His Dark Lady (48 page)

Cheapside, London, autumn 1586

THE LEAVES TURNED
red and golden on the trees as summer slipped warmly into autumn that year. Although Goodluck had been at home some weeks, under the care of a maid sent to him by Walsingham as a gift for his good service, it was the twentieth of September before he felt well enough to leave his house in Cheapside. The worst of the wounds he had sustained during his fight with Twist had long since healed, and no longer irked him. But his heart weighed heavy, and he could not help but feel he had made the wrong decision in allowing Lucy to be married to Jack Parker.

Yet what else could he have done? He had visited her new home at Aldgate not long after the wedding, and found Lucy silent and withdrawn. The lad Jack had not touched her, though, so she had sworn when she had spoken with Goodluck privately, and he had been forced to leave her there in the company of the young man’s parents, a tight-lipped pair who seemed to loathe their new daughter for her black skin.

He had agreed with Walsingham that any marriage was better than none, for her belly would soon be rising out of her gown, but Goodluck was both sad and relieved that he had not been able to attend the ceremony and see his darling girl handed away to another man.

Coward! You wanted her for yourself
, his heart jeered, and his
mind
could not argue with that damning testimony. Though he could never have asked Lucy to marry him and watched the devotion in her face turn to scorn as she realized that even Goodluck, her own guardian, lusted after her like an ageing satyr.

No, however subdued she was as a new wife, Lucy was excellently placed with this Jack Parker, a younger man who would be a better father to her child than an old spy like Goodluck could ever hope to be.

Roughly an hour before dawn that September morning, Goodluck pulled on a hood and cloak, and trod wearily out through the city and across to St Giles-in-the-Fields. There a sturdy scaffold had been erected, with a gibbet on top, and already a crowd had gathered around it, several thousand strong, with more flooding in as they waited in the chill dawn light, buying apples, spicy gingerbreads, and hot handfuls of nuts from the street sellers’ glowing braziers, stamping their feet and singing the hour away until execution time.

Goodluck had witnessed many executions over the years, and knew them to be foul but oddly satisfying events for the crowd. Today, however, there was a tense silence as the cart pulled up, the drums began, and the condemned men, chained at wrists and ankles, were led in a shuffling row to the scaffold steps. Everyone had heard, as Goodluck himself had done, that these men were not to hang until they were dead, but were to be cut down warm from the rope and sliced straight open, still kicking. The ones at the front had all been discussing it as the cart appeared. This savage decision, one burly man suggested, was to frighten other would-be assassins in the crowd by the extraordinary terror of their deaths. Most seemed to agree with him, and Goodluck heard many muttering ‘Unjust!’ and ‘Too cruel!’ as the men trooped on to the platform above, most stooped and pale after weeks spent under torture in the Tower cells.

Some of the traitors came up the steps bruised and sullen-faced, waiting in silence for their turn to die. Among them Goodluck recognized Dunne and Barnwell, both men determined and recalcitrant in their last hour on earth. By contrast, young Anthony Babington seemed terrified out of his wits as he gazed at the crowd of thousands who had come to watch him pay for his crime, then raised his eyes to the rough gibbet from which they would all hang.

One man at the back of the scaffold, whom Goodluck did not
recognize
, looked up at the gathering light of day and cried loudly, ‘Save us, O blessed Mary, Mother of our Lord!’ and was promptly knocked to his knees by an executioner’s man.

A few laughed at this spectacle. Others called out, ‘For shame!’ Still others crossed themselves furtively, muttering the Lord’s Prayer under their breath. Some wept openly and tore their hair, perhaps relatives or friends of the men about to die.

One red-faced, corpulent woman, whose gown and apron strained tightly over her belly, called each traitor’s name aloud in a shrill voice, demanding that they should say why they had betrayed their country before they were hanged, ‘So we shall understand why you would spit in the face of our good Queen Bess and plot to put a whore and a Papist on the English throne!’

Stripped of his clothes, Ballard came to the gibbet first. Naked but unbowed, he stood straight and read aloud a passage from St Augustine while the crowd jeered.

‘Forget this Papist nonsense! Confess your treason like an honest man!’ called one of the sheriff’s men, standing not far from Goodluck.

Ballard did not reply, but handed the book to one of the others when he had finished, and sank to his knees, praying quietly to himself.

‘Have you no shame, priest?’ demanded the sheriff himself, who seemed delighted to have been granted the honour of dispatching such notorious traitors. ‘You would have killed the Queen and laid waste to the whole of England. Surely you will not go to your death with that on your conscience?’

‘I shall be with the blessed saints and angels before long,’ Ballard replied. Glancing down at the crowd as though searching for someone in particular, he scanned the faces of those nearest the scaffold. His eyes narrowed slightly, pausing momentarily on Goodluck’s face, then he turned to the executioner. ‘I am ready.’

The chaplain, at his back, could not resist one last stab at the poor fellow. ‘The angels will not receive you if you die a Papist. It is not too late to turn away from that corrupt faith before you meet your Maker.’

Stubbornly, awaiting his punishment, Ballard began to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Latin, as used to be done under the old religion. The
chaplain
cursed him for a heretic and a fool. Bustling to the front of the platform, he held up his plain wooden cross and spoke across the Latin, reciting the same prayer in English and encouraging the crowd below to join in and drown out Ballard’s voice.

His prayers finished at last, Ballard’s hands were bound behind his back, the thick coil of the rope placed about his neck, and he was set upon a stool.

The stool was kicked away. Ballard’s eyes bulged and his legs jerked fitfully as the rope tautened about his neck. After only a few moments, the executioner stepped forward and cut Ballard down. He lay on the platform gasping, his eyes rolling white in his head.

‘So perish all traitors!’ cried the sheriff to the crowd, even though the man was still plainly alive.

The executioner’s knife flashed in the early-morning light. There was an agonized scream, and suddenly he was holding Ballard’s penis aloft, blood spurting from a gaping wound between the man’s thighs.

The crowd shouted and stamped their approval while Ballard writhed helpless, his hands still bound, gurgling incoherently in his throat.

His penis was thrown aside into a basket. Then the knife flashed again, slitting his belly straight across until it gaped like a blood-stained mouth.

Delving inside with both hands, the executioner tugged and struggled, slowly dragging Ballard’s innards out. They spilt across the platform, a coiled heap of shiny, reddish-purple loops steaming in the chill September air. Then he began to hack brutally into Ballard’s chest, ducking the jets of blood which soaked his leather apron. Again the crowd cheered and applauded, though those nearest the platform were holding their noses by now, repelled by the stench of the condemned man’s entrails and the shit he was passing in his last moments. Ballard’s legs kicked almost on their own, his bare feet slipping in his own blood, his mouth working frantically, though by now he was beyond even an attempt at speech. Then his heart was out of his chest, still pumping blood as the executioner held it up for all to see.

In a gush of blood, Ballard died.

The crowd quietened for a few moments as the body was roughly
quartered
and its four parts dragged away to be thrown into the grave already dug and waiting for them, close at hand. Only when Ballard’s severed head had been stuck on a spike and paraded in front of the watching people did they stir again, calling, ‘God save Her Majesty!’ and cursing all traitors.

Then their eyes turned to the next man in line, named as a Master Tichborne, who was still weeping and begging the Queen’s forgiveness as the executioner cut his heart out. Goodluck did not recognize Tichborne, but heard him blame Babington several times as he lay dying, claiming he had corrupted them all, and saw Anthony stare and shake his head, his face white with terror.

The executions continued, relentless in their violence, blood spraying the faces of those nearest the scaffold as each traitor died in choking agony, their bodies hewn apart and decapitated before being dragged to their allotted graves. Even the vast crowd, so keen at first to see the traitors punished, grew weary in the end. Some near the platform cried out to the executioner to let the last men hang until dead, ‘For pity’s sake!’, while others turned away from the carnage in heaving disgust, or vomited where they stood. But Goodluck could see that the sheriff had no intention of deviating from his orders. His small eyes watched viciously as each man danced on the end of the hangman’s rope, and his nod seemed given more quickly each time.

Eventually it was Babington’s turn.

Trembling, his handsome face almost unrecognizable under the bruising and dirt, he shuffled forward to speak his last words. But his voice seemed to fail as he stared out at the crowd. His hands were bound behind his back while he gazed helplessly up at the sky, almost as though hoping to see an angel descend and save him from the agony he knew was waiting for him.

The rope having been placed about his neck, Babington cried out ‘
Parce mihi, Domine Jesu!
’ and then he was thrashing in mid-air, his eyes bulging in panic.

Goodluck had seen enough. He turned and elbowed his way through the tight-packed, shouting crowd until he was clear of their madness and could breathe a sweet country air unpolluted by blood and shit and the acrid sweat of his fellow men. Suddenly queasy, he stopped to retch behind a young oak tree, then wiped his mouth and
carried
on more slowly through sunlit fields towards the city walls. What a sorry waste of life, he thought, and grieved for the violence of their deaths even while he knew it to be necessary. Lord Jesus had not spared Anthony Babington, despite his desperate last plea on the scaffold. For how else could this sorry charade have ended but in a traitor’s death for them all? Without such dire and unspeakable punishments for rebellion against the Queen, she would have lost her throne long ago.

And if he had not managed to get word to Lucy and be released from the Tower, he too might have joined their sad band on the scaffold this morning.

Goodluck stared ahead at the smoky city, lying squat and snug between the glittering coils of the Thames. Life on this earth was short and needlessly brutal, and it sometimes seemed to him that he had little of it left to enjoy. He loved Lucy, and as more than simply the child he had been left to bring up. He owed his life to her courage. So why the hell had he allowed Walsingham to take her away and marry her off to that fool Jack Parker?

So you could not be tempted to marry her yourself, he thought savagely.

At least Parker was a boys’ man. He was not interested in women. Or so Walsingham had repeatedly reassured him when he had arranged for the marriage to take place. Lucy should be safe enough at Parker’s house for the time being, hidden away from John Twist, whose whereabouts were still unknown, but who was probably back in London by now.

And Lucy’s reputation was safe, too. She was less likely now to forfeit any future place at court for her mistake in lying wantonly with Will Shakespeare. That prize must be worth the weight of any rushed, clandestine marriage to a youth she neither knew nor could love.

Two

SEATED AT HIS
workshop bench, clad in an old sheepskin jacket and woollen cap, his father looked up blankly as Will ducked his head through the low doorway, glad to get out of the rain which had been falling mistily all morning.

John Shakespeare did not recognize his son.

‘How may I serve you, sir?’ he asked politely, setting aside the rectangle of kidskin he had been stretching over the wooden shaper.

The cramped workshop was just as it had been when Will had left it, the stink of new hides soaking in buckets in the passageway, fine skins hanging from the ceiling, ready to be cut and shaped, a rack of ready-made gloves for sale on the front counter, his father’s workbench cluttered with tacks, pins, several lengths of gold lace and bobbins of gold thread to match. On a separate shelf near the wall were his glovers’ tools, a confusing array of knives, clippers, shapers, moulds, wooden patterns, and the curved steel needles he used for threading rough cowmens’ mittens in the cold season. Will remembered picking up each of these curious implements with interest, when forced to work there as a boy, and asking what they were for. Now he looked on them with nostalgia, so very different from the tools he used in the theatre, the ramshackle chests of properties and costumes, the torn script rolls and the blunted knives they used for stage fights.