Revenger

by Rory Clements

  “It suits you very well, Mistress Day.”

  “Mr. Watts learned it in Italy, where it implies a certain respect.” She clapped her hands and a maid came quickly to her side, a sweet-faced girl perhaps five years younger than her mistress. Starling herself was dressed in a fifty-mark dress of gold and silver with a voluminous bum-roll and a low neckline that let loose her expanding, milk-white breasts. The garment, which she said was confected by Tredger the tailor, of Cheapside, was clearly intended to mark her out as gentry, but sadly only marked her out for what she really was, a gaudy strumpet whose cards had turned up kings.

  “Winnie, fetch us malmsey wine and saffron cakes.”

  The maid bowed and went out of the room. It was a room rich with tapestries from Arras and cushions of colorful silks from the Indies, a room befitting the well-fed whore of a wealthy, piratical merchant like John Watts.

  “How may I help you, Mr. Shakespeare?”

  “I am here with a most curious request, for I know you have friends in the bawdy houses of Southwark.”

  “Oh dear, I am not so familiar with bawdy houses as once I was. My trugging days are over since Mr. Watts took a liking to me, although I would happily take you to my chamber for the joy alone, Mr. Shakespeare.”

  Shakespeare smiled at the offer but shook his head. “I am looking for a woman named Eleanor Dare, born White, though there is a good chance that she no longer goes by either of those names. She was seen by the Bull Ring last week, where the Winchester geese parade for customers. It was said she wore the attire of a street woman touting her wares.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Pretty, from what I am told. Slender with fair hair and strange, piercing blue eyes with a gray ring.”

  “And can you tell me why you want her?”

  “It is a strange tale.” As the maid returned with wine and saffron cakes, Shakespeare told Starling the story of Roanoke and of the sighting of Eleanor in Southwark. “It is so curious that I do not really wish it bruited about. If this woman Eleanor is in England-and if she were to hear of my inquiries-I fear she might well disappear.”

  “Then I shall ask about quietly, Mr. Shakespeare. And I shall send word to you as soon as I have heard aught of interest.”

  Shakespeare took his leave of Starling Day and walked the short distance home to Dowgate to fetch his horse, sure all the while that he was watched. Another man might have felt intimidated, but you could not work in a world of secrets and be too concerned by such things. Shakespeare knew how to spot the observer who wished to remain unseen: the shadow on the wall that stopped when you stopped, the figure in the crowd that did not quite flow with the surging of the mass, the face that was cowled despite the warmth of the day. More importantly, Shakespeare knew, too, how to lose the watcher when it became necessary.

  At the mews he ordered the groom, Perkin Sidesman, to ready his gray mare, then went through to the house for a brief refreshment and to fold a change of garments into a pack-saddle. He also met his deputy, George Jerico, and told him that for a short while he was to assume the duties of high master. Jerico looked shocked and a little worried, but Shakespeare merely shook him by the hand and thanked him for his forbearance. “I will see that you are properly recompensed, Mr. Jerico,” he said, then left him to contemplate his new responsibilities without a chance to make objections.

  On his way through the courtyard, Shakespeare encountered Rumsey Blade. His narrow face sneered.

  “Ah, Master Shakespeare, might I have a few words with you?”

  “Later,” Shakespeare said sharply, not breaking stride as he made for the mews.

  Blade scurried to keep up with him. “It is only proper to inform you that I have this morning sent a report to Bishop Aylmer. You can expect to be disciplined in the most severe terms.”

  “Good-day, Master Blade.”

  “The bishop does not take these matters lightly, so I have recommended him to revoke the school’s license. I am sure of a fair hearing in this, for the bishop is my kin.”

  Shakespeare stopped. He looked Blade in the eye. “And I have information for you, sir. You are dismissed from your post as a master of this school. You will leave the premises this day and will not return.”

  Blade’s pinched face creased even more, shocked to be spoken to thus. “You cannot do this, Shakespeare.”

  Shakespeare gestured to his servant, who was carrying a water butt toward the house. Jack Butler was a giant of a man, well over six feet tall. He set down the butt and came to his master. “Mr. Butler, will you please ensure that Mr. Blade is off these premises before sunset.”

  Butler bowed. “As you wish, master.”

  Rumsey Blade looked aghast. “This is intolerable. The bishop will not allow it. Not when he hears about your failure to beat the boys, your absences, your wife’s Papism.”

  Shakespeare clapped the man on the shoulder and smiled broadly. “The bishop knows all that, Blade, and more. And I trust that in time he will come to support me wholly in this, my decision. So goodbye. And if you wish for advice, look for some new employment that does not involve the flogging of little boys.”

  The gray mare was saddled. The groom held the reins while Shakespeare stepped on the mounting block and slid nimbly aboard. Below him, Rumsey Blade stood stone-faced in shock. Shakespeare took the reins from the ostler, then leaned over and whispered toward Blade, “And you may take your birches with you, sir, for they will no longer be used at the Margaret Woode School.”

  B OLTFOOT COOPER SAT in a corner of The Hope, on the south bank of the Thames, directly facing the western edge of the Tower. He was dismayed.

  In his younger days, this was one of the taverns he and his crewmates frequented. It gave a fair welcome, and offered beds at reasonable prices and soft flesh with a welcoming smile. Now the only girl in the taproom was scrawny and had a sullen aspect. The landlord scowled as he slopped the beer. Even the daub of the walls was breaking away from the wattles, and you could see sky through the thatch. It had been a similar story in a dozen or more other taverns he had visited. He was getting sick of such places. With Jane growing larger, he did not enjoy staying away from home.

  But here in The Hope he had at least found Will Legge, an old companion from the three long years aboard the Golden Hind, when they sailed the world.

  Legge, who had been a steward to Drake, could barely raise a cheery word of greeting. “Well, look at us. Reduced to misery. Left for dead after the great bloody Armada victory. Victory for who? Not the common mariner, Boltfoot.”

  “You always did complain a great deal, Will Legge.”

  “And did I not have cause? Did Drake not treat us like dogs the way he took and kept our gold, which he had promised to us? You, too, not just me. Twenty-nine ounces. I could be living in a fine manor house with that.”

  Boltfoot could not argue the point, for he knew he spoke the truth, even if he exaggerated the value of the gold a little.

  “Come, meet the fellows,” Legge said. “Hear what they have to say, if you don’t believe me.” He led Boltfoot across the taproom to join half a dozen long-bearded, weather-hardened men, all with wound scars. One was tall, well over six foot, and had a peg leg and a vivid red scar along his forearm; another had just one arm and no legs and was propped inside a crate; a third was blind in both eyes.

  “These are the men as did for the Armada, Boltfoot. Look at them now in their rags. Many more are dead, starved on the shores where they were off-loaded when the fighting was done. And did the Queen whose skin we saved send food and gold to us in thanks? Did she buggery! They’d string me up if I said what I thought of that poxy old bag of rancid mutton.”

  “You’ve said enough, Will Legge.”

  “Report me, will you, to your fine friends on the Privy Council?”

  “No, but you’ve said enough. Now, stow you while I stand these fellows ale and talk with them awhile.”

  Boltfoot bought the group ale and beer, then asked the
m what they knew about the voyage that had taken the colonists to Roanoke.

  “They was Puritans, so I heard,” the blind man said. “Drove the poor mariners Bedlamwards with their sermonizing and praying and damning the world to hellfire. It’s the poor savages of the New World I feels sorry for, having to listen to their zealous ranting and roaring the whole day long.”

  “And what do you think might have happened to the colonists?”

  “Disappeared up their own zealous arses, I reckon,” the blind man said.

  Their theories went on and on, none of them surprising or original. “What I most want to know,” Boltfoot said, “is whether any of you ever heard tell of any mariners that were on the voyage that took them there. And if so, would you know where they are now? There would be gold in it for the man that could find me such a one.” It was an offer Boltfoot had made several times already that day without success.

  “Gold?” the tall one said. “We don’t want gold, we want tobacco.”

  “If you’ve got a name, tell me and I’ll give you a mark-and another when I’ve found him. You can buy your own sotweed.”

  The seafarer turned down the corners of his mouth dismissively. “Can’t get it. All goes to the royal court. Mariners used to have as much as we liked; now it’s nowhere to be found.”

  “I’ll get you tobacco,” Boltfoot said reluctantly. “I have some.”

  “In that case I might just be able to help you, Mr. Cooper. But it would have to be a good half a pound.”

  “Six ounces. Who is he-and where?”

  The man shifted uneasily in his seat. He looked from one to another of his comrades. Then he thrust out his enormous grimy hand. Boltfoot felt most disgruntled as he fished into his jerkin pocket and brought out his prized pouch of tobacco. The landlord fetched scales and Boltfoot weighed out six ounces as if he were being forced to give up his vital organs. He looked disconsolately at the few strands of leaf that were left him. “Here.” He handed over the tobacco. “That’s best verinshe, that is, so this had better be good.”

  The big mariner sniffed at it and his eyes brightened. He was about to pat some of it into his walnut-shell pipe, but Boltfoot stayed his hand. “You can smoke it when you’ve spoken-if I like what you say.”

  “As you will. But none of this comes back to me if he’s unhappy. It’s dangerous business telling stuff like this. Don’t want anyone thinking I’ve got a loose tongue, not in days like these.”

  “You’ve got the sotweed. Get on with it.”

  The seafarer’s eyes flickered this way and that. Boltfoot could understand his fears; he had, himself, worried that there was something more to this, something sinister, and had done his utmost to avoid being followed or observed as he journeyed between these seamen’s haunts.

  The man with the information sniffed again at the tobacco. “Very well,” he said. “His name was Davy. I recall him from the end of the year the Scots Queen was beheaded when all the yards and docks were getting in a frenzy about the Spanish fleet they said was coming. There was a taproom out at Blackwall, and he was in there telling the whole world of that voyage when they put them poor souls down in the New World. We was all giving him ale to keep him talking with his tales of warlike savages and mad-prattling Puritans. He was a caskwright, like you, Mr. Cooper.”

  “What use is any of this to me? That was five years ago.”

  “That’s the point. I saw him a few weeks since in Gully Hole and I did hail him. But it was as if he was deaf, for he just hurried on and paid me no heed.”

  “How will that help me find him?”

  “Because I saw where he came from, Mr. Cooper. And I reckon he’ll go back there again, being as how he’s a cooper like you and he was wearing his workman’s belly-cheat.” He patted a pinch of tobacco down hard into the walnut shell, put the straw sticking from it into the side of his mouth, begged a lighted taper from the landlord, and inhaled deeply of the fragrant smoke. He closed his eyes and sighed with the luxury of it. “Ah, that’ll keep King Pest at bay,” he said, basking in the pleasure.

  “Well?” Boltfoot demanded irritably.

  The man held out his pipe and his fellows all looked at it appreciatively, hoping to savor some of it themselves. At last the smoker grinned. “He came from Hogsden Trent’s. That’s where I saw him come from, Hogsden Trent’s.”

  Chapter 14

  S HAKESPEARE’S PURSUER, WHO WAS ON FOOT, WORE a dun-colored cowhide jerkin, black woolen breeches, and gray hose. There was nothing to distinguish him from any other working man, but Shakespeare had not lost his skill in spotting the one who wished not to be noticed.

  He kicked his gray mare into a trot and soon saw the pursuer floundering behind him, walking fast, occasionally breaking into a run, but losing ground the whole time. At last he felt sure he was in the clear and turned westward through New Gate, then along the Strand, past Westminster and out into open country toward the little village of Chelsea. He stopped and looked about him. The road was busy with drays and carts and postriders.

  He rode on a little further, then reined in some distance short of Shrewsbury House, tethering his horse to a sycamore on a piece of common land. He walked the last quarter mile to the north side of the building.

  Shrewsbury House was an opulent, brick-built manor, facing the Thames on its southern side. Most visitors arrived by river at the landing stage, but Shakespeare went to the postern gate, where he was met by a guard.

  “I would speak with the Countess of Shrewsbury.”

  “Are you expected, sir?”

  “No. But say I am sent by Sir Robert Cecil with a message which I must convey to her in person.”

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Marvell,” he said, giving his wife’s birth name. “John Marvell.”

  “Please wait here.”

  The guard returned in a few minutes and led Shakespeare into a magnificent hall, adorned with shields and splendid tapestries, many threaded with gold and silver. It well befitted the second most wealthy woman in the land. A liveried footman appeared and took over Shakespeare’s care from the guard, leading him through to another chamber.

  Cecil had described Bess of Hardwick as a hard woman. From all he had heard, Shakespeare certainly knew her to be formidable: married four times, mother of eight children of whom five survived, grandmother to a host of well-bred grandchildren, sometime companion of the captive Mary Queen of Scots when her late husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was her keeper, and good friend of Elizabeth herself.

  In the flesh, Bess of Hardwick did not disappoint. She was examining bolts of cloth laid out on the floor in front of her by a richly clad mercer and his three assistants. There were great lengths of taffeta and black damask, satins and silks. A tailor and haberdasher stood close by, with their own assistants, beside a table laden with quantities of intricate white and black lace, gauze, black velvet, and cambric.

  She looked up at Shakespeare’s entrance and smiled warmly.

  “Mr. Marvell? I don’t think I know you.”

  Shakespeare bowed. “I am sent on an errand from Sir Robert Cecil, my lady. It is a matter of some urgency.” He glanced at the tradesmen. “May we speak alone?”

  Bess nodded to the mercer and haberdasher and their assistants. “Gentlemen, if you would. And think on those prices I have offered, for they are fair.”

  “My lady,” one of the merchants pleaded, “you will ruin us.”

  “I will go no higher. Take it or leave it.”

  They all bowed low and hurried from the room.

  The Countess was not tall, neither was she a beauty, though she was very slender and healthy for an old woman of nearly sixty-five-six years senior to the Queen. She was strikingly dressed in black velvet and a broad ruff and wore a black coif atop her still-golden hair. Long strings of perfect pearls adorned her neck, cascading down to her narrow waist.

  “This is all very secretive, Mr. Marvell. Please proceed.”

  “It is a delicate ma
tter, my lady. It concerns your granddaughter, the lady Arbella.”

  “Is Sir Robert still worried about Arbella?” Bess’s attentive eyes revealed her intelligence as she spoke. “I do think he imagines I neglect my duties as guardian.”

  “Indeed, I am sure he does not, my lady. He speaks most highly of your loving care for her upbringing and education.”

  “But he fears Spanish plots. He thinks King Philip will send his mercenaries to spirit her away and make an Infanta of her and use her as a tool to steal the crown of England.”

  “My lady, that is his concern. He wonders if you would agree to remove Lady Arbella to your holdings in the Midlands and North, that you might better protect her there.”

  “Well, if that is what Sir Robert desires, then I shall do so. I hold Sir Robert in the highest esteem. We shall leave for Hardwick at the earliest opportunity.”

  “Might I tell him how soon that will be?”

  Bess smiled her warm smile once more, but Shakespeare thought he detected a hint of irritation. She was not one to be commanded.

  “Well, let me think,” she said. “I have much to pack up and take with me-perhaps twenty wagonloads. I have two hundred and thirty household staff who must be provisioned for the long journey. There are clothes, linen, livestock, hangings and wondrous new paintings and tapestries to transport. It cannot be done in a midnight flit, if that is what you mean, Mr. Marvell.”

  “Forgive me. I did not intend to discomfit you. I asked only that I might report back to Sir Robert.”

  “Let us say two weeks, then. Three weeks at the most. Would that suit the next Principal Secretary?”

  Shakespeare was certain that Cecil would not be at all happy, but there was nothing to be gained from argument. “I am sure he will be pleased at your cooperation, my lady. And most relieved that the lady Arbella will be out of harm’s way.”