Carey laughed. ‘Somebody should have warned them about Dodd in the mornings. Bears with sore heads isn’t in it.’
‘Och. It wasnae so bad afore her husband bust in.’
‘Husband!’ Barnabus snorted. ‘Molly Stone’s never been wed in her life, ’cept to a bishop.’
‘You couldn’t pass the word, could you, Barnabus? Tell ’em to lay off?’
Barnabus shook his head. ‘Nah, sorry, sir, I’m out of touch.’
‘Give it a try, there’s a good fellow. I’d be grateful.’
Barnabus shrugged. He didn’t seem himself that morning, though it was hard to say what was wrong. He seemed subdued, depressed. Mind, it wasn’t surprising, considering what had happened to his sister and her family.
‘At least you’re awake now, aren’t you, Sergeant?’
‘Ay, I suppose I am.’
‘Excellent. Make yourself decent and let’s go.’ Carey had paced restlessly to the window and back again. He looked as spruce and tidy as ever: damn him, he must have gone to a barber’s while he was out, his hair was shorter and his face was clean-shaven while he smelled daintily of lavender and spice and he had a new ruff on. It was obscene, that’s what it was.
‘Where now, sir?’ Dodd moaned.
‘Greene’s lodgings.’
‘Och, not him again, sir!’
‘Yes, him again. I haven’t talked to him properly yet and I’m bloody certain he knows more than he’s letting on about my idiot brother Edmund, not to mention the false angels that Heneage slipped you, according to Barnabus.’
‘I suppose ye want to catch him when he’s sober,’ said Dodd, dispiritedly dealing with his points and buttons and wishing there was a more sensible way of fastening your clothes. His head was still pounding and his eyes wouldn’t focus properly.
‘Good God, no,’ said Carey. ‘All we’d hear would be rubbish about snakes and spiders and demons attacking him. Catch him when he’s only half-drunk, that’s the best plan. Come on, Dodd, hurry up or we’ll miss the golden moment.’
Dodd found his cap and jerkin and finished buckling on his sword and dagger, followed Carey’s long stride out the door.
A thought struck him halfway down. ‘Wait, Sir Robert, Ah’ve lost ma purse.’
‘No, you haven’t. You left it next to the bed and I took it with me this morning when I saw how dead to the world you were. Here you are. I haven’t borrowed anything.’
He hadn’t, as Dodd could tell by hefting it. Not for the first time since he met the Courtier, gratitude and annoyance warred in him.
‘Not that it’s any of my business,’ said Carey after a tactful pause, ‘but when did you hire yourself a trollop?’
‘Me?’ Dodd was outraged. ‘Ah thocht she was yourn?’
One day Carey would hang for the way his eyebrows performed. One went up by itself and then the other joined it. ‘What?’
‘I thocht ye hired her, to wake us up like. Did ye no’?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Ye didnae?’
‘No.’
Dodd shut his eyes tight and shook his head, trying to clear it, which was a mistake. ‘But…but when I woke, she was already…at ma tackle, ye ken.’
‘And so you…er…’
Dodd could feel himself getting red as a boy caught with his hands down a kitchen maid’s stays. ‘Ay,’ he said truculently. ‘Wouldn’t ye?’
Carey grinned. ‘Yes,’ he admitted cheerfully. ‘But didn’t you wonder how she got there?’
‘Ay, I did. Like I said, I thought she wis…’
‘Mine.’
‘So to speak.’
‘Ah. So who the hell hired her? Barnabus?’
‘No, sir. Why would I? You’ve never needed any help like that before.’
‘Well, did you ask…?’
‘I woke up with her hand rummaging ma privates and no, I didnae think tae ask her.’
‘Hm. Now isn’t that interesting. I wonder who the benefactor was?’
Dodd shrugged. ‘Sir Edward Fitzjohn hisself?’
‘Who?’
‘The man in the pretty doublet that wanted all ma money or he’d put me through the church courts for adultery.’
Barnabus snorted. ‘Sir Edward Fitzjohn, my arse. That was Nick the Gent.’
‘Dodd, could I have a look at that false coin you had?’
‘Ay.’ Dodd fished it out and handed it over and Carey stopped to hold it up to the light and squint at the bite marks. ‘It’s very good, you know. It’s an excellent forgery. I think it’s pewter inside with a thin layer of gold, but the minting’s perfect. And you got it where?’
‘I think it was in Heneage’s bribe. That he give me at yer dad’s party.’
‘Oh, that’s when he did it, is it? Who was the…agent?’
‘I dinna ken. The man give it me in the garden, all muffled with a cloak.’
‘Hmm. Interesting.’
‘Ay, well, he could have got me hanged for spending it.’
‘So he could. Hmm. Can I keep it?’
‘Ay. It’s nae worth nothing now.’
‘Hmm. You never know,’ was all the Courtier would say while Dodd decided that the whyfores of forgery were more than he could handle with his present headache.
Oh God. Maybe it wasn’t a hangover. Maybe it was plague. Was that a lump he felt in his armpit? Did he have a fever? He deserved God’s wrath after such a sin of adultery and fornication, no matter how desperate the temptation. The Courtier might not be shocked but Dodd was, shocked at himself. Dear God, why had he done it? what if Janet found out? what if he’d taken the pox…?
In the common room they passed Shakespeare lying curled up on the bench with a cloak over his narrow shoulders. The only comfort was that Dodd felt quite certain Shakespeare would feel even worse when he woke up than Dodd did. Which served him right.
Carey strolled over to the innkeeper who was just opening and talking to him quietly—got nowhere, to judge by the sorrowful headshakings. And now the bastard Courtier was humming to himself as they walked along yet another stinking street, some tweedly-deedly court tune all prettified with fa-la-las. God, thought Dodd, I hate London and Carey both.
Very slowly, the exercise of walking through the noise and bustle of the London streets in the bright warm sunshine moved from being a torture to a pain to a mere misery. Very slowly the awful pounding in Dodd’s head faded down to a mere hammerbeat. Maddened with thirst, he drank a quart of mild ale at a boozing ken’s window and felt much better, though still more delicate than one of those fancy glass goblets from Italy the gentry set such store by. If you blew hard on him, he would break.
Greene’s lodgings were over a cobbler’s shop. Carey asked at the counter which produced hurried whisperings and a small skinny faded-looking woman hurried in from the back of the shop to be introduced as Joan Ball, Mr Greene’s…ahem…common-law wife.
‘He’s not well, sir,’ she explained. ‘He’s been ill all morning. Very, very ill.’
Carey made a dismissive tch noise. ‘I know what he’s suffering from. I’ll see him anyway.’
‘Well, I don’t know, sir, he’s very…It’s not his usual illness, you know, sir. I’d get the doctor to him if there was any left in London.’
‘It’s no’ plague, is it?’ Dodd demanded, with another greasy thrill of horror down his back.
She rubbed her arms anxiously up and down her apron. ‘Oh no, no. Nothing like that. Some kind of flux, I think. Or even poison. I don’t know, sir. He says he’s dying and he keeps calling for paper, says he’s got to finish his swansong.’
Carey frowned with suspicion and disbelief. ‘What? Let me see him, I’m his patron, damn it.’
‘I’ll ask,’ whispered the woman and scurried upstairs.
‘Ye never are,’ said Dodd, staggered at this further evidence of financial insanity.
‘Yes, I am. Or I was. I paid five pounds for a thing he wrote last year and dedicated to me.’
‘What was it?’
‘Er…can’t remember, I only read the dedication.’
The woman came downstairs again, her face drawn and miserable. ‘He’s not making any sense, sir, and he particularly said he wasn’t to be disturbed…’ Carey slipped a sixpence into her hand and she shrugged. ‘…but you can go up if you want.’
They went up the narrow winding stairs at the back of the shop and into the room under the roof. It was almost filled by a small bed and a little carved and battered table next to it. Papers covered the elderly rushes on the floor, piled up in drifts and held down with leather bottles, plates, rock-hard lumps of bread and, in one instance, a withered half of a meatpie; there were books on the windowsill and books on the floor under the bed. In a nest of unspeakable blankets sat the barrel-like Robert Greene, wearing a shirt and nightcap he might have wiped his arse with, they were so revolting.
His skin was greyish pale under the purple network of burst veins, his face worked in pain. A full jordan teetered on a pile of books. Next to him on the table were a pile of papers covered in a truly villainous scrawl. With a book on his knees and a piece of paper resting on it, an inkpot teetering by his feet and a pen in his fist, Robert Greene was scribbling with the fixity of a madman.
‘Mr Greene,’ said Carey, marching in and bending over the man on the bed. ‘I want to talk to you about my brother.’
Greene ignored him, breathing hoarsely through his mouth and sweat beading his face, the pen whispering across the page at an astonishing rate.
‘Mr Greene!’ bellowed Carey in his ear. ‘My brother, Edmund. What have you found out?’
‘I’m busy,’ gasped Greene. ‘Piss off.’
Carey sat on the bed and removed the ink bottle. The next time Greene tried to dip his pen, he discovered it gone, looked up and finally focused on Carey.
‘Give it back,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Damn you, I’m dying, I must write my swansong…Oh, Christ.’
Seeing the man retch, Carey got up hastily and backed away. It was the one of the ugliest sights Dodd had ever seen in his life, to watch anyone vomit blood. There were meaty bits in it. When the paroxysms finished Greene was sweating and shaking.
‘Joan,’ he roared. ‘Get these idiots out of my chamber and bring me another pot of ink.’
He doubled up again and grunted at whatever was going on inside him, a high whining noise through his nose with each return of breath.
‘Edmund Carey,’ shouted the Courtier mercilessly. ‘Tell me what you found out about him?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ gasped Greene. ‘Who cares? I’m dying, I know I am, I’m facing Judgement and what have I done, I’ve wasted my life, I’ve drunk away my gift, what have I ever done but write worthless plays, books full of obscenity, garbage the lot of it, I must write something good before I die, can’t you see that, can’t you understand?’
There were tears in the wretched man’s eyes. On impulse Dodd took the ink bottle out of Carey’s hand and put it back on the bed. With only a grunt of acknowledgement, Greene dipped his pen and started scribbling again. Carey didn’t protest.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Barnabus from the stairs as Joan Ball pushed past him. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘Why hasn’t he seen a doctor?’ Carey asked the woman.
‘They’ve all run on account of the plague.’ She was wiping sweat off Greene’s face as he panted over his page.
‘Plague? That’s not plague.’
Not as far as you could tell, although Dodd felt it paid to be suspicious. But there was no sign of lumps disfiguring Greene’s neck, no black spots. The smell in the room was unspeakably foul but more a muddle of unwashed clothes, old food, drink and an unemptied jordan plus the sour-sweet metallic smell of the splatter in the rushes by the bed. Plague had its own unmistakeable reek.
‘No, sir, but there’s plague hereabouts, and the doctors are always the first to know and the first to run for the country.’
Carey’s eyes were narrowed.
‘Have you heard about this, Barnabus?’ he asked.
Barnabus coughed. ‘There’s always plague in London,’ he said. ‘It’s like gaol-fever, comes and goes with the time of year.’
Greene had started whooping and bending over his belly, his face screwed up with pain.
Joan Ball scurried to the window with the disgusting pot, opened it wide, shrieked ‘Gardyloo!’ and emptied, before running to the bed. ‘Get the apothecary.’ She hissed, ‘Get Mr Cheke.’
‘The quality of the angels—there you see the cunning of the plot,’ gasped the man in the bed. ‘They’re all in it, by God, who could doubt angels,…urrr…And where’s Jenkins, eh? Answer me that?’ His face contorted.
They tactfully left the room and Carey turned to Dodd. ‘Go with Barnabus and see if you can find or kidnap a doctor or the apothecary,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get some sense out of him or I’ve nowhere to start looking for my brother.’
Dodd was quite glad to get away from the place. As they went down again into the street he tapped Barnabus on the shoulder. ‘Where’s Simon?’
‘Oh, he’s back in Whitefriars, looking after Tamburlain the Great.’
‘How is he?’
Barnabus didn’t look up. ‘He’s fine. Let’s try here.’
It was a barber’s shop with its red and white pole outside. There was only one customer and he and the barber glared suspiciously at the two of them.
‘What do you want?’ demanded the barber.
‘We’re looking for a doctor.’
‘Stay there. Don’t come any closer. Why?’
‘It’s not for plague,’ said Barnabus stoutly.
‘So you say, mate, so you say.’
‘I ain’t lying. Will you come?’
‘No.’
‘Well, is there anyone who will?’
‘Certainly not a doctor,’ said the barber and sneered.
‘What about Mr Cheke?’ Dodd asked.
‘The apothecary’s round the corner. He’s mad enough to try it.’ The barber was snipping busily again. As he left the shop, Dodd heard one of them sneeze.
They went round the corner and found the right place with its rows of flasks in the windows and a pungent heady smell inside, and a counter with thousands of little drawers all labelled in a foreign language Dodd assumed was Latin. A boy peered over the top of the counter.
‘Yes, sirs?’
‘Where’s the apothecary?’
‘Out, in Pudding Lane.’
Philosophically they went back into the street, turned left and then right, and found themselves in a street where every door seemed to be marked with a red cross and a piece of paper, where there were already weeds growing in the silted up drain down the centre of the alley and what looked suspiciously like dead bodies lying in a row down one end.
Both Dodd and Barnabus stopped in their tracks and froze. Down the centre of the street a monster was pacing towards them. It was entirely covered in a thick cape of black canvas and where its face should be was an enormous three foot long beak of brass, perforated with holes. Above were two round eyes that flashed in the sun and from the holes in the beak came plumes of white smoke.
In the unnatural silence of the plague-stricken street, a plague demon paced towards them with a slow weary tread, a bag full of souls in one hand, and its head moved from side to side blindly, looking for more flesh to eat.
‘Ahhh,’ said Barnabus.
Dodd was already backing away, sword and dagger crossed before him. Would blades kill a plague demon? Maybe. Who cares? It’ll not get me without a fight, he promised himself.
‘Sirs,’ said the demon, its voice muffled and echoing eerily from the beak, as it stopped and put up one white-gloved hand. ‘Sirs, don’t be afraid. I’m only a man.’
Holy water might stop it, Dodd remembered vaguely, or a crucifix; he’d heard that in the old days you could get crucifixes or little bottles of holy water blessed by the Pope to keep demons off, and neit
her of those things did he have with him. He had his amulet, but he couldn’t touch it because his hands were occupied with weapons that he wasn’t even sure could cut a demon and…
The demon took its face off and became indeed a tall pale man, with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. He coughed a couple of times.
‘Ah,’ said Barnabus. ‘Would you be the apothecary for hereabouts?’ All credit to him, thought Dodd, still shaking with the remnants of superstitious terror, I couldnae have said anything yet.
‘Yes, I am,’ said the man, giving a modest little bow before putting the beak and eyes back on and transforming himself into a monster again. ‘Excuse me, please, until we are away from the plague miasmas of this place.’
That was sense. Dodd put his blades away and they left the street as fast as they could walk, trying not to breathe in the miasmas, with the demon-apothecary pacing behind them. Nobody else in the next street gave him a glance, though a few stones were thrown by some of the children playing by a midden with dead rats on it. At last they were back in his shop.
‘Peter Cheke, sirs,’ he said as he took the beak and eyes off again and carefully sprinkled his canvas robe with vinegar and herbs. He wiped his face with a sponge soaked in more vinegar and cleaned the beak with it, then opened one end and took out a posy of wormwood and rue and a small incense burner which had produced the smoke. Dodd watched fascinated.
‘Does all that gear stop ye getting the plague?’ he asked.
‘It has so far, sir,’ said Peter Cheke gravely. ‘And I have attended many of the poor victims of the pestilence to bleed them and drain their buboes and give them what medicines I have.’
‘Did ye cure any?’
Cheke shook his head. ‘No, sirs, in all honesty, I think those that live do so by the blessing of God and a strong will.’
Without the sound-distorting beak his voice was unusually deep and rotund, speaking in a slow measured way. He seemed very weary.
‘How may I help you, sirs?’ he asked, blinking at them as if he was stoically preparing himself for more pleas for his puny help against the Sword of the Wrath of God.
‘We don’t think it’s plague,’ said Barnabus quickly. ‘It’s more like a flux or something. But he’s puking blood and getting pains in his belly something awful.’
4 A Plague of Angels Page 16