The boy didn't answer.
"The bitch sold him out completely to Topcliffe."
The boy must have heard some of it already because he didn't flinch or look angry at this description of his sister. He just nodded.
"That is what I heard from my parents," he admitted, "But I don't believe it, Mrs Crosby. I'm sure it can't be true."
"It can. You'd best forget her."
"No, Ann is my sister," he said quite gently, "I don't care what you or my parents say she's done, I've come to help her wherever she is and whatever people think of her."
Mrs Crosby uncrossed her arms, went through the door and paused. "Look at the skulls on the bridge," she said, "One's still got a bit of hair on from the summer. They're luckier than that poor man, Southwell. He was tortured for days, they say, didn't give anything away, not a name, nothing, and then they put him in the Tower at the end of July and that's the last anybody's seen of him or likely to."
She slammed the door and went to see to the burning of the clothes the priest had turned up in, which would probably burn well thanks to the large amount of coal dust in them. She could use the the coals at the top of the sack he'd been carrying full of his gentleman's clothes and other stuff. She had to admit it was clever of him to come by way of a Newcastle coal barge – a less direct route but much less well-guarded by the tunnage and poundage men.
What would the boy do when he found out what had really happened to his sister, Mrs Crosby wondered.
On a thought she opened the door again without knocking and found the boy on his knees by the window, smiling stupidly as he prayed with his eyes shut. His hair still had coaldust in it but the rest of him was quite clean after a wash down. Mind, the basin she had brought was charcoal black with it.
Mrs Crosby took the basin herself, then put it down again.
"I'll knock tap tap tap, tap tap, tap. Three, two and one, like that," she told him, "That means it's safe to open. If I reverse the order or knock differently, then hide."
The boy – well, he must be in his mid to late twenties if his sister Ann were younger than him – stood up immediately.
"Where do I hide?" he asked.
She showed him a panel in the wall which slid open. He smiled. "It's very good," he said which showed he knew nothing, "I hide there?"
"Yes, get in." Meekly, he did and she shut the panel. "Now then, Mr Nick Owen built this. While the panel is shut, press hard at the right side of the wall made of bricks." There was a moment of fumbling and then a faint creak and a soft chuckle from Bellamy.
"I'll bring a tallow dip to grease that hinge. Can you see where it goes? Can you fit down the ladder?"
"Yes," said the boy after a couple of grunts and a rustle, "This was a house of easement, was it? Where does it come out?"
"Chimney," Mrs Crosby told him, "You can't use them, they're too narrow. There's a passage at the bottom and then a door in quite a surprising place. I'll tell you later. For now, you stay here in this room and well away from the window."
There was the faint creak as the boy put the brick wall back in place and slid back the panel. He had a smudge on his chin and his hair was on end.
"Thank you, Mrs Crosby," he said nicely, "God bless you for all your help. Would you like me to say Mass for your household?"
She hesitated. It was the Month of the Virgin Mary and it would be a good thing... but could she get the use of the crypt in Walbrook that had been raided the month before? She thought hard, calculating.
"Are you sure you don't mind the danger?" she said.
"It's what I'm for really, isn't it?" said the boy seriously, "Not just rescuing my sister, in a way that's quite selfish of me. I'm here to say Mass for you and hear your Confession and bring you the miracle of Christ's Presence and all the Sacraments. They come first."
Mrs Crosby nodded as a solution to the whole stupid problem suddenly occurred to her. It might be possible. And it might be a good idea at that.
The lawyer known as James Enys wearily climbed the endless flights of steps to the top floor of the tottering building made of scraps of old abbey in the courtyard recently bought as an investment by the Earl of Essex, or so it was rumoured. If the talk was true, then it was certain he’d only done it to annoy his great rival and enemy at Court, Sir Robert Cecil, who was equally busy buying up the Inner Temple.
Yawning and rubbing her red eyes, she unlocked the new door and went in, taking care to shout “I’m home, sister,” for the benefit of James Enys’s neighbours.
There was nobody else in the pair of chambers. The larger one was Enys’s main chamber and study, with full book-presses and piles of papers, pens in various stages of making and ink in bottles from different St Pauls stationers.
Beyond the next door was the bedchamber with a large and ancient four poster bed and the trundle that fitted under it for a servant to sleep on. Hanging on pegs around the walls were... Portia Morgan’s clothes and James Enys’s clothes and all of them now fitted the lawyer.
She unbuckled her sword, hung it on a hook and rubbed her arm muscles which were aching from sword-schooling – on the whole she was glad she had kept the appointment with the Master of Defence that afternoon, because it had tired her body and mind and made the sight and smell of Kettle Annie’s body less pungently in front of her thoughts. She had bread and sausage and a flask of ale for her supper but was now too tired to eat, so they would do for breakfast.
She set to taking off the uncomfortable clothes she must wear to be a man: first the high boots, then off came the green woollen doublet with black velvet trim she had carefully altered and strategically padded to even out her hips and waist, off came the waistcoat she kept tied to her canions and then the long hose she wore underneath. Damn, there was another little hole beginning on the heel that she would have to darn since she couldn’t afford to buy any more knitted hose yet. Underneath it all was her plainest shift that she had cut down to get the bandages that she now unwrapped from around her breasts. She wore a man’s under-breeks which was just as well. She thought the kerchief she had wadded up to save her modesty during her courses was now ruined. Hopefully she put it to soak in a bowl of cold rainwater that was under one of the dripping places in the ceiling, found her usual pad and made herself more comfortable. Scratching vigorously at the fleabites, she pulled on a clean linen shift that went to the ground and had her own blackwork on its collar and cuffs, then a comfortable old English-cut velvet gown on top. She sniffed the used shirt – perhaps it would do for the next day but would need laundering after that.
Then with a linen cap over her short hair, she could sigh and relax onto being a mere woman again. She opened the window and called.
A large grey striped cat came jumping across the complicated corners of the nearby roofs, thatch and shingle alike, miaowing excitedly. She cut the end off her sausage and the cat graciously deigned to eat it and be stroked and have his head scratched. Sometimes in cold weather he would come and sleep against her stomach and defend her against the cold empty expanses of the four poster with the curtains shut. He also kept the rats down in numbers and occasionally brought her one in triumph to pay the rent.
She yawned mightily and drank some of the mild ale in the bottle. It had been an exhausting 36 hours and she wished her brother could have been there to talk to her and dispute with her. Alas, he had disappeared in September and she could only hope that once again he would pop up somewhere like a Fool at the playhouse, unexpected and disgraceful. If he was alive, of course. It was quite possible, by all accounts, that he wasn’t. She still wasn't sure what she felt about it: on the one hand, her heart ached that yet another person she loved was taken from her. On the other hand, she no longer needed to worry about her brother's gambling habits, recklessness and general unreliability.
She sat down and took her workbag out, found her darning mushroom and started repairing the hole in her hose. The cat curled up on her lap under the rest of the hose and settled down to a steady rumbl
ing purr. She wondered vaguely what Shakespeare was up to and Maliverny Catlin as well. She had already decided that, thanks to the merciful inconvenience of her courses and as she wasn't in court, tomorrow was a day for being herself, not James Enys.
Shakespeare was drunk again. He was sitting in a booth at the Mermaid, playing dice and drinking aquavitae and wishing that he wasn’t. Somehow he had got himself into a particularly stupid game of dice with Anthony Munday in his tidy grey doublet of double worsted fine wool. He didn’t even like diceplay nor Anthony Munday who insisted on showing him his latest attempt at play writing.
It wasn’t just that Munday was bad at play writing. It was that Munday was utterly cloth-eared to the music of language and completely devoid of imagination. However he was a very diligent worker. As a result he wrote plays that were dull and badly written but he didn’t know this because he wasn’t good enough to realise it and wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell him. After all, didn’t the playhouse owners pay him for his work? Wasn’t he an expert at turning a plat into a play? Hadn't his lurid youthful account of life in the Roman seminary been an instant hit many years ago?
Shakespeare himself had had to play some of his boring characters which involved the hideous effort of committing to memory his stupefyingly banal and stupid dialogue, in which Kings explained to Lords that they were attacking someone and the Lords explained to the King that someone was the King's brother and so on and so forth.
In Shakespeare's opinion, Anthony Munday was too incompetent to have any idea of how incompetent he was. He was convinced that he was the outstanding poet and playwright of the age, a dubious honour that in fact belonged to Marlowe. Still, Anthony Munday was well-connected, tenacious, shameless and busy and people were frightened of him because he was a pursuivant. So he had no trouble getting paid well for his dull work, never got into trouble with the Master of the Revels who particularly loathed imagination in a work, and added steadily to his pot of properties and money. Which he boasted about with the false modesty of the typical tailor, his original trade.
In fact, Shakespeare decided blearily, he hated Munday with a passion that shocked even him with its ferocity.
“You see, Will,” Munday was presently lecturing him with a wagging forefinger, “You’ve got to give people what they want. If they want a love story, give it to ‘em. If they want a comedy, make sure plenty of people fall over and the dog bites someone.”
To be fair, other people had told him this but Shakespeare had to drink another cup of aquavita to avoid punching Munday’s round dull face.
“What abou’ poetry?” he muttered, without meaning to.
Munday nodded sagely. “Of course, scansion is important so the players can remember their lines. But you don’t want too much poetry because it’s harder to write and it puts people off.”
Shakespeare blinked at the man. Harder to write? Was he serious? Poetry was much easier to write than prose, it just flowed out once you got it going. Ha! Once you got it going. He felt the tide of melancholy reaching for him hungrily and finished the drink.
Munday was in lecturing mood. “Nobody wants to have to work out what you’re saying. If you compare a woman to ... oh... I don’t know, a flower perhaps...” Munday’s moon-face was full of proud complacency at his originality. “...then it’s better to use a rose so you get the blushing cheeks and the thorns, you see? Then people know what you’re talking about.”
“You can compare a woman to... to almost anything,” Shakespeare protested, unable to help himself. “A... crow... a summer’s day...”
“No, no,” said Munday, laughing tolerantly, “That’s mad, Will. How can a woman be like a summer’s day?”
Shakespeare knew that his forehead was overlarge. Right now it seemed to be one big wrinkle. “S’obvious,” he said with difficulty, “Warm, changeable...”
“No, go with a flower,” insisted Munday, “You’ve got to choose your metaphors carefully...”
“...golden, fruitful, could be storms...”
“Mind you, I did compare her Majesty with a sunbeam once,” said Munday, “I think she liked it.”
“Like this summer, it was awful,” added Shakespeare deciding that arguing poetry with Munday was like arguing the value of precious jewels with a red pig and that the weather was safer, “Wind, rain. And as for fruitful, they say the harvest’s the worst it’s been for years.”
But Munday was a Londoner through and through and wasn’t very interested. “Just an excuse for farmers to put the prices up. You see there are some subjects that are poetic and some that simply are not, Will,” he said, wagging a finger again, “War can be poetic. A fight in an alehouse or a dead whore can’t.”
“What?” said Shakespeare, almost shocked into sobriety.
“Whores can’t, virgins can. Beer can’t, wine can,” added Munday, drinking some of the Mermaid’s dreadful wine which he felt showed he was a cut above beerdrinkers because it cost twice as much.
“You can’t make a poem out of a pig,” Munday added, “Or be romantic about a rape. It’s impossible.”
“Well I can.”
“Anyway,” added Munday with finality, “There’s no demand for it. D’you want another one?”
Bald Will rolled home to his lodgings in the Poultry, with a kind of dull iron constriction around his heart. Anthony Munday always did this to him because the bloody begotten banal bastard of a man was so utterly certain he was right, so utterly blind to beauty, so... so...
He had to stop and hold onto a house corner for amoment and the boy he had paid to light his way stopped solicitously for him.
“You drunk, then?” he asked, not gloating too much.
“Urgh,” sighed Shakespeare as he waited for the street to stop rocking.
“You the player wot found French Mary’s body, done in like Kettle Annie?” asked the boy, wiping his nose on his sleeve and scratching his hair.
“Ah,” Shakespeare had to stop and think. Had that been him? Yes, it had. He wouldn’t have imagined something like that, that someone who had been so thoroughly killed could have such a peaceful expression on her face. “Yes,” he said.
“That man Mr Catlin wants me to find out about Kettle Annie’s clients,” said the boy meaningfully, “Shall I tell ‘im you was one of ‘em?”
Aquavitae was making serious thought impossible. “Wha’?” asked Shakespeare, “But I wasn’t.” Kettle Annie was pretty much the opposite of the kind of woman he lusted after.
The boy shrugged. “I don’t care, do I?” he said, “You’re a player, ‘e don’t like you so he’ll believe it when I give ‘im yer name. If I give him yer name. He just wants a big list of names, like always. Fing is, if they’re not people ‘e already suspects, he gets annoyed and then he dun’t pay, so what’s the point of it? So there’s no good giving ‘im names of Kettle Annie’s real clients cos ‘e wouldn’t believe me, so you’ll do.”
Shakespeare pushed himself upright and blinked.
“You want me to pay you for not putting me on a list of Kettle Annie’s clients?” he said clearly and carefully because rage was starting to cut through the booze.
“Yerss,” said the boy, picking his nose.
“Or maybe...” said Shakespeare, “I’d pay you and then you’d forget I’d paid you and put me on the list anyway and tell Mr Catlin that I’d tried to bribe you not to put me on the list and so get me taken up for the murders. Eh?”
The boy squinted at him for a moment, then said, “Oh.”
Shakespeare wagged his finger at the boy in a very Mundayesque way.
“If you’re going to get someone with more than half a brain to pay you for something it better not be for not doing something because then he’d have to keep paying you not to do it and he’d know that. Wouldn’t he?”
The boy nodded, transfixed by Shakespeare’s finger, the torchlight shining on the snailtrail down his upper lip.
“Sho,” continued Shakespeare, “it’d be a lot shim
pler just to kill you and have done with it, wouldn’t it?” His voice was flattening and becoming more Midlands with anger.
The boy’s mouth was open and he was backing away. It looked as if he hadn’t thought this through properly. And perhaps Shakespeare was too hasty. He didn't want the boy to run off. And he really wasn't going to kill him.
“What you do,” he said, continuing carefully on his journey and managing miraculously to avoid the large pile of pig guts and chicken heads that told him he wasn’t far from home, “is you get paid for doing something and you do it and then everybody’s happy.A’n’t they?”
The boy stopped backing up, his ugly little monkey face transfigured by hope.
“Are they?”
“Fr’instance,” Shakespeare continued, “If you gev me the list of names you give to Catlin and the list of names who really were Kettle Annie’s clients and another list of names of people who were French Mary’s clients, then you might get some more money for it. If they were true names.”
“A shilling,” said the boy instantly, naming the largest sum he could think of, probably.
Shakespeare patted his purse which was in his doublet pocket because it was flat as a pancake and not worth the stealing.
“Two groats a list,” he said, “And I’ll feed you as well. Understand?”
The boy’s eyes gleamed in the dark. “Yerss yer honour,” he said, “But I don’t tell nuffink to Mr Catlin.”
Shakespeare narrowed his eyes with the effort of thinking straight. Not all the booze had burned off.
“That’s for you to decide,” he said, “Lift up that torch or it’ll go out.”
The boy held it up. Shakespeare shook his head muzzily again and hoped he could find some pennies somewhere... oh yes, he did have a penny for the boy firmly gripped in his hand. Good.
They got to the little chicken-breeder’s house in a very slimy alley. Shakespeare paid for the light home, discovered that the boy's name was Peter the Hedgehog and watched him go round the corner. Then he let himself in carefully so as not to disturb the hens roosting on the house beams in the downstairs room. His bedroom was up a ladder in the roof, but he was used to climbing it in the dark and drunk. He wasn't supposed to leave a watchcandle there because of the feathers everywhere, in case he set light to the place while he was out. He thought wistfully of the Earl of Southampton and the secure place that could be his as a rich man’s house-poet, with his own bedchamber and no feathers or chicken shit on the floor.
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