The Spy of Venice

by Benet Brandreth

  William felt Alice reach for his hand and, twining her fingers in his, squeeze. He leaned down. ‘How shall I know your room?’

  Alice cast her eyes about in thought. ‘I shall leave a candle in the window, and tie a scarf to the frame that you should know it mine. Promise, promise that you will come.’

  ‘I shall, sweet,’ William said.

  He pulled himself back behind a stall a moment before Matthew Hunt heaved into view.

  ‘Ah, there you are, child. Why must you dally so?’

  Hunt pulled his daughter away by the hand. Trailing behind him she turned her head to give one last look to her Tristan. A moment before she disappeared into the throng, she slipped her father’s hand and ran to where William hid behind the stall. She grabbed him and planted a fierce kiss on his lips. Without a further word she was gone, leaving him wide eyed with the wonder of a woman found bolder than he had expected. His mind on this, he did not note the danger.

  A hand snatched at his shoulder and pitched him to the ground.

  A-horseback, ye cuckoo

  Ben Nightingale, face red, stood over him.

  ‘Shakespeare, you foul mosquito. Come to latch onto my company.’

  William scrabbled to get up. At the prospect of the row the nearby stallholders hurried to cover their goods. Others crept in to catch the entertainment.

  ‘Your company?’ William brushed angrily at his mud-splattered clothing. ‘Rudesby, be gone. Your delusions are no business of mine.’

  ‘Plague on you.’

  ‘If it pleases the company to use another’s words, what basis is that for your ill temper?’ William asked.

  ‘You think I don’t know your game?’ Nightingale spat his question. ‘I’ll not be replaced. Not by you.’

  ‘Peace, man,’ said William.

  ‘Don’t speak to me of peace, you cuckoo.’ Nightingale tried to advance on William, who slipped back to put a cart between them.

  ‘Peace, child, I should say, since you bawl like one,’ said William.

  Nightingale growled and lunged but William moved to keep the cart between them.

  ‘I have no interest in your position,’ said William. ‘Word wrangler to a ragged band of players? All my business with your company is done.’

  Nightingale grunted and shook a finger at William. ‘See that it is.’

  William let out his breath as Nightingale departed.

  ‘Shame that.’

  The sudden voice close behind him made William start.

  ‘Jesu, Hemminges?’ William clutched at a nearby stall to steady himself as the voice from behind him resolved into the sturdy figure of Hemminges.

  ‘I’d hoped you’d join us. Or have thought about doing so, at least.’

  ‘Would that I could, Master Hemminges. But I have family in Stratford. Camp follower to a travelling player would not suit my wife.’

  ‘Aye. Certainly not with such a – how did you put it? “Ragged band”. ’

  ‘I only said that to convince Nightingale,’ said William.

  Hemminges smiled for the first time in William’s acquaintance.

  ‘No offence taken. It’s true enough. At the moment, at least. But that’s the thing about our business. Things can change in a moment. Nick and I could tell you some fine stories to that effect.’

  Hemminges’ faraway look lasted only a moment before his gaze returned to William’s face. He clapped the younger man on the arm. ‘Our playing here is done. We leave for London tomorrow. Wanted to thank you.’

  ‘It’s I that should thank you,’ said William.

  ‘No thanks needed,’ replied Hemminges. ‘That piece is a good one and will serve as payment enough when we do it again.’

  William shook the older man’s hand. Hemminges’ grip closed on his fingers like a door shutting.

  As William watched him depart he wondered what he would have said in answer if Hemminges had been serious about his joining the company. Probably much the same as I did, he thought. Which, by reminding him of his business in Stratford, led him on to thoughts of Alice Hunt, her hot kiss and the tricky question of how to get to her bedroom unseen.

  Imagination of some great exploit

  Alice looked from the window again. Though the moon was full she could see no sign of William. The field beyond Sir Thomas Lucy’s house was edged with wood. Alice strained to pluck forms out of every shifting shadow. She did not dare believe that William would come. She prayed he would.

  The stub of candle was nearly burned through. That little piece was all she’d been able to steal on their return from Stratford before her father had ordered her to bed. When it was gone, so would her hopes.

  Alice slumped back on her bed and stared at the rafters of the attic. The great house was quiet. Perhaps all are in bed, she thought. She might sneak down to the hall, see if she could find another candle. Though if her father caught her, from her room let alone stealing candles from Sir Thomas Lucy, he’d not spare the rod.

  I am the foolish child my father calls me, Alice chided herself, to put my hopes in a rogue of whom I know so little, save that he thinks too much of himself and smiles like a wolf about to spring.

  And that he writes plays for me.

  Alice smiled and closed her eyes. She saw once more the moment when William had spoken to her from the stage. She felt again the thrill of sitting among a hundred who watched the same traffic of the actors but did not know that she was Iseult, that Tristan spoke to her.

  It had not hurt his attractions that all the tedious ride home her father had railed at the wretch Shakespeare and his father, both of whom ‘thought themselves too good when they were but barely godly’.

  A tap came at the window. Alice sat up. She hurried to open it, nearly knocking the candle to the floor in her haste.

  ‘You came.’

  ‘Did I not promise that I would?’

  ‘God. If you are caught here . . .’

  ‘For you I dare all.’

  William had prepared a speech based on the theme of his daring. He never got to speak it. His mouth was stopped with kisses.

  Hot hounds and hardy chase them at the heels

  The baying of hounds drove William splashing through the stream. A cruel contrast from the warm comforts of Alice Hunt’s bed in which he had lain until minutes before. Sharp branches reached out from the darkness and cut at his face as he ran. It was a cold morning, sharp tongues of frost licking at William’s sweat-drenched head. Yet hunting dogs and stinging branches could not strike the smile from his face. It was a smile of triumph.

  William’s schoolmaster had forced him to read Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric. William recalled only two things from the experience. First, how his schoolmaster had stood over him, cursing William’s poor Greek with every haltingly translated line. The second, that when Aristotle turned to talk of the emotions, their causes, their spurs and halters, William had felt himself the great man’s master in understanding already.

  So it had proved with Alice Hunt. William felt, though he had met her but briefly, he knew who she wanted to be and who she needed him to be. It was not only William that railed at Matthew Hunt’s puritan show and longed to snip at his nose for it. The steward had bred a rebel to his own rule. The realisation of his own understanding had been heady; a pleasure greater than those that followed. It was, after all, a love scene that he was writing.

  This chase, however, was no part of William’s plotting.

  He had been lying in Alice’s bed, alive with thoughts, just before the dawn, when he heard the heavy tread of Hunt approaching. The Lord alone knew what had alerted the tiresome steward. A question for a quieter moment. He raced to haul on his clothes before the man reached the top of the stairs. God be thanked Matthew Hunt was fat and slow. A tun of man does not move fast even in anger. William went out of the window – the way he came in. Halfway in and halfway out he had found himself grappled. Alice Hunt stole a last kiss from him, then scurried back to her bed to feign inno
cence again.

  William was out of the window in an instant and moving quickly along the roof, heading for the rear of the house. Then a slipping foot on a rain-slick roof tile had sent him tumbling towards the edge. His hands flailed about in search of a grip, his body twisted out over the void, his elbow caught on the pipework, a desperate clutch at the guttering and the slam as his legs swung into the wall below.

  It had taken a moment for his head to clear and for him to realise that he hung near face to face with a serving-girl on the other side of a window. Pretty too, even with her mouth gaping open in astonishment. Perhaps particularly so because of it. He had given her his second best smile; the pain in his elbow preventing better. She had screamed.

  Pure good fortune to be hanging over a balcony. A short drop and he was back on his way. Skipping over the balcony and scrabbling down the side wall to the ground and then off through the woods. He let out a whoop of excitement. Behind him the sound of shouting and men and dogs being roused to the chase.

  William threw himself into the water. Its swirl would keep scent and sign of his passing from his pursuers but, God, it was cold. Two hundred yards further down the stream from where he had entered, he pulled himself up on the far bank and pushed through a wall of reeds. Ahead lay Stratford. Within the hour he was in the rear room of his father’s glove shop – stripped before the fire and rubbing himself with a cloth in an effort to restore warmth to ankles that throbbed with pain.

  Here was exercise for a March morning. Trouble was sure to follow from this adventure. William found he didn’t care. There was, if anything, greater pleasure as a result. The blood stirs more to rouse a lion than to start a hare, he thought.

  Dressed again, William sat before the fire. His fingers drummed restlessly on the carved oak arm of the chair. He contemplated the day of work before him. The thought of the endless petty tasks to be completed dragged the smile from his face.

  He heard a key turning in the lock.

  John Shakespeare closed the shop door behind him. His troublesome son was sitting before the fire, one leg thrown over the arm of the chair.

  ‘Morning, Father.’ William twisted round in the chair and smiled.

  ‘I take it there is a reason, other than the desire to purchase gloves,’ replied his father, ‘that means Matthew Hunt approaches in the company of two of Sir Thomas Lucy’s larger gamekeepers?’

  Many Jasons come in quest of her

  William sprang from the chair.

  ‘Merciful God.’

  He was at the door in a moment and opened it a crack to peer into the street. Advancing majestically down the road was a triangle of men, the vast bulk of Hunt in the van. William’s father rolled his eyes to heaven.

  ‘Father,’ William whispered, ‘it would be a good thing if Hunt were not to find me.’

  He dashed to the storeroom door and darted inside.

  John Shakespeare slowly pulled off his gloves. He took care not to harm the embroidered lace cuffs that adorned them. He shrugged off his heavy cloak and laid it next to the gloves on the countertop. His son popped out of the storeroom, threw his father an embarrassed grimace, raced to the fireplace, picked up a pair of sodden shoes and hurtled back to his hiding place.

  John ran thin fingers through greying hair and turned to face the door. Beyond it could be heard the leaden tread of Matthew Hunt approaching.

  ‘Shakespeare!’

  William pressed against the wall in the storeroom at the back of the shop, hidden from sight. He heard his father move to the shop door and open it.

  ‘Shakespeare. Where is your son?’ Hunt’s cheeks wobbled, glutinous with the spittle of righteous indignation.

  Hunt bustled forward followed by two men whose faces were weather-cut with a thousand little creases like old leather saddles. John Shakespeare moved slowly aside to allow the three men into the small shop.

  ‘Master Hunt,’ said John Shakespeare. ‘Good morning to you.’

  ‘I’ve no time for pleasantries, Master Glover,’ said Hunt. ‘Your son was caught on my lord’s estate this morning. Where is he?’

  John Shakespeare drew up his eyebrows and pursed his lips. ‘I am at a loss, Master Hunt. You say my son was “caught” on Sir Thomas’s estate this morning. Yet you come to me to enquire where he is?’

  ‘Don’t bandy with me, Shakespeare,’ Hunt said. ‘I have not the mood for it. Your son was caught –’ The great bellows of his voice declined to a wheeze. His mind sought the right word to describe the circumstances of Shakespeare’s visit to Sir Thomas Lucy’s estate.

  ‘– poaching.’ A grimace of relief at the discovery of this euphemism appeared on Hunt’s fleshy features. ‘Yes, poaching, for which he has a reputation.’

  This last was accompanied by a face of high indignation, chins tilted up, eyes pointing down the nose.

  ‘He managed to fly before we could detain him,’ Hunt continued. ‘Where is he now? I have come to bring him to Sir Thomas to explain himself.’

  ‘He was caught – in the act?’ John asked.

  ‘Faith no!’ Hunt said. ‘I arrived too late for that. There was no mistaking what had been afoot, though! We’d have had him in the woods too, but he slipped the dogs.’

  Hunt was looking around the tidy little shop as he spoke, his nose still thrust up as if he could smell out the presence of the insolent villain Shakespeare.

  ‘I am still unclear as to why you think it was my son that you seek?’ John asked. ‘Was he seen?’

  ‘The girl as good as confessed it,’ Hunt answered.

  ‘The girl?’ John Shakespeare said. ‘I thought we spoke of poaching?’

  When Hunt finally spoke it was as the angry wheezing of steam from cracks in the earth. ‘You know full well of what we speak, Shakespeare. This is the fruit of the untrammelled licence of which I spoke at the play. Where is your boy?’

  For William, the silence that followed Hunt’s demand opened wide as a snare. He knew he had been more burden to his father of late than aid. To defy Lucy, even in the pompous form of his steward Hunt, was no minor matter. William realised he was holding his breath.

  ‘I think you are mistaken, Master Hunt,’ John said. ‘My son could not have been poaching as you suggest for he has been here at his work all night.’

  Hunt made a wet sound of incredulity.

  ‘You doubt me, sir?’ John demanded. ‘With what reason?’ There was a cold timbre to John Shakespeare’s voice.

  ‘I know it was him,’ Hunt said.

  ‘You did not see him, did not catch him and it is clear by your choice of words that this girl has made no confession,’ John Shakespeare responded. ‘Who is she? Some scullery maid full of fine fancies?’

  ‘She is no such thing . . .’ Hunt’s voice trailed off.

  John said nothing but let the silence grow. William thought his moment ripe.

  ‘How now, Father? Master Hunt.’

  William’s voice was light as he emerged from the back room and laid cut leather, hastily gathered from the storeroom, upon the counter.

  ‘Whelp, what mischief have you performed?’ said Hunt.

  William feigned confusion and astonishment at Hunt’s question.

  ‘I, sir?’

  ‘Don’t play the fool with me, boy,’ said Hunt.

  ‘I never play, sir,’ William said, ‘though I have tried my hand as a player . . .’

  ‘You have tried to seduce –’ Even as he sought to cut William off, Hunt’s voice trailed away at the thought of acknowledging out loud his shame. ‘– that which I would keep most safe from such as you,’ he finished.

  William raised an eyebrow. ‘Some kind of treasure? A jewel of some kind?’

  ‘Far more than that,’ said Hunt.

  ‘A magical item, then,’ said William. ‘A golden fleece!’

  ‘What?’ spluttered Hunt.

  William leaned across the counter towards Hunt. ‘You should take great care of such things, Master Hunt. For you will find
that many Jasons come in quest of the prize and a fleece will not guard itself. It needs a good guard dog.’

  ‘Enough, William,’ the older Shakespeare cut his son off.

  John Shakespeare turned to Hunt. ‘It’s clear that you make your accusations without foundation. I say again, my son was at his work all night. Here.’

  Hunt made no immediate reply. There were further rumblings from deep within the massy torso. Heat spread up his face. He leaned in and rested meaty hands on the counter, which creaked beneath the weight.

  ‘Very well, very well. This is to be the game?’

  He pointed an eloquent finger at the father and son, then turned to leave; no speedy process for so large a man. Eventually the barge of his body turned. As Hunt passed through the door he gave no backward glance but simply repeated his promise from the play.

  ‘I’ll not be mocked.’

  The grim-visaged gamekeepers followed after.

  Unmannerly boy

  The slap of his father’s hand on the counter snatched William’s smile away.

  ‘What has passed here?’ his father demanded.

  William drew breath to answer but could not speak before his father slapped the counter again.

  ‘Mark you, not one false word. Not one. By God, William, you try me.’

  His hand fluttered on the counter where it lay. William could not take his eye from its twitching.

  ‘This is ill done,’ his father said.

  ‘It’s just a game,’ William replied.

  He took a step back at the flare that lit in his father’s eye.

  ‘What has passed here?’ his father repeated.

  In hurried words William explained all. When he finished his father’s hot eye had been replaced with a pale-faced tremor.

  ‘You have brought disaster on us,’ he said.

  ‘That fat fool Hunt has no grounds for accusation,’ William protested. ‘You said so yourself. ’Sides, what retribution there may be will fall on me.’

  ‘Why? Why do you think that?’ John Shakespeare asked. ‘You think that Sir Thomas will stand by and see his steward mocked in his own home? The steward’s own daughter, by Jesu. You think his eye will fall only on a wayward, unmannerly boy and not on the family that bred him?’