Shakespeare shifted on the bench and coughed. Interesting. His ears were treacherously hot. He wished they wouldn’t go pink every time his imagination began to work on things like that. Or at least that he could have more hair to cover them with.
Enys coughed as well and avoided his eye. “So... I’d managed to find a corner of an alley where I thought no one would come and I’d... ah... undone my points and so on and squatted... Then I realised my courses had come on.”
Shakespeare blinked rapidly. And that might be difficult too. How did you deal with it? He remembered his wife back in Stratford making a great fuss about the matter, with pads and secretive washing of stained petticoats and so on. She was also a dreadful shrew before, he’d noted, and tended to eat more sweetmeats during. Almost as bad as when she was with child.
“So I was... er... trying to sort it out when that bloody man Catlin comes staggering along, sees me, turns aside, thank God – I don’t think he saw anything – then stumbles into a little side-passage I had not even noticed. And then he stumbles out with his face whiter than his collar and pukes all over the place, nearly splattering me with a hit direct and splashing my boots.”
Shakespeare grinned. “Oh ay?” He loved the way farce and tragedy hunted side by side. Even Enys looked rueful.
“So I managed to arrange myself whilst he was busy and then he gasped something and I looked where he had been and... I saw her.” Enys was sober-faced now. He dropped his husky voice further.“Will, it was awful. He had taken all her guts out and... and... he put an organ on her thigh which was her womb.”
Shakespeare beckoned the potboy for more aquavitae since somebody seemed to have drunk his.
“Guts in a spiral pattern?” he asked.
Enys nodded. “Was French Mary’s womb...”
“Between her legs and cut open very neatly,” Shakespeare was whispering too now. The potboy was refilling their horn cups from a flagon.
“Kettle Annie’s was entire,” said Enys. “So... ah... so we went straight to Mr Recorder Fleetwood because I thought, if the whores find this on top of the Plague and the theatres, they’ll riot.”
Shakespeare grunted. That was certain. French Mary had made them very angry already.
“Fleetwood’s a better man than I had thought,” Enys continued, strengthened by aquavitae, “Once he knew what had happened, he came out with his men at once and took up Kettle Annie’s corpse – it’s in St Bride’s crypt now. But then the bastard hired Catlin and me to investigate and find the killer.”
Shakespeare swallowed a laugh. “How did he persuade you?”
“Offered twenty pounds each or he’d arrest the two of us for the murder.”
“Ah,” said Shakespeare.
“Quite,” said Enys. “So I thought I had best agree but now I’m stuck with a Puritan pursuivant who could as well be the man that did it for what people say about him, and I’m supposed to find out and capture a monster that kills women and then cuts them up.”
“Catlin’s a good pursuivant,” said Shakespeare judiciously, “Even Marlowe respects him.”
“I’m amazed Catlin would give Marlowe the time of day, he hates players. And as for what he’d make of Marlowe’s other habits...”
“Well Marlowe can be discreet when he wants to be. He only admits to poesy to Catlin. Which is quite bad enough by the way.”
Enys put his arms on the table in a very manly gesture for a woman. “So,” she said, “As I have no knowledge whatever of... of pursuiving, Mr Shakespeare, I was hoping to treat it as I would a court case and begin by learning everything I can about the matter in hand. Would you be willing to show me where you found the other body? And tell me what you saw?”
Shakespeare considered this. He was completely certain he didn’t want to be involved in any way. On the other hand, the playhouses were shut, the aquavitae was singing a siren song to him and he would do almost anything to avoid dealing with the ugly hole lurking inside him where normally a poem would already be growing like a mushroom.. In the dark and on a rich bed of horseshit. He smiled slightly at his own metaphor. But what good was it when he needed something a great deal less pungent and more polished than the groundlings could understand? Above all he needed something to do.
Decision made, he stood, knocked back what was in his cup and offered the remainder of his meal to Enys, who gratefully stuffed the cheese and a couple of picked onions into the side of the penny loaf and took a large bite as they headed out the door.
They walked towards the Bridge, which was a two mile detour because neither of them felt rich enough to throw two pennies away on the mere convenience of a boat without an emergency.
Ludgate Hill was choked with people as usual, passing the Belle Sauvage Inn where a public sword fight was being advertised. St Paul's was also full of folk and Enys quietly manoevred Shakespeare away from the churchyard where the booksellers cried their wares. It seemed Enys knew not to let a poet get in among the stalls, because he would stay there for the rest of the day. They took Watling Street through the City, past St Anthony's church and into Budge Row where the furriers had their shops, They weren't supposed to do any tanning within the city but of course they did, so the streets behind the respectable buildings always stank with their vats of piss and oak bark until the City fathers cracked down on them again.
“Mrs Nunn of the Falcon knows,” said Enys, as they passed the London stone. “About Kettle Annie’s death, I mean. She challenged Fleetwood about it in the common room of the Cock this morning.”
Shakeaspeare’s lips pursed in a soundless whistle.
“Mr Recorder was not pleased,” added Enys.
“What’s Catlin doing?”
Enys shrugged. “How would I know? Probably hunting down his normal informers and blackmailing them. Can you tell me how you came upon French Mary at the new theatre?” he asked as they sidled down Crooked Lane which had the smellier overspill from New Fish Street. At the end of New Fish street was the great clock paid for by the fishmongers guilds, allegedly to show how quickly their fish had been brought from the sea. The street was even more choked with people, carts, donkeys, barrels, horses, messenger boys, serving men and broad-beamed women buying salt fish by the barrel at high prices. At the end of it was the entrance to London Bridge.
Shakespeare paused as, in the theatre of his mind the images lined up into a good story. He didn’t want them to, they just obediently did. Perhaps telling the tale might help get rid of them. It occasionally worked for particularly annoying sonnets.
“We were there to inspect the works and talk about how big the stage should be and where to place the pillars.”
“Why? Is it important?”
Of course, Enys wasn’t a player. “Yes it is,” Shakespeare told him, “If the stage is bigger of course it means you can do more with battles and sieges and suchlike, but then you can fit in fewer groundlings in the pit, which means fewer pennies. And vice versa. So if Mr Henslowe could have his way, there might be hardly any stage at all other than a painted ledge whereas Jemmy Burbage is on fire for a stage as great as the world whereon he can strut and fret.” He had to pause to elbow his way through a group of high-coloured Kentish women with large baskets ambling along like cows in the middle of the street that led down to the Bridge towers. They could hear the waterwheels already.
“I was between the two of them trying to keep the peace.”
“Not on Burbage’s side?” Enys smiled but Shakespeare shook his head seriously.
“God no,” he said, “Never trust a player with architecture nor money. Especially not money. And especially if they are good.”
They were under the heads on pikes at the gate. The smell was no longer so bad since the crows and buzzards had pecked them clean and eaten the brains of the newest some weeks ago. They had to pause again because the crowds were thick with women taking up twice as much pavement space as they needed with the fashionable width of their farthingales.
Enys had
to sidle apologising past two large ladies admiring the display in the first draper’s shop on the Bridge. The window was barred like a goldsmith on Cheapside, a roaring boy standing at the door with his thumbs in his sword belt, busily guarding the delicate brocades that came all the way from the Land of Silk. Also tumbled from their bolts in artful display were the silk velvets, woven in Flanders by the best weavers in the world who first unravelled the silken threads of the less fashionable brocades from the east. Shakespeare had heard a rumour that silk came from giant worms that required to feed upon entire trees. He doubted it. Unquestionably that was as much a fantasy as the lamb-wort – the magical plant that grew fluffy puffs of wool which eventually grew together to make a vegetable lamb that hopped and skipped like any lamb until it died without ever becoming a sheep and mating, and from its corpse grew the new plants for next year. Besides, how would you catch such a giant worm and how much damage would they do and where on a worm could silk come from anyway? Much more likely that another rumour was true and that silk was the fleece of the unicorn which could only be shorn by virgins... Hm. Perhaps? As an opener for the poem..?
No, too quotidian. Mr Enys was talking again. He had paused to look a little longingly in a milliner’s window to admire the new high-crowned hats with their elaborate hat-bands and feathers. Enys pointed at one.
“If I can find the murderer and collect the fee, perhaps I shall buy my sister that hat to go to church on Sunday.”
Shakespeare smiled. Mr Enys’s sister was, of course, Mr Enys herself. It occurred to him that Sundays must be a problem as well. The church wardens would be keeping a count and while they would let Enys’s sister miss Divine Service on Sundays, they would insist on seeing her occasionally in case she was a Papist. Shakespeare thought that might involve some quick changing and considered offering Enys lessons in the art. Purely to be helpful of course.
They had to push and excuse their way through another knot of women gathered around one who was having a fainting fit. Shakespeare spotted it was Mollie Stone and hissed at Enys to be careful of his purse... Yes, there were a couple of small children darting among the crowding kirtles, harvesting purses from their strings.
As they finally won to the other end, the carrion smell was fainter, because these were older heads, some dating back to the early 1580’s harvest of Jesuits before the Spanish Armada. Once through the Great Stone Gate they were in Southwark and could turn right to thread through the alleys to Bankside and the great circular landmark of the bear-baiting ring. They threaded cautiously around the Clink prison and crossed the stream to Dead Man's Place by a rickety wooden bridge. The new theatre was being built in some fields that had been full of peasant huts, since cleared away.
At last Shakespeare opened the gate in the fencing around the new theatre. Somebody was already starting to steal the scaffolding, he noted, thinking it might be as well to take it down until they could start building again. He had heard that Henslowe was planning to call it the Swan in honour of the badge of the courtier who had made it possible with his investment and influence. Shakespeare was very proud of that connection because he had made it. A watchman came out of his hut to check on them: Henslow had hired him to stop their theatre being pilfered as an embryo. He nodded to Shakespeare who glared back because the man had obviously been bribed or asleep a great deal of the time.
“Who’s that?” asked the watchman of Shakespeare, tilting his head at Enys, after swallowing a mouthful of pie.
“An investor,” said Shakespeare, “Perhaps.”
Enys was attempting to look haughty. However the watchman’s eyes flicked over the worn velvet trim of Enys’s respectable but out-of-fashion woollen suit and sniffed.
“Looks like an unfee’d lawyer to me,” he muttered.
Hand on his sword hilt, Enys stalked past the man looking quite authentically offended.
They crossed the bare trampled earth which would eventually be the pit and went down the rear passage to the future tiring rooms where Shakespeare had found the corpse. He actually had to pause to gather strength as his memory hit him with full force and colour. And smell. The colours were particularly hard. Most of the time Shakespeare was grateful for the memory God had given him and schoolmasters had trained without much need of the birch. But on occasions like this and in his dealings with women, memory could be a treacherous friend.
The wood of the tiring room passage was raw and unpainted and now stained brown in splashes. The earthen floor had soaked up the blood in the forgiving way of clay. There was still a powerful smell of old iron though. There had been a lot of blood, Shakespeare recalled, he had been shocked at how much.
Enys was squatting down and looking carefully at the stains. “Tell me what you saw as exactly as you can,” he said.
“It was French Mary, you know that,” Shakespeare began, “So she filled the whole passage.”
It was in fact an unusually wide passage because two players in full costume had to be able to pass each other in a hurry without tangling. Or in this case, one French Mary and her barrel of slightly stale hazelnuts. Enys was waiting patiently for him to continue.
“Well,” said Shakespeare hearing the reluctance in his voice, “Her head was here, looking up, back. She was lying on her back, legs bent up and apart. Her kirtle was off but not her farthingale, that had been pushed back and flipped over her head so at first... we didn’t know her.”
It had looked very odd indeed. Like a small tent filling the passage. The larger the woman, the larger the farthingale, of couse.
Shakespeare paused. Henslowe had made an off-colour joke about who might be distempered of drink until they saw... He took a deep shaky breath. What was it about it that upset him so? He had seen dead bodies, he had killed and gralloched deer once upon a time, long ago, he had even managed to get up early enough to be in the front of the crowd to watch a screaming Jesuit being disembowelled and quartered.
Get it over with. “Underneath her stays and shift were sliced open down the middle.” Enys nodded, intent. “Her stomach was cut from here to here.” Shakespeare’s hand started just under his breastbone and swept down to his codpiece.“ He had pulled out the guts and laid them in a spiral around the body, and so also with some of the organs. The hysterum...” Shakespeare coughed. He wasn’t showing off his classical learning, for some reason he was unable to say the word womb. Perhaps it was too intimate.
“How did you know what it was?” Enys asked. “I didn’t.”
“Ah. We guessed. For where it was.”
“Which was?”
“Between her legs, cut open and... ah... spread out. As if someone was looking for something.”
“Anything else?”
“The liver had been opened as well...” Shakespeare blinked as his inner sight gave him the pictures again, indifferent to his feelings. “It was white in many places and speckled. Perhaps if I were a Roman haruspex I should cry dole and misery upon all the Republic.”
“Perhaps.” Enys seemed a little puzzled. Of course, he... she was self-taught. She would never have gone to school and learned that the pagan Romans would prognosticate the future, not by astrology from the stars in a proper scientific way, but by sacrificing an animal to Jove and looking at the liver. “Her face?”
“Her face was hidden by her farthingale...” French Mary had been like a ship in full sail. “When we flipped it down again to make her more decent, we saw her face was not touched.”
“How was it?”
“It was dead,”
“No, I mean, what was the expression?”
“Calm,” Shakespeare told her thoughtfully, “As if she had been sleeping.”
“What about her hazelnut barrel?”
Carefully Shakespeare examined the pictures behind his eyelids. He shook his head. “I didn’t see it, though surely she wouldn’t be selling hazelnuts in a half-built theatre.”
“So what was she doing here?”
“Well... ah...” Shakespeare knew
his ears had gone red again. “I imagine she was working. She knows Mitchell the man that guards the place and if she had a customer this might be the place to come.”
Enys had gone pink too. “A customer?” There was surprise in her voice. So she had really been a very respectable matron before the smallpox had destroyed her children, husband and face, thought Shakespeare, and that made him feel better.
“French Mary still had customers who liked her... um... size.”
“Was her kirtle still on?”
“No,” said Shakespeare, “We found it in a heap nearby. Her best, the velvet-trimmed tawny.”
“Kettle Annie too,” Enys told him, “Her kirtle was off.”
“Hm. Yes,” said Shakespeare, “So we have here a villain that allows the whores to lead him astray and then...” He gestured. “It must be a Puritan.”
“Why?”
“Think of it! Think how they hate the whores.”
“Surely this must be someone utterly astray in his wits, perhaps even possessed of a demon...”
“Of course, of course, but why else attack whores? It must be a Puritan like Catlin, full of bile and hatred and preaching against whores and players... Why else would he do it?”
Enys smiled. “Because whores are easy to attack?”
Shakespeare blinked at him. “French Mary?” he asked, “Kettle Annie?” They were probably the two most redoubtable women in the sprawl of London and Westminster together. Apart from Mrs Nunn at the Falcon and a few others that worked at the stews and Paris Garden.
“Perhaps not. Then perhaps it is a Puritan.”
“Must be. Perhaps it’s Maliverny Catlin himself. That’s a bad bastard... Or so I hear.”
“He was drunk. When he saw the body, he puked...”
Shakespeare dismissed this. “He was acting. He had finished his evil deed and then he saw you too near it, followed you and....”
Enys shook her head. “No, he came towards me, not from behind. And in any case the woman was cold.”
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