Revenger

by Rory Clements

  Shakespeare showed the body to the law officer. “Inform the sheriff and the coroner and get this body to the Searcher of the Dead at St. Paul’s. Is that clear?”

  The constable, a dullard with thin hair and a distended belly, looked doubtful.

  “He has been murdered, Constable. His name is Jack Butler. He has been murdered in exactly the same manner as at least two other men. Tell the searcher John Shakespeare sent you and he will explain all you need to know. Tell him a name: McGunn. Charlie McGunn. If he can be found, arrest him and hold him for questioning. He is a dangerous man. He has an accomplice, known only as Slyguff. Take him, too, and hold him.”

  Shakespeare could have added that a good place to start the hunt for the two men was Essex House in the Strand, but clearly no law officer in the land would dare ask for a warrant to enter the Earl’s premises. In the back of his mind, he realized this was a matter he would have to deal with himself. No one else would bring these two men to justice.

  He turned to the groom. “What did you see, Sidesman?”

  “Nothing, Master Shakespeare, nothing at all.”

  Shakespeare was sure he was lying, but there was no time now to pursue it. “We will talk in due course,” he said coldly. “I could have you in custody this very day, for I believe you may have information that will prove useful to a prosecution, but I fear the horses would not get fed and watered. Stay here. Help the constable, tell the sheriff all you know, and I will see you presently. Do this and I pledge that your work here will be safe.”

  Sidesman bowed his head. “Thank you, Master Shakespeare.”

  “Now feed and water the mare, for this day I must ride harder and faster than I have ever ridden.”

  A T TEN IN THE MORNING, a reluctant Boltfoot Cooper went to the hospital chapel with the other walking-wounded patients. Sister Bridget, the nurse, had told him he must do this if he was to retrieve his weapons and purse from the hospitaller.

  The preacher delivered a hectoring tirade on the price that man must pay for his manifold sins-and that price was sickness. Boltfoot listened but did not hear, for his mind was elsewhere. He wanted to be back in Long Southwark in case the unknown woman came to ask after him again.

  As they left the chapel, Sister Bridget turned to him with angry eyes. “He was saying the people of London have brought the plague on themselves, yet I know of good people who have fallen ill and died of it-godly people who never did harm to any man and kept true to His commandments. Why should He scourge the godly and ungodly alike?”

  Boltfoot grunted in agreement. The fate of Jane and their unborn child was much on his mind. He was sure she, Catherine, and the children would have left London and the plague far behind by now, but he was anxious for news.

  “It gets harder day by day,” the nurse continued. “Every day we turn away more people who have the plague and send them on to the Lock Hospital in Kent Street. I cannot believe they are all the worst of sinners.” She shook her head sadly. “It is pitiful to see their faces, for they know that the Lock Hospital is a sentence of death. Few come from there alive.”

  Although Boltfoot’s head was still swathed in bandages, he was in less pain and he had regained much of his strength from the beef, bread, and copious ale the nurse had brought him.

  “Will you take me to the hospitaller now, Sister?”

  “Mr. Cooper, I should be setting you to doing some carpentry today. That is the rule for those not confined to bed. The women must launder as drudges and the men must help with their craft.” She gave him one of her motherly looks, but nonetheless led the way to the hospitaller’s office.

  The hospitaller was a solemn man of advanced years and heard Boltfoot out. “Indeed, Mr. Cooper,” he said. “A most unlikely tale if I might say so.” But he handed Boltfoot back his weapons, his powder horn, and his pouch of balls.

  Boltfoot examined them carefully. They were undamaged. He fixed his belt and cutlass about his middle, then slung his caliver over his back. Though the weapons were heavy and he was still weak, it felt good to be armed once again. He looked in his purse for gold. He had two marks and a few pence. He offered them to the hospitaller, who waved them away.

  “I will not leave you impoverished, Mr. Cooper. Return with money for us when you have some to spare. All gifts are gratefully received from those who can afford it.”

  Boltfoot bowed. “Thank you, Master Hospitaller. I believe you and your establishment have saved my life. Indeed, I know it to be true.”

  With the nurse by his side, he walked out through the front gate into Long Southwark, where she bade him farewell with a shake of the hand. The gateway was narrow and clogged with the stalls of butchers and other market men. The noise and stench of the place brought Boltfoot back to the jarring reality of city life after the tranquility of the hospital. He dragged his foot behind him across the dusty road and waited in a doorway. It was, he realized, near to the spot where he had been bludgeoned. The question was, would the woman who sought him come by here this day on her way to St. Thomas’s?

  He did not have to wait long for an answer. The fair young woman from the house in Bank End, the home of Davy Kerk, arrived carrying a basket of bread.

  Boltfoot followed her as she walked around to the back gate on St. Thomas’s Street, where patients were usually admitted to the hospital. He observed her as she spoke to the gatekeeper. The man shook his head and she turned away, disappointed, and made her way back in the direction of the river and westward toward her home.

  Boltfoot’s energy was low. His clubfoot slowed him more than usual. He was out of breath and his head throbbed. The woman walked briskly and it was all he could do to trail her.

  He battled to go faster and had just managed to get close behind her when she reached her door. She turned, and came face-to-face with him. She recoiled and he put a hand to her mouth, stifling her cry.

  “Open the door,” he ordered, taking his hand away from her face.

  She hesitated, then removed a key from the bread basket and pushed it into the lock.

  Before the lock could be turned and the latch lifted, Boltfoot heard a sound from within-the sound of a groan-followed by a thud, a sharp cry, another thud, and a muffled scream. He stayed the woman’s hand, then unslung the caliver from his back and quickly primed it with powder and ball. His fingers were steady and practiced. If, in the heat of battle, a man could not pour powder without spilling it, he was of no use to his captain-general or his copesmates. Boltfoot’s hands had never trembled in conflict, however hot the fire.

  With a nod, he signaled the woman to open the door, slowly. She was clearly frightened, but she did as bidden.

  Boltfoot went in first, the light wheel-lock musket in front of him with its ornate octagonal muzzle pointing deep into the room. His cutlass swung at his hip, ready to be drawn in a second.

  At the far end of the room, in a doorway, he saw the shadow of a figure, the eyes glinting at him from the gloom. For a moment, it seemed as if the figure would spring to attack, but then the eyes lighted on Boltfoot’s deadly firearm and the man vanished.

  In the center of the front room, draped over the table where the woman had been plucking a fowl when last Boltfoot had been here, was a body, dead but not yet still. The legs and arms dangled over the edges of the flat surface, twitching in their death throes.

  Boltfoot took in the scene with sweeping glances. Behind him, the woman gasped and buckled at the legs.

  There was blood everywhere. Boltfoot slipped and slid in the gore as he hurled himself at the doorway where the figure had disappeared. He found himself in a large storeroom with grain and beans and other foodstuffs. A beplumed turkey cock hung by its neck from a hook. Not far from the bird was a thick hempen rope with a hangman’s noose at its end, hanging from a high rafter, swaying in the light breeze from the open back door.

  Boltfoot pushed through the back door, his caliver tightly gripped in his right hand. He looked both ways down the narrow alleyway, but could s
ee no one. The figure had gone.

  He returned to the scene of carnage. The woman cowered in a corner, trying to shield her eyes from the body of Davy Kerk lying across the table. The twitching of arms and legs had all but ceased. The injuries that caused the death were evident. His head was half severed, the left side of his neck slashed with a downward sweep of a sharp blade, and there was a bloody gash to the belly.

  Boltfoot put down his caliver and lifted the body from the table. The head flopped pitifully. With great effort, he laid the corpse on the floor at the edge of the room, away from the woman. He brought a blanket from the storeroom and covered the carcass as best he could. Then he picked up his weapon again.

  Of a sudden, the woman stood up and dashed for the door. Boltfoot moved fast to hold her. Even in his weakened state, he held her firm.

  He turned her around so that she had to face him. “I need answers. Who are you?”

  “There is no time. He will kill me, and you, too.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Eleanor Dare?”

  She nodded frantically. “Now, please, I cannot stay here. You see what he did to Davy. He will do the same to you and he will hang me.”

  The noose in the storeroom. She had not even seen it, yet she knew that she was to be hanged.

  She tried again to break free. Her terror was giving way to fury. “You led him here! You brought him to us.”

  Boltfoot ignored her, slung the caliver over his back, and pulled the woman into the storeroom, binding her around the waist with a length of thick-knotted cord. She looked at him with a curious mixture of resignation and contempt.

  “You think you can beat him, don’t you, Mr. Cooper? No one can. You are wasting your time.”

  He wrapped the other end of the cord around his own left wrist. He used sailors’ knots. There was no more than eighteen inches of cord between them. It was not going to come loose.

  He pushed the woman from the front door and out into the dusty street. She stumbled and almost fell, but he held her up by her elbow, then marched her a quarter of a mile eastward, past the Clink prison. She cried out for help to an apprentice, but he laughed.

  “You got your hands full there, mister,” he called back to Boltfoot. “I’d trade her in if I were you. Plenty of willing whores hereabouts.”

  A couple of women sitting on the doorstep of a bawdy house, scratching their sores, cackled with laughter as he pushed Eleanor ever onward. They reached the water-stairs at St. Mary Overy. The only people there were two stern-looking wives, who glanced disapprovingly at the heavily armed Boltfoot and the woman with him, now covered in dust and grime, her fair hair awry like a hedge of twigs.

  Boltfoot hailed a tilt-boat and hauled his captive into the back. The boat rocked violently as she struggled against him. One of the watermen eyed the pair suspiciously.

  “He is holding me against my will.”

  “I am taking the dirty callet home to feed the children and stop her whoring,” Boltfoot said.

  “I’d leave her on the game if I were you. Nice-looking lass like that will earn a groat or two, put good English beef on your table.”

  The watermen chuckled and set to rowing across the river to Dowgate. Boltfoot sat back in the boat, beneath the canopy. He was exhausted. The woman beside him said nothing more, but sat defeated, looking eastward down the river as if there might be some succor or escape along there.

  Boltfoot had but one thing in mind. To get to his wife, Jane, and keep her safe until their child was born, healthy and sound. First, though, he had to fetch this woman Eleanor Dare-this so-called lost colonist-to Essex House in the Strand and deliver her into the hands of those who had commissioned the search for her, the Earl of Essex himself, or his agent Charlie McGunn.

  And the body of Davy Kerk in the house at Bank End? Master Shakespeare would know how to deal with that.

  Chapter 34

  S UDELEY CASTLE ROSE FROM THE LATE MORNING haze like a fantastical palace. John Shakespeare reined in his weary gray mare and gazed down on the magnificent vision nestling below him, deep in the folds of Gloucestershire.

  A mass of flags fluttered idly from the battlements and towers of this great house. Its royal connections went back to the days when Great Henry brought Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, here in 1535, the year before he relieved her of her head.

  From churches all around, the joyful peal of bells filled the air. But it was the long train of carriages and horses, stretching into the distance further than a man could see, that really stirred the blood. At its head were Elizabeth’s servants, resplendent in their royal livery, followed by a troop of guards, banners held proudly aloft. Then came thirty of her equerries and chamberlains, followed by half a dozen Privy Councillors, among whom were Sir Robert Cecil, watchful and alert despite the exhausting day’s ride; the great Sir Thomas Heneage, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the Queen’s truest friend; white-haired Howard of Effingham, Lord Admiral of the Fleet and the man who, with Drake, destroyed the Armada four years earlier.

  With these was the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift-ferocious enemy of Puritans and Catholics alike-riding with fifty of his own horsemen. And last, immediately preceding the royal carriage, came the Lord Treasurer, old Burghley, afflicted by the gout and suffering in the heat of the day.

  Elizabeth sat alone in splendor, waving to the adoring throng of peasants and townsfolk that lined her route with cheering and waving of little flags. They had left their looms and their mills and their shepherding to come here, never having seen such pageantry and magnificence in all their lives. It was a sight they would talk of for years to come, regaling their children and grandchildren with tales of the day they saw Elizabeth, Gloriana, come with her court to their little town of Winchcombe to stay at Sudeley Castle and celebrate the Armada victory. The family who lived here-Giles, the third Lord Chandos, and his wife Frances Clinton-had spent six grueling months preparing for this visit, to offer their sovereign three days of unparalleled feasting and merriment.

  Behind the Queen rode Essex, Master of the Horse. No one sat taller in the saddle. He was followed by more Privy Councillors, then two dozen maids of honor in fine gowns, riding side-saddle on white palfreys, and a hundred more of the royal guard. And so the progress went on: scores of nobles and knights, courtiers and their retainers, hundreds of men and women, receding into the distance. Among those closest to the fabulous royal carriage, Shakespeare spotted the squat, feral figure of Richard Topcliffe. Even at this distance, two hundred yards or more, he exuded a raw malice that would frighten children and dogs.

  Shakespeare was exhausted. He had pushed on hard westward and a little north across England. He had ridden through the night until he was almost asleep in the saddle. Even now, with this remarkable sight below him, he could happily fall from his horse and sleep in the open field.

  Yet though he was driven in his desperation to meet up with the royal train, he had not been able to ignore the state of the country he passed through along the way. The England he had encountered was very different from the glittering spectacle of the Queen and her train now entering Sudeley. He had ridden through a land of desperate poverty, dry fields of tares, pathetic beggars with outstretched hands, gibbets of bones at every crossroads, even the occasional unburied victim of starvation and disease left at the roadside as carrion for the magpies and crows to peck at. The sights had filled him with gloom.

  He would have to find lodgings. Every spare room and bed in the town would be full. He shook the reins and spurred his weary mount gently forward. First, he had to try to find Essex. Clearly McGunn had discovered Shakespeare’s links to Cecil-but had he told Essex?

  He also needed to speak secretly with Cecil. There was much to tell him, but one thing he could not reveal: his brother’s part in all this. Somehow, Shakespeare thought through the smoke of his tired mind, he had to protect Will from the deadly foolishness that had enmeshed him in
this web of intrigue.

  E LEANOR DARE SAT ON the green and slippery water-stairs at Dowgate and refused to move. The brackish incoming tide lapped at her feet, soaking her shoes. Boltfoot did not have the strength to drag her and, besides, a mass of people thronged the landing stage; he did not want one of them to intervene or call the constable.

  He squatted down beside her and tried to reassure her. He could see that she was terrified and stricken with horror at the fate of Davy Kerk.

  “Was he your husband, Ananias?”

  She shook her head.

  “Who did it? Who killed him?”

  She put her hands to her mouth and gasped for breath.

  Boltfoot tried again to put a comforting arm around her, but she pushed him away and hunched into herself.

  “I am not here to hurt you, Mistress Dare. I was sent to find you by my master, John Shakespeare, on behalf of the Earl of Essex. Will you not come with me now to Essex House? You will be safe there.”

  Her breathing was panicky and shallow. She clenched her hands into fists. In anguish, she began to hit her head at both temples, screwed her eyes closed, and bared her teeth in a silent scream.

  On an impulse, Boltfoot withdrew his dagger from his belt and cut the rope that bound them together. “There,” he said. “Go. You are free to go.”

  But she made no move to get up or escape; merely sat and beat herself in her torment.

  Boltfoot stood up. “Come with me, or go. If you come with me, I will protect you.” He said the words quietly; they were for the woman alone, not the crowd waiting for wherries across the Thames. Two or three people glanced at them, but shrugged it off; whatever was happening between this man and woman looked no more than a domestic dispute between husbandman and goodwife.

  He thought she was close to madness. Three years at sea circumnavigating the globe with Drake had taught him to deal with Spaniards, scurvy, and storms, but they had not shown him a way to cope with a distraught woman. On the rare occasions Jane had a weeping fit, he could do naught but stand and watch her, wishing himself anywhere else in the world. Now he felt just like that.