by M. J. Trow
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by M.J. Trow
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Authors’ Note
Also by M.J. Trow
The Kit Marlowe series
DARK ENTRY *
SILENT COURT *
WITCH HAMMER *
SCORPIONS’ NEST *
CRIMSON ROSE *
TRAITOR’S STORM *
SECRET WORLD *
ELEVENTH HOUR *
QUEEN’S PROGRESS *
BLACK DEATH *
The Grand & Batchelor series
THE BLUE AND THE GREY *
THE CIRCLE *
THE ANGEL *
THE ISLAND *
THE RING *
THE BLACK HILLS *
The Peter Maxwell series
MAXWELL’S ISLAND
MAXWELL’S CROSSING
MAXWELL’S RETURN
MAXWELL’S ACADEMY
* available from Severn House
THE RECKONING
M.J. Trow
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This first world edition published 2020
in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY.
Trade paperback edition first published
in Great Britain and the USA 2020 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.
eBook edition first published in 2020 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2020 by M.J. Trow and Maryanne Coleman.
The right of M.J. Trow to be identified
as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-129-1 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-699-9 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0424-0 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described
for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are
fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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ONE
The light filtered in through gaps in the canvas and the dust motes dancing there shone like stars. The very sound of breathing was muffled and the men’s heads, close together, made a mosaic in a fitful beam of winter sun. Black curls, bronze curls and blond locks mingled with a skull beneath the skin. Freckles, tan, the pasty white of a man who rarely saw daylight, all moved in a slow pavane and their voices, muttering low, seemed to stay in the circle, the words melding and melting together until no single one could be heard.
The mice in the wainscoting shuffled and chewed. They knew that after this strange meeting there would be crumbs to be had, bedding to drag home to their children. This happened now and then and only men knew why; mice sorted out their squabbles and disagreements with a swift, sharp stab of razor teeth and then it was over. But these men were still muttering, trying to jockey for position, to get the upper hand.
Eventually, one voice rang out from the others. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Shaxsper!’ it said, exasperation in every syllable. ‘Can you please just draw a straw and be done with it? I for one don’t want to be here all the live-long day. I have places to be.’
‘All right, Ned.’ The nasal tones of the Warwickshire man were peevish and whining. ‘I just don’t want to be cheated, that’s all.’
‘Come on, Will.’ The next voice had mastery and music in it. ‘Do as Alleyn says and choose a straw. I believe he has a widow just coming to the simmer down in the Vintry and he doesn’t want to miss the tide, if I may mix my metaphors for a moment there.’
There was a sigh and a voice the mice recognized above the others. This belonged to the one who dropped the most crumbs, made the most curls of wood and the lovely sawdust for their babies. He was there all day and half of most nights. The mice listened intently. ‘I don’t know why we do this,’ Tom Sledd said. ‘I always pick the …’ there was a pause and a rustle and some chuckles in the sun-pocked dark ‘… short straw.’
And with murmurs of ‘Bad luck, Tom,’ the others melted away.
‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Men?’ Philip Henslowe snarled. ‘Never heard of them.’ The impresario didn’t even bother to look up at his stage manager. In Henslowe’s world view, if you didn’t acknowledge something, it didn’t exist. He found this worked particularly well with actors asking for money.
Tom Sledd had known that this would not go well. Philip Henslowe may have his finger in many pies – not all of them that savoury – but his heart lay in the Rose, the theatre he had built from the ground up with the sweat of everybody else’s brow. Tom Sledd owned two of those brows, but he was merely stage manager at the Rose, something on Henslowe’s pattens.
‘Ssh!’ Sledd hissed, flapping his hands as if he was talking to his little daughter when she was having a tantrum. ‘It’s very hush-hush.’
‘What is?’ Henslowe hadn’t finished his weekly accounts yet and his little counting house under the theatre’s eaves was filled with piles of tickets, earthenware pots and small change. The Queen looked haughtily up at him from the floor with a hundred identical faces.
‘The troupe,’ Sledd whispered, as if the word were blasphemy. ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s troupe.’ By now, he wasn’t even whispering; he was just mouthing the words in an exaggerated mime.
Henslowe put an inky finger down on the page to mark his place. ‘One hundred and ten,’ he murmured to remind himself of the running total. Tom Sledd, Henslowe would be the first to agree, was a good functionary but he could irritate for England. No one could build the towers of Ilium like Tom Sledd; nor the ghetto of Malta; nor the killing grounds of Paris. But he was still a pain in the arse. ‘We are talking about the Lord Chamberlain?’ Henslowe checked. ‘Henry Carey, Baron Hunsdon? Queen’s cousin? Good jouster back in the day?’
‘The very same,’ Sledd nodded. He hadn’t wanted this task, breaking the news to Henslowe, but he had, as always, drawn the short straw. And here he was, facing the ogre in his lair. Whenever Sledd had to confront the gorgon that was Henslowe, he kept reminding himself that the man was not a scholar or patron of the arts; he could make money, that was all his skill. But each time, it didn’t work.
The philistine’s finger rings alone could buy the stage manager twice over.
‘I didn’t know that Hunsdon had any theatrical leanings,’ Henslowe said. ‘He liked putting down rebellions in the North if memory serves. Oh, and Italian mistresses, of course; dark ladies and all that. Before your time, I expect. But the theatre? No, I hadn’t heard that.’
‘Oh, it’s all the rage now, isn’t it?’ Sledd toyed with pulling up a chair to engage in conversation but thought better of it. Besides any other consideration, to move anything even an inch in this room under the eaves would be to invite an avalanche of paper and coin that might be impossible to stop. ‘Lord Strange. Effingham. They’re all at it.’
‘Yes,’ Henslowe grunted. ‘Effingham. You got that right.’
‘It’s only a short run,’ Sledd went on. ‘A couple of weeks at most. Croydon, Guildford; Scadbury, maybe. Nowhere … unpleasant, you know. Nothing Northern.’
Henslowe nodded. He was grateful for that at least. ‘What’s the play?’ he asked.
‘Er … something by Tom Kyd, I think. The Spanish Tragedy.’
‘You think, Sledd?’ Henslowe repeated. ‘You’re the stage manager, for God’s sake. Don’t you know?’
‘Yes, all right, then. It is. Kyd. Spanish Tragedy.’
Henslowe’s brain whirled for a moment. ‘Right. So, you’re taking the walking gentlemen, right? People like Skeres? Frizer? Shaxsper?’
‘Oh, probably,’ Sledd shrugged. He was edging towards the door. He lifted a paint-spattered hand to his mouth to stifle a sudden cough. ‘And Ned,’ he said.
Henslowe held up a hand and the stage manager froze, like a sparrow in thrall to a weasel. ‘Pardon?’ the impresario said, his head on one side and a glacial smile on his lips.
‘Yes, sorry.’ Sledd cleared his throat. ‘I beg your pardon. Bit of a frog in my throat. So, I’ll be off now, then …’
‘No, I mean, pardon, what did you say?’
‘When?’ Sledd smiled brightly. He could still just about get away with ingénue parts if the light was right.
‘You said Ned.’ Henslowe was still smiling. It was like a basilisk but a basilisk on the verge of a very serious tantrum.
‘Hmm?’ Sledd raised his eyebrows and inclined his head, trying to recall. ‘Oh, yes, I did. And Ned. So, if that’s all …?’
Henslowe was suddenly not smiling. He was on his feet, leaning forward on his knuckles, paper and ink going everywhere. ‘Ned Alleyn?’ he roared.
‘He insisted,’ Sledd told him.
‘He insisted?’ Henslowe knew Ned Alleyn. The man believed that the sun shone from his arse and that all London loved him. And he was constantly flirting with Henslowe’s daughter. He would no more go on the road in the dead of winter than fly to the moon.
‘Well, actually, it was Kit.’
‘Kit?’ Henslowe was repeating things a lot this morning and his stage manager knew that was a very bad sign. ‘Kit Marlowe?’
‘That’s the one,’ Sledd grinned. It was hard to imagine there could be another.
‘What’s he got to do with it? It’s Kyd’s play.’
‘Ah, I think he might have to do the odd rewrite. You know Tom Kyd – bit weak on the rhyming couplets.’
‘That’s a Merchant Taylor’s schoolboy for you,’ Henslowe nodded. ‘So Marlowe’s going too?’
‘Yes.’ Sledd’s hand was on the latch. ‘And Richard,’ he said to the door, in an almost inaudible voice.
‘No!’ Henslowe’s ears were attuned now to Sledd’s subterfuge. He was out from behind the desk in what seemed to Sledd a preternaturally short time for a man of his age and condition. The impresario drove his patten into the door so that it stayed shut. ‘You’re not taking Burbage as well. You can have Marlowe, Shaxsper and even Alleyn. But I’ll die in a ditch before I let you have Burbage.’
Tom Sledd knew the very ditch he had in mind – it ran along the embankment past the Bear Pit where the great black beast that Master Sackerson believed himself to be usually failed to entertain the crowd. Master Sackerson, according to Kit Marlowe who was one of the bear’s favourite people, had a rather subtle sense of humour, but this was largely lost on the passing playgoers and pleasure seekers who peered down into his Pit.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Henslowe shouted, his face purple above the ruff. ‘No Burbage!’
‘What do you mean, “no Burbage”?’ Kit Marlowe asked.
Tom Sledd didn’t know how many other ways he could say it. A genius like Marlowe, all fire and air, probably had a hundred ways. But Tom Sledd was of the common clay. He had nothing.
‘I need Burbage for the king,’ Marlowe shouted.
‘Don’t shoot the messenger, Kit,’ Sledd pleaded. ‘You know what Henslowe’s like. If you wanted it to go differently, you shouldn’t have rigged the straws.’
Marlowe looked shocked. ‘Rigged? Tom, you cut me to the quick. As if we would …’ he caught a glimpse of Sledd’s face. ‘All right, so there may have been a little sleight of hand. But you know Henslowe the best. You can manage him, Tom, you know you can.’ He smiled and punched the stage manager’s arm lightly. ‘Anyway, what did you tell him about the play?’
‘Like you said,’ Sledd told him. ‘Tom Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. He seemed all right with that.’
Marlowe chuckled. ‘I’m not sure Tom will be,’ he said. ‘I may be looking for a new lodger after this.’
‘Kit.’ Sledd always whined a little when something was bothering him. And something was bothering him now. ‘I don’t really understand this. Why all the secrecy?’
Marlowe looked at the man. He and Tom Sledd went back a long way and he knew that the stage manager would walk through the fire for him. But there was no need to tell him more than he need know. ‘The Lord Chamberlain’s a strange man,’ he said. ‘Cousin to the Queen, Privy Councillor; they don’t come much higher up the tree than that.’
‘So?’
‘So, he has to run with the hare and with the hounds. At heart, I suspect he’s an old Puritan, like the rest of them. And you know how the hard hats and stiff collars feel about the theatre.’
Sledd did. There wasn’t a Puritan in the land who wouldn’t cheerfully burn the Rose – and the Curtain – to the ground. And if the actors were inside, that would be even better. He’d listened to a Puritan preaching at Paul’s Cross once; he’d never heard language like it.
‘But recently,’ Marlowe went on, ‘Carey has immortal longings in him. He likes poetry, Tom. Some of us do.’
Sledd nodded.
‘So he’s putting a toe in the theatrical water. Taking a show on the road, rather than opening here in London. As for the play …’
Sledd screwed up his nose. ‘I’ve read better, if poetry is his passion.’
Marlowe smiled. He knew a hawk from a handsaw, did Tom Sledd, but no one could call him a connoisseur of words. But he was right on the money this time. ‘There may have to be … adjustments, shall we call them?’
‘Does Kyd know?’
Marlowe looked at his friend from under his lashes. ‘Not as such,’ he murmured.
‘By that you mean “no”, I assume.’
‘Look on the bright side. There may not need to be any.’ Marlowe would be the first to admit he was no actor and the line certainly failed to convince. ‘But if there are,’ he added, hurriedly, ‘they won’t be obvious, no, not by any means.’
There was a silence between the two. They were both running a few lines of Kyd’s play through their heads.
‘But if there are,’ Sledd said for them both, ‘there’s no need to let Kyd know in advance, is there?’
‘No, no, indeed.’ Marlowe gave a stagey shake of the head. ‘Not at all. And … if all else fails, well, I expect I may have … something.’
Sledd’s ears pricked up. ‘Something new?’
‘Unperformed.’
‘Hmm …’ Sledd racked his brain. He couldn’t think of what it might be.
‘Allegorical.’
Sledd shook his head.
‘It’s best you don’t know,’ Marlowe said. ‘If you don’t know, you can’t tell, can you?’
Sledd’s eyes widened. ‘Not … not Master Topcliffe?’
Marlowe laughed. ‘Good Lord, Tom, what do you take me for? I wouldn’t imagine that a simple play would interest the Queen’s dungeon master. No, I just mean, you can’t accidentally tell Tom Kyd. He is my lodger, don’t forget. And a friend, of a sort. Be reputed wise, Tom, for saying nothing.’
Sledd shrugged and turned away, cannoning into Shaxsper as he went. ‘Sorry, Will, didn’t see you there. Can’t stop – things to do, you know.’ And indeed he did. He had timber to buy, carts to hire. A travelling troupe doesn’t float on air, after all. At the door, he paused and turned. ‘And don’t forget – and you’re my witness, Will – there is no way in Hell that I am playing Queen Dido, Zenocrate, Catherine de Valois or Helen of bloody Troy! You know Ned Alleyn’s not my type.’
Shaxsper and Marlowe watched him go, with a grin.
‘Anyway,’ Shaxsper said, having listened outside the door for long enough, ‘you don’t know where he’s been. Who is playing the female lead, by the way?’
Marlowe looked at the erstwhile playwright and stroked his chin. ‘Ever thought of losing the beard, Will?’ he asked, thoughtfully.
Philip Henslowe may have reluctantly allowed some of his actors to go on the road with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, but he had refused point blank to allow them to use his theatre to audition for other parts. He knew, he told Marlowe in no uncertain terms, when he was being taken for an idiot. So Marlowe was sitting on a settle at the sign of the Mermaid across the river – he wouldn’t put it past Henslowe to listen in and then put a spoke in his wheel. The man would stop at nothing, even as he paid lip service to the idea of going on the road. There was a goblet of wine before him, a sheet of paper beside him, a list of names on it, largely scratched through.