Crimson Rose

by M. J. Trow

  He stood up, raising the candle high and crossing the stage again. He asked, ‘And who sits here, Thomas, in this most shadowy corner of Henslowe’s Rose?’

  ‘The orchestra!’ Sledd shouted. ‘The bloody orchestra!’

  ‘Bring your candle, Tom.’ Marlowe was striding across the wooden O. ‘We struck lucky once. I wonder if …’

  He dropped off the edge of the stage and crossed to where the gallery seats began. ‘Where was Eleanor Merchant sitting? Exactly, I mean.’

  ‘Next level up,’ the stage manager told him. ‘And over to your left.’

  Marlowe dashed up the steps and worked his way along the benches. ‘Here?’ he called back to Sledd.

  ‘Next alcove. There.’

  Marlowe looked back and crouched. Behind him the timbers of the upright were splintered and he held the line in his mind, sighting it with where Sledd stood in front of the orchestra’s space. He drew his dagger, holding the candle to give him more light and eased its tip into the hole he found there. He felt it strike something and angled it out. Another lead shot, but different from Shakespeare’s. And this one was brown with the blood of a theatre-goer.

  There weren’t enough fields for Shakespeare. As a boy, he’d chased pheasants in the orchards at Charlecote, run wild in the forest of Arden with the brambles ripping at his legs. Here it was all smoke and tanneries and the clanging and banging of a great city, as old priories came down and secular replacements went up, the cloisters turning into counting houses.

  Norton Folgate, it was true, was on the edge of all this. It was on the edge of everything, in fact, being a Liberty outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, a fact that Shakespeare had grasped with both hands when Marlowe told him of it, until he realized that it made absolutely no difference to his status of wanted man on the run. Not being subject to petty bye-laws was one thing; being a man indicted by an inquest jury for murder was another. Escaping this was not as simple as walking down Hog Lane. But at least Hog Lane gave him a view of green. At its northern end it gave on to a vista of fields and trees and if he kept his back to the tanneries and breweries and could ignore the smells, he felt he could be back in Warwickshire.

  With his eyes slits and a hand over his nose, he could concentrate on the drovers from the country, bringing their flocks into the city down the great artery of Ermine Street, heading for Smithfield. The honking of the geese greeted the dawn and the bells of lowing cattle rang him to his bed. But if he missed the pheasants, and the sleepy hollows of Arden, if he missed Anne and the children, he missed Constance Tyler more.

  He had been wary when Marlowe had offered him room in his lodgings. Back in Blackfriars, Eleanor Merchant had been a constant presence in his room, listening on the stairs, peering out of the casement whenever he left the house. A landlady outside the door would not make hiding easy; Shakespeare had gone straight from his father’s house to his wife’s and had no idea that landladies in general, although quite keen to prevent their lodgers from stealing the fixtures and fittings, nevertheless usually left them well alone, except on rent day.

  Marlowe’s house had come as a revelation. Although once far grander than it now was, it still was a much more substantial building than the one he had roomed in with Eleanor and Constance. It was not hemmed in between its neighbours, all leaning on each other for support. Although Hog Lane was scarcely a wide thoroughfare, it would not have been possible to shake hands across it from the upstairs windows; no neighbours would be able to see in from across the way. The windows were large and airy, with wide sills on the inside that made excellent seats for a poetically minded young man to sit brooding, with his fevered brow against the cool pane. And not only that; Marlowe did not live in one poky garret room with a hard and narrow bed. He had two rooms, both well furnished, aired and clean; the rushes on the floor still smelt sweetly of river grass and the mattress on the bed was soft goose down, with not even a hint of prickly straw. Jack Windlass had an eye for such things. And a nose. All in all, for all his sour looks, he was one in a million.

  Shakespeare hid his disappointment well when Marlowe opened a cupboard in the corner, revealing the foot of a ladder leading up into the attic above his rooms. A truckle bed in the corner looked comfortable enough and the cobwebbed window in the gable end gave light enough to see by.

  ‘If you want to have a candle burning,’ Marlowe had told him, ‘come down into my room, but only when I am here. Otherwise, you will have to sit in the dark, I’m afraid. No one must know you are here, and if they see a light from the attic, they will be suspicious. More than that, they may fear that there is a fire and then the whole street will be in on the action, buckets every which way, poles to tear down the roof.’

  Shakespeare looked mulish, but Marlowe ignored him. It had been almost an automatic action to bribe the gaoler, to bring Shakespeare back here to his rooms, but already a thread of doubt had begun to stitch itself through his brain. Shakespeare wasn’t stupid, he knew, but for all that he could sometimes be so simple in his thinking that Marlowe thought that being locked up for his own good would perhaps be the best way forward. He would wait and see and meanwhile he would work out how to secure the cupboard door to lock him in; one prison exchanged for another. Windlass had not been keen on the whole enterprise; Marlowe had sensed that. Here was another mouth to feed, another chamber pot to empty.

  Shakespeare sat hour after hour in his garret room, writing Constance sonnets that she would never read, that no one would ever read. More often than not he would tear them up or screw them into tight balls of frustration, flinging them around what little space he had like the arrows of outrageous fortune and watching them bounce and settle in the dust. Apart from his bed, hard and small but at least not in the dank walls of the Clink, the room was used for storage. At one end, lengths of lumber and some old shutters, spongy and green with damp and mould, were leaning against the chimney piece. Boxes of God-knew-what were stacked around the eaves and he had dragged one over to his bed to act as a table for his scribbling.

  It was just as the sun was setting and his evening vigil alone with his thoughts was just beginning that he heard it. It was the time when, as a boy, the Shaxspers would kneel at home in prayer, each one in turn watching the street through a window for the prying eyes of the Puritans. But this wasn’t the whispered Mass or the gentle chant of the psalms. It was a tapping, muffled but getting nearer. It sounded hesitant, like an old blind man feeling his way with a stick in a strange and darkened world.

  Shakespeare closed his own eyes to focus on the sound. It was downstairs, two floors below. The floor where there should have been no one at that hour. This was Kit Marlowe’s place. And Kit Marlowe was at the Rose again tonight, talking to Henslowe as the man cracked open his money pots and discovered yet again that he was richer than God. The servant Windlass was out too, lying with some whore in the Vintry or fleecing some poor paralytic sod at Primero where the Kings and Queens and Knaves tumbled like confetti. ‘On no account, Will –’ Shakespeare could hear Marlowe’s voice in his head – ‘on no account play cards with this man.’

  Will Shakespeare wasn’t in the mood to play cards with anybody tonight. His acting days at the Rose were over. Christ, his life was over, if he wasn’t careful. Unless some miracle could save him. And the Shaxspers didn’t believe in miracles any more. They had vanished with the Mass and the Rood and the certainty of the Holy Father. Even the Muse seemed to have deserted him but the tap-tap-tapping wouldn’t go away. And it was getting nearer.

  Shakespeare couldn’t wait any longer. He’d pawned his spare coat when he’d first reached London and bought himself a sword. It was an old weapon, heavy, broad-bladed, the sort of steel old soldiers kept when they retired, to chop wood at home. And Will Shakespeare was no swordsman, especially in the half dark as the night of London closed in on him. He crept down the ladder, sliding the bolts as noiselessly as he could and eased the door open.

  Shit! He cursed in his head as the hi
nges creaked. It was like being back in the Clink again. Ahead of him the landing stretched bare and dark, lit barely by the window at the far end. He stepped out, one pace, two, holding the door to the garret with a trailing hand in case it creaked again as it closed. He squatted, trying to make himself invisible, trying to blend with the darkness. The tapping had stopped. He felt his lips parchment-dry and his tongue thick with fear in his mouth.

  There was a bang and he jumped, dropping the sword which thudded on to the boards. His heart was pounding as he picked it up, rising now before he lost all feeling in his legs. The taps had started again, getting nearer, getting louder. He squeezed through the doorway on to the gallery, leaning over to get a better view of the stairs. That was where the sounds came from but there was no one there. He edged forward, the blade point ahead of him like a dancer in the dark.

  ‘Will!’

  The name was hissed behind him, like an inrush of breath or the drawing of steel. He spun round, slashing the clumsy broadsword in a wide arc that flashed in the half light. It rang on other steel, slimmer, faster, more deadly, and he felt the hilt fly from his hand as the sword twirled in a high circle to clatter and bounce on the stairs below. Not that Shakespeare saw it fall because his head was held upright in a painful lock, a rapier point squarely between the collars of his shirt and tickling his throat.

  ‘Now, what did I tell you about leaving your room?’ a familiar voice said as Kit Marlowe slid out of the darkness. He dropped the sword point and Shakespeare’s head flopped forward, his shoulders sagging as he breathed for the first time in what felt like years.

  ‘You absolute bastard!’ the Warwickshire man shouted and Marlowe sheathed his rapier before wagging a finger at him.

  ‘I shall tell my dad,’ he said. ‘And my dad’s bigger than yours.’

  ‘I thought …’

  Marlowe took the man by the arm and led him down the stairs. ‘You thought I was at the Rose. You thought Windlass was out on the town. You thought you heard a cane tapping its way upstairs.’

  On the first landing, Marlowe raised a finger and Windlass stood there in his leather jerkin, operating a couple of levers which reached across to the stairwell. He pulled one, then the other and the ends of the levers clacked on the wood. ‘Wrong, wrong and wrong. I was at the Rose, but I’ve been back for an hour. Windlass was out on the town … How much did you make today, Jack?’

  ‘Enough, Master Marlowe, thank you.’ Windlass smiled, his auburn moustaches curling at their ends.

  Marlowe leaned in to whisper to Shakespeare. ‘He’s a deep one.’ He chuckled. ‘Never a straight answer.’ He pointed at the levers on the stairs. ‘As far as the cane goes, a little gadget that a friend of mine uses from time to time. Just to scare people. Nicholas Faunt – I would ask if you had met him, but men don’t always know when they have. He is a tricksy one and no mistake.’

  Shakespeare shook his head.

  ‘Well, just pray you never do,’ Marlowe said. ‘All right, Jack,’ he called down the stairs. ‘That’s enough nonsense for one day. Will and I will dine through here. When you’ve got a moment?’

  Windlass stopped playing with Faunt’s gadget and wandered off into the scullery, muttering. Marlowe threw himself down in the chair by the empty grate. ‘Just a little lesson, Will,’ he said, looking at Shakespeare who stood, still quietly fuming, in front of him.

  ‘I don’t care for your games, Kit,’ the Warwickshire man said. ‘There’s a price on my head.’

  ‘And mine,’ Marlowe reminded him, ‘as the person who sprung you.’

  Shakespeare sat down. ‘Look.’ He raised both hands in an attempt to explain his predicament. ‘I’m grateful to you and all that. Really, I am. It’s just this … this endless waiting around. Not knowing what’s going on. I’d have done better going home.’

  Marlowe sat back in the chair, unhooking the rapier and its hanger and easing the sheathed dagger from the small of his back. ‘The door’s open,’ he said, with an extravagant flourish of his arm. ‘Your road’s to the north. They probably won’t stop and search you at Bishopsgate and at this time of the year, the Hackney Brook shouldn’t be too brimming in its banks, so you probably won’t drown. Of course, I’ve heard there are ruffians between Shoreditch and Finsbury Fields who like nothing better than to welcome a gentleman from London with a reasonably sized purse, even if his sword isn’t up to much.’

  Shakespeare sat upright. ‘I can find my way home, you know,’ he said. ‘I’m not a child.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ Marlowe nodded. He smiled, giving the Warwickshire man time to picture the scene. ‘So you’ve returned home. You’re back in … what’s that place called, your wife’s place?’

  ‘Shottery.’

  ‘You’re back in Shottery. All homecomings and welcomes and “Daddy! Daddy!”.’ Marlowe leaned forward. ‘Then what? “Isn’t it about time you got back to work, Will?”’ For a man who had never met Anne Shakespeare, he did a rattling impression of her. ‘So there you have it; Will Shaxsper the glover is back at his trade again, his mind numbing, his senses dying. You’ll never see a play again, still less act in one. Man, the only book you’ll ever read will be the Bible – and we all know how that one ends.’

  Shakespeare leapt to his feet and slammed his hand on to the mantel shelf, staring into the blackness of the grate. He knew Marlowe was right. And he hated him for it.

  ‘Will.’ Marlowe’s voice was soft like sin. ‘I’ve seen you out there on that stage. I’ve read your poetry – it’s really come a long way since …’

  ‘What?’ Shakespeare spun to face him.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Marlowe’s hands were in the air now. ‘They were lying on your bed and I couldn’t help myself. Not bad. Not bad at all.’

  ‘You had no right,’ Shakespeare snarled.

  ‘And you have no right to conceal the truth,’ Marlowe sat back again. ‘The truth is in your blood, Will Shaxsper, just as surely as it is in mine. You can write your poetry anywhere, I concede that point. But plays, Will? Treading the boards? Making the Muse dance to your tune? That … well, that can only be done here, in London. That’s why you won’t go home. And that’s why we have to get you out of this little difficulty of yours.’

  Shakespeare subsided again. The man was right. Damn him to Hell, Kit Marlowe was always right.

  SIX

  Mary Bancroft huddled close to her cousin as they waited in the ante room of the High Constable. Outside a feeble March sun shone on the comings and goings in Candlewick Street. Costers wheeled their carts along its twisting length and men and women roared out their street cries in pale imitation of Cheapside bustling and roaring to the north.

  Here, though, the light and sound hardly carried at all and the oak-panelled walls were dark and foreboding. A clerk, Sam Renton, sat in a corner on a high stool scratching at vellum with his quill, doing his best to ignore the worried woman sobbing occasionally into her kerchief.

  Hugh Thynne clattered into the stillness, his cane tapping on the stairs and the strewn floor. He took in the couple before him. He knew faces. Never forgot a face. It didn’t pay in his line of work. But he didn’t know these two. The man was a Johannes-come-lately, all new satins and cheap fur. His beard was rather too curled for his liking and his cheeks too closely shaved. And he had a smell about him that Thynne recognized but couldn’t place.

  The woman was a little older, careworn, pale and distraught, her fingers twisting endlessly in her kerchief, her eyes red with crying. Although her face was lined and her hair greying at the brow, her clothes too were new and gaudy. They sat on her body harshly, not worn into the creases and folds of her elbows and waist as good clothes, handed down and cared for by the impoverished gentry were. They were a good attempt at the clothes of a gentlewoman, but the extraneous bows and ribbons, the fluttering of laces let her down. Combined with her sodden cheeks and hand clenched round her lace-trimmed kerchief, they looked almost laughable. Like a costume she consciously wore
for the world, not for herself.

  ‘I understand,’ the man said as he rose to meet the High Constable, ‘that you have a body.’

  Thynne saw the woman shudder. ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘Let me explain,’ the man said. ‘I am Thaddeus Bancroft, tobacconist.’

  Thynne smiled. So that was the smell he couldn’t place. ‘This is my cousin, Mary.’

  Thynne nodded. He had been closeted with the mayor all morning and that never put him in the best of moods. And as to bodies, he came across them all the time, the flotsam of London. It was easy to forget that to someone they had once been as dear as life itself. And Hugh Thynne had forgotten it a long, long time ago.

  ‘Simon Bancroft is my cousin, the husband of this good lady. He has been … missing for a while.’

  ‘What sort of while?’ Thynne wanted to know.

  ‘A week ago yesterday,’ Mary Bancroft said. ‘That’s when I saw him last.’

  ‘What does he do, your husband?’ The High Constable crossed to the fire, still smouldering in the grate for all it was spring outside. He was not much of a fashion plate himself, and he took little notice of what others wore, except when the clothes were so clearly at odds with the person within. Besides, this was Elizabeth’s England. Clothes marked the man, the gallant from the counterfeit crank, the queer-cuffin magistrate from the queer-bird serving his time. There used to be laws about such things. It didn’t take a perfumer to smell the tobacco on Thaddeus Bancroft nor to smell new money on his cousin’s wife.

  ‘He is a tobacconist too, sir,’ she told him. ‘He carries on his business in Fish Street, hard by the Bell.’

  Thynne nodded. That explained the new money smell. Fish Street lay to the north of the Steelyards along the river. A man bent on self-slaughter only had a short walk to take. Alternatively …