Witch Hammer

by M. J. Trow

  There was a commotion at the west door and Lord Strange was helped down the steps by Marlowe.

  ‘Here he comes,’ said Sledd, ‘but I don’t like the look of him.’

  ‘And he’s our meal ticket,’ Thomas muttered. ‘Lose him and we lose all that sponsorship.’

  ‘Heart as big as the great outdoors, Thomas, that’s you. Anyway, I’m not talking to you, as I’m sure you recall. I’ve got to find another female lead now because of you answering the call of nature. And it’s precisely because of our imminent loss of sponsorship as you put it that we’ll have to hit Oxford. Got to make some money somewhere until we can find a new lord as stage-struck as this one. Know anything about the Earl of Northumberland?’

  Thomas just shrugged.

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise,’ Sledd muttered. ‘When we reach Oxford, you’re on the thunder box. Although why I should give you a second chance, I don’t know. My Lord!’ And he trotted off to where Strange was being helped into a carriage. William Clopton was fussing around, as was Joyce, but, in the event, it was Marlowe who took charge.

  ‘My Lord, I believe you met this gentleman briefly last night,’ he said quietly as Nicholas Faunt bounded into the carriage.

  Strange recoiled. ‘Liar!’ he shouted, disoriented. He plucked at his cloak, trying to hide his face.

  ‘A mere subterfuge, My Lord,’ Faunt calmed the man. ‘You are right; we have met before, in London. I work for Sir Francis Walsingham.’

  Strange frowned and blinked. ‘Walsingham?’ he repeated.

  Faunt nodded. Strange, bewildered and half delirious though he was, assessed the situation. Faunt was armed to the teeth, with a rapier, dagger and the butt of a wheel lock under his cloak. If he worked for Walsingham, he worked for the Queen and that was good enough for Strange. He was finding focusing difficult, but by closing one eye and looking across the bridge of his nose, he could see the man clearly enough and he did seem familiar.

  ‘Master York will accompany you, My Lord,’ Marlowe said loudly, stepping down from the carriage. ‘Driver,’ he called up to the man, ‘Her Majesty’s palace of Nonsuch and don’t spare the horses.’

  ‘Wait,’ Strange gasped, sticking his deathly pale face out of the window.

  Faunt had gripped his sleeve and brought his mouth close to the sick man’s ear. ‘Another subterfuge, My Lord,’ he breathed. ‘We are going north to your estates. The driver knows that. Whatever actually happened last night, we must accept that someone here means you harm. The less they know about your actual destination, the better.’

  Strange turned panic-stricken eyes to him, but didn’t move his head. Faunt’s hot breath was still cooling in Strange’s ear when he heard another voice calling his name. The voices were bothering him this morning and it was all a bit too much. He wrapped himself closer in his cloak and closed his eyes.

  ‘My Lord Strange!’ Sledd was still trying to barge his way through the Cloptons and Marlowe.

  ‘Not now, Ned.’ Marlowe turned to face him. ‘His Lordship is not well.’

  ‘The Devil,’ Sledd grunted.

  ‘Yes.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘Very likely.’

  And the carriage rolled back a little before the driver hauled on his reins and whipped his horses on.

  ‘That this should happen in my house.’ William Clopton shook his head as he watched the coach rattle under the archway and out of sight.

  ‘Master Marlowe.’ Joyce left the old man at the door and crossed to the playwright. ‘They tell me you spent the night in Lord Strange’s room.’

  He closed down his face and looked at her, giving away nothing.

  She smiled and led him away, out of her father’s earshot. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘A guard that can be bought by a poet’s purse can also be bought by the lady of the house. That was brave.’

  ‘No more, My Lady, than you intended to do, or so I hear.’

  She paused in her walk, then burst out laughing. ‘I’m afraid we are both guilty of over-bribery,’ she said. ‘I shall have to dock Ogden’s wages; the man is earning far too much.’ Then, her smile faded and she looked anxiously over Marlowe’s shoulder to where her father still stood, watching through the archway as if he could still keep an eye on the departing coach, long out of sight. ‘What did you discover?’

  ‘About the black arts?’ Marlowe asked her.

  She shrugged. ‘About any arts,’ she said.

  He looked around him. Cawdray and Haywood were standing by their saddled horses, talking to Sledd. Lord Strange’s Men – and women – were hauling canvases and timbers on to wagons to be ready for the road. ‘Before I went to Strange’s chamber,’ he told her, ‘I went to the Great Hall.’

  ‘What for?’ she asked.

  ‘To see if I could find Lord Strange’s cup.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘You suspect poison,’ she said, nodding.

  ‘Let’s just say I believe it more likely than the power of an evil charm.’

  ‘The pastry cook is prostrated. His model in sugar had taken him days to make and to have it reduced to the pillow for a poppet has quite unhinged him for the moment.’

  ‘An extreme reaction,’ Marlowe remarked. ‘Perhaps we should look closer at the pastry cook.’

  ‘He is a sensitive soul,’ she said, dismissing the cook’s temperament with the wave of a hand. ‘I have seen him take to his bed if his Easter buns don’t rise properly. He is no poisoner. Did you find the cup?’

  ‘One among so many? No. It was always an outside chance and, anyway, Boscastle is an excellent steward and had already issued his orders. Every cup, every plate, every knife was washed and dried and put away.’

  ‘Who do you think was responsible?’ she asked, with hardly a tremor in her voice.

  Marlowe smiled at her and shook his head. ‘Half Warwickshire was here last night, My Lady,’ he said. ‘And men like Lord Strange have many enemies.’

  ‘My father is heartbroken,’ she said. ‘To think that a guest in this house . . . well, what with his other troubles, the shame of this could kill him. I must go and try to get him to take a little breakfast, Master Marlowe. If you will excuse me?’ and she dipped her head in farewell and walked back to the old man. As she took his arm, he hardly acknowledged her and allowed himself to be led away. As Marlowe watched them he was aware that more than one man had been led to the gates of death the previous night. He bowed to her retreating back.

  ‘Kit,’ Sledd called as the playwright crossed the courtyard to where the other men were standing. ‘Master Cawdray here feels we have cheated him.’

  ‘Oh?’ Marlowe raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I don’t believe in hocus pocus, sir,’ Cawdray said. ‘I came to see a play. I hope His Lordship will mend.’

  ‘We all do,’ Sledd echoed. He, above all others present, had hopes that His Lordship would mend; the Late Lord Strange’s Men was a bit of a mouthful for the handbills. ‘I’ve told Master Cawdray, Kit, that we’re on our way to Meon Hill to get some rehearsals in. And I’ve promised him the best seat in the house on our opening night in Oxford.’

  ‘Gratis,’ Cawdray remarked, with a smile.

  Sledd sketched a bow. ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘Gratis.’ The word was wrenched out through his gritted teeth.

  ‘I hope we won’t disappoint you, sir,’ Marlowe cut in quickly, so that Sledd didn’t end up papering the entire house with Cawdray’s friends and relations.

  ‘I’m sure you won’t,’ Cawdray said, tucking his toe into his stirrup. ‘Any company with the great Ned Alleyn in it can never disappoint.’

  Marlowe drew breath to answer, but Sledd’s heel pressed down on his toe stopped him in his tracks. He settled for a muttered agreement, though it was hard to bear. ‘The great Ned Alleyn,’ he said; he was a play short because of that man.

  ‘Too kind,’ Sledd gushed. ‘Too kind.’

  They rode south-west as the sun climbed in the heavens, taking the old drovers’ road through the Cotswolds, the low hills pa
le and shimmering in the July heat.

  ‘It’s good of you to put me up, Simon,’ Richard Cawdray said as his roan calmly negotiated the iron-dry ruts of the road.

  ‘My pleasure, dear boy,’ Hayward said. ‘At the agreed price, of course.’

  Cawdray smiled. ‘Of course.’

  ‘I never knew a man so keen to see a play.’ Hayward squinted sideways at him, knowing full well that his agreed price for the stay at Winchcombe was little short of usurious.

  ‘I love it,’ Cawdray said. ‘I never miss a performance at the Rose or the Curtain when I’m in London.’

  ‘Do you go there often?’ Hayward asked him.

  ‘Not any more.’ Cawdray’s smile had faded. ‘Not since . . .’ His voice tailed away.

  ‘I don’t mean to pry.’ Hayward shrugged, looking around to find another topic of conversation.

  ‘No, no,’ Cawdray said. ‘It’s all right. My wife loved the theatre, too. She saw in it a kind of magic. The lights, the music, the actors . . . She could lose herself in it, she said, in all that. Now she’s dead.’

  Hayward jolted a little in the saddle. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. There seemed little more to say. The tale was clearly a sad one; Cawdray was no age. Middle thirties, perhaps, hardly more. ‘Sweating sickness?’ he ventured. ‘Ague?’

  ‘No.’ Cawdray was staring straight ahead. ‘She took her own life.’

  They rode on for a while. Hayward hated a silence as he hated the Devil. ‘Children?’

  ‘Only the one who died in her womb,’ the widower replied, shutting his mouth like the gate of a tomb.

  ‘That’s the road to Long Compton.’ Hayward seized on the geographical feature like a drowning man on a straw. ‘It leads to the Rollrights and to Meon Hill. That’s where Strange’s Men are going, isn’t it?’

  Cawdray nodded. ‘I believe so.’

  ‘That’s what I don’t understand about these damned actors,’ Hayward said. ‘You’d think they’d want to put up at an inn or something, say at Moreton or Chipping Norton. What the attraction is in camping in some bloody field, I don’t know.’

  Cawdray smiled. ‘I asked about that,’ he said. ‘According to them, it’s all to do with the Muse, apparently, being at one with God’s nature.’

  ‘And nothing to do with saving money, of course,’ Hayward said.

  And both men laughed as they rode on to Winchcombe.

  ‘God’s nature, my arse!’ Ned Sledd slapped his boot top with his riding whip. ‘Come on, lads. How hard can it be?’

  ‘Talking of arse,’ Nat Sawyer grunted as he took the strain, ‘if you got off yours and helped us lift, it’d be a whole lot easier.’

  ‘I have . . . people,’ Sledd told him. ‘We actor-managers do the thinking. You lot do the wheel changes.’

  ‘Well –’ Martin wheezed with the exertion – ‘Kit’s got his shoulder to it, and he’s a genius.’

  ‘Dear boy,’ said Marlowe, in unconscious imitation of Edward Alleyn and although Martin was easily ten years older, ‘how nice of you to notice.’

  The cart had died a little south of Ettington and it was only Thomas’s quick thinking that had saved two chests of costumes crashing into the ditch that drained the road. Now everybody, except old Joseph, who couldn’t, and not-so-old Sledd, who wouldn’t, were raising the wagon while the women tried to fit the spokes, strapped and nailed, back into position.

  ‘All right,’ said Sledd, to whom every minute lost on the road was a loss of money, ‘we may as well have our dinners here. Liza, bread and cheese, if you please. Perhaps we can catch the odd coney by tonight. Hello, who’s this?’

  A solitary horseman was trotting along the road, wheeling around the parked wagons and reining in alongside the collapsed cart.

  ‘Master Shaxsper,’ Sledd hailed him. ‘I thought we’d seen the last of you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Shaxsper swung out of the saddle. ‘So did I. Look . . .’ He closed to Sledd and Marlowe. ‘I was a little hasty back at Clopton. It’s a fault of mine, I’m afraid, shortness of temper. Well, call me old fashioned if you like . . .’ He paused, but nobody did.

  Sledd, however, clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Master Shaxsper, we’re none of us sure exactly what happened back there . . . with Lord Strange, I mean. But we are his Men –’ he stood up proudly, striking a pose in a theatrical tradition – ‘and we owe it to him to carry on.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Shaxsper asked.

  ‘Meon Hill,’ Sledd told him. ‘To rehearse. And then, on to Oxford.’

  ‘Meon Hill?’ Marlowe could have sworn that Shaxsper’s naturally waxy complexion had gone several shades paler still. ‘The Rollright Stones?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sledd. ‘Do you know the place?’

  Shaxsper nodded. ‘I’ll be frank, Master Sledd,’ he said. ‘I had a row with my Anne earlier. Oh, it’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. I’ve made up my mind to join Lord Strange’s Men if you’ll have me. But the Rollrights . . .’

  ‘As I understand it,’ Sledd said, ‘they are simply a circle built by ancient peoples, long ago. A natural amphitheatre, I’ve been told.’

  ‘No.’ Shaxsper was grimly serious. ‘No, nothing like that.’

  There was a silence, punctuated suddenly by a crack as the repaired wheel broke again and a burst of blasphemy from Thomas and Nat in the finest tradition of choral speech.

  ‘Do you intend to follow us back to London, Master Shaxsper?’ Sledd asked him.

  ‘Indeed,’ the glover said, looking at Marlowe. ‘And to write for the stage.’

  ‘Well,’ Sledd said with a smile. ‘A word of advice, then. Shaxsper. Shaxsper. It’s a little . . . odd, isn’t it? Rather . . . brutish and short. As though there’s a syllable missing and, not to beat about the bush, a bit foreign sounding. If you’re going to make a name for yourself, I’d better start by making one for you. How about . . .’ He looked around for inspiration and his glance fell on one of the wagons where the women were setting about making dinner. He tried a few words silently, just to see how they sounded in his head, then said, ‘Bacon? No? Hmmm . . . Ham, then?’ This was met by a snort of derision from most of the troupe and Sledd climbed on to his high horse and jingled the bridle pettishly. ‘All right, then, if you are going to deride my best efforts, let it be Shaxsper and see how it goes down in London.’

  Liza looked up from sawing bread against her bosom with a fearsome looking knife. ‘What about Shakespeare, Ned? That doesn’t sound quite so . . .’ One of the other women nudged her and giggled. Liza nudged her back and carried on, ‘Well, Master Shaxsper, we think Shakespeare doesn’t sound quite so rude.’

  Shaxsper, who had never seen the comic possibilities in his name, although Nat Sawyer had compiled four obscene couplets based on it within their first five minutes of acquaintance, stood silently, thinking.

  ‘Shakespeare!’ Sledd declaimed. ‘It has a ring to it, all right, don’t you think?’

  ‘Shakespeare,’ Shaxsper repeated, then smiled at the company at large. ‘Yes, yes I like it.’

  ‘Done, then,’ Marlowe said. ‘Now, Master Shakespeare, how are you at changing wheels?’

  Sir William Clopton sat in his favourite chair by the fire in the solar, soaking up what remained of the heat of the day from the ancient stone. Joyce sat opposite him, trying to look calm but giving the game away with her hands, tightly interlaced, one finger over another and her brow, which was furrowed and taut. She had had Boscastle send someone to light the fire; although she was warm enough, even overwarm on this summer’s evening, her father’s hands were cold and trembling. His eyes were closed in his waxen face and his lips moved silently, saying his rosary without the benefit of beads. Every now and again, he twitched and shook and moved his head slightly from side to side, but never stopped his unending wheel of prayer. Eventually, she could bear it no longer.

  ‘Father?’ she said, gently. ‘Father, wake up. We must talk.’

  He opened one eye and
looked at her and she was taken back to games of hide and seek in the park of Clopton, all those years ago when she was just a tiny girl and Sir William was still hale and hearty. She almost expected him to jump up and shout: ‘Boo!’ But it was not a hale or hearty Sir William who spoke.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why talk? Surely, we must talk over what happened to Lord Strange. What is happening to us, here, with Edward Greville on the prowl.’

  Her father shut his eyes again. ‘I meant, why wake up? I want to sleep until I die.’

  Joyce felt her heart shrink into an icy ball and she was on her feet and at his side before he knew she was moving. She fell at his feet and buried her head in his lap. ‘Don’t,’ she muttered. ‘Don’t speak of leaving me, Father. I will be all alone.’ She felt his hand rest on the top of her head, but it did not caress her, it just lay there like a dead thing.

  ‘You will marry,’ he said, dully. ‘You will soon forget your old father and the mess he left behind.’ The words came slowly, and were only clear to her, who had lived with him every day of her life.

  She left her head in his lap, and gently stroked his knee. ‘Father,’ she whispered, ‘Father.’

  She lay in his lap, with the fire crackling behind her for who knew how long, before a cramp in her leg made her stir. His hand slipped off her head and slapped down on his lap, palm up, fingers uncurled and didn’t move. She drew back so the light of the fire fell on his face. The man she knew had gone, transformed into a blank mask, as blank as the vizard he had worn only the night before. Only his eyes betrayed that there was a living man inside the shell.

  Joyce was her father’s daughter, through and through and she did not shout, panic or scream, although every nerve told her to do all three. She knelt at her father’s feet for a few minutes more, stroking his lifeless hand. Then, she walked to the door of the solar and stepped out on to the landing. Pulling the door half shut behind her, she called for her father’s steward. Boscastle would know what to do.

  They looked like an army. They sounded like an army. To the people of Clopton Hall, they were an army. The flag of the Grevilles lifted and floated wide on the breeze and the solitary drum kept time.