Crimson Rose (9 page)

The weaselly man swivelled his eyes to the counting pots on the table. ‘Do we know the total, Master Henslowe? For yesterday?’

Henslowe poked the pots and set them rolling. ‘As you see, Master Corkerdale,’ he said, ‘they have not been broken yet. I believe that we had a full house, though, so we have done well. We will count them into the chest later. I need to know what I should do about—’

Preston’s fist came down on the table and made the pots jump. ‘All those in favour of going on with the play, say Aye.’

The table roared back, ‘Aye.’

Preston turned a greasy eye in Henslowe’s direction. ‘All those against going ahead with the play and ruining us all, causing our wives and children to live out their lives in poverty and disgrace, say Nay.’

Henslowe set his mouth. The play was indeed the thing, but his conscience was troubling him all the same. A woman was dead. A man was in prison and likely to die there. There was something not quite right in his little world within the wooden O. He pushed himself back from the table.

‘As you wish, gentlemen. I will let Thomas Sledd know to tell the actors and stage men. Meanwhile, I think I’m going to have a little chat with my bear.’ He left the room with what dignity he could muster. What no one heard was his final sally as he clattered down the stairs. ‘At least you can get some sense out of Master Sackerson.’

Thaddeus Bancroft was picking his way carefully down Rose Lane when he became aware of a noise behind him. He knew who it was, so didn’t panic, but it struck him it was not a noise one would wish to hear coming from inside the linen press in a bedroom on a cold dark winter’s night. It sounded as though Master Sackerson, struck down with catarrh, was breathing down a trumpet whilst eating a very soggy pie. Bancroft was being chased by Preston, the pork butcher.

‘Master Preston,’ he said, without turning round.

‘Master Bancroft,’ the butcher wheezed. ‘I wonder, could we sit down? I find walking and talking together somewhat of a trial these days.’

Bancroft looked at him dispassionately and couldn’t help but wonder how long ‘these days’ were. That amount of lard around the middle didn’t happen overnight. And were the man’s eyes simply extraordinarily like the animals he cosseted then slaughtered, or were they ordinary eyes, but very deeply sunk in fat? He settled on a combination of the two.

Bancroft steered him to a low wall and the man lowered himself on to it, gratefully. The wall was very low and getting up would be a challenge, but it was better than walking, any day. Bancroft stayed standing, his eye straying down the street to where Henslowe leaned over the wall into Master Sackerson’s Pit, talking earnestly, throwing his arms around as excitably as any actor and, worryingly for anyone who had money invested in the man’s enterprise, apparently waiting now and then for a reply.

‘Did you chase after me for a reason, Master Preston, or is this a social call?’ Bancroft was a busy man. His business didn’t run itself. Unlike Preston he didn’t have a family of burly sons who could do the work three times as well and twice as fast.

Preston took offence. ‘I just thought I might have a word, Master Bancroft, that’s all. I wouldn’t trust that lawyer further than I could throw my prize pig and as for Corkerdale, he’d murder his mother for fivepence.’

‘What about the new man. Flaunt, was it? I didn’t catch his name properly. Is he a new investor?’

‘That was one thing I was going to ask you,’ the butcher wheezed, his lungs sounding like a bagpipe with moths. ‘Can we afford new investors? My dividend was very small last Lady Day.’

‘Marlowe’s plays will make us all rich men,’ Bancroft said. ‘I can’t remember the last time I went home with lines from a play ringing through my head.’

Preston was aghast. ‘You’ve been to one of his plays?’ He tried to get up by rocking back and forth, but gave it up as a bad job. ‘I didn’t have you down for an arty type, Bancroft. I had you down as a hard-nosed money man.’

Bancroft sighed. The man was, indeed, a pig. ‘I invest in the theatre because I love poetry and beauty,’ he said. ‘If occasionally we have to back plays about rude mechanicals hitting each other with bladders, then so be it. But even then, I attend. I think it only fair.’ He paused. ‘Why do you invest in the theatre?’

‘Why, to make money, of course!’ Preston was as amazed as he was disgusted. That he had been about to ask financial advice from some primping poetry-spouting prig … He was aghast. ‘I invest in all kinds of things. I’ve got money in …’ He raised one fat finger after another, listing his interests: ‘Pigs – well, that goes without saying. The pig will never go out of fashion. Hides. Candlemaking – the rendering side of things, of course. Er … I have some interests in a printer in Paternoster Row, but I think he’s gone a bit religious. Not reliable, so I may remove my patronage there. Er …’ He waggled his thumb as he tried to remember his other money-making ventures.

‘A very mixed lot of interests,’ Bancroft said. ‘I just invest in my business and the theatre. The two things keep me busy enough.’

The butcher leaned over and took a pinch of Bancroft’s doublet between his finger and thumb. Looking down, Bancroft could hardly believe how like a trotter it looked. ‘Nice bit of stuff, Master Bancroft. The wife is always on at me to smarten myself up. Who is your tailor?’

Bancroft conjured up a picture of the man who made his clothes, a gentle-eyed man with a soft voice and agile hands. Going to be fitted for a new shirt or doublet was a little piece of Eden in the middle of Pandemonium and he wouldn’t share his name with this porcine bully. ‘Er … my cousin’s wife arranges all that. I don’t know the man’s name. I am sorry, Master Preston.’

Preston started rocking again, holding his arms out to Bancroft for help. Bancroft looked down at him and smiled ruefully, then put his hands in the small of his back. ‘I’d love to help you, Master Preston,’ he said, ‘but my apothecary says I really mustn’t. I have to dash now. Give my regards to Mistress Preston and the boys.’ And he was gone, picking his way through the mud as though Preston didn’t exist.

As he turned the corner, he stopped an urchin who was running with almost everyone else in earshot to see what the noise was about. ‘If you help that fat man off that wall,’ he told him, ‘he will give you a penny.’

The child’s eyes lit up and he turned to go.

‘Make sure you get it up front,’ Bancroft advised, and went on his way, a smile playing on his thin lips above his fashionable beard.

On his way to commune with Master Sackerson, Henslowe had been waylaid by Richard Burbage again. He was leaning against the oak beams of the Rose, making small talk with a girl and when he saw Henslowe, he broke away and pounded over to the theatre owner.

‘Master Henslowe.’ He doffed his cap with a theatricality that might have rivalled the incomparable Alleyn, assuming Burbage could act at all. ‘I just heard of the tragedy.’

‘Just heard of it, Burbage? You were there, man. You heard it at the time. And saw it. Good day. I have a bear to see to.’

‘No, no.’ Burbage was insistent. ‘Not the woman. Oh, that was … dreadful, of course, quite dreadful. No, no, I mean Master Shakespeare. What a loss to the theatre.’

‘We’ll manage,’ Henslowe grunted.

‘I don’t see how,’ Burbage said, too loudly and too quickly. Then, more cajolingly, ‘I mean, you have a vacancy. Who could possibly play the King of Argier?’

Henslowe frowned. ‘Almost anybody,’ he said.

‘But I …’

‘
You
,’ Henslowe said, prodding the man’s chest, ‘are not even of my company. Or indeed, any company.’ He looked at the boy’s large nose and straw-stubbled chin. ‘Come back when you can grow a beard.’

From his point of view, the conversation was over, so he crossed to the low wall above the Bear Pit, smiling broadly. ‘How’s my little dumpling?’ he cooed to the four-hundredweight mass of fur, sinew and bone snoring gently on his rock.

B
ecause Eleanor Merchant had died in the Rose Theatre and because the Rose lay within the verge, within twelve miles of where Her Majesty lay at Placentia, it was Sir William Danby, the Coroner Royal, who presided over the proceedings.

He had every reason to be pleased with himself. After years of slogging it out at the Bar, from the Inns of Court to the heights of the Queen’s favour, he had become, at last, Coroner Royal and he sat that morning in his outer office in the great Palace of Whitehall, the glittering chain around his neck. There were some unkind souls who said he wore it in the bath.

Hugh Thynne was not one of those. As he waited to be shown into the presence, looking out of the window at the Queen’s guard marching and counter-marching in the mud of the tilt yard, he reflected on his lot in life. He would never see forty again, but the round of a skinner’s assistant had never really appealed and one day he had hung up his scraping knife forever and offered his services to the parish. However, he kept his yearly subscription to the Worshipful Company of Skinners just in case crime began to pall.

The door opened and a liveried flunkey ushered Thynne into the chamber.

‘Thynne.’ Danby was sitting cross-legged at his desk, its surface buried in scrolls. ‘I expected you at the inquest.’

‘Sir William?’

‘The dead man in the Thames.’

‘I thought it was time Constable Williams won his spurs, sir. How was he?’

‘Perfectly good.’ Danby rolled up a paper and slid it aside. ‘Perfectly good. I don’t suppose we know who he was, the dead man?’

‘We are still making our enquiries, Sir William,’ Thynne told him. ‘Now, to the other matter—’

There was a sharp rap at the door. ‘Begging your pardon, Sir William,’ said the flunkey standing there with a letter in his hand. ‘This came just now, sir. It carries the seal of Lord Burghley.’

Danby frowned. ‘Does it now? Er … later, Hugh …’

‘Are we still for supper on Wednesday night?’ Thynne asked. ‘My wife is so looking forward …’

‘Ah, I’ve a problem there, Hugh,’ Danby said, slitting the wax seal with his knife. He read Burghley’s missive quickly. ‘Er … I’ll let you know. Can you see yourself out?’ He waved the letter. ‘Affairs of State. You understand.’

Three days had passed since William Shakespeare had been unceremoniously frogmarched to the grim, low granite of the Clink in the Liberty of the See of Winchester and there they threw away the key. It was not until the next day that Kit Marlowe jumped the puddles of Bankside in another London downpour. Windlass had argued he should go with him, but Marlowe had hired, he reminded him, a manservant, not a nursemaid. Windlass was to stay put – hadn’t he got some pewter to polish? Marlowe tapped with his rapier hilt on the solid oak door. A grille slid sideways and a face peered out, one or two brown teeth still clinging desperately to their gums. ‘Yes?’

‘I wish to see a prisoner, newly brought.’

‘Name?’

‘William Shakespeare.’

‘Who wants him?’ the face beyond the grille asked.

‘I do,’ Marlowe told him.

‘You’ll need a pass,’ the gaoler grunted, narrow-eyed.

Marlowe slid the sword away into its hanger and flashed a silver groat. The gaoler smiled. ‘The very one,’ he said and the grille slammed shut. There was a growl of locks and a rattle of chains and a wicket door creaked open. Marlowe stepped inside. He was standing in a yard surrounded on all sides by ramshackle buildings that had once been inns. Prisoners wandered everywhere, some ignoring each other, others in whispered conversations out of the corners of their mouths. On a hay mound in the far corner, a large man was lying on top of a trollop, jerking up and down. Her legs were spread wide but other than that she appeared to be totally unmoved by the whole experience and was in fact carrying on a desultory conversation with a woman who sat on the ground alongside, suckling a child.

‘The pass?’ The gaoler held Marlowe’s sleeve. He flipped the coin to him.

‘Where will I find Master Shakespeare?’

‘What’s he in for?’ the gaoler asked.

‘He’s accused of murder,’ Marlowe told him.

‘Oh.’ The gaoler’s face lit up. ‘
That
Master Shakespeare. You’d better leave that sword here, sir. There’s people in this building would kill you for that.’

‘They can always try,’ Marlowe told him, his hand on the weapon’s hilt.

‘Suit yourself.’ The gaoler slid back the wicket bolts before lighting a lantern and trudging across the yard. ‘We don’t have many murderers here, as it happens. Harlots, fornicators, pretty boys, night-wanderers. Oh … and over there –’ he pointed to the corner with the copulating couple – ‘recusants. Go on, my son,’ he bellowed to the thrusting man. ‘Give her one from me.’ He leaned closer to Marlowe, his dreadful teeth bared in a grin. ‘Not that I’d go nearer than a bargeman’s pole to her,’ he assured him. ‘Your Master Shakespeare has a whole room to himself; Master Side’s what we call it here.’ He fumbled with a huge key in another lock and then stopped short. ‘’Ere.’ He looked hard at Marlowe and his weapons, having noted that the man was also carrying a dagger at his back. ‘You ’aven’t come to kill him, have you? Only, I’ve got a reputation to uphold.’

‘No.’ Marlowe smiled. ‘He’s a friend of mine.’

‘Oh,’ the gaoler sneered. ‘Pretty boy, eh? Well, it takes all sorts. Just remember –’ he pressed his face close again – ‘there
are
laws against that sort of thing, you know.’ He kicked open what had once been an inn door and held up the lantern so that Marlowe could see his way in the room’s grim interior. A whole family of rats had made their home in the crumbled wainscoting and the floor was slippery with urine-soaked straw. A pale, balding man was crouched on a rough stool in one corner. He peered at him as the light from the outside hurt his eyes.

‘Thank you, gaoler,’ Marlowe said. ‘Leave the lantern, will you?’

‘I’ll have to lock you in,’ the man grunted. ‘Bang on the door when you’re ready.’ And he trudged off, turning the key behind him.

Marlowe squatted in front of the actor, placing the lantern carefully on the floor. There was no possible chance that the straw would catch fire, wet as it was, but he wanted to keep the glare from the man’s eyes. He leaned forward. ‘Will?’ he said, gently. ‘How are you?’