My chaplain, the vicar of the manor church, says I eat too much and drink too deeply of the rich claret but what does he know, the silly fart? I have seen them, he hasn't.
Doesn't he believe in demons, sorcerers, ghosts and ghouls? I do. I have lived too long a life with the bastards to reject them. A fool once told me about Murder, a little dwarf woman, who dressed in yellow buckram and burgundy-coloured shoes with silver buckles. She was the jester at Queen Mary's court. You know – pale-faced, red-haired Mary, who married Philip of Spain and thought he would give her a baby. Her belly grew big though no child was there. Poor, bloody Mary, who liked to put the Protestants in iron baskets and turn them to spluttering fat above roaring fires at Smithfield next to the meat shambles. Anyway, this jester, God knows I forget her name, she claimed the sky turned red at night because of the blood spilt upon the earth since the time of Cain, the first murderer. Another man, a holy vicar (a rare thing indeed!), once wondered whether the souls of murdered men and women hung for all eternity between heaven and earth. Do they, he wondered, float in some vast, endless, purple-coloured limbo, like the fireflies or will-o'-wisps do above the marshes and swamps down near the river?
Oh, yes, I often think of Murder as I he between my gold-embroidered, silken sheets with the warm, plump body of Fat Margot the laundress lying hot beside me. She shares my bed to keep the juices running though, of course, the vicar objects.