4 A Plague of Angels

by P. F. Chisholm

  Dodd kept his face solemn though in fact there was something funny as well as pathetic and idiotic at the idea of Sir Robert being ‘little Robin’ and at risk of fright at the sight of his brother brought so low. But then, he supposed, if he was in a like case and not quite in his right mind from fever, he might want to stop Red Sandy from seeing him. Old habits die hard and you could never stop being a big brother once you were one.

  He squatted down and took the bony wrist which felt hot and dry. ‘Och, puir man,’ he said. ‘How much would it take to move him somewhere better?’

  ‘At least ten shillings, since he’s in debt to Newton for the Knight’s Ward charges as well. And another couple of shillings’ garnish to unchain him.’

  Dodd’s lips tightened. He was beginning to take a considerable dislike to Newton.

  ‘What’s your name, mistress?’

  ‘Julie Granville, sir.’

  ‘Is your husband not about?’

  She looked down. ‘He was a sharer and officer in a ship bound for Muscovy, sir, and when the ship didn’t return, and we had heard nothing of it for a year, our creditors arrested me for his debts.’

  ‘But that’s terrible, mistress. What about yer family?’

  ‘I haven’t any, sir. And my husband’s family are…Well, his father was opposed to the voyage in the first place.’

  Dodd shook his head. Impulsively he put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m not Sir Robert, see ye, but I am his man, and I’m a man o’ parts myself in ma ain country. Now dinna ye fret, Mistress Granville, I’ll see it sorted.’

  She obviously didn’t understand much of what he had said, but she understood his tone of voice and she smiled. She took a cloth out of the bucket she had been carrying and began wiping Edmund Carey’s face and hands. He woke a little more and began muttering. She shushed him and began feeding him spoonfuls of some kind of porridge she had brought in a wooden bowl.

  Dodd stood, turned on his heel and strode to the door, banged on it and was let out of the hell of Bolton’s Ward, up the stairs and into the courtyard. He was scowling with thought; God might move in mysterious ways, but this was a little too pat for his tastes. What a strange coincidence that he should be arrested in mistake for Carey, when Carey had been blazing about the streets with courtier branded on every inch of him, and brought to the one prison in London that also contained Carey’s missing brother, for whom Greene had been searching before his death, and Carey as well. It didn’t make sense, or rather it did and he didn’t like the sense it made.

  He was not at all surprised to find a familiar face in the courtyard when he came blinking out into the sunshine, Mistress Bassano’s erstwhile servant, the balding poet.

  Dodd strode over to the man, took his elbow between thumb and forefinger in a way which forbade argument, and propelled him into the shade of a corner between two buildings.

  ‘Sergeant Dodd,’ said Shakespeare, his voice shaking a little. ‘I’m…er…I’m very glad I’ve found you.’

  ‘Not half sae glad as I am to find you,’ said Dodd, deliberately crowding him against the wall. ‘Now, I ken ye work for Mr Vice Chamberlain and I dinna give a pig’s turd why. But I’m sick and tired of being used as a fucking chesspiece in some fancy game o’ yer master’s, so now ye’re gonnae tell me what the hell’s going on here, or I willnae be responsible for what I do to ye. D’ye understand me or will I say it again more southern?’

  Shakespeare was white-faced and trembling. ‘I…er…I understand,’ he panted.

  ‘So.’ Dodd leaned one arm against the wall in front of Shakespeare, blocking him with his body. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Er…I really don’t know…very much.’

  ‘Och,’ said Dodd with false sympathy. ‘That’s a terrible pity. I’ll have to kill ye on general principles then.’

  Dodd hadn’t even bothered to draw his blade nor lay hands on Shakespeare, but for some reason the little poet believed him.

  ‘I…I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Ye’re the man that told Heneage that Sir Robert was on his way south, ay?’

  Shakespeare nodded. ‘I told Marlowe, though.’

  ‘When did he warn ye to do that?’

  ‘About August, I think.’

  ‘How did ye tell him? In person?’

  ‘No, in writing, in code. I leave messages with a…a trustworthy person who passes them on.’

  ‘Who is the person?’

  Shakespeare shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  Dodd considered beating the name out of him, but decided not to since he didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

  ‘What’s Heneage’s game? What’s he trying to do?’

  Shakespeare looked at the ground. ‘I don’t know. Why would he tell me?’

  ‘All right. What’s he told ye to find out?’

  ‘He…er…I think he wants to know anything about my lord Baron Hunsdon that will discredit him with the Queen. He also wants to know where Edmund Carey is. That’s quite urgent. He’s been quartering London for the man.’

  Dodd blinked and looked hard at Shakespeare, who was swallowing and trembling in front of him. He was not a fighting man and although he was a poet and must be good at lying, he didn’t look as if he was lying now. In which case, what the hell was going on? Dodd had been convinced that Heneage had put Edmund Carey in the Fleet, possibly into Bolton’s Ward as well. But if Heneage didn’t know where he was…And wanted to find him…?

  Dodd changed plan. ‘What are ye here for?’

  ‘To talk to you, find out if you needed anything.’

  Dodd scowled deeper which made Shakespeare shrink back against the wall.

  ‘Who sent ye?’

  ‘I can’t…er…tell you.’

  ‘And why not?’

  ‘B…because I…I’m more frightened of them than I am of you, sir,’ said Shakespeare with a desperate glint of humour.

  Against his will Dodd let out a short bark of laughter. ‘Ay. Well, that’s because ye dinna know me sae well.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Bide there while I think what to do.’

  Dodd looked around him for inspiration and scowled. The complexity of the situation was making his head hurt. His immediate impulse had been to send Shakespeare hotfoot to Somerset House to roust out Lord Hunsdon and bring him to the gaol to fetch his son. But the messenger was tainted. The likelihood was that a verbal message would go straight to Heneage or the mysterious person that scared the poet so much, and a written message the same. For a moment Dodd thought about codes but he didn’t know any and besides, it stood to reason that experienced intriguers like Heneage or even Shakespeare would know more about secret writing than he did. He couldn’t even tell Shakespeare simply to fetch Lord Hunsdon for the same reasons. He couldn’t send the man to fetch Barnabus or Simon Barnet because they had the plague and were probably dead by now.

  ‘I’ve got naething for ye to do, because I canna trust ye,’ he said to Shakespeare, leaning towards him. The poet was trying to burrow backwards into the wall. ‘If ye had a particle of decency in ye, ye’d go tell my Lord Hunsdon where I am and why, but as ye dinna, I willnae waste my breath asking ye to.’

  ‘I…I’m sorry.’

  Dodd drew back disgustedly. ‘Och,’ he said. ‘Piss off. Ye’re dirtying my nice clean gaol.’

  Shakespeare sidled past him and into the courtyard, then scurried across it looking pinched about the mouth. Dodd spat in his wake.

  For a moment Dodd thought of paying the money that would get Edmund Carey moved out of the stinking disgrace of the beggars’ ward but then it occurred to him that any action like that would probably be reported to Heneage within the hour and Heneage would want to know why he was so solicitous of a stranger, might well make the connection.

  It occurred to him that there was one thing he could do without giving away any secrets, since it would be expected of him. He went back into the courtyard and over to the table covered wi
th a higgledy piggledy array of things, including a lump of rock covered in dust that the dog-eared notice by it claimed to be gold ore. There, after considerable haggling, he bought himself paper, pen and ink and sat down cross-legged with his back to a corner and a stone in front of him for a writing table. He hated paperwork. He knew his ability to write, which was rare among the Borderers, had helped him get his place in the Carlisle garrison as Sergeant, but he still hated it. The effort of making up words and then forming the letters for them always made his head hurt and his hand sweat. He avoided the labour as much as he could but this time there was no help for it.

  ***

  Peter Cheke had gone to bed after another night of desperate labour against the plague, also ending in failure. He had slept the dreamless headlong sleep of exhaustion and woken very late in full daylight, feeling thirsty and still exhausted. He had even slept through the bells calling him to church. As he went to the window to look out into the street, he saw a tall man in ill-fitting homespun russet jogtrotting purposefully through the crowds, straight to his locked shop door.

  The hammering resounded up the stairs and Cheke stood staring down at the statute cap of the man, overwhelmed with helpless misery. Yet another desperate father, begging for something, anything to save his babies, his wife, offering every penny he had for healing Cheke knew he could not give, as if salvation could be bought.

  Eventually he put on his gown and hat, went down to open the door and tell the poor fool to begone.

  At first he didn’t recognise the man because of the conflicting signals of clothes and bearing and the fact that his hair and face were dirty. By the time he had worked it out, Carey had pushed his way into the shop and shut the door behind him.

  ‘What…er…what can I do for you, sir?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Mr Cheke,’ said Carey. ‘I’ve come to you because I have nowhere else to start. I must know where Dr Jenkins performed his alchemy.’

  ‘Sir, I gave my word…’

  ‘I know you did. But what if they were coney-catching? What if the process you saw was not alchemy at all, had nothing whatever to do with the Philosopher’s Stone, but was a well-known goldsmithing mystery called parcel-gilding?’

  ‘I am sure it was the true art, sir, as sure as my life.’

  ‘Then let’s prove it. Have you scales?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have any of the angels that were made?’

  ‘I…I was given a fee, yes.’

  ‘Excellent. I have here a true angel direct from Mr van Emden on Cheapside.’ He took out a small yellow coin and tossed it, snapped it out of the air and showed it to Cheke, the Archangel Michael, battling the dragon, bright and fine upon it.

  Angry at this bland certainty that Carey was right and he was wrong, Cheke led the way silently to the kitchen of the house, and brought out his scales. Then from a loose brick by the oven, he took one of the angels he had seen made and struck and brought it over.

  Ten seconds later the last bastion of Cheke’s world had fallen, for the pan with the true angel on it dipped much lower than the one he had been given by the worshipful Dr Jenkins.

  He took the others out, checked them against Carey’s coin.

  ‘Yours is full of lead,’ he said, desperately.

  ‘No, Mr Cheke,’ said Carey wearily. ‘Lead weighs less than gold. Look how thin mine is, how much it weighs. You were coney-catched, Mr Cheke, like others before you, and like my brother, who was the gentleman investing in the project.’

  ‘We weighed them at the…the place.’

  ‘Who supplied the scales?’

  ‘Dr Jenkins.’ Cheke looked at the flagstones. ‘But…’

  ‘You know yourself it’s not so very hard to alter the balance arm of a pair of scales so it’s biased one way or the other.’

  Cheke put his head in his hands and fought not to weep. Carey paused and then said quite softly, ‘I am not claiming that the transmutation of matter, that the goal of alchemy, is impossible. I am only saying that you yourself have not yet seen it done.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ said Cheke, his voice muffled. ‘You don’t know how happy I was. I have spent most of my life seeking out the truth of matter, trying to understand God’s mind therein. And to know it had been done, to know that someone had succeeded… It didn’t matter to me that it was not I that did it, only that it had been done. That God had vouchsafed a little of his mystery…’

  ‘Mr Cheke, I’m sorry. I must know. Where did the process take place? Where were the angels made?’

  For a moment Cheke burned with rage and hatred for Carey and then the fire died inside him, to be replaced with a grey hopelessness.

  ‘In the Blackfriars monastery, in the old kitchen where there is a fireplace we altered to be a furnace. The gentleman had a key.’

  ‘Of course he did. And with the noise of hemp-beating in the Bridewell prison nobody would hear the sound of the coins being struck.’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s right.’

  Carey smiled at him. ‘Come on, Mr Cheke. I want to see it.’

  He hadn’t the energy to resist any more. He stood and went with Carey. They threaded through the back streets of the city, behind Knightrider Street and St Peter’s, alleys pockmarked with red painted crosses in some places and utterly normal in others.

  Getting into the Blackfriars was made a little complicated by the fact that for some reason, Carey did not want to go through the gatehouse and the cloisters. Instead they went down St Andrew’s Hill to Puddle Wharf and round the remains of the monastery walls that way, threading between the newly built houses to a much older, swaybacked stone building separate from the Blackfriar’s hall.

  Carey tried the door, but it was locked.

  ‘The gentleman had a key to it,’ offered Cheke.

  Carey nodded. ‘Yes, he would. I think my father owns this part too. Well, let’s see.’

  Carey padded restlessly round the whole building, disturbing a goat in its shed, craning his neck to look at the high windows and the massive chimney.

  ‘Come on, where is it?’ he said to himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I never saw a kitchen yet that only had one door. Where did the servants collect the food, where’s the hatch?’

  ‘Hatch?’

  Carey looked across a tiny jakes-cluttered yard at the Blackfriar’s hall, jutting above the rooftops with its buttressing, narrowed his eyes as he followed some invisible notional path and came up against the goat shed again.

  ‘Must be,’ he said, and barged into the shed where the goat bleated in fright. There were a couple of bangs and crashes. ‘Come and give me a hand with this,’ he ordered Cheke.

  After sidling past the goat who stared with those unnervingly cold slit-eyes of hers, Cheke saw that Carey had managed to wrench two planks from the back wall of the lean-to shed and had uncovered what was obviously a serving hatch. They both tried to lift it, but it was stuck fast and so Carey simply picked up a stone that must have been used for milking and battered through the old wood. It gave in a shower of musty-smelling dust and Carey tutted.

  ‘It’s got dry-rot,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to demolish it.’ He climbed up onto the sill and pushed through the hole he’d made; Cheke followed him, borne along by Carey’s certainty. The goat stuck her head through the gap after them, bleating with interest.

  Very little daylight was filtering through the high glassed windows. A huge table stood in the middle of the flagged floor, the vast fireplace was empty except for its rusting fire-irons and spit. They had used the chimney from the smaller charcoal fireplace on the other wall because it was narrower than the great fireplace and the airflow was more easily controlled. Where the monks’ food had been sinfully soused with complex spiced sauces, Peter Cheke had built a small closed-in furnace with stones and cement, sealed with clay. His own pair of bellows lay at one of the air-holes.

  Carey hunted around until he found what he was looking for, a whole tre
etrunk made into a block, with a small neat round hole set into it. The mallet lay nearby.

  ‘Now where are they?’ he muttered to himself and began digging in the cupboards. In one he found a dusty academic gown and what Cheke at first took for a dead cat, until he picked it up and found it was a false beard such as players used at the theatre.

  It was all too ridiculous for words. Cheke remembered his joy and pride at being present when Dr Jenkins produced the scrapings of the Philosopher’s Stone, of actually admiring the curly dark beard, streaked with grey, that was now tangled with the noble doctor’s gown. He started to snigger helplessly.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Carey, emerging from another cubbyhole, covered in dust.

  Cheke couldn’t stop. ‘He…I think…this is all that’s left of Dr Jenkins.’

  Carey glanced at the gown and false beard. ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Do you know who played the part?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suspect. Was the good doctor bald?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thought so. Well if the coin dies are here, I don’t know where. Do you know?’

  ‘I think that the gentleman had them. He told me he had bought them off a retired mint-master fallen on hard times who had kept a trussel and pile that should have been cancelled as an old design.’