Alms for Oblivion Read Online Free PDF

none was to be found, but that when you had no desire to cross the river and
were simply enjoying a stroll along its banks there was sure to be a whole fleet of them idling off-shore.
    “You are certain of this, Nick?” said Peter. “That I will be welcome at your company rehearsal?”
    “As I said back there, you’re an apprentice come to learn the craft.”
    “And craft is what we want now. A river craft.”
    “Oh, yes, ha. There’s never a boat around when you need one.”
    But at that moment I heard a creaking sound and spied a tall shape taking on definition through the yellow-grey gloom. And the moment after that something strange happened, happened to me, I
mean. I felt my scalp prickling and the hair stir on the nape of my neck.
    It must have been the lurid gloom and the grinding of the oar against the side of the boat and the way in which the boatman’s outline was distorted by the foggy vapours. It must have been
all these things as well as the steady, undeviating approach he was making towards our wharf. Whatever it was, it made me think of that other boatman.
    You know the one I mean.
    In the old stories it is Charon who ferries the souls of the dead across the river Styx to the underworld. It doesn’t matter that he is a man of unprepossessing appearance for he does not
have to win his clients. They have no choice, since there is a river to be crossed and only one ferryman to take them. To pay him they have a coin tucked into their mute mouths. I shivered at the
grizzled features of the boatman as they emerged below us in the haze. The taste of the fog was like a coin laid on my tongue.
    And then the spell was broken.
    “Hop in, gents.”
    Peter and I scrambled down the slippery stairs and took our places on the damp, padded seats in the stern.
    “Where to, gents?”
    “What? Oh, Temple Stairs.”
    “Rightaway.”
    We swung out, bobbing into nothingness. The boatman, the soul of cheerfulness, hummed tunelessly under his breath and plied with a will. At least he seemed to know where we were going. Pulling my
cloak tighter about me, I noticed that there was a fire-fly of a light hanging above our heads in the stern as there would have been for a night crossing. The sight of other smudges of light around
us and the sound of other oars creaking away across the water were reassuring.
    I laughed (in my mind) at my fears and premonitions and was glad when Peter resumed his account of how and why he’d quit his family home. He’d hinted in the tavern that there were
other things apart from his father’s hostility which had driven him out. In confidential tones, while we sat shoulder to shoulder in the back of the boat, he now told me what they were. After
a period of violent mourning his father Anthony Agate had taken him a new wife – or rather been taken by a new one. She was a well-practised widow with, according to Peter, all of a
widow’s wiles.
    “I don’t like her, Nick. She’s already seen two husbands into the ground.”
    “She can’t be blamed for outliving them.”
    “And I can’t be blamed for not liking her.”
    “That’s not so unusual with stepchildren and step-parents, I suppose.”
    “She seized on my father like a – like a harpy, with her claws out and her wings flapping.”
    Peter almost whispered this, although I don’t think the boatman, humming away, plying his trade, was listening.
    “But my father seemed happy enough with this. Or at least his raging moods went.”
    Anthony Agate might have been as opposed as ever to the notion that his son could turn player, Peter explained, but now he was distracted with a change of wife he treated his children better
than he had done in the aftermath of their mother’s death. That is, he largely ignored them.
    “I will say this for Mistress Gertrude Potts, even though it goes against my teeth to do so – ”
    “Gertrude Potts?”
    “The harpy. My father’s new wife. She was formerly married to Randolph Potts of