Crimson Rose (7 page)

Constance dropped her eyes demurely and then looked up from under her lashes. She had found this seldom failed, no matter how tense the situation. ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ she said. ‘My sister and I know some of the actors and we didn’t want to miss their entrance.’

The man looked her up and down and then did the same to Eleanor. ‘You do not surprise me that you … know actors,’ he said, the tiny pause speaking volumes. ‘But can you know them a little more quietly in future?’ He turned back to watch the stage, the back of his neck showing outrage better than many people could do with a written ten-page declaration.

‘I think we had better be quiet, Constance,’ Eleanor said loudly. ‘We wouldn’t want to annoy anyone!’

‘Madam,’ said a black-clothed man to Eleanor’s right in strident tones. ‘Do not worry that you are interrupting this masque of the Devil. We should all lift up our voices and proclaim our hatred of this mumming and blasphemy, with boys dressed as women, and men—’ He was cut off short as the burly men who had removed the bawdy woman appeared at his shoulder.

‘Would you like to come along with us, sir?’ one of them said, grabbing an arm.

‘No, I have paid my penny and I intend to stay!’ the man said, trying and failing to cross his arms.

‘We have Master Henslowe’s instructions to refund your penny, sir,’ said the other man, wondering if anybody realized the extreme unlikeliness of what he had just said. He leaned round and pressed the man’s jaw hard between finger and thumb. When his mouth popped open against his will, the first bouncer put a penny in it and then clamped it shut until he swallowed.

‘Refund complete, Zachariah?’ asked the second bouncer.

‘Complete,’ his colleague answered and, taking an elbow each, they walked the black-clad zealot backwards and flung him out into the street.

Constance and Eleanor had been staring transfixed as the little play within a play had unfolded, but Constance was the first to recover.

‘Eleanor,’ she said, ‘sweet sister, I think that I will never be able to understand this play if I stay in this spot. I can see a quieter part of the crowd over there and if I can make my way there, I will. I will meet you outside by the Bear Garden when the play is over and we can go home together.’

Eleanor nodded and turned back to the stage. It was very true what they said; Master Alleyn had a well-turned calf and if he ever took the armour off, he might display a well-turned manhood, too. Why Constance was being so coy, she would never understand. She let herself drift off on a daydream of the deceased Master Merchant and his one talent, as Marlowe’s mighty lines spun and twisted in the air above her oblivious head.

‘You pleased with it, Kit?’ Thomas Sledd was waving to his man who dutifully trooped out on to the stage with a placard round his neck that read, ‘Act Five, Scene One’. ‘He’ll have to go,’ he muttered to the playwright. ‘Deaf
and
illiterate. Not the right part for him at all.’

‘Relax, Thomas.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘It’s going well. Will? You look a bit put out.’

Shakespeare was edging his way behind the Arras that screened the orchestra. ‘It’s this bloody gun,’ he mumbled. ‘I hate the things.’

Sledd snatched the arquebus out of the actor’s hand. ‘I’ve told him, Kit, a hundred times. The thing’s as safe as houses. So are all the others.’ He pointed across the stage to the far wings where the others in the scene shouldered their weapons. ‘This fuse will burn for ever but it won’t do anything. You’ll get a flash and a pop and the clapper will do the rest. The Governor will scream – though, please God, not like he did in rehearsals – and you’ll get a round of applause. You’ll like that, Will, won’t you?’ And he stuffed the gun back into Shakespeare’s grasp before pirouetting away into darkness.

‘He’ll have to go,’ the Warwickshire man muttered to Marlowe. ‘Jumped-up stage hand! What does he know about the Muse?’

‘The Muse, Will?’ Marlowe chuckled. ‘Young Sledd has been making the Muse dance and sigh since I was singing at the High Altar at Canterbury and you were creeping unwillingly to school. Trust him. If he says the gun is safe, the gun is safe.’

‘I care not,’ the Governor of Babylon was bellowing from the ramparts below the heavens’ canopy, ‘nor the town will never yield As long as any life is in my breast.’

‘Oh, shit, that’s me!’ Shakespeare stumbled out into the limelight, colliding with Techelles and his guard before straightening and getting into his role.

‘Thou desperate governor of Babylon,’ he cried out, cradling the arquebus in his arms. ‘To save thy life, and us a little labour …’ He paused for Techelles to chuckle in reaction, but the dolt missed his cue and Shakespeare stormed on, ‘Yield speedily the city to our hands. Or else be sure thou shalt be forc’d with pains More exquisite than ever traitor felt.’

Kit Marlowe peered through the slats and sought out the face of Sir Francis Walsingham. He knew more about the pains meted out to traitors than anyone in the Rose that day but the face was as immobile and unreadable as ever.

The orchestra shattered the air and there were mixed cheers and boos as Ned Alleyn came on, drawn by half the cast in chains, their jaws strapped with leather and hauling the chariot Philip Henslowe had mortgaged Master Sackerson’s Bear Garden to buy. The action went on and Marlowe could see what the audience could not. Thomas Sledd and his number two had slipped iron bracelets over the wrists of the Governor of Babylon and hauled him upwards so that he hung from his own walls. The pain in his wrists, arms and legs was appalling and he growled in agony.

‘That’s good,’ Marlowe muttered to cast members nearby. ‘Did he do that in rehearsals?’

‘Your feet!’ Thomas Sledd hissed through the canvas and wood flat. ‘Put your feet on the ledge, you stupid bastard!’

With gratitude, the Governor found the ledge and the feeling flowed back into his wrists and hands.

‘See now, my lord.’ Amyras was Tamburlaine’s son, although John Meres was actually a year older than Ned Alleyn. ‘How brave the captain hangs.’

Alleyn gave another of his cruel, cynical laughs. ‘’Tis brave indeed, my boy: well done!’ He turned to Shakespeare, already fumbling with his wheel-lock. ‘Shoot first, my lord,’ Alleyn ordered, ‘and then the rest shall follow.’ Six guns came up to the carry as the cast became a firing squad.

‘Then have at him,’ the Warwickshire man shouted, ‘to begin withal.’ And he levelled the arquebus, before bringing it up to point at the Governor’s chest. There was a flash and a puff of black smoke. Shakespeare stumbled backwards with the thud of the explosion, momentarily blinded and with an appalling pain in his right shoulder. There was a scream and Eleanor Merchant fell back in the gallery, a gaping hole in her throat.

On his wall, the Governor jumped, jarring his wrists anew and he all but slipped off his perch. That wasn’t supposed to happen. ‘You save my life,’ he said, trying to keep things going, even though the groundlings were screaming and shouting, swaying now towards Eleanor Merchant’s box, now away from it, ‘and let this wound appease the natural fury of great Tamburlaine!’

Great Tamburlaine was striding across the stage. Shakespeare was standing in shock, the murder weapon still in his hand, the harmless wick still smoking. Thomas Sledd was there seconds later, easing the gun out of the actor’s cold hands while Philip Henslowe, as bewildered as everyone else, ran on to the stage and begged for order.

‘A doctor here!’ someone shouted. ‘For the love of God!’

And the screaming started again.

T
he wind whipped along Bankside that night, driving people to their beds and the stinging rain to the west. A handful of men, cloaked against the weather, splashed their way to the entrance of the Rose, dark and silent now that the crowds had gone and the place had ceased to resemble Bedlam.

A single church candle burned in the centre of the stage and the cast of
Tamburlaine
sat disconsolately around it, their faces flickering in the flame. They’d talked themselves hoarse over the bizarre events of the afternoon and Philip Henslowe had gone into a nervous decline. He had had to give some people their money back and he had never actually done that before. He was still feeling a bit queasy.

The doors crashed back and the group of men arrived, torches guttering in their faces, throwing lurid shadows around the empty galleries. Their pattens clattered on the boards and thudded on the groundlings’ mud, churned by the rain and panic of the afternoon. The man at their head stood alone for a moment, half-resting on a cane, then raised his torch higher. ‘I am Hugh Thynne,’ he told the company, ‘High Constable of London. Who’s in charge here?’

Four men were on their feet: Philip Henslowe, Ned Alleyn, Thomas Sledd and Kit Marlowe.

‘That’s all I need,’ Thynne grunted. ‘A committee.’ He turned to his constables of the Watch. ‘Find the doors. Nobody leaves. Which of you is Henslowe?’

‘I am,’ the impresario said. He had never met Hugh Thynne before but he knew his reputation; he’d be lucky to have a theatre at all by midnight.

‘Do I assume, Master Henslowe,’ Thynne said as he climbed the steps to the stage, ‘that these people are your company?’

‘They are, sir,’ Henslowe said. A fine-tuner of conversation was Philip Henslowe. If a man was your social inferior you called him sirrah and metaphorically shat all over him. If a man was the High Constable of London you grovelled for England.

Thynne looked him up and down. ‘You own this place?’ he sneered, wiping a finger along the edge of the stage.

‘I do, sir,’ Henslowe told him.

‘Who are you?’ Thynne half-turned to the next man.

‘Christopher Marlowe.’ There was no ‘sir’ this time.

‘What do you do here?’ Thynne asked.

‘Here?’ Marlowe looked around. ‘I watch my plays being enacted.’

‘Oh, a playwright.’ Thynne was dismissive. ‘I’ve met people like you before. Watson, was it? Nashe, I believe. There aren’t many people I don’t know.’

Marlowe chuckled. ‘You must have misheard me, Constable. I said I was a playwright.’

Such bonhomie as Thynne showed in his face vanished in an instant and he closed in on Marlowe so that their noses almost touched. ‘I didn’t mishear you and that’s
High
Constable, by the way.’

‘High Constable indeed, Master Thynne.’ Ned Alleyn felt that only his lofty intervention could defuse the moment. ‘You know me, of course.’

Thynne dragged his eyes away from Marlowe, committing every feature to memory, for the next time. And there would be a next time, he just knew it. He focussed on Alleyn. ‘No,’ he said flatly.

‘Edmund Alleyn.’ The actor bowed with an extravagant flourish, though it looked less dignified than it might have done because he was still wearing Tamburlaine’s half-armour, unbuckled and curiously unbecoming in Thynne’s torch light. The High Constable ignored him. ‘Let’s have more light in here!’ he shouted to no one in particular and Thomas Sledd obliged, clapping his hands and sending his stage hands skipping to find and light candles.

‘Careful, Thomas,’ Henslowe hissed. ‘Naked flame. Straw. Timber. I don’t have to paint you a picture.’ And he stared at the constables’ torches with undisguised panic.

‘Er … yes.’ Alleyn couldn’t let it go at that. ‘I am currently on loan to Master Henslowe, as it were, from the Lord Admiral’s Men. The Lord Admiral—’

‘I know who the Lord Admiral is,’ Thynne stopped him short. ‘One of too many rich gentlemen with troupes of actors as toys. Well, let me tell you – all of you – while I’ve got you here, you and your triple-damned theatres give me and my lads more grief than all the other low-life of London put together. You!’ He pointed his cane at Sledd, now back in the seated circle. ‘You’re the factotum here?’

‘Master Sledd is my Stage Manager,’ Henslowe volunteered.

‘Mute, is he?’ Thynne asked.

‘No, I ain’t!’ Sledd stood up to his full height and barely reached Hugh Thynne’s nose.

The High Constable smiled. ‘Then you’re the one I want to see. Where’s the gun?’

‘Backstage,’ Sledd told him.

‘And the body?’

‘The Tiring Room.’

‘Right. One thing more. Where was the victim when she was shot?’

‘Over there.’ Sledd pointed to a gallery to the left of the stage, half-hidden in darkness now.

Thynne took it in, turned and walked to the stage’s edge. Then he turned back. ‘Who fired the fatal shot?’

There was a silence in which eyes flicked from right to left and back again. After what seemed an eternity, a balding actor got to his feet. ‘I did,’ he said, looking Thynne squarely in the face.

‘Name?’ the High Constable asked.

‘Shakespeare … er … Shaxsper.’

Thynne walked slowly towards the man. ‘Well, which is it?’ he asked.

The Warwickshire man stood his ground. ‘Shakespeare,’ he said.

Thynne tucked the cane under his arm, reached out and took the actor’s right hand. He held it close to his eyes and proceeded to sniff his fingers, until Shakespeare pulled it away.

‘Powder,’ Thynne said. ‘You’ve fired a gun all right, and recently. Just checking you aren’t covering for another of your number. You know what they say … thick as thieves.’

‘That’s outrageous,’ Alleyn began, but Thynne was probably the only man in London capable of stopping the greatest actor since the time of Jesus from holding forth and it worked, with one flick of his hand.

‘Shakespeare. Sledd. You will come with me.’ And he marched towards the Arras at the back of the stage, the pair trooping behind him. Marlowe joined him. So did Henslowe and Alleyn. ‘Not you,’ Thynne growled. ‘Nor you. Nor you.’

‘These men were working under my auspices, Master Thynne,’ Marlowe said in level tones. ‘I owe them my support.’

‘Support?’ Thynne chuckled. ‘They’re going to need more than that.’ He paused for a moment, then relented. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But just you, Marlowe. And the rest of you,’ he yelled to the still sitting cast. ‘My men are at every door, every gate and there are others outside. If anyone attempts to leave … well, don’t attempt to leave.’

Sledd led the way behind the Arras, making sure Thynne’s flames didn’t catch the sparkling velvet and he led them down a small flight of stairs to the Tiring Room. Props lay everywhere here, wigs, dresses, shackles and all the panoply of ancient Persia, all of it made a few weeks ago by the sweated labour of Spitalfields. What had looked like gold and costly vestments to the groundlings was shown here in its true tawdriness as paint, plaster and a sprinkling of glamour, which was all lost in the harsh light of the Constable’s torch.