Alone in the Lords’ Room Orlando stared. He saw them all and understood them; but he did not let them shame him.
He had paid sixpence to enter the Lords’ Room, more than any of them. He supposed he was a richer man, quite probably, than anyone in that theatre. He had paid, hoping in his heart to see himself as a hero.
There was no doubt that he was the central character of this play. As soon as he arrived, he saw the audience pointing at him, heard the whispers and the buzz with a feeling of satisfaction. The first scene he saw confirmed this view. The Blackamoor of this play was captain of a ship and evidently a man of some importance. Only kings and heroes, he supposed, had plays written about them. But if, he thought, I am to preside here over this play about myself, I will lean forward, and let them know me and see my face.
By the second act he understood better and by the third act he was certain. He had seen very few plays, but this Blackamoor was clearly a villain. As the fourth act unravelled, he started to feel indignation, then fury. Had this fake buccaneer ever heard the cannons’ roar, known the force of a gale, faced death or a mutinous crew? Could he have brought a ship through a storm where the waves came over you like solid thunder, or killed a man in cold blood because he had to, or even guessed what it was to come from six weeks at sea into the arms of a warm and sultry beauty in an Afric port? And, just because he was untutored, only he, the Moorish mariner, in all this audience truly saw, in its entirety, the vulgarity of Meredith’s poor play.
Then he remembered, once more, what Meredith had said. “I can make you into a hero, or a villain; a wise man or a fool.” So this was the power of the young popinjay’s pen. He thought he had the power, in this wooden circle, to make him not only a villain, but to make him worthless.
His face still showed nothing. He felt for his knife.
The audience had at last had enough. With the fifth act, they could take no more. The play might be terrible, but at least they could have a little fun. As the Blackamoor, attempting his greatest and most terrible crime, was foiled and caught, to be followed by his inevitable trial and execution, they gazed at the actors, considering how best to begin.
Seeing the villains on stage, and the strange, mask-like face of the black man staring out so incongruously from the Lords’ Room above him, someone in the pit saw the joke.
“Hang the devil,” he cried out. “And the other one too!”
It was a good joke. The audience took to it at once. Here was something of interest. A player pretends to be a blackamoor while a real blackamoor, like a presiding spirit, hovers behind him.
The next lines were cheerfully obvious. “Spare the actor. Hang the blackamoor!”
“Someone must hang for this play!”
“They’re partners. Hang both!”
If the pit saw a broad joke, the gallery saw subtler implications. “Spare the blackamoor. Hang the playwright. The play’s the crime.”
“No,” a gallant explained to the audience. “The play’s not dull. ’Tis a true report. And behold,” he pointed to Orlando Barnikel, “the real villain.”
The audience could not contain itself. It rocked with laughter. For a moment the actors could not proceed.
Black Barnikel did not move. His face was still a mask.
It was then that they started throwing things. They meant no harm. Nothing dangerous was thrown. Small nuts, cheese rind, a few early apple cores, one or two cherries. It was all good-hearted. Indeed, wishing to spare the actors, and even the young playwright, too much ignominy, they tossed their missiles towards the blackamoor in the Lords’ Room, who, it seemed to them, could provide a harmless focus for this horseplay, and who in any case was somehow the inspiration behind it all. Most of the projectiles fell short. Only two or three landed close or hit him. A moment later, one of the Burbages called back the actors and sent on the clown to give the customary jig. So pleased were the audience with their wit, that they received him with roars of warm approval.
So ended Meredith’s play.
Black Barnikel did not flinch: not a muscle of his face moved, nor did his eyes blink as the missiles flew towards him. He had never flinched, even when lead and cannonballs flew, on the high seas. He despised the nuts, fruit and cheese rinds as much as he despised the throwers. He felt, deep in his stomach, a profound contempt for these people, pit and gallery alike.
Yet Meredith had done his work well. He had come to see a play about himself and been shown this travesty. All London now thought of him not as a rich and daring sea captain, as he wished, but as a villain; and worse even yet, a figure of contempt. Men who would have trembled at his name on the seas were throwing food in his face and laughing at him.
Worst of all was the feeling of desolation – the desolation of a man who, though he has accomplished all that is possible, discovers that he will still, always be scorned; and that, as his Billingsgate cousins had gently hinted to him in their conversation two days before, even in what he thought of as his home, he must always be an outcast. His, was the fate of the mariner for whom there could never be any home-coming.
So what remained? The only thing he had ever truly possessed: his honour. Meredith had dared to insult him. He had killed men for far less. While the clown was still playing, Black Barnikel silently slipped out.
Jane walked with Edmund all the way home to the Staple Inn. She could not leave him alone at a time like this. She linked her arm in his and gave him what warmth she could.
“Was it all bad?” He had not spoken until they reached the bridge.
“Some of it was very good.”
He did not speak again until they came out of Newgate. “It was laughed off.”
“No. It was the blackamoor in the Lords’ Room. That’s what set them off. Not your play.”
“Perhaps.” He grunted. “Where did he go?”
“Who knows?”
When they got to the Staple Inn, she hugged him and gave him a long kiss. Afterwards, she would be glad that she did it. Then she went slowly back home.
Black Barnikel watched her, as he had since she and Meredith left the Globe. Then he gazed thoughtfully at the high, timbered façade of the Staple Inn.
Dusk had just fallen the following night when the dark figure and his two seamen struck. They did so with great efficiency. They had been lying in wait for some time.
They rolled the body into a small sail and carried it swiftly away. A short time later, they were rowing a boat downstream towards Black Barnikel’s vessel, which sailed before dawn on the ebb tide.
The group which gathered a day later at the Fleming house was glum. The business was inexplicable. There had been no message. No one had seen anything. There was no sign of a body. The aldermen who had been informed had already instigated a search. Alderman Ducket, though he did not like any of them, had behaved with courtesy and even kindness, riding over himself a few minutes before to tell them that, as yet, the city sergeants had found nothing. Neither Dogget, nor Carpenter, nor the Burbage brothers could suggest any solution either.
The breeze was coming from the south-west, so they had made good progress down the estuary. By mid-morning they had come to the last great bend in the widening river; by early afternoon they were passing the broad opening of the River Medway on their right while to the left the more distant East Anglian coast had already begun its huge curve and, by later afternoon, was sinking over the horizon.
Jane stood on deck and breathed in the sharp, salt air.
It was kidnap, of course. But as she saw it, Black Barnikel ran no great risk. Who would guess? And if they did, what could anyone do about it? They would soon be far out to sea. After all, she smiled ruefully, he was a pirate.
Orlando Barnikel’s original plan, when he arrived in London, had been to find a wife. He was tired of the women of the port he encountered. He had money enough, whenever he chose, to settle down; and often, as he sailed in distant waters, he had thought of his red-haired old father and his burly, friendly cousins a
t Billingsgate, and considered how he would like to find a bride in the only place in the world, he supposed, which he could call home.
The Barnikels of Billingsgate intimated to him that no girl in London, no matter how humble, could be induced to marry a blackamoor. “I have money,” he protested. There were women in some Mediterranean ports who would have had him gladly. But the fishmongers had shaken their heads. “You’re our cousin and always will be,” they had explained magnanimously. “But marriage . . .” Alderman Ducket had uttered similar cautions.
Orlando had briefly hoped that the unexpected play would cast him in a better light – enough to impress some girl, somewhere. But that, too, had been a bitter illusion.
And so, debating whether to kill Meredith or not, he had come to a different conclusion. Why give these Londoners, who despised him, the opportunity to put his head in a noose one day? His fury, his hurt and his honour might call for Meredith’s death, but he had not achieved what he had without being cunning. He could punish the young man another way, and solve his own problem at the same time. Twice he had watched the couple together and seen they were close: he would steal Meredith’s woman.
As for the problem of her kidnap, if he ever returned to London, he smiled. “She will say she came willingly with me by the time we go back,” he predicted to the mate. He had experience to prove that in many a place.
And so Jane, who had no illusions about what was to come, gazed out at the eastern horizon and, having resigned herself to her fate, felt a strange sense of excitement as they entered the open sea. She thought of her parents, of Dogget and of Meredith with affection, and then, deliberately, cast their images into the wind.
GOD’S FIRE
1603
In the wet and windy days of March 1603 two men, several hundred miles apart on the island of Britain, waited anxiously. Each was expecting a personal signal from God.
In the north, James Stuart, King of Scotland, waited for a messenger. For down south, in a Thameside palace, old Queen Elizabeth was dying. It was no secret. The bright wig she wore, the thick paint on her face, the carefully staged appearances – nothing could now conceal the ravage of time. The creaking play was done. And who should be her heir?
The virgin queen could not bring herself to name her successor, but everyone – the court, the Parliament, the Privy Council – knew that it must be James. His grandmother had been a Tudor, great King Harry’s sister, making him nearest by blood. And although he was the son of that treacherous Catholic, Mary Queen of Scots, James himself was free of taint. Placed on the throne of the mother he scarcely knew, he had been trained to reign as a cautious Protestant. The dour Scots council had seen to that. He would suit England very well.
And England would suit James. After the long, bleak years in his poor northern land, the rich kingdom of England seemed to him a warm and pleasant place indeed. Was this the wonderful destiny that God had planned for him and all his heirs to come?
Then, one morning, God’s hand was seen. Like a cold draught down a long gallery, blowing curtains, taffeta, silks and gee-gaws before it, time’s wind came, and swept through the gallery of the Tudors. A messenger was riding northwards. The Stuart age had begun.
Just down the lane from St Mary-le-Bow, on the site of a tavern and by the place where once, centuries before, the sign of the Bull had hung, there was a very handsome house. A mixture of brick, timber and plaster, five storeys high and surrounded by a walled orchard garden, its three great gables dominated the tiny parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves below. Alderman Ducket, disgusted that plays had been performed in Blackfriars again, had lived here for the last two years, and as the messenger to James was riding north, he too was about to learn his family’s destiny. Cautiously he looked into the cradle where the new-born baby lay. Surreptitiously, so that his wife did not see, he put in his hand. Carefully he felt. Then he smiled with relief.
The curse had been lifted.
Thrice he had been married: three children by the first wife; three from the second; and now this made three more, the ninth child. And all were free of the curse of the webbed fingers. He had never forgotten the day when, as a boy, he had inspected his grandfather’s hands and the old man had told him: “My grandfather’s were the same. And he had it from his grandfather – the Ducket that dived into the river and married the Bull heiress. Helped him swim, I dare say.”
The Ducket family were rich, as rich as any of the Bulls had been. When King Henry had dissolved the monasteries and taken over much of the Church’s huge hoard of plate, the alderman’s grandfather had acquired so much that he was known as Silver Ducket. But there was no denying their lowly origins. Not that they had ever tried to do so. Descendants of Bulls also, they instinctively scorned any lie; and besides, every generation or two, the webbed fingers had appeared to remind them. They had accepted the fact. But the proud boy could not. His grandfather’s hands had shocked him. In his mind, it was if the grand river flow of the patrician Bulls, to which he felt he belonged, had been joined by a polluted stream. Worse yet, in those increasingly Calvinistic times, he began to wonder – could this even be a mark of God’s displeasure, a sign that he and all his blood might not, after all, be members of God’s elect?
Yet surely the river was cleansed now. His father had not been disfigured; nor was he. Anxiously, but with growing hope, he had inspected each of his new-born children, the third generation; and now thrice three had come, all whole. The curse had passed. It must be so.
Of course, you still had to be careful. Even the elect had to fight the Devil – the hidden enemy within. It would, for instance, have amazed the actors at the Globe to know that when Ducket had attended their plays, he had enjoyed them. He had crushed this sign of weakness in himself, however, just as firmly as he had tried to crush them. Two years ago when, despite his continued protests, the harmless and courtly boy-actors had been allowed to give occasional performances in the new Blackfriars theatre, he had moved away to his present house, to escape the contamination. But of this he could now be confident: God had shown His hand. As long as he brought his family up carefully, with clear moral precepts, the future was bright indeed.
As he gazed down at his ninth child and third son, he smiled happily and, since he had a taste for the classics, announced:
“Let us call him Julius. A hero’s name, like Julius Caesar.” Then, gently taking the baby’s tiny finger he said quietly: “No curse, my little son, shall ever attach itself to thee.’
A month later, proof of the divine favour now attaching to the family came when, riding out with the mayor to greet the new king, Ducket along with his fellow aldermen received the accolade of knighthood. He was Sir Jacob Ducket now, bound by sacred fealty to the monarch. And so with confidence he could give his children these two important lessons: “Be loyal to the king.” And perhaps profounder still: “It seems that God has chosen us. Be humble.”
By which, of course, he really meant: be proud.
1605
On the eve of 5 November, the day when King James – the first of that name in England, the sixth in Scotland – was to open his English Parliament, it was discovered that a great cache of gunpowder had been hidden in the Palace of Westminster and that a certain Guy Fawkes, together with other Catholic conspirators, intended to blow up king, Lords, Commons and all at the ceremony.
It was a sensation. Sir Jacob Ducket grimly took his family to St Paul’s churchyard to witness some of the executions; little Julius was too young to go, but by the age of four, when the local children built a great bonfire opposite Mary-le-Bow and commemorated the day by burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes, he knew the chant:
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot . . .
He knew what it meant, too, since his father had firmly instructed him, with his third, never-to-be-forgotten lesson: “No popery, Julius. The papists are the enemy within.”
1611
It was impossible no
t to love Martha Carpenter. No one who knew her could imagine her ever acting with malice. Nor indeed could she. Always gentle, always meek, she had never in her twenty-seven years asked anything for herself. When told she must remain at home to look after her grandmother, she undertook it as a duty of love. When Cuthbert left and went to build the Globe, though her grandmother cursed him, she had continued to see him and to pray for his soul. Yet now, as she held out the book to her brother and looked up with her round face and her sweet smile, the blood drained from his face.
“Swear,” she said.
Martha shared with many Puritans the quality of hope. Hope was an important virtue, which was about to change the world.
For the Reformation had come not only to destroy. The true doctrine of the Protestants, as they saw it, was one of love, and their best preachers conveyed a message of extraordinary joy.
There were many such men in London. Her favourite as a child had been a Scotsman, a quiet old man with crinkled white hair and the clearest blue eyes she had ever seen. “It is simple,’ he would tell her. “Strip away the pomp, worldliness and superstition of the Romish Church and what remains? The Truth. For we have the Word of God in the scriptures, the very utterances of Our Lord in the Gospels.” When she read the Bible, she realized, God was speaking to her directly.
Several of their neighbours in the little parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves were fellow Puritans. When they met to hear a sermon, or to pray together in each others’ houses, they did so in a spirit of charity. Admonition was rare. In Presbyterian Scotland and the Calvinist regions of Europe every parish was organized like this. There were no priests, for each congregation elected its own elders to lead it. Nor were there bishops. The elders in turn elected regional committees to co-ordinate their activities. And it was these developments abroad which had sown the seed of the greatest hope of all: that the kingdom of God might come on Earth.
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