Crimson Rose

by M. J. Trow

  ‘If you could arrange it, Master …?’ Sir Avery waited but there was no reply. ‘If you could arrange it, that would be wonderful. And the promissory note?’

  ‘Will come due in one hundred days. Time enough for you to get some rents in, that kind of thing.’

  The Knight of the Shire closed his eyes and appeared to be adding on his fingers. His host sighed; with arithmetical prowess at this low level, no wonder he was knocking on dubious doors at midnight and past.

  ‘Well?’ How long could a simple calculation take?

  ‘That is acceptable,’ the man said, with a sigh. ‘That takes us past the next quarter day and I will be able to repay you then. I am so grateful to you, Master …?’ But again, there was silence. ‘I will write the note right now. Oh, before I do, may I see the merchandise that is worth forty pounds?’

  ‘Well, thirty-five pounds, shall we say. A man must live, Sir Avery. I will fetch it while you write the note,’ the man said. ‘Oh, don’t worry. You needn’t sign until you have seen it.’ He indicated parchment and ink on the desk. ‘You know the wording, I expect.’ He pre-empted the next question. ‘And just leave a space for my name. I will fill it in later.’ Leaving the candle behind, he left the room.

  Left on his own, Sir Avery dipped the quill in the ink and began to write: ‘I, Sir Avery Ambrose, promise to pay –’ he left a long space, not knowing what name might have to fit in it – ‘the sum of forty pounds, not more than one hundred days from the date below.’ He waited for the merchandise to be brought in before signing. He may be profligate, but he wasn’t born yesterday.

  His host returned on silent feet, carrying a silver jug, with gargoyle heads at each corner and some rather unsettling engravings on its sides. He looked for long enough to establish its quality, then said, ‘It’s an ugly great thing, isn’t it? Who would want to buy it for forty pounds?’

  ‘Er … thirty-five, but I see your point. But fortunately for you, one man’s ugly old jug is another man’s prized possession. Have you signed?’ Sir Avery shook his head. ‘Do so, I beg of you. Or it will be too late. Even I baulk at knocking people up at gone one in the morning. London is crawling with footpads, you know.’

  The man signed, dated and added his address to the note, which the moneylender snatched as soon as he lifted the quill and locked away in a drawer of the desk. In his absence to fetch the jug he had added stockings, shoes and a doublet to the shirt and breeches and now he reached down a cloak from behind the door, pulling the hood well down before he turned again to the beleaguered borrower. He tucked the jug under his arm.

  ‘Shall we?’ he said, ushering the man out with a flourish. ‘It isn’t far.’

  On the brisk walk through streets which still saw the occasional passerby, both men kept to the shadows, one through prudence, one through shame. There was no conversation; what was there to say? After a few twists and turns which Sir Avery could have never reproduced, they arrived at a house in a row, all of which had seen better days. The moneylender rapped on the door, in what seemed like a random pattern but which was in fact a complex code. After a pause, the door creaked open just a hairsbreadth.

  ‘Yes?’

  It was hard to identify, but to Sir Avery it sounded like a woman. Surely, this transaction would be a man’s work. His companion put his mouth to the crack and whispered something. The word ‘jug’ could just be made out, but nothing more. The door opened enough for them both to squeeze through and they found themselves in a hall, shadowy and cavernous in the light of a small taper burning in a chamber stick, held in the hand of a woman in bedgown and a shawl. Her face was shaded by the frill of her nightcap, but not for subterfuge, just the vagaries of fashion.

  ‘You have something to sell, Sir Avery?’ she asked. ‘I am a collector of …’ She glanced at the other man. ‘Jugs? Yes, jugs. May I see the piece?’

  The moneylender extracted it from beneath his cloak and handed it to her.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Just the thing. But, sadly, I was offered one just this afternoon for only fifteen pounds. I have committed to buy it, I am afraid, Sir Avery. Thank you for troubling to bring it to me, but …’

  The landowner had gone white. He glanced at his companion and licked his lips, which were suddenly dry. ‘But … I was assured that … Can you not …?’

  She looked up into his face and her face fell into an expression of compassion. ‘You poor man,’ she said. ‘I had no idea that the situation was so desperate.’ She patted his arm. ‘I am a fool to myself, but I will offer you twenty pounds. It is all I have in the house. I am sure the other seller will understand. It is a very desirable piece and he will find another buyer easily enough.’ She looked at him again, shaking his arm in sympathy. ‘Come now? Will you take twenty?’

  Sir Avery hung his head, then nodded, slowly.

  ‘There, now,’ she said, bustling off with her taper and leaving them in the dark while she ferreted for something in another room, just off the hall. Both men heard the chink of coins in a bag. Then she was back, with her light and, best of all, a chamois leather purse, heavy with gold. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to count it.’ He shook his head. ‘What a gentleman,’ she said happily. Then, to the moneylender, ‘Will you put it on the shelf?’ He reached up and put the jug on a corner cabinet near the door. ‘I would love to talk more to you both,’ she said, ‘but the hour is very late, and I can’t wake my maidservant at this hour.’ She already had the door open and ushered them out. ‘Goodnight.’ She pushed on the heavy oak, but stopped before it was quite closed. A hand came through and dropped four angels into her outstretched palm. With a wave of the fingers, it withdrew and she shut the door behind it. She leaned against the planks for a moment, catching her breath. It wasn’t something she enjoyed, but ten per cent was ten per cent, no matter how you looked at it. The twenty pounds would come with the messenger sent for the jug in a day or so. And then it would just be a matter of waiting until the next time. Because there was always a next time.

  THREE

  The man Robert Greene was looking for had reinvented himself since leaving Cambridge. Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall, had been all set to take over the running of Corpus Christi. He even had plans to re-christen it Harvey College, but it was not to be. Now he was telling everybody that he had come to London to take his rightful place in society as the patron of the poet Edmund Spenser, the most dazzling wordsmith of this or any other age. Harvey had made the man what he was, since Spenser himself could hardly carry a rhyme in a bucket and he wanted to make sure everyone knew that. Not bad for a lad from Saffron Walden whose dad made ropes for a living.

  Even so, knowing all this, Robert Greene was not prepared for the apparition sitting alone in Mrs Robertson’s Ordinary along Lombard Street that night. His ruff was so huge he could barely reach his mouth with his fork and his Venetians spread wide along the bench he sat on. Greene caught the man’s eye and doffed his cap, squeezing past the tables in the smoke-filled supper room.

  ‘The last time I saw you, Greene,’ Harvey said, leaning back to sip his wine, ‘I kicked you out of my college.’

  Greene remembered. In an age of patronage, he had once hitched his wagon to Harvey’s star, but in the cutthroat world of literary endeavour, all that seemed a long time ago. ‘Your college, Professor?’ In that cutthroat world, Greene could fence with the best of them.

  Harvey paused, the goblet still at his lips. Then he put it down and wiped his fingers on his napkin. ‘I let Copcott have it,’ he said. ‘I’d tired of Cambridge. Decided that my rightful place is here.’

  ‘May I join you?’ Greene asked, unbuckling his rapier and hooking it on the wall.

  Harvey was about to say it was a free country, but neither man believed that. Gloriana sat like a vengeful harpy on her throne. She had had her own cousin executed and no one’s life was worth more than the entrance fee to see a play.

  ‘You know Tamburlaine opens tomorrow, don’t you?’ Greene asked. ‘Part Two.�
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  Harvey laughed. ‘So that’s it. I wondered what would make you swallow your pride after our last encounter. Of course; it had to be. Your insane, irrational hatred of Kit Marlowe. Oh, malicious envy! Greene by name and green by nature.’

  The would-be playwright sat down heavily, clicking his fingers for service. No one came. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t hate him too.’

  ‘I don’t have a pretentious bone in my body,’ Harvey said, arranging his stomacher and crimping his ruff. ‘Unlike you, Greene, I know genius when I see it. Marlowe has that quality – what do people call it? His mighty line? It’s just the man I can’t stand.’

  ‘You’ll go tomorrow?’ Greene asked him.

  ‘To see Tamburlaine at the Rose? Assuredly.’

  ‘So will I. As a gallery commoner. I don’t want the smug bastard seeing my face on stage.’

  ‘You think he’ll be there?’ Harvey asked.

  ‘Oh, he’ll be there.’ Greene was still looking this way and that, trying to attract a waiter’s attention. He became confidential, leaning in to his man, resting on his elbows. ‘I may have a surprise for him.’

  ‘Well, well.’ Harvey clicked his fingers and a serving man was hovering at his side in seconds. ‘Let it be a surprise for us all, then,’ he said. ‘Master Greene is about to place an order. Add my reckoning to his, would you?’ And in a swirl of silk and satin, Dr Gabriel Harvey was gone.

  The dead man bobbed his way down stream, rolling with the dark waters past Paul’s Wharf. If he had still had his senses, he would have recoiled at the stink of Billingsgate where the corpses of gutted fish floated, like his, on the ebb tide. He was making for the sea in that casual, unhurried way that dead men will. If he once had promises to keep and places to be, he was past all that now. Time was the river’s, as it had always been between those banks. The tall houses of Elizabeth’s London leaned their gables over to watch him glide between them. He dallied for a while at Queenshithe, rubbing shoulders with the tarred ropes that held the merchantmen at their wharves. He half turned to the blind alleys that ran up from the mud to the Ropery and to Ratcliffe. His clouded dead eyes saw, with the second sight of the dead, the spars black against the fleeting clouds and the cold crescent of the moon beyond them. He saw sailors and their trulls rolling home from the taverns that lined the north bank, their calls and curses and laughter like a half-forgotten dream.

  The current turned him again, as it turned boats on this stretch of the river too. Ahead loomed the rickety arches of the Bridge, its stanchions knee deep in the wild, foaming water. Lights tumbled here and there from the jumbled houses above and to his right the heads of traitors rotted on their pikes, a reminder to all of the risks of crossing Her Majesty the Queen and those who served her. He was hurrying now, his arms lifting out of the frothing current, rushing towards the confines of the archways. His head came up, as though checking his way in that deathly flood. And, buffeted on the slime-green stone, he hurtled into the foam and shot past the Bridge for one last time.

  The rain was drifting across the city the next morning, driving away the mist that wreathed the river. A knot of men stood up to their ankles in the mud alongside Custom House Quay where the St John of Lubeck rode the tide, her cargo laden and waiting for the wind.

  ‘How long will this take, Master Thynne?’ a fat official called from the greasy planking of the quay, keen to keep his expensive pattens out of the clawing mud.

  ‘How long is a giraffe’s pizzle?’ Thynne threw back at him. If there was anything Hugh Thynne didn’t suffer gladly, it was fools, especially fools who wore the livery of Her Majesty’s Custom House. Because Hugh Thynne was the High Constable of London and he routinely ate Justices of the Peace for breakfast. Officials of Custom House Quay were just sweet-meat snacks to assuage the hunger pangs of the day.

  Thynne was squatting in the mud, hooking up his robe so that it didn’t drag in the water and testing the solidity of the ground with his ivory-handled cane. He was looking at the dead body caught up on the St John’s anchor ropes.

  ‘Who found him?’ he asked the men of the Watch standing around him.

  ‘I did, my lord.’ A waterman hauled off his cap and waited. Hugh Thynne wasn’t a lord. He was a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners and under his official robes he still wore the stitched badge of his calling, the three crowns and the field of ermine. But if garbage like watermen chose to see him as such, well, that served a purpose too.

  ‘You found him here?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Just as you see him. All tangled up in them ropes. We get it all the time.’

  ‘Do we?’ Thynne stood up. ‘How so?’

  ‘Suicides, my lord,’ the waterman told him. ‘They’re drawn to the river like moths to a flame. Most of ’em jump off of the Bridge. This one …’

  ‘Yes?’ Thynne narrowed his eyes as the rain drove harder, bouncing off the carvel planks of the St John and spattering on furled canvas. Two or three crewmen in their capes and wide leather hats lolled on the ship’s rail watching the morning’s entertainment.

  ‘Well, it’s hard to say, sir.’ The waterman rubbed his stubbled chin. While he was talking to his lordship here he wasn’t getting a fare – and time, after all, was money.

  Thynne turned to get his bearings. He recognized the tallest tower above the jumble of rooftops behind him. ‘St Dunstan’s in the East,’ he said. ‘Whose parish is that?’

  ‘Mine, sir.’ One of the constables saluted.

  ‘Oh, good day, Williams. I didn’t see you there. This is your patch, is it?’

  ‘Indeed it is, sir.’

  ‘Pay the man, Williams. You can put it down to expenses for the next quarter.’

  Williams’ face fell, but he rummaged in his purse and threw a couple of coins to the waterman who caught both expertly, bit them and slipped them into the leather pouch at his belt.

  ‘I’d say he went in upstream, sir; somewhere near the Fleet, maybe, or the Bridewell.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’ Thynne asked.

  ‘Current’s tricky along that stretch. It’d take him along St Paul’s Wharf. See those marks?’ The waterman pointed to the body’s left arm. Thynne nodded.

  ‘Tar. The biggest cluster of ships on the river at this time of year is Paul’s Wharf. It’s the hay and firewood wherries from Essex, they put in there mostly. He’d have got caught up there for a while, then the ebb tide would have sent him wide, probably midstream and once under the arches, he’d end up here.’

  Thynne was impressed. You didn’t need a local constable or his Watch when you had an expert like the waterman. He looked at the dead man’s head, half submerged in the black water. ‘What did that, would you say?’ He was pointing to the back of the corpse’s skull, shattered and matted with blood, kept liquid by the action of the water. ‘The Bridge?’

  ‘Could be the Bridge, my lord,’ the waterman said. ‘Could be an Apprentice’s club.’

  ‘Indeed it could. Constable Williams?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Lift that head up. I want to see his face.’

  Williams waded out, his boots making grotesque sucking noises as he reached the floating body. He grabbed a handful of the black hair and hauled the head upwards. Thynne took in the pale features, the eyes black with bruising, the mouth open in a snarl.

  ‘How long would you say, Waterman, he’s been in the water?’

  ‘Not long, sir. Half a day; may be a little longer.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Look at his skin, my lord. No washerwoman’s hands. The water makes the skin wrinkle, see, afore it comes away from the flesh altogether. And the rats haven’t got to him yet, neither. Mind you, stuck as he is, that’d only be a matter of time.’

  ‘Williams.’ Thynne smiled. ‘Whatever you just paid this man, double it. He’s earned his crossing today ten times over. Waterman, give your name to the constable here. You’re First Finder. You’ll need to give evidence at the Inquest. Where are we?’ Thynne lo
oked to his left to where the church of All Hallows sat squat and dwarfed by the grim portals of the Tower. ‘Within the Verge,’ he muttered half to himself. ‘That’ll be Coroner Danby. Well, well. You men.’ He straightened in the river mud. ‘Lend a hand there and get this to dry land. I want to find out who this man was and how he came to pay his respects here at the Custom House.’

  ‘Lot of riff-raff in today, Thomas.’ George Beaumont tried to make himself heard above the row. ‘Those bloody groundlings will be trying to look up my skirt again!’

  ‘They should be so lucky,’ Sledd grunted. All morning he had been wrestling with problems of his own, especially how to hoist the Governor of Babylon on his own walls in Act Five, Scene One. Anything before that was the actors’ problem. Still, young Sledd had a soft spot for the boy actors. It hadn’t been so long since he’d worn the farthingale himself and he knew how tricky it could be. Balance and deportment was all and then, of course, you had to be prepared to have leading men slobbering all over you. No, Thomas Sledd didn’t envy George Beaumont at all.

  This afternoon, George Beaumont was Zenocrate, wife and love of Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, who had been circling the wooden O earlier signing autographs while the band tuned up. The boy checked his white makeup in the foxed mirror for the last time and the trumpets announced that the play was about to start. Not that that reduced the noise among the groundlings at all. The day-labourers and the journeymen had queued all morning for this, watching for the flag to rise over the Rose, praying that the early-morning rain would not come back and jostling good-naturedly with the ribbon and mask sellers and the Winchester geese who waggled their breasts at them.