by Mike Ashley
I cautioned: “Squire Thomas said that he had done no murder.”
“Then you’re a fool, or coward! On May eighteenth Walsingham sent Poley to find Kit a place to hide in Holland from the warrant brought by Kyd’s deposition. But Baines’s charge of blasphemy was too serious – Walsingham feared he would be compromised by helping Kit defy it. More, he determined on murder to prevent the public disclosures of Kit’s trial.” Her voice writhed in its own venom like a stricken serpent. “Oh, player, I would lay the dust with showers of that man’s blood. But hold – enough! My quarrel is yours no further.”
“I’ll not leave you, Anne,” I declared passionately.
“You must. Had I met you before Kit – ” Her fingers brushed my lips in sexless caress, and regret laid its vague wings across her face. “Too late! Hell has breathed contagion on me; I am fit only to drink hot blood.”
I shook my head and declared flatly: “I will walk with you, Anne; take you through the dark night to your home.”
Outside the Cathedral it was cold and the air bit shrewdly. Rank river fog, driven by the eager nipping wind, obscured all about us. Noxious plague odours assailed us, and from the muffling smoke came the clop-clop of hoofs as a death cart rattled about its grisly business, the cartmen leaping down with iron tongs to drag the sprawled and sightless corpses from the slops and urine of the gutters.
Through the swirling fog of Dowgate Hill I could see the cobbler’s house where last year Rob Greene was lost in death’s dateless night. Here Anne broke in upon my reverie.
“Now surely twelve has struck – the moon is down, and it goes down at twelve. It’s the witching time of night; in my soul shriek owls where mounting larks should sing. And now I must leave you.”
“Now? Here? Surely not here, Anne?”
For we had arrived at Cold Harbour, where criminals impudently mock our English courts and the filthy tenements breed every vice.
“Yes, here,” she whispered. “Here night cloaks me from my own sight while my body buys me sustenance to nurse revenge; and here I live only in hope of one day taking Walsingham about some act with no salvation in it, so his heels may kick to heaven while his soul is plunged to deepest hell.”
She led me down a narrow alley where rats scuttled unseen and my boots slithered in foul mud; suddenly a man was silhouetted before us, naked steel glittering in his right hand.
“Back – this way!” I warned.
Too late! Behind were two more figures. Light glinted off bared swords, a spur chinked stone. I felt so unmanned with terror of my sins that I could not even draw my sword – for thus conscience makes cowards of us all. But then one of the men called out.
“Stand aside – we seek only the woman.”
But I recognized the voice; and with recognition came anger.
“Booted and spurred, Rob Poley?” When I cried his name Anne gasped. “You three have ridden hard from Scadbury Park this night.”
“You know us, player? Then by these hands you both shall die!”
“If hell and Satan hold their promises.” My sword hissed out like a basking serpent from beneath its stone, barely in time to turn his darting steel. “Aha, boy!” I cried, “Say you so?”
But as he gave way before me Anne Page flashed by, dagger high.
“Murderer! Your deeds stink above the earth with carrion men!”
His outthrust rapier passed through her body, showed me half its length behind. She fell heavily sideways. Before his weapon was free I might have struck, but I was slow, for never before had I raised my blade in anger. Then it was too late. He put a ruthless foot against her neck, and jerked free.
“Stand on distance!” he bellowed at Skeres and Frizer. “Make him open his guard. He must not live!”
But by then my youthful blood was roused, and like all players I am expert in the fence. I turned Skeres’s blade, shouting: “Now, while your purple hands reek and smoke.” I lunged, skewered his dancing shadow in the throat so sparks flew from the stone behind his head, and jerked free. “I know these passes . . . these staccadoes . . .”
My dagger turned Frizer’s sword, I covered, thrust, parried, thrust again, my arm longer by three feet of tempered steel. “. . . they’re common on the stage . . . here . . . here . . . the heart!”
Frizer reeled drunkenly away, arms crossed over his punctured chest; but what of Poley? Fire lanced my arm and my rapier clattered from my nerveless grasp. Fingers like Hanse sausages closed about my windpipe. I felt myself thrust back so his long sword could reach me.
“Say you so now?” His voice was a snarl of triumph. “Are you there, truepenny?”
My head whirled giddily for lack of blood. In an instant his steel would – but then my dagger touched his belly. “How now!” I cried. “Dead for a ducat, dead!”
With my last despairing strength I ripped the two-edged cutter up through his guts, sprawled over his twitching corpse.
Silence. Moisture dripping from overhanging eaves, hot blood staining my fingers. A rat rustling in the gutter. The turning world turning on, aeons passing. Yet I lay silent in the drifting smoke. Then from beyond eternity a weak voice called me back to life.
“Player – my gashes cry for help – ” Somehow I crawled to her, cradled her weakly lolling head against my shoulder. Her voice was small, so very small. “The churchyard yawns below me. I’ll trade the world for a little grave, a little, little grave, an obscure grave . . .”
My salt tears gave benediction to her death-ravaged face; her body now was lead within the angle of my arm. “Anne!” I cried. “Anne! Oh, God! God forgive us all!”
“Let not this night be the whetstone of your sword.” Her heart fluttered briefly within the frail cage of her body; her whispers touched my ear in failing cadence. “Let your heart be blunted. This death is – a joy unmixed with – sorrow.”
No more. I lowered her gently to the waiting earth, struggled erect. My breath still rasped and rattled in my throat; dark walls weaved, receded, shifted; lantern bright above Cold Harbour Stairs, stone slimy beneath my vagrant gory fingers, cold Thames below, whispering its litany she is dead she is dead she is.
Falling. Nothing else besides.
Movement aroused me. I lay on the cushions of a waterman’s boat, river fog upon my face. Peering forward I saw a familiar figure.
“Lad, how did I come here?”
John Taylor turned anxious eyes on me. “I found you at the foot of Cold Harbour Stairs.” He indicated my sword at my feet. “Your blood upon the cobbles led to this – and one that was a woman. But rest her soul, she’s dead. Two others were there also, one with his wizand slit, the other drawn like a bull in the flesh shambles.”
I thrust my arm into the clear Thames water, found the wound only a painful furrow in the flesh. Frizer had escaped. Anne was dead. I needed time – time to think.
“The Falcon, lad. I’ll see what physic the tavern accords.”
I gave the boy my silver and went through the entrance, narrow and thick-walled from pre-Tudor days, to the tap-room. Here I was met by a blast of light and noise. I kept my arm against my side to mask the blood. A jolly group was gathered by the bar.
A cup of wine that’s brisk and fine
And drink unto the leman mine:
And a merry heart lives long-a.
“Before God, an excellent song!”
“An English song,” laughed the singer. “Indeed, we English are most potent in our potting. I’ll drink your Dane dead drunk; I’ll overthrow your German; and I’ll give your Hollander a vomit before the next bottle’s filled!”
But this was Will Sly, the red-faced jolly comedian I’d left in Dover! At sight of me he threw his arms wide.
“Out upon it, old carrion! You can’t have heard: The Admiral’s Men have been disbanded! By William the Conqueror who came before Richard III, Will Sly finds himself in the good Falcon with bad companions swilling worse ale.” He suited actions to words, then leaned closer and lowered his voice as
he wiped the foam from his moustache. “But you look pale, lad; and your tankard’s dry. Ho! Drawer!”
“Anon, sir.”
I had barely drawn him aside with my story when a blustery voice broke in. “Players in the corner? Then some man’s reputation’s due for a fall. In faith, it’s better to have a bad epitaph than the players’ ill report while alive. But let me tell you what I’m about.”
“Why, two yards at least, Tom Lucy,” laughed Will Sly.
Lucy was from Charlecote, a few miles from my home – a trying man with severe eyes and beard of formal cut, and the brains of a pecking sparrow.
“Perhaps two yards around the waist, Will Sly, but now I’m about thrift, not waste.”
He was always full of wise saws and modern instances, so I cut in curtly: “We’ll join you at the bar presently, Master Lucy.”
After he had turned about I went on; soon Will Sly’s face was as long as his cloak. When I told of the meeting with Anne in St. Paul’s he burst out bitterly: “Fool! What if you were seen with this Anne Page? If – ”
“Anne Page?” said Lucy to me. “I wondered at the name of the doxy you walked beside on Dowgate Hill hard upon mid-night, player.”
Will Sly matched his name. “Then you’ve been seeing double, Tom Lucy; he’s matched me pot for pot these four hours past.”
“I’m not deceived in her,” said Lucy. “In the Bankside Stews her eyes have met mine boldly, like any honest woman’s.”
“Then the sun shone on a dunghill!” I burst out.
“Now vultures gripe your guts, player!” Lucy clapped hand to sword dramatically. “This’ll make you skip like any rat!” When I stiffened he laughed loudly. “What? A tiger wrapped in a player’s hide – or merely a kitten crying mew?”
Will Sly drew me away with a hasty hand. “Make nothing of it, lad – bluster must serve him for wit. He lives but for his porridge and fat bull-beef. But never before have I seen you foam up so, like sour beer, at any man. Is this my honest lad, my free and open nature – ” He broke off abruptly, eyes wide at the blood upon his fingers.
“They set upon us in Cold Harbour. I left them stiff.”
“How many? All? Dead? Why, you hell-kite, you!”
“There were three – Frizer lived, I think. Man, they made love to that employment! They’re not near my conscience.”
He shook his head. “Until tonight I’d have thought you incapable of taking offence at any man – nothing deeper in you than a smooth and ready wit. But yonder fat fool may yet breed you unnatural troubles.”
“Just keep him from me,” I said. “My blood is up.”
But Lucy stopped me at the door, still not plumbing my mood.
“Hold, puppy! When a man mouths me as you have done, why, I’ll fight with him until my eyelids no longer wag!”
Then he winked broadly at the company, waiting for me to turn away as is my wont. But suddenly I found myself with my rapier in hand, and saw, through the red mists, Lucy’s mouth working like a netted luce’s.
“Softly, master player!” He backed off rapidly. “I only jested. Er – I hold it fit that we should shake hands and part. You as your desires point you and me – why, I’ll go pray.”
I saw that he would pass it off as a joke, so I thrust away my sword and ignored his hand to stride from the place with Will Sly behind.
“Why so hot to-night, lad? The rightly great stir only with great argument. When honour’s at stake find a quarrel in a straw – ”
“Before my eyes they killed her!” I burst out. “Killed Anne!”
“No!” His homely face crinkled in honest sympathy; he turned away. “And you had begun to feel something more for her than pity?”
“I know not, but she and Kit cannot lie unavenged. What is a man if all he does is feed and sleep?”
“A beast, nothing more. And yet, lad, two carrion men crying for burial also shout to me of vengeance taken.”
“But Walsingham – ”
“Leave him to heaven. Look: he said no murder had he done. Are you God, to judge him false? They might have struck for private reasons, or for hire other than his. Can you be sure they didn’t?”
We were at the verge of the river. I could smell the mud and osiers. Across the broad reach of gliding water a few firefly lanterns winked on the London side, for the mist had lifted; from downstream came the creak and grumble of the old bridge in the flood-tide.
Could I be sure of Walsingham’s guilt? If killing is once started, where did it end?
The calm gliding river had begun to calm my own troubled spirit. My nature was not bloody, my trade was not revenge. Kit had died as he had lived, in violence; but his death, perhaps, had shown me the way to even greater things than he had done: plumb man’s nature to its depths, transfigure with creative light the pain and sorrow and suffering of the human spirit – yes! White hairs to a quiet grave mean not always failure, nor does a life thrown away upon a gesture mean success. Perhaps in all of this my mettle had been hardened.
Perhaps . . .
Will Sly spoke as if divining my thoughts: “Forget these sad and bloody hours, lad; the night is long indeed which never finds a day. In these bones of mine I know the world yet shall hear of you. Don’t toss your life away upon revenge, as the tapster tosses off his pot of ale, for one day the mass of men will come to honour and revere your name – the name of William Shakespeare.”
PART III
Regency and Gaslight
THE CHRISTMAS MASQUE
S. S. Rafferty
S. S. Rafferty is the pen name of former reporter and advertising executive, Jack J. Hurley (b. 1930). He has been the author of scores of short stories in the mystery magazines but has only published one book, Fatal Flourishes (1979), which features the adventures of Captain Cork in colonial America.
The series started in 1974, in the years leading up to the American bicentennial celebrations, when Rafferty determined to write a detective mystery set in each of the original thirteen states. As continuity between these stories he used businessman Captain Cork, who delights in “social puzzles”, and who is accompanied everywhere by his associate, Oaks, who serves as his Watson in recording his cases. The series spans forty years from the earliest case, “The Rhode Island Lights”, to the grand finale, “The Pennsylvania Thimblerig”, set at the outset of the War of Independence. The following tantalizing crime is set in the year 1754.
As much as I prefer the steady ways of New England, I have to agree with Captain Jeremy Cork that the Puritans certainly know how to avoid a good time. They just ignore it. That’s why every 23rd of December we come to the New York colony from our home base in Connecticut to celebrate the midwinter holidays.
I am often critical of my employer’s inattention to his many business enterprises and his preoccupation with the solution of crime – but I give him credit for the way he keeps Christmas. That is, as long as I can stop him from keeping it clear into February.
In our travels about these colonies, I have witnessed many merry parties, from the lush gentility of the Carolinas to the roughshod ribaldry of the New Hampshire tree line; but nothing can match the excitement of the Port of New York. The place teems with prosperous men who ply their fortunes in furs, potash, naval timber, and other prime goods. And the populace is drawn from everywhere: Sephardim from Brazil, Huguenots from France, visitors from London, expatriates from Naples, Irishmen running to or from something. I once counted 18 different languages being spoken here.
And so it was in the Christmas week of 1754 that we took our usual rooms at Marshall’s in John Street, a few steps from the Histrionic Academy, and let the yuletide roll over us. Cork’s celebrity opens many doors to us, and there was the expected flood of invitations for one frivolity after another.
I was seated at a small work table in our rooms on December 23, attempting to arrange our social obligations into a reasonable program. My primary task was to sort out those invitations which begged our presence on Christmas Eve
itself, for that would be our highpoint. Little did I realize that a knock on our door would not only decide the issue, but plunge us into one of the most bizarre of those damnable social puzzles Cork so thoroughly enjoys.
The messenger was a small lad, no more than seven or eight, and he was bundled against the elements from head to toe. Before I could open the envelope to see if an immediate reply was required, the child was gone.
I was opening the message when Cork walked in from the inner bedchamber. Marshall’s is one of the few places on earth with doorways high enough to accommodate his six-foot-six frame.
“I take the liberty,” I said. “It’s addressed to us both.”
“On fine French linen paper, I see.”
“Well, well,” I said, reading the fine handscript. “This is quite an honour.”
“From the quality of the paper and the fact that you are ‘honoured’ just to read the message, I assume the reader is rich, money being the primer for your respect, Oaks.”
That is not absolutely true. I find nothing wrong with poverty; however, it is a condition I do not wish to experience. In fact, as Cork’s financial yeoman, it is my sworn duty to keep it from our door sill. The invitation was from none other than Dame Ilsa van Schooner, asking us to take part in her famous Christmas Eve Masque at her great house on the Broad Way. Considering that we had already been invited to such questionable activities as a cockfight, a party at a doss house, a drinking duel at Cosgrove’s, and an evening of sport at the Gentlemen’s Club, I was indeed honoured to hear from a leader of New York quality.
Cork was glancing at the invitation when I discovered a smaller piece of paper still in the envelope.
“This is odd,” I said, reading it:
van Schooner Haus
22 December
Dear Sirs:
I implore you to accept the enclosed, for I need you very much to investigate a situation of some calamity for us. I shall make myself known at the Masque.
It was unsigned. I passed it to the Captain, who studied it for a moment and then picked up the invitation again.