Crimson Rose (17 page)

‘I mean, to see the armourer.’

‘Pass me that parchment and my quill,’ Dee said. ‘And the ink. It should be in that upturned rat’s skull, over there.’

Marlowe passed it across with a grimace. ‘Any reason for the skull? It isn’t even properly watertight.’ Ink had dripped everywhere, across the surface of the table and had soaked into some rare-looking incunabula, piled haphazardly next to a charger on which a piece of pie and an orange had begun to fuse together with a fascinating mould.

‘Just for the look of the thing, my dear boy. Just for the look of the thing.’ Dee scratched at the parchment and then waved it in the air to dry it. ‘This should get you in. And out.’ He dripped some wax on the fold and pressed his ring on it.

Marlowe took it and put it away in his doublet. ‘Do you know everyone?’ he asked.

Dee thought for a moment, and then answered. ‘Not everyone, just everyone who needs knowing.’ He stopped speaking and looked fondly at the young man opposite. Kit Marlowe was all things to all men; when men spoke his lines, people listened. When he spoke them for himself, they listened harder. When he moved, there was almost a hint of burning tin on the air, the taste of lighting on open ground. But to John Dee, he was just a boy who, once upon a time, had sat beside his dead wife and promised to make Helene live again with his words. As if, for once, he had read the magus’s mind, Marlowe spoke, low and soft.

‘Helene was beautiful,’ he said. ‘“She is fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”’

‘You remembered!’ The old man looked up, with tears in his eyes.

‘No one will forget her while you live,’ Marlowe said, standing up and shrugging on his cloak. ‘And, when I have time, I will write such a play that will mean no one will forget her, not even when we are both gone, you and I.’

Dee stood up and hugged the playwright, patting his back, reluctant to let him go. ‘When you have time, Kit,’ he said.

‘When I have time.’

‘A
nd I tell you he’s not here!’ an exasperated Thomas Sledd was all but screaming at the High Constable who stood in the centre of the Rose’s stage like an ox in the furrow.

‘What’s all this fuss?’ Philip Henslowe clattered down the stairs from his counting house. ‘High Constable.’ He half bowed. ‘I’m afraid we’re full for this afternoon. Perhaps you could come back in August.’

The last time Philip Henslowe had met Hugh Thynne, the owner of the Rose had been more circumspect, as soon as he realized who Hugh Thynne was. But Philip Henslowe had made rather a lot of money since then and he could probably buy the High Constable three times over by now. That fact made him a little cavalier.

‘I’m looking for the actor William Shakespeare,’ Thynne told him flatly.

‘I keep telling the High Constable.’ Sledd sighed. ‘He
was
of this company. Now he’s in the Clink.’

‘He’s
not
in the Clink!’ Thynne lost his temper at last, roaring at the boy-actor-turned-stage-manager. ‘He was released from the Clink by one Robert Greene … Do you know him, either of you?’

‘No,’ both men chorused and, for once, it was half true. Henslowe had met the crawler once and didn’t like him. To Thomas Sledd, Greene was one of those groatsworths who hung around theatres like grey miasma hung around graveyards.

‘Search it,’ Thynne barked to his catchpoles. ‘Every nook. Every cranny. And get under this!’ He thumped his right foot down on the stage so that the floorboards jumped and the dust flew.

‘Just a minute …’ Henslowe stopped them. ‘Where’s your warrant?’

Thynne turned to the man and fixed him with his basilisk stare. ‘My warrant, apple-squire? Can you be serious?’

‘Apple-squire?’ Henslowe spluttered. Tom Sledd had to wander away rather than burst out laughing. ‘Apple-squire?’ So outraged was Henslowe that he had to repeat it.

‘You
are
familiar with the term?’ Thynne checked.

‘Of course I am,’ Henslowe fumed. ‘And if you are insinuating that I am a pimp, a serving man in a bawdy house …’

‘Well?’ Thynne raised a dismissive eyebrow.

‘I
own
three of them,’ Henslowe roared. ‘The Punk Alice along Rose Alley. The Upright Man in Maiden Lane—’ Suddenly he stopped, realizing the extent to which he had incriminated himself.

An eerie sound rattled across the stage of the Rose; it was the sound of Hugh Thynne laughing. ‘Don’t worry, Master Henslowe,’ he chuckled, ‘I know the haunts you own and what goes on in them. I can close you down with a click of my fingers.’ He stepped closer to Henslowe and leaned in. ‘Do we have an understanding? About the warrant, I mean?’

Henslowe licked his lips and turned to Thynne’s men, already dispersing in pursuit of their enquiries. ‘Search away, lads. We’ve nothing to hide here.’ He dashed across the O and hurtled behind the gates of Babylon, already in position for the afternoon’s sell-out performance of
Tamburlaine
. ‘Tom, Tom,’ he hissed. ‘He’s not here, is he?’

Sledd looked at him, aghast. ‘No! I told Thynne, he’s in the Clink.’

Henslowe waved him away. ‘Just checking, Tom, I know you don’t tell me everything that goes on here.’

‘But …’ Sledd had been brought up on the road, with a troupe of vagabonds and thieves, most of whom wouldn’t know the truth if it got up and hit them round the head with a spade. But, against all the odds, he was probably the most truthful man in London.

‘No, no, don’t tell me. Best I don’t know. Just get up to my office, will you? I don’t want those flat-footed boobies ferreting about in my chest.’ He tutted and rolled his eyes to the Heavens. ‘God’s teeth! Give me an honest thief any day.’

Robert Greene, scholar of St John’s College, Cambridge, went to St Paul’s Cross that morning, in search of likely lads. As he watched the sun sparkling on the waters of the river, his task seemed as unlikely as something in a dream and he half expected to wake up any minute. As he turned to his left and saw the carrion kites wheeling over the bridge, swooping for their breakfast on the traitors’ heads on their pikes at the far end, the dream became a nightmare.

The din of the city was already starting up, the shouts of the watermen, ‘Eastward ho!’ and ‘Westward ho!’ echoing and re-echoing in the Vintry. Greene had been in London long enough to know which areas to avoid. Even in broad daylight he’d never venture into Alsatia, the Bermudas or Damnation Alley – he’d lose a lot more than his dignity if he ventured there. He crossed the Fleet Ditch and walked on up Ludgate. As he turned the half corner the smell hit him first, then the clamour. Hands were clawing at him through the bars of the grille at the gaol. ‘Alms, sir. For the love of God.’

Greene ignored them. He had places to be and the sweepings of the prison held no interest for him. On the hill ahead, St Paul’s rose in its granite vastness, dwarfing the little rickety houses lying round it. Yesterday had been an execution day and the temporary scaffold still stood there, to the left of the crowd at the Cross. Judging by the ankle-deep garbage that Greene trudged through, the crowd had been sizeable. The crowd there now were standing fascinated by a preacher in black from head to foot, haranguing them. ‘Beware,’ he was bellowing over the clash of the city and the lowing cattle on their way to Paradise by way of Smithfield, ‘for the Devil is among you.’ Greene was confident he didn’t mean him but as always when near a mob of the great unwashed, he kept his purse tight about him and his hand on his sword hilt.

Greene knew St Paul’s Walk. Like so many gulls new to the city he had lost his gold on his first visit there. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake. In the south aisle, he knew, the usurers gathered, those strange bearded Jews from Portugal, with their skull-caps and clipped way of talking. They were rarer than blackamoors, but if you found them anywhere in London it would be St Paul’s Walk, where their great-great-grandfathers had spat at the man in their own Damascus. Here, too, although Greene didn’t know it, Papists conversed in hurried, whispered conversations, spreading the vital news of their detested heresy. Like most vain people, Greene took little notice of anything more than an inch from the end of his nose and he would have passed the Pope himself without a second glance. The north aisle was already crawling with clerics hungry for a living and pestering anyone wearing an ecclesiastic robe just in case he was their ticket to a comfortable future.

At Duke Humphrey’s tomb the beggars clustered, in assorted rags and smelling like the Fleet Ditch. He didn’t linger long there, in case someone assumed he, too, was of their persuasion; although surely, no one so well dressed could be thought to dine regularly with the Duke. There was the usual crowd at the Si Quis Door, scanning the notices flapping in the breeze. Some of the more generous were reading out the job offers to those who couldn’t manage the long words and Greene toyed briefly with posting a notice himself: ‘
If anyone wants to take down an arrogant whoreson playwright a peg or two, please apply …
’ But then he realized he didn’t have to.

A cripple was dragging himself across the sunlit floor. He was grey and bent, his rags sweeping the flags and he hobbled on a crutch, a useless stump waving to one side of it. ‘The Dons took my leg, sir,’ the man was saying to a gentleman who stood there, at once appalled and transfixed by the beauty and the squalor of the place, ‘at those islands men call the Hesperides.’

The gentleman’s lady was leaning forward, a gentle look on her face. ‘You poor man,’ she was saying. ‘Have you no pension?’

The cripple looked at her, uncomprehendingly. ‘Pension, lady? I sailed as a privateer, madam. The Queen don’t pay us, because we don’t fly her colours.’

‘That’s dreadful,’ said the lady, reaching out with a kid-gloved hand, only to change her mind at the last minute. ‘Ralph,’ she looked up at her husband. ‘Give this poor man some money.’

‘Well, now, wait a minute …’ Ralph was by no means sure he wanted to share his worldly goods, even a little of them, with this ragged privateer.

‘Now, Ralph,’ his lady insisted, with a small edge creeping in to her voice.

Ralph sighed and, half turning from the beggar, tugged a couple of coins from his purse.

‘I said “some money”, Ralph,’ his wife said frostily, ‘not “an insult”.’ And, sighing, the hapless Ralph added more to his handout.

‘God bless you both,’ the beggar croaked, tugging his forelock as he hobbled away. He made for the Si Quis Door and Greene followed him. Once through the throng, the cripple’s dragging walk mysteriously speeded up and he vanished around a corner. Greene stopped and waited. It may be he was wasting his time, but he had a sixth sense about this man.

As he twisted around the buttress, a miracle happened. Not only was the beggar a head taller than he had been, he seemed to have shed fifteen years and grown a new leg. That was the one he was rubbing now, to bring the feeling back into it. Alongside him lay a leather harness, the one that had pinned the limb up into his tattered Venetians a moment ago. Alongside him too, another man was counting out coins, including the goodly handful just wrested from Ralph, via his soft-hearted wife.

‘Bravo!’ Greene cried, clapping his hands slowly. ‘I’ve never seen it better done. But what are you, exactly? A whipjack or a ruffler?’

The beggar looked confused and decided to brazen it out. The roisterer standing there, hands on hips, wasn’t a constable nor even a catchpole. No need to feel his ears burning just yet. ‘I’m afraid I don’t …’

‘Beg for a living, pretending to be a soldier? Or a man who has suffered losses at sea … yes, you do, I’ve just seen you do it.’

‘All right,’ the ex-beggar’s accomplice said flatly. ‘You know thieves’ cant and you’ve caught out my friend here. The question is … are you going to live to tell the tale?’ Suddenly there was a knife in his hand and he was on his feet. Greene stepped backwards, his hand on his sword-hilt again.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he said quickly. ‘You misunderstand. I have need of your services.’

‘Oh?’ said the newly restored cripple. ‘For what?’

Greene came as close as he dared, trying to ignore the blade inches from him. ‘Does the name Christopher Marlowe mean anything to you?’

‘It might,’ the knife man said.

‘He’s a playwright,’ the cripple said, still flexing his leg and fumbling behind him for his boot. ‘His
Tamburlaine
’s playing at the Rose.’

‘That’s right.’ The other one slipped his knife away in an economic movement borne of long practice. ‘He’s a genius, some say.’

‘That’s right,’ his friend agreed.

‘That’s not right!’ Greene tried to prevent his voice sounding too shrill and all but succeeded. ‘The man is a purloiner of other people’s creation.
I
wrote
Tamburlaine.
’

‘Did you now?’ said the money man, turning to his friend. ‘This is the
real
genius, Ing.’

‘I knew it, Nick.’ The erstwhile cripple stood up and stamped around to remind himself where his toes used to be. ‘Genius will always out, they say.’

‘This Marlowe,’ the other man said. ‘What do you want done to him? And who are you, as a matter of fact? We don’t do … jobs for just anyone.’

‘I am Robert Greene,’ he announced. ‘Poet and playwright. And you are …?’

The man got up and bowed with a flourish. ‘Nicholas Skeres, ruffler, whipjack, palliard and, if needs must, a prigger of prancers. My badly dressed friend here is Ingram Frizer – largely the same qualifications, but not so good.’

‘Stow you!’ Frizer spat. ‘Well, Master Greene,’ he beamed, ‘I believe Nick asked which of our many skills you require. Throat-slitting comes extra.’

‘It does.’ Skeres nodded solemnly. ‘We have our own blades, of course, but there’s the cost of hiding out in the country.’

‘New clothes,’ Frizer added. ‘You can rarely get the stains out.’

‘True,’ Skeres agreed. ‘Sometimes, we even need a passport …’

‘Dear God, no,’ Greene said.

Frizer looked at Skeres. ‘Doesn’t look like a big payer, Nick,’ he said.

‘You’re right.’ Skeres nodded.

‘It’s not the money, gentlemen,’ Greene assured them. ‘It’s the task. I don’t want Marlowe dead. Just … well, done down, shall we say?’