Shakespeare's Rebel

by C. C. Humphreys

  It gave the other men time to recover their courage, and the one his club. ‘Right, you whoreson,’ he declared, ‘give us that locket.’

  ‘You cannot have that,’ replied John, swallowing back his nausea, slowly rising, reaching up, back. ‘But you can have this.’

  There was only one other thing he possessed now, truly the last thing he would ever part with. It rested between his shoulder blades, in a sheath designed for the purpose. Drawing the six-inch blade now, he took guard.

  Its appearance punctured the men’s bravado like its point would have an inflated bladder – to John’s considerable relief, since both men, though stationary, refused to stay still to his sight, and moreover had each acquired a glowing yellow and green carapace. ‘Now, now,’ said the wiry one, swallowing, ‘there’s no need for that.’

  ‘Is there not?’ asked John. It was a real question; yet before either man could answer, boots sounded upon the stairs. Keeping the knife before him, John shifted it slightly towards the attic door. Spaniards might be about to burst through it.

  They didn’t, but the landlord of the Cross Keys did. ‘Out, swine,’ the three-bellied man bellowed. ‘’Tis past nine. Do you think I keep a bawdy house and you the Earls of March? The nightmen want your bed.’

  He seemed oblivious to knife or cudgel, just shooed them while a boy entered, swept a filthy cloth over the more soiled of the floorboards and left bearing the teeming bucket. The two thieves followed with a few brave mutters and dark looks at John. Fumbling his knife back into its sheath – he nicked himself doing it, adding a future scar to the ones already there – John bent, repossessed his cloak and lurched towards the stairs.

  The landlord delayed him with words. ‘Someone looking for you. In the yard.’

  ‘Me?’ It was a surprise. He didn’t know anyone in Wapping, an outlying district far from his usual haunts. It was why he had chosen it for the climax of his month-long debauch. ‘Who?’

  ‘A boy.’ The man put a hand on his shoulder and pushed. ‘Now be off.’

  A boy? For a moment, John’s heart lurched. Ned, he thought. His first two steps were quick at the happy thought, slowing thereafter. He might want to see his son. He did not want his son to see him. Not like this, the way he looked, the way he stank. It had been a year since the last drunk, and he’d given Ned some cause for hope that it would not be repeated.

  Still, he peeped into the yard, hoping to at least get a glimpse of the heir to all his nothing, ready to run out the front once he had. It was not Ned there, though, but a dark-haired younger lad, maybe ten years of age. John did not know him, though he thought perhaps he had seen him somewhere before.

  ‘You seek me?’ he said, crossing the slick cobbles with as even a gait as he could manage, making for the butt of rainwater in the yard’s corner. It had a crust of ice on it. John broke it; then, taking a breath, he plunged his whole head in, gasped at the shock and pain, plunged deeper.

  He stayed submerged as long as he could stand. When he rose, he discovered the boy had come closer but not close. ‘Well,’ he asked, through dripping water, ‘who sent you?’

  The boy did not reply. Perhaps he did not wish to open his mouth. Instead, he held out a scrap of paper. The moment John took it, its deliverer turned on his heel and fled.

  Some of the ink smudged under what ran from his fingers. But the brief message was clear enough. He scratched at his wild beard and beneath his doublet. He was flea food again.

  What, John thought, sucking soured rainwater from his moustache, did London’s most famous actor want with him now?

  II

  Southwark Ho!

  He had fortune on the riverbank. No wherryman came so far from London for fares and he had no coin for one if he had. But a skins trader was bound thither with a full load and was in a good enough mood to allow John – who requested it with little more than a few grunts and gestures – free passage with him; as long as he didn’t mind riding on his wares.

  ‘As comfortable a bed as you’ve slept on for a while, I’ll warrant ye – if you’ve slept in a bed at all,’ said the man, eyeing John’s stained clothes and scraggled beard before gesturing to the mound of cow hide. He and a labourer sang hymns while they rowed, and did not seek news of the world, the usual fee for a free ride, allowing John to sink back with a groan and consider how, indeed, it was a far better bed than he’d had in many a week – fewer fleas, a soft pillow not a log, most of all no flatulent, kicking, thieving fellow occupants. Better too than the walk he’d thought he’d have to make. The fields of Mile End and Whitechapel had started to be encroached upon by those who could not squeeze within the City’s walls or sought freedom from its controls. That meant businesses of every kind – taverns, ordinaries, brothels, shacks and tenements – and it also meant people, some of whom would be watching for the unwary traveller.

  Him, John thought. He was amazed that he’d seen off the bed-sharing thieves.

  Yet if he believed the comfort would make him doze again, he was wrong. He ignored the banks, the jostling humanity in the wharves and warehouses. The river better suited his mood, drew him eye, ear and nose. Streaked with daubs and paints of different hues, sheened with effluent from the tanneries, dotted with spars of wood and broken rafts twined with rope on which perched gulls and gannets. Carcasses floated, a bloat sheep here, a piebald dog, a cat; once, a human, gender rendered indeterminate by long immersion and the pickings of fish and bird.

  So much flotsam was a match for the jumble of his mind. It was always thus, after a month’s debauch, detritus swirling around his head, with him unable to alight on any item for long. Yet settle he must. This summons from Richard Burbage? Did opportunity lie in it? Would he be sober enough to seize it if it did?

  A harsh cry drew his eyes from murky surface into the air. More a bark, for ravens did not call like other birds. He knew this for he had spent months listening to them, when he had little else to do but learn to distinguish between their voices. He had even befriended one, a blue-black brute he called Jeremiah, in the time when they’d shared the dwelling.

  He raised his eyes to that dwelling now. The Tower rose like a stone mountain from the water, dwarfing every building nearby, the weight of its stones pressing upon the city and upon himself. It appeared almost as a continuation of his dream from the morning, for his capture by the Spanish that day in Cadiz, his imprisonment in Seville afterwards had led, within a year, to imprisonment there. It was what the English authorities did with prisoners who had, by whatever means, escaped the clutches of the Inquisition. For many had been released only on the promise to return to London and assassinate the heretic queen, and that John had reported this mission on arrival had not led to the hailing of a hero and the rewards he’d expected but to three months of close examination.

  ‘A foul place!’ exclaimed the skin trader, seeing the direction of John’s gaze. ‘Gives me the fears each time I pass by.’

  John grunted agreement.

  ‘Well, to happier thoughts, eh?’ the man said, leaning on his oar against the current, swinging the prow of his boat away. ‘And fairer prospects.’

  Fair was not a word oft used to describe what was before him now, but for once John thought the description more than apt. It wasn’t the vista, the usual huddle of riverfront warehouses, many with the fug of industry rising from them, slaughterhouses alongside fish smokeries, tanneries beside glue factories. It wasn’t the byways beyond which would be the same twisting, narrow, gloomy, cessfilled alleys and streets that were upon the opposite bank.

  It was the people who thronged them. It was the life upon them. It was the pleasure that could be had along them. It was the Liberty of the Bishop of Winchester, and contained more taverns, more brothels, more cockpits and bear bait rings, more gaols and more playhouses than any other square half-mile in the known world.

  ‘Southwark ho!’ the trader announced. ‘It’s where we’re stopping, so unless you want to ride back to Wapping on the next tide, you�
��d best alight.’ The prow nudged into a wooden wharf and the labourer leapt off to make the vessel secure. ‘Pickle Herring Stairs. Will they suit?’

  John rose from his hide bed, wobbled to the gunnel, paused there to get his balance. He inhaled, filling his nose with the acrid, sweet, rancid scent emerging from the warehouse that gave the stairs their name. For the first time in a long time, he tried a smile. Words accompanied it. ‘They suit well. And I thank you for your kindness.’

  The man reached out a steadying hand and braced John as he stepped on to the wharf. He looked surprised. ‘You’re English?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘God’s teeth, I thought you was, you know . . .’ He shrugged. ‘. . . foreign. On account you’re so dark and you don’t talk much.’

  John shrugged as well, stepped away. The man called after. ‘You sounds like you could be a bit of a gentleman too. So I’d watch myself in Southwark if I were you, sir.’ John turned to look back. ‘Know any people ’ere, do you?’

  John found he still had a smile on his face. It went on the man’s words. ‘A few,’ he replied, and climbed the stairs. More than a few, he thought, as he pushed through a crowd of labourers seeking coin to help unload the cargo. And very few of those do I wish to see. But Richard Burbage is certainly one.

  Should he go there straight? He bent his head to his chest, sniffed his doublet, winced at an odour so strong it even pierced the fug of pickled herring. Peg Leg, he thought, and turned, not along the route to the playhouse. but down the High Road.

  The inn was called the Castle upon the Hope, and was run by a former comrade from the wars, Jack Tanner, known as ‘Peg Leg’ Tanner for what he’d given for his country. Peg Leg kept a bathhouse, a taste for which he’d picked up during his time as a prisoner in Granada. There was hot water to be had there – and if John was to meet with London’s premier player it was probably better not to be stinking like a stallion at covering time.

  The reason he was called ‘Peg Leg’ and not ‘Legless’ was down to John. He’d arrived in the nick and managed to prevent the four Spanish soldiers sawing off the other limb by the neat device of killing them all. Today, though, he could see in the man’s eyes that his gratitude was not, as he had blubbered at the time, eternal. In truth, thirteen years of presuming upon it appeared to have worn it thin.

  John observed this through rising steam. The water was quite clean, scarce in its second or third use, a state he was, however, changing rapidly with his occupancy. Though it seemed that even this was not the main cause of Peg Leg’s plaint.

  ‘You were here a week ago, John.’

  ‘I was?’ It was news, and especially alarming as he remembered nothing about it. He always avoided Southwark during a debauch – for reasons that his old comrade began to enumerate.

  ‘You were. And most . . . distraught, I would say. You demanded your sword. There were men you had to kill.’

  ‘What men?’

  ‘You did not say.’

  John thought back. Nothing came. ‘You did not give it to me?’

  ‘I did not. You had made me swear, a month ago, when you embarked on this latest . . . voyage . . . that under no circumstances was I to let you have it until you were sober.’

  ‘Quite right. You did well in refusing me.’

  ‘I did, John. But my inn did less well. You were lion drunk.’ He looked mournful. ‘You broke things.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Chairs. A door. Several tankards. You boxed young Harold’s ears, then took a bottle of whisky and ran off.’

  ‘Ah.’ John contemplated the greying foam on the water’s surface. ‘I will pay you for it all, Jack.’

  ‘You have money?’

  ‘Oh. No. Not now. But soon. I have hopes.’ He saw the doubt in the other’s man’s eyes. ‘Burbage has sent for me today. Perhaps he has a role in mind.’

  ‘Are you not still . . . exiled from the stage?’

  ‘Exiles end. Grudges cannot last for ever.’

  ‘Some men’s can. Just like their obligations.’ Peg Leg sighed. ‘Have you clothes to meet him in other than . . . ?’ He pointed to the discarded and reeking pile.

  ‘I do not. Might you . . . ?’

  Another sigh. ‘I will see what I have. This time though I will want them back. Unholed.’

  ‘Of course.’ The man turned to go, and John called after, ‘And, Jack, one other thing . . .’

  ‘John, truly, I cannot bring you whisky . . .’

  ‘Nay. I have foresworn it. Ale only passes my lips, as it has done for three days now. It is my . . . method, as you know. Speaking of, a pint will further my recovery.’

  ‘I will send a boy with it. Would you like a crust and some pottage?’

  John considered his stomach, then shook his head. ‘It is yet a little early for food.’

  The man did not turn, spoke over his shoulder. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘My sword. Nay, do not fear, old friend. I ask it now for protection, not vengeance. No man should go unarmed within the Bishop’s Liberty.’

  ‘You shouldn’t.’ Peg Leg nodded. ‘I will fetch all.’ He turned, paused, turned back. ‘The day after you were here, two men came seeking you.’

  John, who’d begun to hack at his vast beard with some shears, stopped. ‘Who?’

  ‘They did not vouchsafe their names. But they seemed most keen to find you. And . . . they wore tangerine sashes.’

  He hopped off. John raised the shears above the water. His hands shook, worse than a man with the palsy. ‘I’ll wear a sword this day,’ he murmured, ‘and pray God and all his angels that I have no cause to draw it. Not for myself ’ – he shuddered – ‘and certainly not for my lord of Essex.’

  Peg Leg’s lendings were the innkeeper’s third-best wear – the beige woollen doublet had holes under the armpits; the breeches, a poorly contrasting green, had been made to accommodate a leg removed below the knee. The netherstocks beneath were wool, threadbare and baggy over the ankles. Still, his long black cloak, as deloused as the attentions of the tavern boy could achieve, covered the worst of the clothing, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down concealed the poor job he had made of trimming his beard. Anyway, he doubted that any would be looking to judge him for fashion.

  Burbage’s note had said only to meet him, but not when or where. He wondered again how the player had tracked him to Wapping when John had thought himself invisible there. Like his return to Southwark and his breaking of Peg Leg’s door, it was a mystery lost to memory. He wondered if anyone else knew of his debauch. Especially . . . she. He would not have it so.

  He was making for the Globe, thinking that the most likely place to find the actor would be in his place of labour – the playhouse he owned, ran and barely left. Yet something nagged at him as he walked, set off by his surroundings. What was it about this day? Southwark rarely slept, yet it seemed twice as busy as any other noontime. Higglers lined the main thoroughfares. ‘Humble pie! Lovely braised cow tail! Rich saveloys! Cock and bull puddings!’ came the competing cries; most seemed to be purveying some kind of meat. And it was that fact, combined with a crowd of blue-aproned apprentices who should have been at labour but instead were running shouting down the roadway, that finally pierced the fog in his head and told him what day it was.

  ‘Shrove Tuesday,’ he muttered, the thought halting him. The day before Lent, the four-week period when meat must be put aside – so this day all consumed excess of it. Excess of everything. One fact lodged unleashed many more, enabling him to see – the whores already out upon the streets or leaning to whistle from windows; the doormen bellowing from taverns, urging entrance for cheap ale; the boys calling people to bear-bait or cockfight.

  But not to the Globe, John remembered, this final fact penetrating. For the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played this Shrove Tuesday at the palace, by royal command. And John had ended his debauch three days before to be as sober as possible for the event. For it was not every day that a Lawley appeared before her
majesty.

  Not he. His son.

  Ned, he thought, the name smashing another dam in his brain, flooding him with thoughts he’d pickled these four weeks. For it was not the news that his son, newly apprenticed to the Chamberlain’s Men, would be treading the platform John himself longed to retread that had set him drinking again. It was the news that came almost concurrently, the bad with the good, as news so often did.

  It was the boy’s mother. Her plans for Lent’s end.

  John stepped forward again, his bent no longer for the Globe. Burbage would be across the water, rehearsing in the Palace of Whitehall. Ned would be there too, nervously preparing for his debut. He would join them. He had no coin for a wherry, so he must take the bridge and make the long walk to Whitehall.

  Yet almost without willing them, his feet did not keep straight. With the bridge’s gatehouse ahead, the traitor’s heads spiked upon it in plain sight, his feet turned him left on to Long Road.

  He was making for another inn, the Spoon and Alderman. Not to drink – even if he had the coin, he had long since been banned from doing so within those premises. No, all he wished was a glimpse of the proprietress. Maybe the briefest of conversations. Enough to ascertain if what had been true was no longer so . . .

  . . . and that on the third Sunday after Lent in the parish of St Mary Overies, Tess Morton, Spinster, would not be marrying Sir Samuel D’Esparr, Baronet.

  III

  A Garden

  His scheme to walk in the front door for a quiet word was thwarted in his first glance.

  The two men at the inn’s door were not the usual cut of doorman retained by Tess to keep out the excessively drunk each Shrove Tuesday. These two were bigger, leaner, with a martial way of resting their hands on their pommels. Yet the most disturbing thing about them was that each sported a tangerine sash across his chest.

  Stepping deeper into the shadows of the alley, only now did he hear the sounds of traded lust further up it. ‘Tangerine,’ he muttered. ‘A plague on’t. Why does it have to be tangerine?’