The Spy of Venice

by Benet Brandreth

  ‘The rhyme is clever,’ she said. ‘I wonder only if it will be your cleverness or your desires that land you first in trouble. Perhaps both will combine? It is a fault in the clever to think too little of the rest of mankind. To value their thoughts and desires but not those of others. You may have seen Aspinall’s character clearly, but have you understood your own? Is your self-regard so great?’

  William gave no answer but, sensing no further chiding followed, rested himself once more against the counter. The small smile was still in place, kept there by the thought of the Thursday past. His careful pursuit of Alexander Aspinall’s mistress had come to conquest in a barn that – oh serendipity – sheltered them from an entirely predictable rain storm. It had been but a brief diversion. Achieved, melancholy had draped over him again.

  William thought his mother wrong to call him selfish. He understood duty. The duty to his father to help in the family business. The duty to Anne, his wife of three years and mother of his three children. Duty was boredom and constraint and sat upon him heavier than the firmament on Atlas’ shoulders. Would that duty would drive him from Stratford and into the arms of opportunity. Scarce twenty winters and already his whole life set before him in endless repetition of overcast days such as this one.

  The bell set over the door of the shop tinkled as it opened. In crept Matthew Holmes, the tanner’s apprentice, his face crinkled with excitement.

  ‘Do you hear?’ he cried. ‘The players are come!’

  William straightened. Here was news.

  ‘Their cart’s just pulled into the King’s Hall courtyard,’ continued Holmes, ‘a grand company. Grand.’

  William’s fingers drummed. The prospect of the fair at the week’s end had been but a mild delight. He had feared it would be all prize ewes and haggling over the price of leather. Only the rumour of the players’ visit had given him hope.

  The first time William had seen a play he had been seven. Sitting cross-legged at his father’s feet, rapt. The flow of the words, the gaudy costumes, the dancing at the end, transported him. His father taken him after the performance to meet the actors. He had been shocked by the boom of their voices. Even without their costumes they seemed larger than ordinary men; more expansive.

  As he grew older he found the plays diverting and the players themselves more so. To hear their stories of travel across the country and sometimes across the Channel to France and beyond was to attend a second play with characters more remarkable and events more miraculous than the first.

  ‘Mother –?’

  Mary Shakespeare did not trouble to look up. ‘Go,’ she said.

  As well try to hold back the tide as keep her son to the shop when the players were in town.

  ‘Keep a sober head, boy,’ she called as an afterthought, but looked up to see she spoke only to a startled Matthew Holmes.

  William was only to be seen through the window, performing a small and unexpected dance.

  The suburbs of his good pleasure

  William could not visit the players’ company dressed in shop clothes. The very idea of a sideways glance from one of the actors, his pitying eye observing the stained and slightly frayed housecoat, caused William to shudder. He would have to go home, to Anne, and change. Resolution made, he set his course.

  A few doors away from the shop, reached by a back path, was the house on Henley Street that William shared with his father, mother, brothers and sisters and his own wife and children. He let himself in. Anne was in the front room with the babies. The squalling of one of the twins struck William’s ears as he entered. Round Anne’s feet ran another child, Susanna, his firstborn. She was yelling at full lung and wielded a stuffed rabbit like an axe. At the centre of this storm Anne smiled calmly. William was always struck with admiration by the contrast between his own reaction to the chaos produced by the children and the measured ease of his wife’s response.

  His daughter caught sight of him and ran over to hug his leg.

  ‘Apple,’ she squeaked, her eyes turned up to him.

  William still held the uneaten apple from the glove shop.

  ‘You want some, lambkin? Wait while your father cuts it,’ he said.

  William walked to the kitchen dresser and took out a knife.

  ‘Watch,’ he ordered Susanna.

  He took the apple in his right hand, palm down, and rested the knife carefully on the back of the hand. Then, raising the index finger of his left hand in the air to indicate that the attentive two-year-old audience should prepare for amazement, he flicked his right hand up. Knife and apple flew up into the air. The heavier knife fell first and William caught it by the handle, point up, to spear the apple that followed. After a moment’s pause for Susanna to admire the apple spitted on the knife like a head upon a stake, William spun and proceeded to cut the fruit into slices.

  ‘Lord, William,’ his wife scolded, ‘must you play with knives around Susanna?’

  ‘Perfectly safe, chick,’ he said.

  ‘So you say, yet even the most skilled may stumble once in a while.’

  William, squatting at Susanna’s height, made a slice of apple disappear in his hand and then found it behind his daughter’s ear. Susanna squealed with delight. Anne glowered at her husband’s bent head. He craned his neck to look at her and flashed a wolfish smile. Her glower lessened and was replaced by a shaking of the head.

  His grin continuing, she smiled back.

  ‘The players’ company is in town,’ William announced.

  Anne’s smile broadened. ‘Ah, there is explanation for your good humour.’

  ‘My good humour is born of your company, chick,’ William protested.

  Anne snorted.

  ‘There will be a play at the fair,’ he said.

  ‘You know I’ve never cared for the plays,’ Anne replied.

  William’s shoulders slumped.

  ‘Don’t pout, Will,’ Anne answered his pose.

  William pushed himself up from his crouch before Susanna. He kissed Anne and walked to the bedroom they shared. Not for the first time he asked himself how his life might have been had he not been seduced by Anne or if their dalliance had not resulted in a child. It was what it was. He thought of how calm he had found her at their first meeting. So serene even as he whirled about her, a young man full of activity, displaying it to the older woman he wished to seduce. ‘Sit still,’ she’d said and he had. Now Anne and he, by virtue of that afternoon of stillness in the quiet field, found themselves partners when each, in temperament and interest, had little in common with the other. The old saying was true: hanging and wiving both go by destiny. They were two wandering planets whose spheres crossed, struck sparks, and by their meeting were pulled from their paths to new aspects.

  ‘You will not mind that I go?’ he called.

  His voice was muffled as he searched in the chest at the end of the bed for a clean shirt.

  ‘I shall be glad of the quiet,’ Anne called back. ‘That the children should rush about my feet I’ll endure, but must I have you pacing like a caged wolf?’

  William’s face poked round the bedroom door. ‘Wolf, eh?’

  ‘Will you be drunk again?’ Anne asked, ignoring his smile.

  ‘Again?’ William’s face changed to a look of injured innocence as he buttoned his shirt. ‘I am never drunk, Wife. Though I grant I am prone to periods of great wit followed by deep sleep.’

  ‘Mind you don’t wake the children on your return,’ Anne chided. ‘Bad enough that I must endure your snoring, but that you set the babes to mewling too.’

  ‘I shall be as silent as Lavinia,’ William replied.

  ‘Who is she?’ demanded Anne.

  ‘A Roman gentlewoman,’ said William. ‘She had her tongue cut out.’

  William mimed the process to delighted, horrified shrieks from his daughter, before disappearing out the door with a parting wave.

  ‘God, William,’ said Anne. ‘Such things you say.’

  A tun of man />
  ‘A jug of wine,’ William called.

  The King’s Hall on Rother Street was a large coaching inn in the north of Stratford, where the players were lodged. New company is best welcomed when it bears gifts, William knew, so he had paused to call for drink from Susanne, the owner’s daughter and principal ornament of the inn, before he went to find the players.

  The rear of the inn opened onto the stable yard, where five men, a patchwork of sizes, ages and activity, were gathered by a long, roofed cart.

  On the roof of the cart balanced a square-set man of about thirty-five. He threw sacks down to another below. He had a look of strength about him. He turned and threw with a powerful grace. He paused for a moment as William emerged from the back door and cast his eyes across the newcomer before returning to his task.

  A squat, pot-bellied fellow stood below, trying to catch the thrown sacks. He struggled with their weight.

  ‘Have a care, Hemminges,’ he cried up to the figure on the cart’s roof. Hemminges made no sign of having heard. The rain of sacks continued.

  At the front of the cart a man, face red and pocked, struggled with a horse in its traces, cursing as he did so.

  ‘Damn beast,’ he said.

  ‘Careful with him,’ called Hemminges from above, ‘he’s worth more than you are, Ben Nightingale.’

  Nightingale spat.

  Off to the side, observing this activity, sat a youth with pale eyes and hands crossed demurely at his lap. The slender young man seemed oblivious to the struggle of man and horse beside him.

  Above it all, sat upon the driver’s bench of the cart, was a vast man; full as round at the chest as a barrel of ale, with crimson cheeks sinking into a bushy white beard, like a sun setting over a snowfield. At William’s entrance this figure’s beard parted to reveal a broad smile of yellow teeth. A voice resonant as any William had heard emerged.

  ‘Aha, an ambassador of welcome.’

  The great man unfurled himself from his seat, revealing a height to match his prodigious girth, and clambered slowly down to the ground. He advanced on William, a heavily ringed hand held before him like a lance. William found his right hand firmly grasped and his left relieved of the jug of wine. He was guided to a small set of cups nearby, into which the wine was splashed, the vast smile holding him all the while.

  ‘Your health, sir, and gracious thanks for this generous welcome,’ said the great man.

  ‘The pleasure is mine,’ William replied. He watched as the fat man held the cup to his mouth in a long swallow.

  ‘William Shakespeare,’ he proffered to fill the silence while the drinking continued. The fat man wore a brightly coloured doublet of yellow wool, much faded and stained across the bib. His face was dominated by a nose that had been generously given by nature and then much enlarged and reddened by drink’s careful nurture. Grey eyes twinkled with mischief across the rim of the cup, which, now emptied, was lowered.

  ‘Oldcastle, sir,’ the man introduced himself. ‘Nicholas Oldcastle. Actor and manager of our little company. The preparation for a show is thirsty work.’ He gestured towards the wine as he poured another cup. ‘For this relief, much thanks.’

  William turned at Hemminges’ approach. A calloused hand took William’s in a grip hard as a gauntlet.

  ‘John Hemminges. Also of the company.’

  Ignoring William for a moment, Hemminges tried to catch Oldcastle’s eye. ‘Our first performance is in two hours. A wordy piece.’

  He looked pointedly at the cup in Oldcastle’s hand.

  ‘A piece I have performed many times,’ replied Oldcastle, patting the air as if commanding a dog to sit, but William noticed he set the cup down.

  ‘You appear young to be a member of so august a body as Stratford Town Council,’ Oldcastle continued to William.

  ‘And I am not yet so,’ said William. ‘I am merely a great admirer of plays. What is this part that you have performed many times before?’

  ‘Mercy, Lord. Don’t get him started,’ Nightingale said.

  The pocked fellow who had been wrestling with the horse had given up the fight and come to join the company, specifically the wine. Not waiting to be invited he reached forward to grab a cup.

  ‘We’ve only two hours till we perform,’ he said, ‘and still all to do. Have Oldcastle start on his stories and he’ll still be talking at the point he nudges your elbow and tells you, “You’ll like this bit. This is where I come on.” ’

  Nightingale began to convulse with laughter at his own joke.

  ‘It is the role of Pyramus in the tragic story of their love that I have played many times,’ Oldcastle said.

  ‘So many times his nose and cheeks are now as stained as the mulberry bush,’ quipped Nightingale.

  William must have stared a little long at Oldcastle. The idea of this portly giant ever playing the young lover Pyramus was hard to picture, let alone at this advanced age and girth.

  ‘You must be a very great actor,’ William managed to offer.

  This brought a grin to Hemminges’ face.

  ‘He’s not playing Pyramus tonight,’ he said, ‘those days are long gone.’

  Oldcastle’s cheeks puffed out in indignation.

  ‘Great though those days were,’ Hemminges finished. ‘Anyhow, William, do you bring some message from the council?’

  ‘No, no, only the welcoming gift of the wine,’ answered William, ‘and the curiosity of the small town bumpkin keen to hear tales from the wider world from those that have travelled it.’

  Hemminges looked about him. ‘I regret we’ve little time for gossip now, sir. Too much to be done before the show begins.’

  ‘Perhaps after?’ asked William.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Oldcastle. Recognising the promise of more free wine, he was less desirous than Hemminges to see William off.

  Hemminges had already turned to Nightingale, who was busily pouring further wine into his cup. ‘Why is the horse not yet stabled, Ben?’ he asked, grasping the man’s arm and causing the wine to slop over the cup’s rim.

  ‘Curse you, Hemminges. That hurts.’

  Hemminges ignored his whining. ‘The horse, Ben, and we need to get the backcloth to the market square and set.’

  ‘When I have finished my drink. Bloody nag has the devil in him anyways.’

  ‘Now, Ben.’

  Hemminges gave a shove that sent Nightingale stumbling and the rest of the wine spilling. Anger flashed over Nightingale’s face. He took a step in Hemminges’ direction. Hemminges turned to face him. Seeing the broad set of the shoulders and the calm face staring at him, Nightingale thought better of his anger and turned back to the horse, muttering to himself.

  ‘Such a company, Nick,’ Hemminges said to Oldcastle and spat into the dust of the yard.

  ‘On the money we pay, dear John, we are lucky to have so fine as him,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Besides, his kind are no trouble to you.’

  Realising that William was still observing this old argument, Hemminges abandoned whatever he had been about to say. He nodded at William and turned back to the cart without a further word.

  Oldcastle’s big sail of a smile once again unfurled. ‘Wearily I must wend my way back to my work.’

  He held his arm straight out before him indicating the cart. A gesture that, outside of a person giving directions, William had only ever seen players use.

  ‘For the wine, again, much thanks,’ he said. ‘I shall look to see you after our performance. A man of your sophistication will no doubt have as much to offer in the way of news as we.’

  Oldcastle bowed low to indicate that the audience was at an end. He held out the emptied jug of wine to William. Slightly bemused by the course of the short conversation and the speed with which the entire jug of wine had been consumed, William found himself bowing in response. He took the stoup from Oldcastle and turned back to the inn.

  As he closed the inn door behind him, William caught sight of Oldcastle. The old man reach
ed for the cup he had set aside earlier, cast a glance at Hemminges’ back and threw the remains down his throat.

  The Yeoman of the Wardrobe

  William anticipated double pleasures that evening.

  The first would be in the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. A play that he had not seen before, though he knew its source, Ovid’s poem, from his schooldays. Two lovers in adjoining houses, their love forbidden, the tragic elopement ending with Pyramus committing suicide in the belief that Thisbe is already dead and her then doing so on discovering his dead body. Good stuff.

  As a grammar school exercise in rhetoric he had been made to compose a speech that would sway Thisbe’s father to let the lovers be joined. William had argued that Thisbe’s father allow the marriage, so that her inevitable future betrayals would fall like punishments on her new husband Pyramus, the original betrayer. He had received praise for the form and language in which his speech was couched; condemnation for the argument. William suspected that Ovid would have appreciated the poetic justice.

  The second pleasure would come after the play, the revels with the players. Oldcastle seemed entertainment in himself. William was not certain of the others, though there was bound to be amusement in the obvious tensions in their company. The horse-wrangler, Nightingale, was a troublesome creature not long for that fellowship if William was any judge. In Hemminges he saw an iron will; in Oldcastle, a constant whetstone to that will. For William had found on past occasions that seeing the players in their revels on the first night, and then prophesying how their humours and their fellowship would find reflection when they played their parts the following night, was fascination. By luck or judgment, William found he was not often wrong in his predictions.

  Two pleasures then, and the better for it. William had found double pleasures were not their sum but pleasure multiplied. A sadness then that, as he had also observed on past occasion, an expected pleasure dashed was double sorrow.