The Tainted Relic

by The Medieval Murderers

  ‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Abel. ‘He calls himself Ben Nightingale. You could say it’s his stage name. But Ben Magpie would be more fitting.’

  After a few moments’ fiddling with his instrument, all done to heighten audience expectation, the singer called Nightingale struck up to his own accompaniment. He had a pleasant voice which carried clearly through the other shouts and cries in the area. The words were distinct.

  My masters and ladies, good people draw near,

  And take to your hearts these words you do hear,

  Look well to your purses, of robbers beware,

  At ’tholomew Fair, Bartholomew Fair.

  Cling fast to your goods and tight hold your purse,

  Or else you had better been starved by your nurse.

  Here are bad men a-plenty, all worthy the noose,

  But none, say I, worse than Master Cutpurse.

  And so he wound on with his execrable verses. But the bystanders seemed to be enjoying it, nodding in agreement with the sentiments or laughing at the foolishness of those who allowed themselves to become victims of ‘Master Cutpurse’.

  ‘He should be hanged…’ I said.

  ‘A bit severe,’ said Jack.

  ‘…for rhyming “noose” and “purse”.’

  ‘This piece of his is called “A Warning against Cutpurses”,’ said Abel.

  ‘Very public spirited of the singer,’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh, very,’ said Abel. ‘But see the individual at the edge. That one there. His name is Peter Perkin.’

  Slightly to one side of the group there stood a short man, his head bent sideways to scoop up the singer’s words. He was squinting as if to concentrate the better on the sound. But I noticed that, beneath half-closed lids, his eyes were darting to and fro. He was dressed as though he’d just come in from the country for the day. There were even a few stems of straw sticking to his rustic hat. Aha, I thought, I bet I know what those straws are for…

  All the time the red-capped singer was running through half a dozen stanzas, each of them reflecting on the iniquity of cutpurses and the need for honest citizens to be on their guard, Perkin kept his head down. And as the singer thrummed on the lute strings to signal the end of his piece and the audience’s hands hovered over their pockets and pouches, the short fellow’s eyes flickered ever more rapidly. When Nightingale concluded with a flourish, this bystander was foremost in the applause. I noticed, however, that he didn’t dive for his own purse.

  The singer removed his cap and moved among the audience, smiling in the way that all performers smile at the end of the show. To judge by his expression, each coin dropped into the upturned cap appeared to come as a genuine surprise. Why, it seemed to say, you mean that I am to be paid for what is purely my pleasure! As the little audience began to disperse and he was tipping the coins with a practised movement into his own purse, I saw him motion very slightly with his head to his confederate, Peter Perkin. You wouldn’t have guessed that there was anything to connect the two of them if it hadn’t been for that briefest of gestures. This second gentleman casually took himself off in pursuit of a couple of well-padded dames. No doubt, once he’d relieved them of what they were carrying, he would track down others whose fat purses he’d noted while he was pretending to listen to Nightingale.

  You had to admire the slickness of the operation. The singer drew the crowds and took their honest tribute once he had rounded off his session with a song against the cutting of purses. Meantime his associate kept watch on where those purses were stashed. It saved time later on if he knew exactly which part of the body to target. Even some bumpkin clinging for dear life to his wordly wealth wouldn’t be secure. It’s wonderful how a straw gently tickled in the ear will cause anyone to let go of what they’re clutching, and our friend in the rustic hat had his armoury of straws.

  A cruder pair of thieves would have robbed the spectators there and then while they were listening. But there was a double disadvantage to this: the singer wouldn’t have been paid for his pains if their purses had gone missing and so a little profit would have been forfeit, and–perhaps more important–some suspicion might have been directed at him for distracting the crowd. This way, Ben Nightingale was free to set himself up in another quarter of the fair. It was a trick which he and his accomplice might play two or three times that day, depending on how greedy they were.

  There was a court of justice which sat within the precincts of Bartholomew Fair for the duration. It was called Pie-Powder Court. Even though its business was mostly restricted to trading matters (short measures in the ale-tents, coltsfoot mixed in with the tobacco), common thievery and cutpursing certainly fell within its jurisdiction. So we might have marched boldly up to the justices in Pie-Powder and alerted them to these rogues who had the temerity to sing a warning about the very crimes they were about to commit. And yet not one of us–not Jack nor Abel nor I–was going to do anything about it. Every man (and woman) is responsible for his own property. As the old proverb has it: ‘Fast bind, fast find’. And hadn’t Ben Nightingale sung an explicit warning to his patrons, Look well to your purses, of robbers beware? We had quite enough to do to look to ourselves. Besides, we had other business at Bartholomew Fair.

  We were searching for a relic.

  At least, that was how WS had described it to me. A ‘relic’.

  I liked to think of William Shakespeare as my friend. He’d shown kindness to me from the moment I joined the King’s Men when they were still called the Chamberlain’s. Some of the other Globe shareholders held themselves a little apart from the run-of-the-mill members of the company. Whether it was because of their age or their temperaments or the heavy responsibilities they bore, the Burbage brothers, John Heminges and the others tended to be aloof. But WS had been ready to talk from the first, to give advice and even to make confidences. Or so it seemed at the time to this junior player. And there had been occasions when he had rescued me from the consequences of my own folly or rashness.

  Because I’d been grateful to him and because I had a high esteem for the man, I was always prepared to listen when WS asked me to do something, even regarding any request as a privilege. But this was an especially odd request.

  At the end of the play the previous day, WS and I had fallen into conversation. We’d been performing in a piece called Love’s Triumph by the playwright William Hordle. The Triumph had lived up to its name and the audience at the Globe clapped and cheered at the end while we did our jig. When we came offstage we were running with sweat–it was a muggy afternoon–but more than content with our reception. I was looking forward to a drink in the Goat and Monkey once I’d got out of my costume in the tiring-house.

  Our costume man is Bartholomew Ridd, a fussy fellow as those in charge of stage clothes tend to be, I’ve noticed. Like others of his trade, he seems to think that the purpose of plays is to display his finery. Actors are no more than clothes-horses. He’s very hot on damage, ready to rebuke anybody whose outfit catches on a nail or is accidentally sullied with a spillage of beer. For some reason Master Ridd is particularly suspicious of me and always takes a personal interest in the condition of my costume when I’ve come offstage. I used to get annoyed with this but now I try to humour him. Anyway, all this meant that, as usual, I was one of the last to leave the tiring-house.

  In the dim passageway outside I almost collided with William Shakespeare. We walked together towards the side door that gave on to the alley known as Brend’s Rents. I couldn’t have explained why, but I had the sense that he’d been waiting for me.

  ‘Off to the Goat and Monkey, Nick?’ he said when we were outside in the alley.

  ‘Just for a quick one–or a quick two,’ I said, wondering whether he wanted to accompany me there. The Goat, not a very salubrious alehouse perhaps but the players’ local, wasn’t the sort of place usually frequented by the shareholders. We walked in its direction. There were a few other people around. It was that stage of the day when business is m
ore or less done but the evening’s pleasures have yet to begin.

  William Shakespeare and I had to proceed carefully at certain points in the walk. This area of Southwark around the Globe playhouse and the bear garden is criss-crossed by channels and ditches that feed into the river. Bridges carry one over the dirty streams. They are often little more than a single warped plank, and to cross them requires concentration.

  ‘Hot work onstage this afternoon,’ said Shakespeare.

  ‘But enjoyable.’

  ‘Oh yes, enjoyable.’

  I glanced at my companion. He hadn’t taken a part in Love’s Triumph–indeed, WS took little part in playing these days–but he generally spent his mornings and afternoons at the Globe. The mornings were given over to rehearsals and (for the shareholders) business matters while the afternoons were for performances. Even though his acting days were mostly done with, WS liked to be in attendance at performances, ready to offer a word of advice or encouragement. I sometimes wondered when WS actually wrote his plays. I visualized him sitting up late into the night in his lodgings in Mugwell Street north of the river, covering the paper by candlelight, his hand flowing smoothly across the blank sheets. Unlike some other writers I’ve known he never came to work with inky hands.

  ‘A good writer is that William Hordle,’ said WS.

  ‘We’ve already done his…let me see, his Love’s Diversion and Love’s Despair and now there’s been his Love’s Triumph,’ I said, asking myself where this conversation was headed.

  ‘With every play he grows better–and William Hordle was good to begin with,’ said WS, who was generous in his assessment of other men’s work. ‘He skipped the rough apprentice stage. Hordle jumped over that hurdle, you might say.’

  Experience had taught me to ignore WS’s puns, which varied from the passable to the terrible. Instead I said, ‘Like you, William? You never were an apprentice?’

  ‘Why do you say so?’

  ‘It is reported that you never blotched a line.’

  Now it was WS’s turn to glance at me. The sun was in our faces. His eyes were shaded by his hat and I couldn’t read his expression. But then, he was a man who was always hard to read. We came to one of the narrow bridges spanning a channel which we had to cross single file. The smell of the river is never agreeable in high summer but the aroma of a Southwark ditch is enough to flatten a fishwife. If you fell in–and people did fall in from time to time on their way to the bear pit or from the tavern–you’d be unlucky to drown in the couple of inches of sludge that adhered to the bottom but you’d quite likely be smothered by the stench.

  When we were safely across, WS stopped and took me by the arm.

  ‘Those reports are wrong,’ he said. ‘I had my rough apprenticeship, when I bodged and blotched with the best of them.’

  This talk of apprenticeship was interesting. I’d always been curious about Shakespeare’s early life in London. But WS wasn’t talking now to satisfy my curiosity. Just as I’d sensed that our encounter outside the tiring-house hadn’t been accidental, so I realized that we had now come to the nub of the matter. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted to tell me, though. That Shakespeare could have made mistakes like any other tyro playwright was hardly surprising, for all his reputation now. But what did this have to do with the man who was famed as the creator of Falstaff and Prince Hamlet?

  ‘Nick, enough of this beating about the bush. I have a request to make. You’ve been to St Bartholomew’s Fair?’

  ‘Not this season.’

  ‘Maybe you are intending to go?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. I had been meaning to wander through the fair, as it happened, but was slightly reluctant to confess this to WS for fear that he might consider me a gawping provincial. The traders at Bartholomew are Londoners while those who come to buy (or to be fleeced) tend to come from outside town, for this is a fair that draws people from all over the kingdom.

  ‘Well, if you should happen to find yourself in the region of Smithfield…’

  He paused, waiting to see whether I would flat out deny this possibility. When I said nothing, Shakespeare continued, ‘If you were to visit Smithfield, I say, I would be most obliged if you could call on a certain gentleman who is set up at the fair. A book vendor.’

  ‘Of course, but why?’ I said this with genuine curiosity. I’d no objection to being asked to do my friend a favour but was unable to see why he couldn’t cross the short distance to Smithfield and call on the bookseller himself. In addition, there was a trace of discomfort in his voice, something very unusual in WS.

  ‘I want you to recover what one might call a–ah–relic,’ said the playwright.

  ‘A relic?’

  ‘I shall explain.’

  And so he did, as we paced slowly in the direction of the Goat and Monkey alehouse.

  It turned out that in his very early days in London, William Shakespeare had penned a journeyman drama about Domitian, one of the mad emperors of the Romans. Not liking the work–which was packed with rape and dismembered limbs and written in three days to catch a public fashion for sensational drama–he’d put it to one side and forgotten about it.

  ‘Don’t mistake me, Nick,’ said WS. ‘It wasn’t the subject matter of my Domitian which I rejected. Shortly afterwards I wrote a thing called Titus Andronicus. That had more than its fair share of horrors and was accounted a success.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Titus,’ I said.

  ‘It was simply that the piece about Domitian was rough in the wrong way. Crude, crude…I should have destroyed it there and then. Put it in the fire. Sometimes flame is the author’s best friend. But I didn’t destroy it. And at some point in my shift from one set of lodgings to another, Domitian went missing. I don’t suppose I’ve thought of it more than twice in the last fifteen years. You see why I call it a relic of my early days. Now I hear that a book vendor has somehow acquired my foul papers.’

  (Don’t get the wrong idea about ‘foul papers’, by the way. This is simply the earliest stage of the writer’s finished composition before the material is sent to a scrivener to make fair copies. As the expression suggests, a foul paper is likely to be full of blotches and crossings-out.)

  ‘Are you sure that it’s in the hands of this book dealer?’ I said. ‘After all, if you haven’t seen it for the past fifteen years…’

  ‘I have it on good authority,’ said WS. ‘Yes, I’m sure he has my Domitian.’

  ‘I suppose he’s going to sell it,’ I said.

  ‘Sell it to you, I hope,’ said WS, quickly adding, ‘I want you to buy it, Nick. I don’t want this thing falling into the wrong hands, one of our rival companies, for example, like Henslowe’s. Hatch would go a long way to embarrass me.’

  ‘Hatch?’

  ‘This book vendor rejoices in the name of Ulysses Hatch. For the most part he’s a dealer in scurrilous ballads and scald rhymes rather than books. In fact, he will trade in anything that turns a profit. A long time ago he and I had a falling-out over…something. Even after all these years he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to get back at me.’

  I didn’t ask WS why this oddly named gent wanted to get back at him. Instead I said, ‘Does it matter if this piece of yours is sold elsewhere? After all, you have such a reputation…’

  An eavesdropper might have thought that I was flattering Shakespeare but I was speaking no more than the truth. Nor did he waste our time with false modesty. ‘Yes, I have a reputation now,’ he said, ‘yet I might be struck down tomorrow. No man can see the future. I would be unhappy if I knew that a ragged piece about a mad emperor was resurrected after my death to be staged and laughed at–for the wrong reasons. It was journeyman work, I tell you. Would you like to be remembered for your earliest, halting attempts to speak verse on the stage?’

  ‘Well, no, I wouldn’t…’

  I was about to say that there was no comparison between an obscure actor and the most famous playwright in London. But I stayed silent, slightly surprised–but also
touched–that even so notable a man as WS should be concerned about his posthumous reputation. Until quite recently, he’d been seemingly indifferent, and given to statements such as ‘Let them sort it out after we are all dead’. Maybe it was age which was causing him to change his tune.

  By this time we’d arrived at the Goat and Monkey. Absorbed in listening to Shakespeare’s story I’d almost forgotten my thirst. But not quite. We paused by the door of the alehouse.

  ‘I cannot go and see Master Ulysses Hatch myself,’ said WS. ‘We know each other too well, fat Hatch and I. He would most likely refuse to sell it to me out of sheer spite.’

  ‘But the foul papers are yours,’ I said. ‘You never sold them but mislaid them.’

  ‘Proving title to a piece is very difficult,’ said WS. ‘He could claim to have come by them honestly, and for all I know he did. Bought them from a landlord perhaps.’

  ‘What about sending one of the shareholders?’ I said, instinctively reluctant to undertake this task.

  ‘He would recognize any of my fellows. He is familiar with the stage world.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t recognize an obscure player?’

  ‘Obscure? Do not say so. Bitterness isn’t in your repertoire, Nick, for all that you’re a good player. One day, perhaps, a fine player.’

  ‘Then why me?’ I said. ‘Why are you asking me to recover your old play?’

  ‘Because you are a straightforward person,’ said WS. ‘No one will suspect you of double dealing.’

  In another man one might have suspected flattery, but with WS I chose not to. Instead I strove to hide my smile in the glaring sun of early evening and, almost before I knew it, agreed to visit St Bartholomew’s Fair the following morning. Agreed to track down Ulysses Hatch and, without revealing who had sent me, to obtain the foul-paper manuscript of a play entitled Domitian, if it was in his possession. WS authorized me to offer up to to five pounds for the play. This was a hefty price and, if questioned, I was to insinuate that I was a member of a rival company to the King’s Men–one of Henslowe’s men, say–interested in getting hold of an early work by the tyro Shakespeare.