Rotten at the Heart

by Bartholomew Daniels

  I made a short bow. “I thank you and will hold your counsel close.”

  “Do you suppose that pamphlet, too, came from this Miller? For I may add that to the curriculum on which I shall have him schooled. As your company bears my name, such public insult to it accrues some to me.”

  “To be true, I did at first think it so. But I have had cause now to wonder other.” I explained the events of the past days in their varied machinations, including such matters of land as I understood. “I see in this confluence of misfortune not so much poor luck, but rather some plan that means the company ill, or at least my person.”

  Carey seemed unsettled, which I took in some surprise, not supposing that my fortunes weighed heavy in his list of cares. Companies of players were thick on the ground, and should one fall, and he still wish to serve patron, he could easy find some other.

  “This matter of lands you mention. This company with which you think Miller be in league is named Somerset?”

  “It is, my lord.”

  “And so some would borrow the name of my house to lend their scheme weight, unless those shareholders be also in residence there.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Shoreditch, you said? This is the centre of their plan?”

  “As far as I can know. Our attorney will inquire further and seeks such records as may confirm the fact of things.”

  “My father gained some land holdings in Shoreditch years back in the settlement of an old matter. As they are not of his baronial estates, I did not account them much – the baronial estates coming to me by primogeniture and such other interests as he did hold bequeathed to my brother for his maintenance. That a company of such name should involve properties of that district and at such timing gives me pause.”

  I thought to my meeting with Carey’s brother, at the scorn he plain had shown for his father’s name and at this new knowledge that he now owned properties in Shoreditch by virtue of the late Baron’s death. But I was unsure how best to say my thoughts to Carey. As I had at every moment in Carey’s company, I felt like a drunk man making his way on frozen ice, taking each step with certain care and afraid at each of some bad fall.

  “My lord, I must relay that, in my converse with your brother, he did not in his manner hold your father in the same affection as do you.”

  “To speak plain, you mean my brother was in turns petulant, offensive, and graceless, but no doubt fine attired and presenting his insult with some considerable style.”

  “I would not impugn his honour to phrase it so, my lord.”

  “You cannot impugn what he does not hold. Were he in some desert parched and water offered, if water be honour, he would drown in its drinking, having no custom in its management.”

  I made no answer, Carey’s opinion being plain and me seeing nothing to be gained in agreeing to such insult to his family. Carey sighed long, and then continued.

  “We are at some change in time, where lawyers are as much feared as men at arms and the Bourse makes such moneyed mischief by means of companies and shares that those lands and estates in which wealth were once measured do oft become instead the instrument of some other’s gain. And nobles, who did once hold their title and honour dear and made their allegiance to the Crown only, now oft make bedfellows with such common grubbers as these. Even our good Queen must make a fashion of obeisance to such usurers who do her nation’s debts support. And all manner of such craft and art as did before hold even a common man in standing, be his trade in wool or iron of those foods on which even our lives do hinge, these now all find the products of art have become abstract commodities, the paper owning of which somehow extracts all wealth. Now he who makes such real objects as on which these new fortunes are founded is left to beg scraps from these same sorcerers who toil not, nor spin, and yet are afforded fortunes that Solomon might envy. They be our new lords who reach their station not through fair service and loyal obedience but instead through such sleight of hand that leaves all wondering how some other did end up holding their purse, with some lawyer standing near to call it fair.”

  “I do admit,” I said, “that I am oft much confused by the ease at which those who seem to contribute least do seem to profit most.”

  “My father’s death seems more surrounded in mischief than I had imagined,” Carey said. “The servants will be at your disposal immediate, so do not tarry in their examination. And I shall consider such debts or properties as may seem party to this evil. Meet me in two days’ time at this same place and hour, and we shall see what the sum of our learnings be.”

  Carey turned, waiting for neither answer nor assent, clear used to his instructions being met with strict comply.

  I was again alone, the distress that had preceded Carey’s arrival back full and compounded now by the full dark of the cathedral district, the church itself being not much lighted and the space about it yawning black like a hungering void.

  I made my way in care toward the light and the sounds of those lanes closest, knowing that what true dangers I might face lurked more likely there, but feeling in this current darkness an oppression of spirit that would answer to no reason. It was instead like the fear of the dark I had felt as a child, most oft when I would make way from the rooms where I was schooled past the charnel house that stored the bones of the dead.

  I turned the corner of the cathedral, barking my foot once hard on some stone – which did for a short moment distract my fears toward more real pains – when some piece of the dark seemed to move of its own accord and not as a piece of the whole. And then I heard the soft padding of feet taking care of their sound, and that piece of dark moved plain and toward me direct and with seeming purpose.

  I turned and ran, my own feet slapping loud, and could now hear those behind me slapping equal loud. As I had not that day dressed from our company’s costume, I also did not carry any sword, but only the short dagger that was my usual – and that used usually only to carve at food, not at spectres formed seeming whole from the bowels of night.

  I stumbled brief on some unevenness, thus losing pace. Those feet behind me held speed to draw closer, and then I heard clear the metal song of a sword drawn from its scabbard. Ahead, and near the wall, I saw stored some stones and timbers that awaited use in the cathedral’s finishing, and I ran hence, hoping to find a tool for my defence. Grabbing from the top of one pile a rock near the size of my hand, I turned and hurled it at my assailant. It struck him on the shoulder, but not of that arm which held his sword – in whose blade seemed focused all the little light there present, so that the sword seemed in its gleaming invested of some foul purpose of its own devising.

  The blow from the rock slowed the spectre’s headlong rush, his feet now making a more purposeful stalking, the blade held easy in his right hand as though from long practice. I grabbed a length of pole that I found handy, it being longer by some two feet than my own height, and turned with it, my hands braced wide to control its length, so that I stood like a pikeman. I hoped that, if this was the same assailant I had previous encountered, he would again prove reluctant to join with a prepared foe.

  But if it were the same opponent, he had more appetite for his work this night, and he continued near. I swung my staff at him with all the force that I could manage, but its length and weight blunted my effort. The spectre raised his left arm, accepting the blow against his ribs. Then he clamped his arm down solid on my weapon and grabbed it with his left hand, and I could feel in the pole’s sudden and complete immobility a strength well past my own. But as I had two arms to control the staff and he but one, I thought I might wrest the pole free or pull him from his balance. So, I braced my feet and swung with my entire effort. He simply danced his feet in the direction of my attempt, taking in that moment the chance to advance his grip on the pole closer to me, his sword now more raised, as though, with the moment of its satisfaction more near, it was now more aroused.

  His hand crept up another length and he swiped with his sword, measuring
the distance remaining, which was uncomfortable slight. I was overcome – not with fear as I would have thought, but instead with despair, my end seeming plain at hand. Past death’s boundary at the end of what short moments I was still allotted, I could sense no comfort or promise or even threat of suffering. Instead I sensed just a blank expanse that in its absolute negation made seem those visions of hell as I had heard of previous pleasant by compare. And I thought sudden of the fishmonger’s daughter and knew her there to be my waiting companion, though in such vastness we would have no congress, but would each drift alone. And so, sudden wearied and absent any hope, I resolved to release the pole, accept the blade, and prayed that in the void at least I would be absent any consciousness, and that the vision of this vile and draining horror would be washed away with my own blood.

  Instead it was my opponent who released the pole, turning sudden to raise his blade against some threat I had in my reverie missed. It was Carey close behind him!

  Carey’s blade descended hard onto that of my enemy. Some last sudden angle in Carey’s effort drove the offending blade not only down but also to one side. Carey then drew his blade up and flicked it across, the tip of it cutting into my assailant’s left arm.

  The spectre seemed only some little dissuaded by this injury, though, keeping his blade level with his right arm, his feet making an artful shuffle, and his sword circling with some subtle motions, as though to invite Carey to attack. Carey held his blade high above his head, as if an axe, and the assailant, sensing some opportunity, lunged forward.

  Carey turned a little to his side and brought his sword down with much savagery but also craft, so that again the foe’s blade was directed down and away, and Carey did again draw his own back across the attacker’s person – this time cutting across the top of his chest. Carey pressed his advantage, bringing his blade down again in the same fashion – this time knocking the enemy’s blade aside so that Carey’s next blow bit unimpeded into that hollow where the neck met the shoulder. His blade continued down far into my assailant’s chest, crushing through flesh and bone, the foe’s death coming sudden and complete.

  I was stunned at this conflict’s speed and nature. Such swordplay as we have in our plays is always of long and artful dance and ending with a thrust that leaves the afflicted poetic in his final agonies, allowing good occasion for some quip or speech to either ennoble or amuse our audience through his death.

  What I had witnessed was no wound of my acquaintance, but instead a sundering through which death did speak complete in a tongue of blood and organ and shattered bone and with an eloquence by which the grave gave full flower to the validity of its argument.

  Carey turned to me. “You had no thought to offer your help?”

  “I… I’m thankful you seemed to have no need of it.”

  He snorted. “He seemed some little practised with a sword, but more of that gentle prancing as the city’s fencing tutors suggest for duelling, where the parties make dance in the name of honour and oft call such little honour as they hold satisfied as soon as the other suffers some small scratch. I have learned my art at war and would have it done quick and to my advantage and with only such little style as necessary to show my foe’s guts to the sun.”

  “Or the moon,” I said.

  He pulled the cloak from the corpse and used it to clean the blood from his blade before he returned it to his scabbard.

  And I looked down into the face of the bulbous-nosed man who had been my common companion these few days last. The exact injury to his nose was now more plain and strange – as though somehow the organ had been exploded outward from the inside and then left poorly to heal.

  “I would make your introduction to that man who has served my shadow since our first meeting,” I said, “but I fear your ministrations do leave him mute.”

  “He can make his conversation with Satan, then,” Carey said, “but I will remember his homely face to my father’s fellows, as I should think that nose would be easy recalled.”

  I looked down at my late shadow, flayed so that he seemed forked, with his head to the left and his arm and shoulder to the right, that yawning grin of violence glistening between in this dull lighting. Even though his intent had been that I now be on such journey as he current suffered, I was still much suffused in that rank despair that I had felt in that moment when I thought myself perched on the brink of such abyss as in which he now plummeted endless, there being no bottom to it nor top nor side. What sense I had previous of death had been of theory only, for while I have seen many dead and even some by violence, I had never before seen death so fully attired in its finery. I knew each minute forward I would feel that same cloak upon my own shoulders – so that no matter how cheered and graceful the raiment of any given day, it would be dulled by my knowing that it was a transitory grace beyond which waited this monstrous nothingness. I was now already part claimed by death, and feared that did somehow make me its servant.

  CHAPTER 15

  I stood before my own door in Stratford in the failing light, much wearied from hard travel, having made in one day a trip that should take two. But in my new familiarity with death I did know it too well to think I had beat it hence, for in the unnatural calm of my household I could feel death’s residence.

  I had returned to my rooms from St Paul’s to word my son was now dire ill, my wife requesting I make home with all haste. But death doth travel with what speed it pleases, and in such time as took her message to reach London and me to reach Stratford, it likely had already borne my son to that destination that now too much coloured my thinking. So I stood, fearful of my own doors, the varied melancholies of my recent experience such that my shames and my fears and knowledge of my petty avarices and banal secrets eroded the pretended honour by which I once entered this house as its worthy master. Seeming to sense that I had come this long distance but could of my own power come no further, the door opened, my Anne standing there, her face some aged from our last meeting and me knowing her heart likely aged more.

  “Our Hamnet is dead,” she said.

  And only then was I able to take those final steps that brought me to the threshold to take her in my arms, but she was stiff and unyielding in my embrace and quick to break it. We made into the house, where my daughters were quiet but their embrace truer. And so I held them long, some shamed that I did need from these children to draw such comfort that I should, as their father, have offered instead.

  “I received your message only this evening past and made such speed as I could,” I said to my wife. But even in my own hearing of these empty words I knew I had near a week previous heard Hamnet ill, and had thought on it only little since.

  “He held life hard until just this morning,” she answered, “and oft asked after you. In your absence and the growing stature of your name – at least in compare to such simple folk as do still here abide – you had become some godlike in his eyes, and he did believe you held some power that would his ills reverse if he could outrun death until your arrival. And so I think you did in your neglect at least some prolong his life, and for that I do thank you. Now, I have much wifely duty before his funeral and do beg your leave.”

  She left to the kitchen, and I sat a long hour with my daughters, making a little talk of no consequence about such local matters as they could at their age understand. I knew well my son’s own body lay somewhere in these rooms, but I feared yet to look upon it, and feared also the company of my own wife. And so I did stick with these smaller women, who were of such age that they could not all my sins remember or even yet understand.

  In our chambers later, I shared news with Anne concerning the College of Heralds and the granting of our armorial bearings, thinking her knowing our son had died a gentleman – and that we could thus array his procession with his Coat of Arms – might some little lighten her grieving.

  “If such vain display doth please you, then by all means we shall have it,” she said, “as it is his right as your son. Your s
on. Though I did bear him and suckle him. Your son. Though I have these several years hence both fathered and mothered him. Your son. Though I did these last days comfort him and wipe the pestilence of fever from his brow and clean his filth as he was too weak to use the pot and try make light his fears in the press of death – and did listen to him in his last breath ask instead for you. Your son. And so, yes, such glories as you have won our name in your distant strivings, by all means, let us make them public so that all may know how well you loved Hamnet and that all may know him your son.”

  Her face was bleached with scorn. “But your father will be pleased. And he has been most kind to us, and for that small mercy at least I do true thank you.”

  I felt a burn of anger that I knew was kindled more by the truth of her words than by the hurt of her saying them.

  “I had thought this such time as a husband and wife might find in each other comfort,” I answered. “And instead you give me venom.”

  She turned to the chest nearest her, taking from it a paper that she threw on our bed. The pamphlet. “Such venom as this, which I only yesterday did receive so as to lighten those final hours in which I watched your son die?”

  I knew sure she could see in my face the truth of it, and I stood mouth agape, trying to imagine what words could make safe passage and finding none.

  “The great Shakespeare, whose quill pens such speech as to make men laugh or cry or quail or swell with pride, all as he likes it, stands dumb in the face of a simple woman? You, who have such words as to make young girls surrender first their virtue and then their lives, have none to answer this commoner, made in her abandonment no longer even wife but just maid and nurse?”

  “Anne, I–”

  She spun, shaking her head. “No, sir, please. Pray you silence some small while longer so I can still clear have my say. For, once you gain you speech, it will sure flow such that I can hold mine own thoughts clear no more, but instead will be such clouded in your arguments as to doubt all I know be true. And then I must also hate myself as I do now so rightly hate you.”