Continued: The True and Scandalous history of the Lords of Aether, being the Reminiscences and Researches of Julius Savage Beare

Part the first

Nothing changes under the sun. People say that these are days of particular wickedness and vice and that it wasn’t like that when they were young. As usual, people talk a load of old cobblers. I’ve seen the old newspapers they have in the Club archives, and those so called “good old days” weren’t one long picnic in the sun with nobody doing anything worse than swatting the head of a daisy with their snickersnee. Rape, murder, robbery, it was all going on back when our dear queen was just a twinkle in her old dad’s eye.

There has been a gentleman’s club on this site since the times of Good Queen Bess and if I say that its members included Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe you’ll have a pretty good idea what used to go on. All boys dressed as girls and “once more into the breach”. My Poll says, “As long as there’s been men there’s been mollies and renters. Probably back to when old Julius Caesar came along and his lot founded the old city, they’ll have been lifting their togas and jiggling their styluses.” Well educated, my Poll.

Now, my “gentlemen” (if you can call such a scabrous bunch of shirtlifting poofs “gentlemen”) aren’t the first to offer their services to the Queen. (And, believe me, these men know all about queens and the services they offer. I’m digressing again, Poll would whack me.) Back in the days of doublets and hose, the men who met here were at the behest of Elizabeth, maintaining her honour against the dagos and any others who sought to breach our wooden walls. They did a roaring trade rooting out spies and tipping the buggers into the sewers up by what was left of the old city walls. One particularly insidious scrote evaded their ministrations, though. Senor Jose Maria Jimenez, dealer in Jerez wine and state secrets, said to be the most dangerous man this side of the channel; Queen Bess’s men couldn’t implicate the swine, not for all the frills on her Majesty’s corset. So they got Will and Kit after him.

Kit Marlowe – there was a bloke. If he turned up on the doorstep today he’d feel right at home with the present day occupants of the club. Will Shakespeare I’m not so sure about. You can’t pin him down, not for all his telling his fancy lad how pretty he was and trying to “shake his darling buds of May”. Is that what they called it in those days, the dirty buggers? Anyhow, him and Kit set up this Jimenez good and proper. Lured him to an upper room in a tavern back end of beyond (well, back end of Bow, but that’s the same thing), and got him embroiled with a young actor laddie who’d whip off his doublet and show his singlet for tuppence. No sooner had the dago gent concerned started fiddling with his codpiece, when an artist sprang out from behind the arras and captured the whole scene on canvas. Threatened to sell it to that scandalous pamphlet “Newes of ye Worlde” unless the man hied himself home. England one Spain nil, I make that.

For all that my gentlemen have got the morals of alley cats, and smell like them sometimes, they’re true servants of the Empire, and I serve them as such, to the best of my abilities and with the aspiration to be the top of my profession. A Beare may be first, a Beare may be second, but there’ll never be a Beare bottom!

Charlie Cochrane Savage Beare