heads...which sometimes happened in the entanglements of love, a way of cutting through the Gordian knot of the heartstrings, so to speak.... He dreamed of dancing, of songs, of roistering, of maidens and meat-pies.

Courtiers, with their heads in their hands, serenaded him with lines he’d stolen from another but of which he was nevertheless inordinately proud, “Alas, my love, you do me wrong.....”

He sniffled. He started to sneeze.

* * * * * * *

Tom O’Bedlam dreamed. Nick the Lunatic dreamed with him, his bosom and boon companion, whom Tom had redeemed long since from the labors of Reason, from the ardors, the cruelty, the slavery of Sanity. This same Nicholas, who had once been gaoler in Bedlam before Tom spoke to him with the true Voice of the place and set him free, which is to say mad; AHEM! This very Nicholas walked with Tom O’Bedlam in the dream they both dreamed together, in the cold and the dark of the night.

They passed a troop of the Watch, pikes and armor gleaming in the pale moonlight; but sober watchers do not affect to see madmen, particularly madmen abroad in dreams; therefore, dreaming, Tom and Nick went on their way without any interference.

Dreaming still, they reached the countryside, drifting down empty lanes, past trees naked of all but their last leaf. And that last leaf rattled mournfully, one leaf per tree, as it was the custom among trees in winter to retain but one.

Tom and Nick jangled their bells, mournfully, by moonlit midnight, as was their custom to reply; but they felt, the both of them, a certain emptiness, a melancholy, and remarked on it without words, for two madmen dreaming the same dream surely do not have to trouble themselves to speak.

Alas, for great loss.

Something burning where the heart is broken, where joy is stolen away, like the last spark sputtering when the fireplace is swept clean.

Aye, and swept clean of all hope, but beautiful in its tragedy, its sorrows like intricately-carven black onyx.

Is there any other kind?

You got me.

They passed through a forest of branchless trees, the naked trunks like enormous, tangled blades of silver grass. A wind rustled through the forest, sighing far away.

The forest gave way to open country, but like none Tom had ever seen. The ground was white in the moonlight, but not covered with snow; more leathery than earthen. It had a distinct bounce to it.

Nick did a handstand, bells jangling. He clapped the sides of his soleless shoes and wiggled his dirty toes, then flung himself high into the air as if from a trampoline...high, high...until great black, winged things began to circle him hungrily, eclipsing the Moon as they passed.

He called out to Tom, who leapt up to catch Nick as he tumbled and caught him by the ankles and hauled him down, out of the clutches of the fiery-eyed, softly buzzing flyers with their gleaming-metal talons; down, down—

They bounced for several miles, soaring over another stand of forest, coming to rest before what seemed a vast mountain with two oval caves in it, side by side. Here yawned the very Abyss, the darkness which swallows up even madmen.

Fortunately more of the silvery strands grew thickly about. Tom and Nick clung to them, at the very edge of the abyss, to avoid falling him.

And standing there, gazing into the depths, Tom O’Bedlam had a vision, as if he were dreaming his own dream within the dream and had now awakened from it.

He understood, as only a madman could.

It was this: he and Nick had become as lice. They had travelled for what seemed like hours across an enormous face, through the forest of the beard, escaping the flying peril of the gnats (or perhaps flies) until they found themselves deposited at the very lip of No! No! That wasn’t it. Abysses may have lips but nostrils don’t!

He and Nick clung desperately to a giant’s nose-hairs as their presence had unfortunate consequences.

“AH—AH—AH—!”

Now the wind roared more profoundly than all the world’s hurricanes—profound, yes, though it didn’t actually say anything; for the hurricane is the philosopher among storms, Tom always said, or one day would, or so said in his dreams (some confusion on this point), and its profundity is so profound that even the hurricane cannot fathom it—

“AH—AH—AH—!!”

—the one certainty being the thunder of its blast, as the eye of the storm passed, or in this case perhaps you might say it was the nose of the storm; and the winds reversed themselves and Tom and Nick lost their grip and went tumbling into an abyss vaster than any that yawns between the grave and the world, between the world and the stars—

“CHOOO!!!”

* * * * * * *

Burning the midnight oil that would never expire, because this midnight would never pass, Peter the Poet paced petulantly in his drafty garret. He sat down at his desk again.

His fancies raged. But words would not come.

His quill scratched across the page:

Alas, my love, you do me wrong,

to cast me off discourteously....

Rubbish, he knew. Anybody could do better than that, even, he fancied, a pair of lice crawling up someone’s nose.

* * * * * * *

King Henry sneezed and awoke briefly. He thought of love. His royal wrath roused. He considered shouting for the headsman and finding someone’s head to lop off, just for the exercise, but, no, ‘twas late, ‘twas cold, and he could do it in the morning. For now he turned and sank back into the deep recesses of the royal bed, and dreamed of meat-pies, and so does not figure largely in our narrative.

“And I have loved you so long,

delighting in your company....”

* * * * * * *

Tom O’Bedlam sneezed and awoke. Nick lay beside him, still asleep, sniffling, but not for long, as the not-so-kindly innkeeper, who hadn’t so much allowed them to stay through the miserable cold of the night as failed to eject them because he was himself entirely too drunk (and customers lay snoring across the tables and benches of the common room; here and there somebody sneeze; a belch; flies or fleas or gnats hovered); verily, i’faith, this same innkeeper, arisen early, unsteady on his feet with an ugly expression on his face, approached them in his thundering, clumping boots with a bucket of slops in hand that he might manage to heave out into the street and then again maybe not, as he would have to step over the recumbent Tom and Nick to make his way to the door—

“Nick,” Tom said, nudging him.

Nick sneezed and swatted a louse off his cheek.

“Nick, we have to go.”

The innkeeper loomed clumpingly.

Nick swatted again.

Just in, as he thought to phrase it, the nick of time, Tom hauled his companion up and out the door and into the street. The innkeeper slipped or tripped, or out of sheer spite threw the slops after them. Foul liquid landed with a splat in the snow.

* * * * * * *

Still Peter the Poet gazed out his window into the darkness, which he fancied to be the darkness of his own melancholy.

The words would not come.

He scratched more rubbish on the page.

I have been ready at your hand,

to grant whatever you would crave.....

He watched the Moon set. He watched it rise. The night would never end.

* * * * * * *

“Is it morning, Tom?”

“It should be, yes.”

“But, look—”

Tom looked. The full Moon was setting in the west, but to the east another Moon was rising where the Sun should be. Birds in the eaves of the houses around them twittered and began to sing, then hesitated, uncertain of what to do next.

“That’s not right, Tom,” said Nick.

“No, ’tisn’t.”

They had to scramble aside as a troop of guards with pikes and armor, with banners flying, with moonlight gleaming off their silver helmets, came tramping down the street, screeching “Make way! Make way for our great lady!”

They bore their lady in a sedan chair. She gazed out through the curtain, resplendent in her fiery, jewels gleaming, regarding the two madmen through a glass of some sort, which only magnified her hideous face, which was that of a naked skull.

Her guardsmen screeched because their heads were not those of men, but of ravens and crows.

“That’s not right either,” said Nick.

“No, ‘tisn’t.”

They stared after the company as it passed.

And so the day passed too, though it was a misuse of the term to call it a day, as there was no daylight in it, as the Moon passed again across the sky amid stars which seemed subtly out of place. And the Moon made to set, and yet another rose in the east; and the cold of the night continued; and though Tom and Nick half-heartedly capered at times, and did their tricks in the cold and the snow—Nick lit a candle at both ends and swallowed it, and spat it up again, still burning—no one gave them any pennies for their pains. There were only ghosts abroad, and ghouls, skeletons, the King of Faerie with his rout, the occasional furtive wizard, the former Lord Chancellor of England in all his state (but minus head) and frequent lunatics—there being such a surfeit of Moons that for the moonstruck it was a very special occasion indeed.

* * * * * * *

Yet the respectable folk of England were still in their beds, still asleep, in the night that would not end.

Peter the Poet paced, not asleep at all.

King Henry dreamed of meat-pies.

* * * * * * *

Tom and Nick came upon a man who sat calmly on a low wall. As they approached he rolled his eyes and shook his head, made a gobbling noise, and fell over backwards into a snowy rubbish heap.

Tom looked down over the wall.

“Never mind the formalities. Can’t ye tell we’re as mad as thou art—?”

“Forsooth,” said Nick. “Or possibly fivesooth.”

But the other merely groped among the rubbish, crooned, and said, “Do not wake me from this wondrous dream, for I lie in the arms of a beautiful maiden!”

Nick regarded him, then turned away.

“Is it sooth he says?”

“No, ’tisn’t.”

“You keep saying that.”

“That’s because a madman must be obsessed, Nicholas. Therefore he hath tics and twinges and odd tatters of phrase, which he repeateth anon and anon, as, well, one whose wits are diseas’d—”

“Oh, aye.”

“You ought to do it more yourself. Keep your madness in good trim, for Madness, though the most natural and unpracticed thing in the world, requires practice, which is a paradox, as ’twas told to me by a pair o’doxies once in a particularly friendly fashion—”

But before Tom could continue his discourse, lunatic as it might be, Nick tried to remind him that none of this would matter a jot if they both froze to death in the dark.

“That nears dangerously close to common sense,” said Tom. “Stop it.”

But even as he spoke there came One with hooded robe and scythe and hourglass.

“Do I not know you two?”

Tom shook his head and jingled his bells.

“We’ve met before, perhaps?”

Tom and Nick shook their heads in unison.

“Let me look it up.” Bony fingers flipped through a notebook made of tiny tombstones, which clapped thunder as the pages turned.

But Tom reached over and flipped the pages back, with a thunder, a crackle, and a crack, losing the place.

“This gets so confusing sometimes.”

“Aye,” said Tom. “It does at that.”

* * * * * * *

Tom and Nick ran. Nick continued his discourse on how the world was ending, the sunrise would never come, there would be no more pennies, warm cups of ale, or inn floors to sleep on. He started to sob. His tears froze and fell down like sparkling diamonds. He stopped to scoop some of them up, wondering if he might be able to use a few to buy ale and mutton.

Tom turned to him and shook him.

“Nick. You’re almost making sense, a fearful thing from a madman.”

“Saint Fibberdeygibbet preserve us! What shall we do?”

“I think we should sleep on it.”

“Are we not already dreaming? That makes no sense at all!”

“Exactly.”

So they lay down in the street, in the snow and mud, and again slept, and again dreamed, though they were never sure they had ever awakened. A coach ran over them almost at once, but it was a phantom coach, drawn by flaming, headless horses, conveying a bishop of London speedily to Hell (or possibly a bishop of Hell speedily to London), and so it hardly disturbed their rest.

* * * * * * *

Meanwhile the poet rose from his desk and paced the room, mournfully, yet again. His fancies gathered all around him, thick as gnats, or fleas, or flies...he would decide which later on...and he imagined himself no more than vermin, crawling on the face of mankind...and all ladies gazed upon him as if they were foul specters, or he was...and he yearned for someone who could understand the burning yearning he had in his breast...that phrase, he knew, would have to go into the rubbish heap, as soon as he found the words, as soon as inspiration returned....

* * * * * * *

Tom O’Bedlam slept, and dreamed that he rode in a phantom coach drawn by flaming, headless horses (there were a lot of them on the streets this night; business was booming for spectral conveyances of all sorts) and that a queen in all her finery sat across from him.

The coach sped; it jostled and swayed as it rattled over the rough streets.

The queen’s head, which had been in her lap, bounced to the floor at Tom’s feet.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You must excuse me.”

Gently, Tom placed the queen’s head back in her lap. There was no room to bow, but he swept his hat from his head in a gallant gesture, bells jingling.

“Are you a Fool?” she asked.

“Are they the ones who say ‘i’faith’ and ‘hey, nonny-nonny,’ and call everybody ‘nuncle?”

“Yes. My husband had one like that.”

“Tiresome lot. No, I, Your Highness, am a madman.”

Her Highness found that to be something of a relief. It was a relief, too, to have a sympathetic ear to talk to, as she recounted how the King and wronged her, jilted her, and lopped her head off for good measure, which didn’t even let enjoy the afterlife, because of the constant, tedious obligation to rise from her grave and haunt him.

“We ghosts wail and sing a lot,” she said. “Not that it does much good. No matter how off-key we are, I think he likes it.”

Tom commiserated. He did remark, incidentally, on how the sun did not rise and the world seemed to have come to an end, but only incidentally, remaining focussed on what really mattered, which is to say the lady’s sorrows, lost love, broken hearts, and the miscarriage of romance.

“Ah me,” the ex-queen sighed. The coach bumped. This time her head bounced into Tom’s lap.

“Ah, you...by the way, while you’re here...are these your fancies that fill and haunt the night, that forbid the sun to rise...?”

She groped forward and took her head back.

“You have been a friend to me, sir. I would grant you any favor I have within my power...but, alas, my powers have been much curtailed by, by...you know.” She hefted her head and gestured with it. “All I can offer you is the advice, that, being a madman, you alone understand the mystery that is love, and that if you find the one who is most wounded in love, and somehow heal that wound, then the world will go on as before...though I can’t see why even a madman would want that.”

“You’d have to be mad to understand, Majesty. Being dead isn’t enough.”

“Ah, yes, of course—”

Just then the coach hit a particularly large bump, the door flew open, and Tom tumbled out into a snowbank.

He sat up, sputtering, awake (relatively speaking), though some distance from where he had lain down with Nick.

On his way there he passed a line of monks who chanted solemnly and hit themselves on the forehead with wooden tablets. He passed pure maidens, gallant highwaymen, dashing pirates, honest politicians, and other such persons as inhabit dreams.

He came again upon the One with the scythe, hood, and hourglass, who hissed at him, “Ssayyy...don’t we havvv an appp-pointmenttt?”

He spun the hourglass with his finger and hurried on.

Above him, there were now eight moons in the sky. A ninth seemed to have become stuck somehow on the spire of St. Paul’s, like an apple on the tip of a knife. The Man in this particular Moon complained vehemently. His dog barked. He dropped his lantern into the street, where it exploded into glittering shards, each of which, Tom knew, was filled with enchantment and could lead someone on a magical, romantic quest, or provide some great and impossible revelation, or boon—but he didn’t have time for that.

The air was thick with melancholy. Gloom hung over the city like a damp fog, dimming the outlines of the rooftops to a dull blur. In the houses as he passed, he heard sleepers cry out and sob in their dreams, dreams which might never, ever end at the rate things were going.

He found Nick lying in the street. Several pigs nuzzled around him. But sufficient Melancholy had puddled there (a foul, dark fluid, like slops) that they were the most sorrowful pigs Tom had ever seem. They merely gazed at him reproachfully as he shooed them away.

He shook his friend. “Nick! Nick!”

“Oh alas,” said Nick, awakening. “I was dreaming of meat pies. I almost had a bite when—”

“Come on!”

“Come whither?”

“Hither. Thither.”

“Blither.”

“Oh, yes. Do so Nicholas. Absolutely. Your madness is like a rare sapling, gently nurtured, which now grows into a vast forest that shall not be cut down in a single night.”

“But what if that night never ends, Tom?”

Tom told him what the headless queen had suggested.

“Now you’re almost making sense, Tom. Beware! Beware!” Nick jangled his bells in warning.

Tom urged him to consider the source. Such advice might have been sound, but how it had been obtained put it safely within the allowable bounds of madness.

* * * * * * *

Now all they had to do was find the one so wounded in love that all the rest had followed.

It wasn’t hard.

They went where the fancies were thickest, where the melancholy filled the streets like black syrup, rising above the windows, splashing over walls, while Tom and Nick swam in it amid bobbing skulls thick as foam on a stormy ocean.

They glimpsed the hooded One with the scythe again, who was standing in an upper window, surveying all that passed below, looking rather pleased with himself.

But when that One saw Tom and Nick paddling by in a washtub, he shouted something and ran downstairs.

But Tom looked ahead, not behind. He saw that he and Nick had come to a forest of gallows, from which skeletons hung, all singing as the wind passed through their bones.

I have both wagered life and land

Your love and goodwill for to have....

They beheld knights on quests, always failing, maidens pining away at tombs which bore the effigies of those same knights. A dragon, quite pleased with itself indeed, gobbled down the maidens one by one.

There were ten moons in the sky, eleven. They bumped into one another. The various Men in the Moons quarrelled furiously.

The skeletons sang:

I brought thee kerchers to thy head

That were wrought fine and gallantly....

Nick tugged on Tom’s sleeve. “What’s a kercher?”

“Rubbish!” someone shouted from a loft, high overhead.

“I think we have arrived,” said Tom.

* * * * * * *

Introductions were in order.

“Peter the Poet, I’m Completely Mad. Completely Mad, this is Nick the Lunatic.”

“Actually his name is Tom O’Bedlam,” said Nick.

“Ah me!” said the Poet, half in a swoon, hand to his forehead.

“Poets do that a lot,” said Tom to Nick. “It’s part of the trade.”

“Sort of like being mad.”

“Yes! Exactly!” said Peter the Poet. “Even more so because I am in love!” He paced back and forth, gesticulating, waving pen and paper in the air. Tom and Nick stretched and bent, trying to read what was written, but the page never stood still long enough. Meanwhile Peter explained how he had been smitten, indeed, with the madness of love, which burned him, from which his life bled as if from a wound, as fortune’s wheel turned but would not favor him, as his fancies raged forth into the night on the holy quest of love (several hundred metaphors followed; we need not list them all), how he had given his heart away—

Indeed, this was so. He undid his doublet, unlaced his shirt and showed them the hole in his breast where his heart used to be.

“Good place to store cheese,” Nick remarked.

And in a great storm of words then, in thunder and fury, in drizzling melancholy the Poet told the whole soppy, sorry story, which had no end, and could only be interrupted to further explain that a Poet’s fancies come from the heart, and if he has already given his heart away, and does not possess it, those fancies must arise in some place other than the residence where the poet resides; ergo a problem of uncontrollable proportions, which the Poet can hardly be expected to do anything about; ahem, since he, therefore, struggling with the Muse, with inspiration, can hardly be expected to recapture and rein in his fancies because what he writes has no heart in it and the result is likely to come out more like:

Thy gown was of the grassy green,

Thy sleeves of satin hanging by,

Which made thee be our harvest queen.

And yet thou wouldst not love me.

“Doesn’t even rhyme,” said Nick.

“It could be worse,” said Peter the Poet bitterly. “It could be Hey nonny-nonny.”

“I shudder to think,” said Nick.

“Does she have a name?” Tom asked.

“Who?” said Peter.

“Your lady-love. Now I too have some experience in the madness of love, for I was wounded in love myself, when I loved a giantess who was unfortunately moonstruck when she stood up too tall one night and the Moon hit her on the head and knocked her over the edge of the world—’twas a sad thing, but not entirely tragic, for still she tumbles in the abyss, among the stars, and she rather enjoys herself—I hear from her on occasion, as she dreams of me, or sings love-songs in her dreams, though she has fallen so far now that sometimes they take years to reach me—but as I was saying, ahem, it is my experience that in these cases the beloved usually has a name....”

“It’s Rosalind,” said the Poet.

“Ah.”

“At least that’s her poetical name. I spied her from afar. I fell instantly, madly in love—something you can appreciate, I am sure—and I declared her my Rosalind. I set her on a pedestal, as my inspiration, my Muse. I gave her my heart, as you’ve seen, but still she loves me not, and my poetry cannot speak of the sorrows I suffer—”

“But you haven’t actually ever spoken to her, have you, much less inquired of her name?”

“What else can she be but my Rosalind?”

“Her name might be Ethel,” said Nick.

“You haven’t actually—?”

“I poured my love into a poem, and thus I gave her my heart. It melted into the paper like butter into toast. I followed her to where she lived, and slid the poem under the door—”

“Where for all you know the scullery-maid found it, and used it to wipe her nose when she sneezed.”

“All gooey with melted butter?” asked Nick.

“Alas, for unrequited love!” said the Poet. “Now sorrows and fancies pour from my heart, which is somewhere else, so what can I hope to do about it?”

“I think I know,” said Tom.

* * * * * * *

And One who bore a scythe and hourglass, and had to hold both rather uncomfortably under his bony arms as he paged through his notebook, stood on the doorstep of the house where the Poet lived in the loft. There were by now twenty-seven moons in the sky, but the night was still somehow dark, the light itself steely, gleaming of death, the air chill, Doom and Gloom and Melancholy flowing by in the street like a vast river from an overturned witch’s cauldron. (In fact every witch in the kingdom rushed out with a jar or a jug to get a sample.)

At last he found the page in his notebook. Yes, he did know these two, who were due and overdue and had evaded the ravages and reapings of himself and all his kind. These two had escaped all the tyranny of Time, for entirely too long.

Now would be a reckoning.

He passed through the door of the house and began to ascend the stairs to the loft, his scythe scraping awkwardly as he held notebook in one hand, hourglass in the other, and in situations like this wished for a third.

Just then Tom, Nick, and Peter the Poet came padding or clattering down the stairs (depending on condition of footwear) and nearly collided with the One who ascended.

The Poet let out a frightened cry. Nick just tugged on Tom’s sleeve as if to say, Do something, and Tom, calmly, with the assuredness of madness, snatched the gravestone notebook out of the apparition’s hand, flipped through it back and forth, laughed at a few things he saw in there, sighed at a few others, and said, “Oh, alas, I have lost your place.”

While the hooded One was still sputtering “Stop that!” and trying to find his place again, Tom said, “May I borrow this?” and took the hourglass. He popped off the top, wet his finger with his tongue, and reached in to draw out a few of the Sands of Time on his fingertip.

He touched his finger to his tongue, then turned to Nick and Peter and touched their tongues also.

* * * * * * *

It was a beautiful spring day, the sky so bright it was almost booming, “Hey! Look how bright I am!” Birds sang, not one of them with a hey-nonny-nonny either. The air was filled with the scents of flowers wafting as such scents traditionally do (as a poet would describe it); and on such a day, Tom, Nick, and Peter the Poet came to a country fair. There, amid the bustling country folk, among the motley of jesters and clowns, the fantastic costumes of the players (who noisily out-Heroded Herod), the puppets, the banners, and funny hats with exotic feathers, there, shining before them all like a beacon, her beauty parting the mass of confusion as a the staff of Moses parted the Red Sea, stood none other than Rosalind.

“That’s her,” said Peter the Poet.

Thus she had appeared to his eyes when first he saw her.

“I am without words,” said the Poet, enraptured once again.

So it was Tom who went up to the lady, bowed low and gallantly, did several somersaults, stood on his hands with his toes waving in the air, while he said, “Your pardon, gentle maid, but if you will take the word of a poor madman, there is a poet yonder who is mad for love with you—”

But the lady merely shrugged and said, “Why of course? I am of radiant beauty, am I not? Poets appreciate that sort of thing.”

She laughed. Tom fell over onto his feet. He found himself with Nick and Peter, back in London. The sky darkened and was once again filled with dripping melancholy and intermittent droplets of ennui, which rattled off windowpanes like sleet.

“That didn’t accomplish very much,” said Nick.

“I feel a hey nonny-nonny coming on,” said the Poet.

Again, Tom held up his finger and touched their tongues.

* * * * * * *

The Hooded One flipped through his notebook furiously. These things had to be done according to protocol. He would have to be patient. But not too patient.

* * * * * * *

Now it was past high summer, with just a touch of autumn in the air, night-time but a proper night-time, with only one moon (a crescent) in the sky, and the Hunter rising to gaze over the horizon onto the fields and towns of England.

Tom, Nick, and the Poet came to a cottage. They knocked on the door and a plump, middle-aged woman met them.

Tom introduced himself, did a few handstands, pulled an egg out of his ear (which hatched in his hand; he gave the woman the resultant chicken) and explained why they had come.

“Ah, madmen,” she said. “Of course. Enter.”

“I’m not mad,” said Peter. “I’m a poet.”

“The same.”

They entered in, and before Peter could launch into another of his flowing, poetical, and very long speeches, the lady broke in and said, “My name really is Rosalind, which is but happenstance. You, young man, are too wild-eyed for me, too like these other madmen. You speak of love. I remember love in all its rages. I think of it sometimes, on quiet evenings by the fire. But my life is not like that now. I count the days. I count sheep. I go to market on market day. The seasons follow one another the way they should. I am content. I might have cared for love once, but not now. Why bother?”

She served them warm ale and bread. They sat by the fire for a while, but said little.

Peter the Poet began to weep. Then he stood up, and swept his arm back as if he were about to declaim.

“Quick!” said Nick in alarm. “It might be one of those hey nonny-nonnies—!”

Tom bowed politely to the lady and touched Peter’s tongue with the last grains of the Sands of Time, then Nick’s, then his own.

* * * * * * *

The Hooded One had it figured out. All he had to do, ultimately, was wait. Time, after all, was on his side. They were relatives. They saw each other occasionally at parties and family reunions.

Yes, wait. He reset his hourglass and thumbed his scythe-blade with a bare, pale bone.

* * * * * * *

In London again, in the snow, Tom, Nick, and the Poet walked along the dark streets. There was no moon at all in the sky this night, only stars, but there were lights in windows, wreaths on doors, and groups of people singing carols. It must have been close to Christmas. From the taverns came the sounds more singing, and of much roistering.

Nick held up his foot. His bottomless shoes flopped around his ankles. He wiggled purplish toes.

“Couldn’t we go in and roister for a while? I’m getting cold.”

“Not yet,” said Tom. “Not quite yet.”

They came to another house, in the city, and climbed a long, dark flight of stairs, the bells on their caps jingling softly, the Poet’s boots scraping.

Gently, Tom pushed open a creaking door, revealing a room where an old woman lay in a bed under thin, ragged blankets, by the light of a single sputtering candle.

She sighed as they entered, “Alas, my love, you do me wrong....”

“I beg your pardon,” said Peter the Poet.

“Had I known when I was young what I know now,” she said, “I would have found a time and place for love. It is the one thing which is both constant and most fleeting. We clutch it like gold, but it trickles away like water. A poet told me that once. I never met him, but he wrote many things, in notes and poems he slipped under my door. I guess he was too shy. I never found out who he was. I could have loved him.”

“Oh, alas!” said Peter, sinking to his knees at her bedside.

“Yes, alas,” said the old woman. She fumbled in a drawer by her bedside. She unfolded a piece of paper, and, though it was too dark to read in that room, he recited what was written thereon, for she had memorized it long, long before.

“Well, I pray to God on high,

That thou my constancy mayst see,

And that yet once before I die,

Thou will vouchsafe to love me.”

Her hand went limp. She let the paper fall onto the bedclothes.

“Not very good,” she said, “but written with real feeling. That’s what matters.”

There on the paper was something that shone like a brilliant jewel, like a star fallen to earth and captured in the hand, a thing as delicate as a snowflake, but all of fire. It was his soul, his heart, the very source of his inspiration, which he had given away in hopeless love so long ago.

First he reached under his clothing, removing a bit of cheese from where his heart used to be, putting the cheese into a pocket. Then gently, reverently, he took up the glowing thing and replaced it within himself, where it belonged.

Now his fancies were under control.

He looked at the lady sadly, but hardly weeping, and began thinking of the words to a sonnet he would write about this night, something elegant in form, like a deftly carven jewel.

“Now I’ve got you!!” hissed the Hooded One, stepping out of the shadows, bones rattling, swinging his scythe wide. “I’ve figured it out! All I had to do was wait! Ha!”

“And you shall have to wait a little longer,” said Tom O’Bedlam, “as anyone who is completely insane can understand readily enough.”

He tapped the hourglass and sent it spinning, end over end. But as the lid had not been secured properly after Tom had opened it during their previous encounter, the Sands of Time spilled out all over the room, and there was much confusion.

“That’s not fair!”

* * * * * * *

Tumbling, then, back through the days of their lives and the days they had never lived, Tom, Nick, Peter the Poet, and Rosalind found themselves once more in a London street, under the bright sky of summer (which is somewhat less obstreperous than many spring skies you could meet). It was an ordinary day. People went about their business. There was talk that the King was going to chop off another queen’s head, or maybe had invented a new kind of meat-pie. No one seemed entirely sure. Rumor, painted in tongues, wagged idly.

The poet got out pen and paper, sat on a wall. Beyond the wall lay a lunatic who had shaped a lady out of rubbish; but she had come to life and the two made passionate love, each of them perfect in the other’s eyes.

The poet started to write a sonnet.

Tom, with the insight that comes only to the mad, stayed his hand, and said, “Have you considered becoming an accountant? Lots of lovely numbers in neat rows. Steady wages. No heartbreak or raging metaphors.”

(The lunatic behind the wall and his lady-love began to sing, something with Hey nonny-nonny in it every other line. It was time for Tom and the others to move on.)

* * * * * * *

The ending was this: Peter married Rosalind, after a proposal that added up their accounts neatly and showed how one side balanced the other. They lived quietly and happily together for a long time. If theirs was not a fiery, all-consuming passion, it was just as well, for such love is only for madmen, as Tom O’Bedlam knew so well. It deprives one of reason by its very nature, but even so, you have to have a knack for it, as you do for really inspired madness.

He explained as much to the Man in the Moon (there was only one) at night when he climbed to the top of the spire of old St. Paul’s and helped free the Moon, which had gotten stuck up there, like an apple on the end of a knife.