Whittington Page 11

  Wilhelmina and Theo pricked up their ears.

  “The sailors had on board two fresh she-goats, which means they had just had babies and were giving milk. The custom among sailors in that time was to drink their milk as long as they gave it, then butcher them for meat. The goats had survived the storm in their tied-down cage. The kittens owed their lives to those goats and so do I.

  “Dick put some goat milk in a cup, dipped his finger, and pushed it into a tiny mouth. The kittens were starving. Goat milk is rich. It made them strong. As he fed and watched them, Dick told the kittens the story of their mother, everything he knew. As they grew up, what they wanted to know most of all was her name and how she had happened to turn up on Sir Louis’s doorstep the afternoon Dick saw her for the first time. He didn’t know.

  “As his battered ship crept through the narrow blue strait to Constantinople, Dick looked over to Asia. A person could swim across. The land of Marco Polo lay beyond in a blue glow. It reminded Dick of the moment in his first voyage sailing past Gibraltar and seeing the red haze of Africa.

  “While his ship was refitting at Constantinople, he saw to the opening of the agency there, as Sir Louis and his backers had wanted. That work done, he put the kittens in his pocket and spent days wandering the city. It was the grandest he’d ever seen, a vast walled fortress filled with gilded domes and temples. The chief one, the Hagia Sophia, seemed to be a city unto itself, a huge space under a weightless golden shell filled with pictures made of colored stones.

  “Outside there were voices and laughter, friends yelling to friends, flutes wailing, merchants singing their wares, men playing stringed instruments and beating cymbals, women dancing to the rhythms of skin-covered drums.

  “The smells of meat cooking made him hungry. At the food stalls he bought chunks of grilled spiced lamb on a stick and dishes of curried grains. The grains were strange. They were rice. He fed the kittens small bits of lamb he’d chewed to paste.

  “In the bazaar at the Golden Gate he bought a carved turquoise bead strung on a thong of black leather. It was a thin cylinder from Tibet. ‘A sacred relic,’ the woman who sold it said as she tied it around his neck. ‘It will bring what you desire above all else,’ she whispered.

  “He bought large woven sacks of figs, dates, and rice, and casks of oil and spices. He walked the docks hunting for merchandise that would sell for a good profit in London. Everywhere he asked for rare plants, especially rhubarb for Fitzwarren. Some knew the dried root, but no one had seen the growing plant. From traders to China he heard report of a vegetable curd popular there, a sort of cake called tau-foo made from a pea. He knew that would quicken Fitzwarren’s heart, so he offered a large reward for the pea and the recipe for the meat made of it. No one took it up. Today we know that ‘pea’ as soy and the food as tofu.

  “He gathered lengths of Indian silk and cotton cloth. He found bright patterned rugs tied knot by knot by the desert people and implements of bright beaten copper and bronze. From an Afghan trader he bought a handful of gem-shaped orange carnelians for the jewelers in London, and chunks of lapis lazuli, the deep blue rock painters grind fine to paint sky. The Afghani had small, shiny blocks of gum arabic for sale too, the dried resin of a tree that painters dissolve to use as a medium for the ground lapis.

  “Dick inquired about sailing east across the Black Sea and then going overland south to Tabriz in Persia. After his reading Marco Polo, the name Persia sounded in his head like a poem. He didn’t have enough money. What with the costs of chartering and refitting the caravel, acquiring the cargo of trade goods, and establishing the agency, he was almost out of gold and credit. He promised himself he’d try again.

  “On the way home, as his ship passed Land’s End at the southwest tip of England, Dick sent word by land to Fitzwarren. A week later, when his vessel finished her reach up the Channel and finally got a favorable wind on an inflowing tide up the Thames, his old friend was on Limehouse Wharf to welcome him like Joseph returned from Egypt. It was Dick’s twenty-second birthday.

  “They embraced and talked for hours in a dark tavern over mugs of warm ale, a joint of roast mutton hot from the spit, black bread spread thick with butter. Dick hadn’t tasted butter in months. It tasted wonderful.

  “Fitzwarren had news of Will’s dying at sea. Dick told about the squall in the Dardanelles, the agency at Constantinople, the gold-domed temple there, the cargoes. He didn’t mention his cat.

  “When he asked about the package he’d sent for Mary, Fitzwarren’s face wrinkled.

  ‘A month after you sailed she married the gentleman, as was planned. Not half a year on, not far from here, he was kicked in the gut by a cart horse gone wild. He lingered for a few days, in agony but lucid enough to make his last will and testament, giving the Church all that he had, including her dowry portion.’”

  “What does that mean?” Abby asked.

  “It means he signed over to the Church everything he owned, including the property Sir Louis gave him to marry her. That gift is called a dowry. It was the custom then for people of Sir Louis’s class to buy their daughters or granddaughters a socially advantageous marriage by settling a valuable gift on the husband. Fathers bargained their children for marriage like they were buying and selling properties.”

  Abby made a face.

  “‘All of that happened more than a year ago,’ Fitzwarren said. ‘Sir Louis took care of Mary after her husband died. When your package arrived, she was still in mourning, so I debated passing it on. I had an idea you’d keep after her, but I didn’t think it right. I was going to take the matter up with Sir Louis. Then I looked at your note again. You asked me to deliver your package. I did so with my own hand.’

  “‘Not long after, Sir Louis passed away. They said he was in his ninety-third year. He’d named me one of his pallbearers. I didn’t know he esteemed me so as a friend. It’s a hard thing to learn you were treasured by someone you admired only after he’s cold.’ Fitzwarren shook his head and looked away.”

  “THE NEXT DAY Dick sent a note to Mary asking if he might visit. She wrote back yes. He met her at Sir Louis’s country home in Richmond, the place he’d been walking to in hopes of seeing her when the bells had called him back. She was wearing his token. The carved shell was a startling likeness.

  “He’d gone up with his two cats. They went everywhere with him. As he sat with Mary in the garden, one cat left Dick’s lap and went to Mary’s, where it settled as if it had been there forever. There was the fragrance of roses.

  “Dick and Mary talked until the sun went down and moths came flickering. Dick took Mary’s hand. It fluttered like a moth. Then it settled into his.

  “He told her about seeing her the first time, the afternoon he called on Sir Louis after his voyage to Africa. He described the birds in the king’s throne room at Tripoli where the cat had won him a fortune, the ancient temple at Palermo that caught the sun at dawn, the scent of wild white narcissus blooming on the rock coast there, the glittering wonders of Constantinople. He untied the black thong with the turquoise bead and put it around her neck.

  “She touched his face gently, tracing his scar.

  “‘How did you get it?’ she asked.

  “He told her about riding to London on the land agent’s carriage with Will Price. He told her about his grandmother.

  “‘You didn’t say goodbye to her?’

  “‘She knew,’ he said softly.

  “Mary told him her parents had died of plague before she was old enough to know them and how Sir Louis had raised her and arranged her marriage. She told him about Fitzwarren coming with his package.

  “‘I knew it was from you before I opened it. It made me joyfuller than I’d ever been in my life.’

  “They married and had a mostly happy life together, with one daughter. Dick Whittington prospered and became lord mayor of London, just as the coachman, Will Price, had predicted on the carriage so many years before.

  “Dick kept Marco Polo’s bo
ok beside him always, but he never left England again. He never made it to Tabriz.

  “He lived to a great age, surviving his wife and daughter. As an old man his companion was his cat, a descendant of the great ratter. People found it strange that as he and his cat walked together, they seemed to be talking.

  “In his last years he spent his fortune on a public library, a hospital, and an almshouse for the poor. His biggest project, though, was the one Sir Louis had dreamed of—laying pipe to carry clean water to spigots in the slums.

  “He is not remembered because he died rich. He is remembered because he gave away everything. And everything he had to give away he owed to his cat.

  “That’s as much as I know,” said Whittington. “I got the story from my mother, who got it from her mother—up the chain, mother to daughter, mother to daughter, all the way back to Dick Whittington’s cat.”

  Nobody said anything. As swallows coasted in and out of the barn, the silence in that heat was like sand falling.

  BEN FINISHED the last Level 19 book the Friday before Labor Day. School was to start the day after. Coach O called Dr. Parker.

  “He’s got the Level 20s to do, but he’s there. Move him up.”

  Dr. Parker called Bernie at the Texaco.

  “Ben did it! He’s going on with his class.”

  “Thanks” was all Bernie could manage.

  He went over to Marion’s room. She left work so fast she forgot to shut down the computer. Ben liked her angel food cake best of all. He was going to have all the angel food he could eat.

  Ben knew before anybody. Coach O had told him. He headed to the barn. “I did it!” he yelled. “I’m not going to stay behind or anything.” Abby was laughing and crying, the rats danced, the horses tore around the paddock with tails flying like it was a race day. The cat swelled up bigger than the day he’d given Havey her surprise. Brahms crowed so long and hard he got dizzy and fell over. The bantams ruckused, Theo sang like it was dawn. All was jubilation, dust, and pandemonium.

  The Lady called for order. “We all had a hand, a wing, and a paw in this. It isn’t just Ben, we’ve all passed!” There erupted such a whooping cheer that Gregory the watch crow came over to find out what was going on.

  THE LADY AND GENT were happy together until the first sharp winds of autumn brought flights of ducks over, calling loudly as they headed south. When Gent called back, some of the fliers wheeled low and yelled to him to come along. He flew up with his children and joined them. He circled twice, honking to the Lady. She squalled and flapped but she couldn’t go. Then it was quiet. Everyone was looking up. The sky was empty.

  Suddenly she felt old and exhausted. She dragged herself to her sleeping place by the barn door and quit eating. Whittington stayed by her. “When the others came over, he had to join them,” she whispered. “I would have gone too. For all my loves here, if I could have flown with him I would have.”

  Bernie put water and a handful of the special grain close to her nest. Al brought out half of his breakfast doughnut and crumbled it for her. She closed her eyes. She wouldn’t talk. For two days she didn’t move except to attend to her necessaries. She ate nothing, drank nothing, said nothing. Even Havey’s nosings and lickings got no response.

  Whittington started telling stories about her as if she weren’t there—how she’d helped him when he’d lost his home. Soon the others joined in. Abby said they were doing the Lady’s obituary.

  “What’s an obituary?” Ben wanted to know.

  “What they write about you after you’re dead,” Abby said.

  The Lady opened her eyes.

  Ben told about her encouraging his reading. “She taught me about taking charge of myself,” he said. The Lady stirred a little at that. The Old One told the story of the truce with the rats.

  Abby made them all laugh about the night with the owls. They told one another about her speech the afternoon of the hawk’s attack.

  “Who will lead in her place?” Wilhelmina asked. “She had standards, she was like a good Dutch aunt. She taught us to keep clean and tidy.”

  The Lady struggled up. “I am not dead,” she declared with a tremendous flap. She looked at the sky and flapped again. “Flying isn’t everything. There’s something to staying put where you’re needed.”

  The animals cheered, even the Old One, who yelled, “Hear! Hear!”

  The Lady looked at Wilhelmina.

  “I’m Muscovy, I am not Dutch!”

  THAT FALL WHITTINGTON and the Lady trained his children. His son was named Fitzwarren; he’d named his daughter Mary Green.

  “Before the big snow comes I’m going to take a trip,” Whittington announced. “I have to see my boy again, the boy in my home before. The one they sent away. I’m going to take Mary Green to him.” Mary Green nodded, as if she’d known all along.

  The last warm afternoon of autumn Ben, Abby, the Lady, and Whittington sat out in front of the barn together. Ben knew how to stroke the cat’s back to make him stretch and purr with pleasure. His purr was louder now but it was still ragged. Brahms sang to them.

  When Ben started talking about the reading lessons, Coraggio, Theo, Wilhelmina, and the horses moseyed over. “It was like coming in out of the dark,” he said. “When I started, it was dark, there were shapes and things but nothing was clear. Then it was clear and I could see. It was like being born.”

  As the sun set, a chill wind came up. They went into the barn to see if his first word was still on the stanchion. It was.

  THE RICHARD WHITTINGTON of history was born in Gloucestershire in the west of England in the late 1350s. He was a younger son of a nobleman. It was the custom of the time that the family’s wealth went to the firstborn male, so Dick was not rich as a young man. He did have the advantages of name and connections.

  He became the richest merchant of his day as a London mercer supplying the gentry with velvets, damasks, and silks. There is a record of his supplying King Henry IV with cloth of gold for his daughter’s wedding. He loaned substantial sums to the kings of his time and was three times elected lord mayor of London.

  After his wife and daughter died, he decided to devote a large part of his fortune to public charities. The size of his bequests and the fact that most were devoted to aiding the poor led to his becoming a folk hero after his death. Money from his estate founded a college and an almshouse and contributed substantially to repairing St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and building a new library at Greyfriars. Other sums went to the rebuilding of Newgate prison because it was “feble, over litel and so contagious of the Eyre, yat hit caused the deth of many men” and to tapping a spring in the bank of the city ditch to make it easy for people to get clean water at that place.

  He died in London in 1423.

  In the early seventeenth century, Whittington’s name, still famous because of his generosities, got attached to a thirteenth-century Persian folktale about an orphan who gained a fortune through his remarkable cat.

  A similar legend about a remarkable mouser is attached to the life of a fourteenth-century Italian merchant named Francesco di Marco Datini. See Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), pages 3–4.

  Dick Whittington and his cat first appeared together in a play, now lost, that was licensed in 1605. That same year, “The History of Richard Whittington, of his lowe byrth, his great fortune, as yt was plaied by the pruynces servants” and “The virtuous Lyfe and memorable Death of Sir Richard Whittington, mercer, some-tyme Lord Maiour” were published. Those too have been lost.

  The earliest surviving reference to his legend is found in Thomas Heywood’s “If you know not me, you know nobody,” published in 1606.

  The earliest form of the story in the British Museum Collection is a black-letter ballad of 1641, “London’s glory and Whittington’s renoun; or a looking glass for the citizens of London; being a remarkable story how Sir Richard Whittington … came to be three times Lord Mayor of London, and how his rise was by a cat.” />
  Present-day versions appear in Andrew Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith Company, 1926); Walter de la Mare, Animal Stories, “Whittington and His Cat” (London: Faber and Faber, 1939); and Ronne P. Randall, Dick Whittington (London: Penguin, 1993).

  Entries for Richard Whittington appear in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1900, and Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. His era is described in Barbara W Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Knopf, 1978).

  For information about rats, I relied on Martin Hart, Rats (London: Allison & Busby, 1982). Rats and the plague are described in Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1935); Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (London: Collins, 1969); and Norman Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague (New York: Free Press, 2001).

  The fable referred to in chapter 13 is “The Lion and the Rat” by Jean de La Fontaine. I used Brian Wildsmith’s edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963).

  Concerning medieval gardens, plants, and medicines, my authorities were Sir Frank Crisp, Medieval Gardens (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1979), a reprint of the 1924 edition; John Harvey, Early Nurserymen (London: Phillimore, 1975); and L. H. Bailey, The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan Publishers Limited, 1942).

  The Amapacherie mentioned in chapter 18 is possibly a euphorbia. The English mercer Peter Collinson described it in a letter to John Ellis, November 24, 1757, as “a wonderfull E. India plant…. For a small pebble being wrap’d in its Leaves & held in the mouth for a Small Time it brake into Sand,” as quoted in Alan W. Armstrong, ed., “Forget Not Mee & My Garden …”: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002).

  I studied ducks, chickens, cats, and dogs firsthand. I studied goats firsthand too, and read Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Jim Corbett, Goatwalking (New York: Viking, 1991); and Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, “Goats.” For more on cats, see Herodotus, The Persian Wars, translated by George Rawlinson (New York: Modern Library, 1942).