Traitor's Storm (12 page)

‘Sorry, Master S,’ Tom said, and threw a ham hock with some shreds of meat still clinging. His Johanna was a dear girl but cooking was not one of her talents. Master Sackerson rolled over and mumbled on the bone, licking into the end for the marrow.

Tom sighed and rested his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. In a minute, he would have to go into the theatre and start trying to wring a performance out of the few actors who remained. Alleyn had stormed off in a huff and was holed up in the grand house of an even grander lady in Greenwich, at least until her husband came back. Burbage, given the lead in Alleyn’s absence, had taken umbrage and had also stormed off in a huff, flinging over his shoulder comments along the lines that he would be damned if he was so desperate as to take Ned Alleyn’s leavings. Shaxsper alone remained, but, losing more hair by the day, had decided that he was a playwright, not a player, and was skulking in corners with an inky face where he kept sucking the wrong end of his quill. Tom Sledd really did not want to go back inside.

‘Master Sledd?’ The voice at his shoulder made him jump and he turned on the newcomer, glad to have someone to shout at.

‘What in the name of God do you think you’re doing, idiot, to shout at a man who is sitting on the wall of a Bear Pit? I could have fallen in!’ Sledd swung his legs over the parapet and stood up on the pavement.

The speaker stepped back and then, drawn by his own inquisitiveness, stepped forward an extra pace. ‘Is there really a bear down there?’ he asked, looking over the wall.

‘Of course there is,’ Sledd said sharply, pointing to a sign on the wall. It said, in rather shaky capitals: ‘BEAR PIT’. ‘Can’t you read?’

Skirrow shrugged a shoulder. ‘Rather flea-bitten, but a bear nonetheless. I never thought to see such wonders,’ he said, trying to sound as though he meant it. Then he turned a rather unsavoury smile on Tom Sledd. ‘I can read, indeed I can, Master Sledd. That is how I could read your name on this packet here and also your description, written by Master Marlowe himself.’

‘Kit sent you?’ Tom Sledd felt his heart lift. If Kit was coming back … Then a horrible thought struck him. ‘Kit is well, isn’t he?’ Why would he write a description of him; why wouldn’t he come himself? He was lying, dead or dying, he knew it. Poisoned by hemlock. Skewered by a rapier. Drowned in the outer deeps. He should never have let him go.

If Tom Sledd had a failing, it was that he wore every thought on his head across his face, flickering and flashing light and shade as though the pictures themselves moved there. Skirrow laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Master Marlowe is well,’ he said. ‘My master, Sir George Carey, has asked him to get up a little entertainment for his guests, and Master Marlowe said there was no man in England who could put on a show as well as Thomas Sledd, of the Rose.’

Tom Sledd grew two inches and puffed out his chest. ‘Kit said that?’ he whispered.

Skirrow nodded and held out the package. Sledd tore it open, taking scant notice of the seal, which was just as well. Skirrow made a mess of it when he resealed it aboard the
Bowe
and had been picking at it absent-mindedly as he rode – it was a poor thing by now. But Sledd was reading, paraphrasing for Skirrow as he read, punching him on the arm every couple of words.

‘It’s true,’ the stage manager said. ‘It’s true. Kit wants me to go down to … a castle?’ He turned huge eyes on Skirrow, who sketched a bow. ‘And help them put on a play … with music …’ His eyes skimmed down the page. ‘He has enclosed some expenses …’ He weighed the little oiled silk bag which had been packed with the letter and then peered inside, raising his eyebrows. Little did he know it was now only half as valuable as it had been. Kit wanted him on the Wight and that was enough for him. He quickly did some calculations. An angel or two for Johanna and the rest for him would be enough. Skirrow meanwhile had taken the opportunity to step out of punching range.

‘So,’ he said, looking down on the bear again, which had now dropped off to sleep, tongue resting wetly on the bone. ‘To cut a long story short, are you able to come down to Carisbrooke and put on the ladies’ little amusement?’

His tone was bored and flat. He made it clear that he cared little about Tom, the ladies or their entertainment. Tom was of a mind to send the fellow packing. And yet … and yet, Kit had asked for him. The theatre was going to the dogs. Henslowe was on his back to get this atrocious play of the Spanish Tragedy up and earning. Alleyn was away … Kit was away … Johanna was proving not quite worth the indigestion …

‘Yes!’ Sledd said. ‘I just need to get some things.’ He heard a door slam in the theatre. ‘But not from there. We will just go past my home, if that is on the way.’ He paused. ‘Which is the way?’

Skirrow threw an arm behind him, pointing roughly south and west.

Sledd linked an arm with his. His step was light and he gave the man a tug down the lane into the muddy thoroughfare beyond. ‘We won’t be passing my house, sad to say,’ he said, with a smile. He could always send word later. ‘Horse or carriage?’ He so hoped it would be a carriage, but horse would do as well. He had covered the length and breadth of the country with Ned Sledd’s travelling players in an old cart with wooden wheels and a broken-down horse to pull it. Whatever this man had at his disposal, it would be a cut above that.

Skirrow laughed. ‘Horse.’ It was almost too easy, but Vaughan need never know. ‘The stables are down this way.’ And the two men walked off together, Sledd’s head full of dreams.

Inside the theatre, Philip Henslowe was in full cry. You can take a dyer out of Bermondsey but you can’t make him like stage managers.

‘Tom! Tom Sledd!’ The echoing rafters mocked him but that was all.

One of the lads looked up from his nest in the costume corner. He was trying to learn his lines. His lisp gave him an almost insuperable problem with them and he was working hard to make himself understood. He didn’t need all of this noise and bellowing. He had been promoted to Isabella from a lowly Page and this could be his big break. ‘See,’ he cried, ‘where his Ghost solicits with his wounds revenge on her that should have revenged his death.’

‘Shut up, you loathsome little scullion,’ Henslowe roared. ‘If you don’t get that lisping tongue of yours sorted out, you’re back to the spit-turning, you little runt. Now, where is Tom Sledd? Have you seen him?’

Choosing his words with care, the lad enunciated. ‘No, I haven’t … been near … anywhere where … he may be.’ How much easier to have said
No, Master Henslowe, I haven’t seen Master Sledd this morning
, but a lad had to think of his career.

‘Imbecile!’ Henslowe threw a random piece of rotting vegetable missed by the cleaning crew that morning and went off up the stairs to his office. By the time he had opened the window and yelled for Tom Sledd out in the street, he and Skirrow were cantering towards the road that led south through the marshes.

‘She said you’d be in a foul mood.’ Bet lay back on the pillows, puffing softly on Henry Meux’s pipe.

‘With her I usually am,’ Meux was washing his face in the water jug on the night stand. They were both talking in whispers.

‘You
are
beastly to her, Henry,’ Bet said, watching the smoke drift up to the velvet hangings of the bed. ‘She loves you, you know.’

He looked at her. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ He threw himself down next to her and tickled the soft flesh around her navel. ‘But she doesn’t have your charms, Bet. It’s like swiving a barn door.’

Bet chuckled. ‘What was all that nonsense with Matthew Compton?’ she asked.

‘Hmm?’ He was watching her skin prickle under his touch.

‘You were telling us over supper, before Cicely retired. That business with the bell and the candles.’

‘Oh, that,’ Meux chuckled. ‘Well, it
was
rather amusing, I suppose. But it doesn’t do much for George’s popularity, Bet, not among the Island gentry, anyway. Of course, the riff-raff lap it up. Did you know Compton?’

Bet set her mouth in a rueful half smile and shook her head a little, her curls whispering on the linen of the pillow. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Dillington.’ He chuckled again, reached for the pipe and sucked on it hard until the tobacco reddened and there was a roar from the stem, like a fire in a distant chimney. He handed it back and blew smoke to mingle with hers in the hangings. ‘Dillington said that you and he … well.’ For an adulterer Henry Meux was very nice about the words he used, and baulked at this one. ‘That you and he …’ He turned her face towards him and looked into her eyes. ‘Were you?’

She laughed and moved his hand back to her belly. ‘I may have met the man once,’ she said, her gaze not wavering. ‘He turned a handsome calf as I recall.’ She moved his hand further down and smiled. ‘But why did George see him off like that?’

‘He was a lawyer, by all accounts. I didn’t know.’

‘I had no idea he was a lawyer,’ Bet said, then hurriedly added: ‘That once I met him. Still, I suppose it’s hard to tell.’ She started to move rhythmically. ‘Whether a man is a lawyer or not. Not from his calves.’ She reached to one side and put the pipe down, wriggling down on the pillows as she did so.

‘Well, we’ll need a new centoner now, of course, in the Militia.’

She half turned to him. ‘Are you up to this?’ she asked. ‘Twice in one night. And you having tramped all over St George’s Down all day.’

‘I am if you are,’ he said. ‘But not so much noise this time, please, my lady. Cecily may be stupid and her room may be in the east wing, but she’s not deaf.’

Bet laughed, then covered her mouth with her free hand. ‘Your trouble, Henry,’ she said, rolling over into his arms, ‘is that you’ve lost all interest in this sort of thing.’

It had to be said that Tom Sledd was not much of a sailor. He was fine in the river with the water slipping like silk past the skiff’s sides. He even found the gentle roll restful. Then suddenly, they were out into the open sea and the wind hit him like a wall. Sledd was used to the rattle and lurch of wagons on the road as Lord Strange’s men had rumbled from town to town in search of a stage. He was even used to roughing it on dark and deadly nights when he was rowed across the Thames under a guttering, spitting flame. He knew all of the watermen and whilst it would be madness to trust them with your purse or anything that glittered in the moonlight, he trusted them not to send him down to the river bed. But this was different and he had never felt anything like it.

The skiff’s bows churned into the whitecaps before butting skywards again, spraying the occupants with wet salt. ‘That’s Spit Sand.’ Henry Skirrow was keeping a running commentary. ‘Horse Sand over there.’ Since Sledd could see neither horse nor sand he found the whole thing a little baffling. ‘That’s where the
Mary Rose
went down in good King Harry’s day.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Sledd managed.

‘What?’ Skirrow looked at him askance. ‘Don’t tell me you admire the accuracy of French naval gunnery.’

‘Gunnery?’ Sledd frowned. ‘No, I was talking about the sea. The place must be littered with the wrecks of ships.’ He suddenly didn’t want to know about how much water was between him and the bottom and he swallowed hard.

‘This is nothing, lad,’ Skirrow assured him, swinging easily with the movement of the ship, shifting his weight from one foot to another to compensate. ‘You want to be back o’ the Wight in a north-westerly.’

Tom Sledd could not begin to tell him how much he did not. His life flashed before him as the bows came round and the little crew began to haul sail. Ahead of them, against a dark canopy of trees, masts of all sizes bobbed above a little armada of ships. There must have been fifteen vessels crowded into a bay along the margins of which a shanty town of wooden huts clustered at rakish angles to each other, smoke drifting up through the branches overhead.

The canvas was hauled down at the end of the worst two hours of Tom Sledd’s young life and oars were slid rumbling into rowlocks as the skiff began to snake its way between the ships moored farthest out. The London man had rarely seen so many foreign merchantmen in one place, even along the Queen’s quays at Rotherhithe. Their sterns were emblazoned with exotic names from France, the Levant and the Barbary Coast. Outlandish flags fluttered from the halyards and bright parrots, green, blue and red, flapped and cawed on their perches on the decks.

Tom Sledd was never so glad as when the keel slid up the wet sand, dragging seaweed with it and slicing through the debris on the beach. His legs felt like blancmange as Skirrow helped him ashore. There were people everywhere, buying and selling; well dressed gentlemen in earnest discussion with stallholders of every colour of the rainbow. A dark-skinned beauty with painted lips swayed seductively over to the new arrivals. She draped a length of coloured silk around Sledd’s neck. ‘Welcome to the Island,’ she said, looking at him under her eyelashes.

Sledd found himself grinning from ear to ear but an even more voluptuous girl wound herself close to him and whispered in his ear.

‘How much?’ The stage manager’s purse was longer than most, but he had never heard anybody charge that, not even in London.

‘You girls get lost now,’ Skirrow grunted. ‘Bothering young gentlemen with your whiles.’ And he shooed them away but not before one of them turned her back and flicked up her tattered gown to reveal a naked arse, which she waggled at them both.

‘Where are they from?’ Sledd asked, his heaving stomach forgotten. ‘I couldn’t place the accent.’

‘The Indies,’ Skirrow told them. ‘The flotsam and jetsam of the high seas, Master Sledd. Coming over here, taking our girls’ jobs. This way.’

He led Sledd through the maze of people where the stallholders cried their wares, up a gentle slope that led through a grove of silver birch. Ahead wound a twisting road along which carts grumbled and there was a grey manor house on the rise of a hill. Skirrow stopped at a shack, larger and set apart from the others, outside of which two sailors in their wooden clogs and red trousers sat on barrels, roped and tarred. Sledd had seen the dress before along the Thames, so he knew these men’s calling. Their coats were long, almost down to the ground, and they made no pretence at all of lacing up their breeches which flapped around their ankles. They wore shapeless caps of blue wool, but Sledd could not help staring at their faces. Each man had blue swirling patterns across his forehead and rows of painted dots down his cheeks like tears.