Strange Devices of the Sun and Moon (2 page)

“Nay.”

She wondered if he was telling the truth. She liked the young men who visited her, but they seemed very much like the plays they wrote, glorious and fantastical but not really fit for daily life. They all thought, or seemed to think, that they needn't work for a living, that their books and plays would earn them enough to live on, and she wondered where on earth they had gotten this extraordinary idea. Look at Tom Nashe now, she thought, lacking nourishment, prone to illness every few months, sometimes unable even to pay his rent. He looked years younger than he actually was, as if he were a foundling. Even his pale watery hair seemed to proclaim his straits, as if it had once been a more robust color, and he couldn't seem to grow a beard. He had on patched and stained clothes, and his newfangled falling collar, worn in place of a ruff, exposed his stark collarbones, thick as thumbs. But they were all of them too thin, all except Chettle, and he looked as unhealthy as the rest. How did they survive? Whenever she saw one of them she wanted to take him aside and tell him to learn a trade before it was too late.

“Well, we must be going,” Thomas said. “Robert Greene forced a bailiff who came to arrest him to eat his citation, wax and all, and we have to see about his bail.”

“Did he really?” She had to laugh.

“Do you doubt my word? And served to it him very handsomely too, on a fine pewter plate.”

She was still laughing as they left, though in truth she was a little appalled. They all seemed to have this streak of cruelty in their makeup, even among themselves. Would they tell her if they found Arthur? Or would they think it was amusing to keep the news from her?

It was almost dusk, the shadow of the churchyard walls falling across a few of the nearer stalls, before she found time to talk to George. They went to the cookshop on the corner for supper, and as they sat eating mutton and drinking small beer she asked him, “Did you see that man in black who came to speak with me?”

“Nay. I told you—I was busy all day.”

“He asked me about my son.”

“It's not good for you to think too much of Arthur. You have said it yourself—he is probably dead.”

“The man I talked to thought him still alive. He asked for news of him.”

“Who was he?”

“I never saw him before. I was hoping you knew. And George—it was so strange—he offered me a coin for information, but the coin looked counterfeit, and when I told him so he smiled, as if he had set me some sort of test. And his smile—I didn't like it, not at all.”

“Did he threaten you?”

“Threaten? Nay, but he seemed—I don't know—intent on something. Almost as if he burned with a fever.”

“Promise me you'll tell me if he comes back.”

“I will. But truly I think he's a harmless madman, like the unfortunates who come into the churchyard at times. I doubt he'll be back.”

“This news worries me, Alice. It's not good for you to live alone, without a man. He would not have dared to trouble you if I had been there.”

“I do well enough.”

“How are your books selling?”

“Not badly.”

“But not well, either. You would have done better to have sold me your husband's business after he died. I thought that the best course then and it seems that way to me still.”

“And how would I have gotten my livelihood?”

“Why, use the money I would have given you. And the stationers' fund takes care of widows, you know that.”

“And when your money was gone? The stationers would have given me very little.”

“Why do you talk that way, as if I had made you a miserly offer? I would have been quite generous.”

“I did not want to sell the shop, no more than I want to sell it now. John would have wanted me to keep it.”

“But you knew so little about bookselling.”

“I learn more about it every day. I just bought another manuscript from Thomas Nashe—”

“Nashe? Who is he?”

“A young man my husband knew. His pamphlets sell well.”

“But how long and how well can you live on one writer's pamphlets? I cannot understand why you must be so stubborn.”

“I enjoy living the way I do.”

“But it's wrong, don't you see that? A woman must have a man above her to guide her, just as a country must have a sovereign.”

“The country does quite well with a woman to guide it.”

“Ah, but she was appointed by God.”

“I did not come to supper with you to argue theology, George.”

“I only tell you what any man in the churchyard would say.”

“I know too well what they would say. Tell me something else, something only George would say. You were my friend, the one I turned to after John's death. Tell me about—oh, the election we're about to have. Who do you think the booksellers will choose as Master of the Stationers' Company?”

After supper George insisted on accompanying her home. The moon, just waning from the full, washed the streets with silver. The churchyard lay empty and silent under its light, the square tower of St. Paul's bulking against the night sky. By a strange trick the tower looked to her to be farther away than the stars, a dark shape cut in the sphere of the night.

George steered her away from a muddy pothole in the road. He really is kind, she thought. And he truly cares about my safety. I wish he understood how hard it is to do what I've chosen to do, to continue the business that John had built up so carefully.

A pleasant smell, as of baking almonds, came from her house. She went inside, and in the pale light from the windows managed to make out that someone had left a cooling pan of marchpane on her sideboard. “I wonder who brought this,” she said. “It's very good of them, whoever it was. Have a piece, George?”

“Nay. It's late and I must be going home.”

“Maybe I have a suitor.”

In the dim light she could not be certain, but it seemed to her that George scowled.

2

In the Saracen's Head in Shoreditch, on the outskirts of London, the night was just beginning. It was a dim place with no windows, lit only by the cooking fire and a few candles. Knives and daggers had scarred the tables and benches. The air stank of smoke and tobacco and stale beer, and the rushes on the floor needed freshening. In one corner a group of men and women sang ballads and madrigals, hitting their pewter cups with knives to keep time. Across the room Robert Greene, freed on borrowed money he could not afford to pay back, was holding forth.

“Nay, I counted it a trifle, an afternoon's fair diversion,” he said. He took a sip of beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “The Compter is a spacious inn compared to some of the prisons which have sheltered me.” He was older than most of the playwrights, and that combined with his stocky build, his great beard and his mane of red-brown hair made him seem avuncular, a natural authority figure.

“Fleet Prison for me,” Thomas Nashe said. He drew on his tobacco-pipe. “I was served a rare vintage there, the last time I was in.”

Thomas Kyd looked between the two men as if trying to decide if they were jesting. He had heard otherwise, that men had died or disappeared in London's prisons, killed by starvation or disease or other prisoners. He was a very serious-looking young man, with a black curly beard and a pale face that, as Tom Nashe had once said, looked like unbaked bread dough. Unlike the other two he had not gone to either Cambridge or Oxford, and he seemed to feel very keenly that he was in some sense their inferior.

There was a fourth man sitting by the three of them, but whether he wanted to take part in their conversation, or was even listening to it, none of the others could say. He had red-gold hair and his eyes were an astonishing green, surrounded by dark, almost black, lashes. They had seen him in the tavern before: he never seemed to drink anything, or indeed to have any money, but by the end of the night he would appear as drunk as the rest of them.

“When were you in Fleet Prison?” Tom Kyd said finally, as if unable to keep silent any longer.

“Many a man of honor has sailed in that fleet,” Tom Nashe said, grinning at him. “Do you tell me that the queen has never offered you lodgings in one of her pleasure houses?”

“Well, of course not.”

“What, never been to the university and never been to prison? Tell me, Tom, what have you been doing with your life? It's a sad case when our brightest playwrights know nothing at all about the world they portray on stage.”

“I know enough,” Tom Kyd said. He wondered if Nashe meant what he said about “brightest playwrights” or if he was just talking to hear himself talk. Or if he was having another joke at Kyd's expense. A year ago Nashe had attacked him in print, and Kyd had decided never to return to the tavern, never to drink with such men again. But there was something about the university wits that kept him coming back, like a poor beggar to a fire. Their very profligacy seemed to blaze like a beacon; someday they would be consumed by it. Not he, though, Kyd thought. He was far too prudent.

“But this day I have made a vow,” Robert Greene said, “never to return to debtor's prison. You see before you a changed man.”

“I remember you have sworn such oaths before, Robin,” Tom Nashe said. “There is not a dog under the table that would believe you.”

“You would do well to make such a vow yourself, my young friend,” Robert said. “Give over your intemperate ways. Quit this foolish rancorous feud you have with Richard Harvey—”

“Harvey?” Tom Nashe said, his beer halfway to his mouth. “That gross-brained idiot? He attacked you first, and in print, too—how can you have forgotten it? He said you were not fit to pass judgment on other writers. And the answer you gave him in your pamphlet was not enough, I fear. It's a matter of honor, Robin.”

“I have struck out that part of my pamphlet—it will not go to press the way you saw it. I tell you, I have changed. As of this day I vow never to owe any man money, never to drink immoderately, never to do anything, by word or deed, that would show me not to be one of the most civil of Her Majesty's subjects.”

“Never to visit Em of Holywell Street?” Tom Nashe asked.

Robert turned to him angrily. But at that moment the fourth man, who until then had said nothing, spoke up. “You may do all of those things,” he said. “I forgive you.”

“You!” Tom Nashe said. “And who are you?”

“Do you not know your king?” The light of one of the candles flared up suddenly, and the man's shadow on the wall grew huge.

The shadow stilled Nashe's merriment for a moment. A serving-woman called an order to the tavern's host, sounding loud in the silence, and someone laughed and was hushed.

Then the candle guttered and died, and Tom laughed. “Ho, the king! And are you Elizabeth's son, or Mary's?”

“Mary?”

“Look at this fellow,” Nashe said, gesturing at the other two. “There's good sport here.” He turned to the young man. “Have you never heard of Bloody Queen Mary, who ruled in our parents' time? Surely you had a mother to tell you stories of the old bad queen.”

The young man looked confused. “Aye, I remember—”

“Good, he remembers his mother. A brave start. And your father? But perhaps that's a more difficult question.”

“Let him be,” Tom Kyd said. “He's lost his wits, can't you tell?”

“My father?” the young man said. “I—I don't—”

Nashe laughed. But Robert Greene had not finished with his earlier conversation, and now he turned to his friend. “Think about what I said, Tom. Don't let your pamphlet be printed as it is now, with the attack on Richard Harvey.”

“And why shouldn't I? Do you think I'm afraid of anything the Harveys might say? Let them answer me. They're all of them pompous asses. I remember Kit Marlowe said to me once—”

“Are you still keeping company with that man, known to the world for an arrant atheist?” Robert said.

“Where is he?” Tom Kyd asked. “I haven't seen him in London for several weeks.”

“He comes and goes as he pleases.”

“But on what errands?”

“Errands? No one knows.”

A few streets away, in the tavern at the sign of the Black Boar, Christopher Marlowe sat and listened to an agent of the queen. The currency exchanged at the Boar was intelligence, knowledge true and false, and so the place stayed silent, ill lit, remote from the hustle and bustle of London. At one table sat a soldier who had done good service in France a dozen years ago and who waited to be taken on for any trifling task again; at another Christopher recognized a man who would work for anyone, anywhere, who had once sold state secrets three times over, to the French, Spanish and English. A sour smell, of old beer and false hopes, lingered in the air.

Christopher took out his tobacco-pipe and lifted the candle close to light it. Whenever he saw Robert Poley he always wondered at how suited the man was for his trade. Look at him once and you wouldn't want to look at him again: his features were so ordinary as to turn him almost invisible. Average height, sandy hair, nondescript face; only his eyes, which were a pale, watery blue, made him stand out in a crowd.

“Did you get the book I asked for?” Robert Poley asked.

“Aye.” Christopher passed a slender volume to the other man, glancing again at the tide:
Being a True History of the Nobility of England, with an Especial Account of the Royal Families
.

“I suppose you read it,” Robert said dryly.

Christopher pushed back his long auburn hair—the same fashionable color as the queen's but much thicker, nearly unmanageable—and looked at Robert. His eyes were a light brown, and he wore a gold ring in one ear. “Of course I read it. Books aren't that easy to come by—I couldn't afford to pass this one up. I thought it interesting, if a little dry.”