by Mike Ashley
It was late afternoon. The sun shone through the office window at a steep angle, so that when I saw Mistress Angharad standing in the doorway, with its light catching her golden hair, for a second I could have taken her for a genuinely distressed damsel from one of the old romances, rather than the devious harlot I knew in my heart she was.
She did not look quite so lovely as before, for her eyes were swollen and red with weeping. No doubt she had applied the juice of leeks, or perhaps onions. She rushed into my untidy office without asking leave, and stood there wringing her hands and saying: “Mr Christian! I have heard that as well as an actor and a playwrighter, you are also an investigator, and have solved many famous crimes!”
Of course this was true, for I had unmasked my father’s killer, and cleared up some lesser matters after I came to London. She wailed on: “Today after you left us, I was tired from preparing the meal, and went to my own lodgings to rest, and when I arrived, I found the door on a jar, and my belongings had been rifled!”
“What! Have your valuables been purloined?”
She shook her head miserably. “Not my casket of jewels, not that they are valuable, no gold or stones, only some silver rings and brooches, they left them and even the few coins I kept in it. No, they took something far more important! They took my good name!”
I regarded her closely, again sure she wanted something and was feigning. She was affecting to not notice the impoverished state of my dishevelled apartment; indeed, as though by instinct she picked up my papers from the floor, doubtless trying to spy what they concerned, and put them on the desk. I asked her coldly how a maiden could lose her good name without her good body being present at the time.
More tears ran down her cheeks. They made no smudges, and I saw to my amazement that her face was not painted. She said: “My good name was in a lead casket which held the family records, and proved we were all legitimate. These Saxon pigs would not call me noble, for they do not allow the Welsh to hold titles or great estates, unless they forsake their language and even their Welsh names. The Queen herself is a Tudor, and her advisors Cecils, but they call themselves English now. They deny our nobility, and even like to claim our great King Arthur who defeated them so many times, was just a fable of a poet.
“My family have been gentry on the Isle of Anglesey since the time of Owen Glendower, but my mother was from another Isle called Man, which is a holding of the Derby Earls. When my parents died, I became a ward of the last Earl. He treated me well enough, but Countess Alice dislikes me, and has often asked to see a sealed box I have entrusted to me in my casket. It is an obligation never to open it except in the time of direst need, for our family, or for the Queen’s family.”
“So what does this box contain?”
“I’m not very sure, but I think it is the will of Owen Glendower, and documents proving the legitimacy of my ancestor Lionel Atmunt, that’s Lionel ap Edmund. You see, Owen married his daughter to Edmund Mortimer, his English ally. It was given out that all their children had died, but I think one of them, Lionel, survived. By that time the English had again overrun Wales, and the rising had ended, except in the high wild country. Owen took to the hills, and no shepherd was so poor as to surrender him for reward.”
She sat at the desk, and after dipping my quill into the inkwell, began sketching, on the back of one of my Glendower speeches, the same man’s family tree. This alarmed me, and I found the Royal family tree, which came with the chronicle I had bought. It was convoluted, but one thing was clear: any link to the Mortimers was important, and could be dangerous. I exclaimed: “If I am right, this Edmund, your claimed ancestor, was a descendant of Lionel Duke of Clarence!” That first Lionel was the oldest of King Edward the Third’s many sons to have descendants still living; but they were few, and included the Queen, her cousin the Scottish King, and that other cousin, the nidicock William of Derby. All the other lines had been cut off in the savage War of the Roses.
An odd look passed over her face, worried, almost embarrassed. I did not see pride. She said: “It was a junior branch of the Mortimer family. I only want the box that proved I am descended from Owen!”
I wondered if she could be so innocent as to not know her value in the great hidden game that was played in England. She was the pawn that could become Queen: could perhaps make a suitor, King. I said: “How many people know about this?”
“Oh, lots of people know we descend from Owen, but these English care nothing for that. As for the other, that is our secret, mine now, till the sealed box is opened.”
“And you have never opened it?”
“No! There’s writing on the box . . . but that’s a very strange thing! It charges us not to open it unless the Tudors are in danger . . . and our family almost as an afterthought! I wonder why that should be?”
I supposed it meant the box was a fake, made a hundred years after Owen Glendower wrote his will, by which time the Tudors were kings, and any mysterious connection to them an advantage. Still, if that were so, the fake would be less dangerous than the true. I said: “I suppose you want me to look for this box?”
“Oh yes! Oh dear, dear Mr Christian, if you would!” She jumped up and flung her arms around me, a soft yet wild embrace which could have seduced a saint. Saints were less hardened by the rottenness of the world than I had become. I disentangled myself as carefully as I could, putting on the disposition of a tradesman and clearing my throat. She took the hint and said: “Of course, you will need a reward. If you can recover my casket, I will give you all the money and silver the thief left undisturbed in my room!”
I agreed, and suggested we repair at once to her rooms to investigate. She explained that she lodged in a house where nobles paid a small rent for their female wards to live while they looked for honest suitors. The landlady protected them from the other kind of men. Mostly the nobles’ wives placed them there, if they did not want these nubile wenches beside their husband’s hearths. In Angharad’s case, Countess Alice had not wanted her to leave, and her rent was paid by William. “So everything looks proper.”
I was reminded with a jolt that women are less to be trusted than anyone, and I had responded to this one’s appeal as though I believed every word of it. Still, I had a more compelling commission from Walsingham. If Angharad was a dangerous influence on William, I needed to know what influence she had. What their relationship was.
So I asked.
She said in a stilted voice that William was her protector. She had very little money of her own, the revenue from a mortgaged estate of poor farmers. Officially, she was still the ward of Countess Alice, but William had smuggled her out of the great country house as his brother was dying. “It was terrible. People said awful things about how the Earl came to die. William said it would come out that he had sheltered Papists, and I was best away from there.”
“I see. Do any of them know about the sealed box?”
“Countess Alice must know something. She kept asking about it.”
“And William?”
“He knows about my casket of papers. I have offered to show him some but he has not yet thought it important to look.”
“Not yet!” I thought quickly. “Is it your expectation that William will marry you?”
“I . . . we are not formally betrothed. But . . .” Her eyes went down and her voice tailed off. I said firmly: “But what?”
“But he has to marry me, if he is the gentleman he seems, the noble he aspires to be!”
I took this to be an admission that she was already a fallen woman, trying to correct her status in a difficult contest with an earl’s daughter who had the mighty backing of Walsingham and the Court. She was at least honest about it. Irritatingly, I felt jealous of William.
Luckily, we came then to the house where she lodged. The owner and her servant were out, as were the other lodgers, so no one challenged us as we went up to the room. Less happily, no one could say if anyone had visited or broken in while Angharad was out.
“I don’t know! I don’t know why anyone should want to! I thought they wanted me to marry William!”
“They? Alice and who else wanted you to?”
“Her poor husband who died lately! I heard them talking once, he said: ‘She’s a silly girl, believes Welsh fables, fit to marry the nidicock!’ Not that there’d been talk of marrying between the two of us! And Alice said: ‘Perhaps, let’s wait and see.’ ”
So Walsingham thought William’s choice of a wife was more important than Alice did . . . or had when her husband was alive. I wondered who might have heard of the Mortimer connection if it was a family secret. She admitted that there might be a few people, but only Welsh-speaking intimates of her parents. She finished refilling the jewel-box, righted it, then said: “Of course, some people will pay more for antique things than you’d think they’d be worth. Why, I used to have another old casket for my jewels, and one of William’s friends gave me twice as much for it as I paid for this one.”
I spent the evening learning my part, and the next morning I put on the disposition of a collector of antique curios, and did a tour of shops full of old curiosities. I asked in particular for Welsh caskets, but recognized none, Angharad having made a sketch for me. I became an authority on Welsh lead and what was asked for it. Though the prices seemed high to me, I did not think the casket would have fetched more than the silver jewellery the thief had left. I had other troublesome thoughts: though I had lacked time to describe Angharad to Walsingham, he had other spies, many more experienced than I.
It saddened me to spy on Angharad as my uncle’s men had spied on me, but that was my destiny now. I sought out the Player King, and took him to a tavern with one of the clowns, who had been born in Wales. After a few cups of sack this man was willing to talk about old Welsh families. He said the Atmunts had been great nobles, as he put it, on Anglesey since the Tudors were even greater nobles there. All had supported Glendower, of course, but when the Tudors took service with King Henry V, the Atmunts remained at home. It was he who told me that one of the Tudors had seduced the King’s widow, which might have cost him his head, had his house been less noble. He proclaimed himself a bard, and translated for me many genealogical poems, but knew of no real connection between the Tudors and the Atmunts.
I was sufficiently impressed to ask the Player King why this man could not play Glendower.
“His part is Fastolfe. Why? Would you prefer to learn that one? The first house is tomorrow. Master William’s request.”
“Ah. Tell me, is his rival patron, the Countess, to see this play?”
“Not yet. She is resting at her country house in the north. One of her stewards was in town recently, to assure Master William that she was well and would soon give birth, but would not risk a journey.”
I doubted all that, for William must be a truer nidicock than I suspected, to risk making his pillow talk if he did not believe it. But if Alice was now as concerned as Walsingham with William’s marital prospects, perhaps she had asked the steward to obtain the box, in the hope it could be used to stir up some scandal against him.
I hurried off to learn my part, worried that it might not be possible to recover the box of secrets, irritated that I found myself more worried about Angharad’s reputation than my reward. I slept badly that night. The wind was high and wailed through the eaves of my lodgings, like a Welsh bard lamenting the fall of a nation, the theft of its secrets.
I hurried to the theatre, confident I knew my part and could put on the disposition of Owen Glendower. I would give some dignity to his struggle to understand the world of spirits, though with an antic flavour, as it was politic to make this a comedy.
When I arrived, Angharad was already there. They were testing her voice from various parts of the stage, fearful a woman’s could not fill the theatre. I went into the gallery myself to listen. Oddly, she did not sound clearest from the open apron of the stage, but from the very back, standing in the curtained recess below the balcony. I suppose it acted as a sounding-board, like the box of a stringed instrument.
I was given a rather foolish costume of a large false beard and tin armour, painted with a crest of a red dragon perched on a leek. Luckily, I had brought my own unmistakably real sword.
I had less to complain of than Angharad. They disguised her height by asking her to perform without shoes, the boy-ladies being in buskins, but made no effort to disguise her womanly figure. Instead, she wore a pillow under the back of her skirt, and two cones vast as the Pillars of Hercules in the front of her bodice. She seemed less like herself than a clown’s apprentice playing the part of her. She wore a daffodil, which she said was the true symbol of Wales, but did not object to being given an oboe disguised as a leek.
During the first two acts, she played this musical vegetable very skilfully in the musical interludes, from behind the curtain. I was so entranced that I was scarcely repelled by the lascivious way her lips caressed the mouthpiece, when she noticed my eyes on her.
We were only on stage during the third act. I went on first, with a clown who had been promoted to play the doomed rebel hero Hotspur. He gave the character an absurd swagger not written in the lines, for it was no longer possible for rebels to be played as heroes.
At first all went well. The scene was building to the discussion I had inserted on the reliability of spirits. The audience laughed several times at points I had not realized were jokes; but at least they were enjoying themselves. I launched the debate with the line “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Hotspur was supposed to reply that spirits were not to be trusted, and I that they could sometimes be the shades of those who had been trustworthy in life. Instead, he vouchsafed me a mischievous grin and declaimed: “Why so can I, or so can any man . . . But will the spirits answer!”
This brought a louder laugh than any. Someone in the box opposite me was giving a wild, high-pitched giggle. I saw it was William of Derby. He was laughing so much he was almost collapsing into the lap of a dark-haired young woman who sat next to him, looking rather less amused. I wondered whom this was: then I realized, for on his other side sat Walsingham.
“Hotspur” was milking the laughter. I nearly walked off the stage: instead I gabbled a line at him which had something about the devil in it, and we continued with the original words.
Soon after, Angharad came on to the stage with a lively but very small boy playing Hotspur’s wife. I could hear his buskins clumping, and see her bare toes under the skirt. I think she already knew her rival was present: she spoke her lines in Welsh very angrily: I think they were part of a battle poem. Then came the song. Up to then, she had been pacing the stage, her costume attracting numerous base comments: but now she retreated to the place under the balcony. Later I learned that the song she gave was the lament of Morgan over the death of King Arthur. I can only say that the laughter and ribald comments ceased, till there was absolute silence all round the circle of the theatre; only the music and that sad voice, and at the end cheers, the loudest applause of the day.
The scene ended with the boy Lady Hotspur refusing very sensibly to sing the song which was in the lines for him. As soon as we were off the stage, Angharad turned to me and said: “Mr Christian, will you please escort me home!”
“What . . . to Master William’s?”
“Of course not . . . did you not see who he was with? She is the daughter of an earl, not a well-liked man, but he will offer a great dowry! How can I compete, having sung bare-foot in a common theatre! Take
me to my own lodging!”
Our parts were done and she was shamelessly ripping the cushions from under her clothes in front of the players, who were mostly too busy to take much notice. I took off my beard and armour, lost for words. How could I tell her that no noble in history had ever been persuaded to marry a mistress of a lower class with less dowry than a real harlot, when all I wanted to do was fall on my knees and worship her by kissing her bare feet?
I hurried her out of the theatre and through the streets, then over the bridge to the main part of the city. It was late afternoon and a wind blew off the water. I told her I had heard that Countess Alice’s steward had been in town, and she replied that he had visited William a few days earlier, but he was an honest man she trusted, and anyway she though he had left London before the robbery.
I did not accept this. After all, she had trusted William. We were still discussing the matter when we reached her lodging. Without thinking, I followed her in and up the stairs. Before we had reached the top, a voice rasped out from below. “Who’s there? Mistress Edmund, is it? Be careful of your reputation!”
She stopped abruptly, so I turned, and saw a woman of about forty, wearing a bonnet and a garishly coloured dress emerge from a room beside the stair. She said angrily: “You, sirrah, you with the sword! Who are you?”
I forgot myself, and forgot I was supposed to be Mr Christian, for I stomped down the stairs and shouted: “I am Hamlet, Hamlet the Dane, and I am this lady’s protector, for no one else will do it!”
She stood her ground and said: “I don’t care if you’re the Great Dane from the Bull Tavern which chases out the drunkards when the landlord wants to get his rest! It’s my duty to protect my girls, and I’ll not have . . .”
Angharad interrupted: “Mistress Ridley, where have you been? I have not seen you for two whole days and I have been robbed!”