I considered returning to the Globe and enlisting Mr. Armin’s help. After all, someone might well object to my carrying off a body. And even if no one did, I wasn’t certain I could carry Cogan by myself.
An hour or two of daylight remained. I could probably make it to the theatre and back before the meat wagon arrived. But what if I did not? When Cogan came to, he might find himself locked inside a charnel house, in the middle of a pile of stiff, staring corpses—or, worse yet, under the ground.
I had chosen, against Father’s Gerard’s advice, to be an accomplice in Cogan’s cock-brained scheme; it was up to me to see it through. I concealed myself in the shadows at the mouth of a narrow alleyway and waited.
When at last a one-horse cart bearing a few bodies rumbled up Newgate Street and stopped before the prison, I sorely regretted not having gone for reinforcements. Instead of the single, shambling carter I had expected, the meat wagon was escorted by two guards in breastplates and helmets, with rapiers at their sides.
“Gog’s nowns!” I breathed. If I had had a sword of my own—which I did not—I might conceivably have overcome a single guard, provided he was not too good a swordsman; against two of them, I stood no chance at all.
Something tapped me lightly upon the shoulder. With a gasp, I spun about. A tall robed figure loomed over me, indistinct in the shadows. “Soft!” said a familiar voice. “They’ll hear you!”
“Father Gerard?” I whispered. “Why are you here?”
“To help.”
“But—you said you wanted no part of our plan.”
“I said I would not be a party to poisoning a man. I have no objection to resurrecting him.”
“Ha’ you a weapon?” I asked hopefully.
“I’m no more willing to stab or to shoot a man than I am to poison him.”
“Then how i’ the name of halidom will we deal wi’ those wights?”
“Well,” said the priest, “we might try trickery.”
Tom Cogan, as I soon learned, had no monopoly on cock-brained schemes. But any action we might take, however ill-conceived, would be better than none at all. For the next several minutes, all I did was hide there in the alleyway, watching as the warder and his helper carried three bodies, one at a time, from the prison and tossed them onto the cart. From where I stood, it was impossible to tell whether or not one of the corpses was Cogan’s.
“That’s the lot,” the warder told the guards. The moment he and his helper went inside, I dashed out of the alleyway and up the street toward the wagon, calling in the same pitiful voice I used for playing Lavinia—before her tongue is cut out, of course—”Help me, sirs! Please help me!”
“What is it, lad?” asked the smaller of the guards.
“It’s me da! ‘A’s being robbed and beaten!” I pointed to the alley. “I there! Hurry!” I seized the man’s sleeve and began dragging him along. When his companion hesitated and glanced toward the meat wagon, I cried, “There’s three of ‘em! Come quickly, afore they murder him!”
Newgate Street was not entirely dark; every twenty or thirty yards, a lanthorn on the front of a house cast a feeble glow. But once we were within the narrow confines of the alley, the sole source of light was the thin strip of stars overhead.
“Where’s your da, then?” demanded the larger guard. “I don’t see nothing.”
“At th’ end of th’ alley! Come!” Though they were clearly reluctant to advance into the unknown, I might have lured them a little farther along. But at that moment the horse that hauled the meat wagon let out a startled whinny. The guards headed back toward the mouth of the alley, drawing their swords as they ran.
I scrambled after them. “Wait! What about me poor da?”
They ignored me, for they had caught sight of the tall figure pulling at the horse’s harness in an attempt to calm the rearing, neighing animal. “You there!” shouted one of the guards. “What are you up to?”
I expected Gerard to run. Instead he snatched the horsewhip from its socket on the side of the cart and turned to confront the two armed men. Though the whip was not a long one—perhaps six feet from handle to tip—it was longer than a rapier blade, and Gerard used this fact to his advantage. By snapping the whip this way and that, he kept the guards at a distance—for a few moments, anyway. Unfortunately they had enough sense to separate and come at him from opposite directions. Gerard could not face them both. If I did not come to his aid, one of the guards would find an opening soon, and skewer him.
Since joining the Chamberlain’s Men, I had spent a good deal of time honing my sword-fighting skills. But I had not forgotten altogether the skills I had learned in the orphanage, defending myself against boys who were considerably larger than I.
Apparently my mock distress had been so convincing that the guards still did not suspect me of being in league with Gerard, so I played the part for all it was worth. I descended upon the smaller guard, wringing my hands and sobbing, “Oh, please, sir! You must save me da! Please, sir!”
“Get away, lad!” the man growled, never taking his eyes off the madman with the whip.
I let out a wail of distress and tugged frantically at the back of his breastplate, pulling him off balance. “You can’t let him die!”
The man’s patience broke, and he swung the hilt of his rapier about, meaning to club me with it. I ducked under the blow and flung myself at the backs of his legs, which folded under my weight. The guard pitched forward; his sword flew from his grasp and clattered across the cobbles.
I dived headlong for it. The instant my hand closed around the hilt, I rolled onto my back—but too late. The guard was already upon me, with his dagger drawn. He thrust the tip of it against my throat-bole. “Don’t move, boy!” Keeping the dagger painfully in place, he turned his head to check on his comrade. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Father Gerard had disarmed his adversary and was advancing toward mine, swinging the whip before him.
“Stay where you are,” called the guard, “or the lad will have a new breathing hole!” The priest halted uncertainly.
“Get Cogan!” I managed to shout, before the guard’s dagger cut off my words and very nearly my windpipe as well.
“Drop the whip!” the man ordered. After a moment’s hesitation, Gerard obeyed. “Jack?” said the guard. “Are you all right?”
“I believe my arm’s broken,” came the reply.
“Well, see if you can manage to tie up that fellow while I take care of this—” He was interrupted by the sound of spectral moaning somewhere nearby. “What the devil was that?”
“It’s—it’s coming from … in there,” said Jack in a voice that trembled.
Something moved within the wagon, making the horse snort and shuffle about nervously. Then a groping hand emerged from between the wooden slats. “God’s bloody bones!” gasped the guard who stood over me. “They’re coming to life!”
“It’s sorcery!” cried Jack. He stumbled backward a few steps, then turned and fled, clutching his broken limb. His comrade, unwilling to face the undead alone, followed as fast as his feet could carry him.
I got unsteadily to my feet, holding the spot where the dagger had pricked my neck, and regarded the hand that projected from the cart, fluttering feebly. “I trust that belongs to Cogan,” I said hoarsely.
Gerard peered over the side of the cart. “I think so. Help me get these other bodies off him.”
We lifted the two dead prisoners from the top of the pile and laid them gently on the cobblestones. “I hope these wights did not die o’ the plague.”
“Plague victims are taken out separately,” said Gerard, “and not by armed guards. No one wants to steal their bodies.”
“You mean someone would want these poor wretches?”
“Medical students—for studying anatomy.”
The corpse that showed signs of life was, to my relief, Tom Cogan’s. His head bobbed about as though he had St. Vitus’s dance, and he was making guttural, half-intelligible noises—the sort that Sande
r used to make in his sleep when he was dreaming something unpleasant.
Though I had bought a vial of smelling salts from the apothecary to revive Cogan, this did not seem the proper time to use it. It was more important just now to get him well away from Newgate. Gerard hoisted the man’s twitching form almost effortlessly and draped it across his shoulders. “Let’s find a tavern,” he said. “A fellow who’s staggering and babbling incoherently will not seem out of place there.”
Keeping to the backstreets and snickleways, we got safely to the Warwick Inn, where we installed ourselves in a private chamber. Even with the help of the smelling salts, it took Cogan some time to come around. “It’s fortunate that I gave him such a small dose,” I said. “‘A came back to life at just the right moment.” I paused and gave a short, ironic laugh. “La Voisin was right yet again.”
“La Voisin?”
“A cunning woman. She said that someone would return to life because of me.” Though one-half of her prediction had come to pass, the other half still troubled me. “She also said that … that I would be the cause of someone’s death.”
“Well, Cogan was mistaken for dead; perhaps that was what she saw.”
“Perhaps.” After all, none of the other things she predicted had come true in the way I imagined; there was no reason to believe that this one would, either.
“Did you get the letter you were after?” asked Gerard.
I shook my head despondently. “It was taken from him. All ‘a remembers is the name of the woman Julia is lodging wi’—Madame Hardy.”
“That may be enough information to let you find the place.”
“It might be—provided I was i’ Paris.”
“Well,” said Gerard, “it may be that I can find it for you.”
Gerard’s superiors, he said, had ordered all Jesuit priests to return to the seminaries in France. The queen’s death now seemed certain and imminent, and if history was any indication, it would be followed by a period of dismay and disorder. Elizabeth had been beloved, even revered, by most of her subjects; the bitter truth—that she was but a frail mortal—would not go down easily with them. They would look for a scapegoat, and their blame would fall on those same groups that they had always suspected—sometimes rightly—of conspiring against Her Majesty: the Jews, the atheists, and the Papists.
Most Catholics, it seemed, believed that if James took the throne he would usher in a new and better era for the faith; his mother had been a Catholic, after all, and so was Anne, his queen. But in the meantime, Papists were likely to be more persecuted and reviled than ever. Gerard planned to leave England soon, taking with him the small contingent of future priests he had recruited. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that Sam has told you yet.”
I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Told me what?”
“That he is one of my recruits.”
“‘A means to be a priest?”
Gerard nodded. “He’s spent a good deal of time with me lately, learning about the faith.”
“Shrew me,” I murmured.’A’s turned traitor after all.”
He gave me a startled glance. “You consider Catholics to be traitors?”
“Nay, not I. It’s another of La Voisin’s predictions.” Though I suspected that Sam’s interest in religion was not nearly so strong as his admiration for Gerard, I did not say so. I did not need to. The priest seemed to have read my mind.
“I am not so naive,” he said, “as to think that it was my lectures on the Trinity and original sin that won Sam over. More likely it was my accounts of exotic places and hairbreadth escapes. But the Church is not particular about our reasons for joining.” He gave a wry smile. “If it were, I would be a gentleman farmer now, managing my father’s lands, trying to save sick sheep and not souls. Like Sam, I was attracted more by the prospect of travel and adventure than by the faith itself. That came later.”
“Aye, well, don’t expect too much of Sam. ‘A’s not a bad sort, but a bit of a scamp.” I drew my purse from inside my doublet and shook the three sovereigns from it. “An you find Julia, will you give her these, to pay her passage home?”
The priest closed one hand around the money and the other around my arm. “I’ll find her,” he said.
With the aid of the smelling salts and a bit of brandy, we brought Tom Cogan fully back to life at last. But, as Gerard pointed out, that life would be worth very little if he remained in London, for he would surely be apprehended again.
“I don’t know where else I’d go,” Cogan said sullenly.
“I can take you to France with me,” Gerard offered. “Of course,” he added, “you’d have to agree to join the Society of Jesus.”
Cogan snorted. “I’d as soon join the Society of Satan.” He poured himself another drink of brandy and downed it. “No, gentlemen, I’ll take my chances here in London. If I keep to Alsatia, the authorities can’t touch me. Where I made my mistake was in stepping outside it, and mixing with well-bred folk.” He shook his head and gave a bitter laugh. “It’s funny, though, isn’t it? If I’d just gone ahead and stole the money to send to Julia, instead of humbly asking folk for it, none of this would have happened.” He fingered the T-shaped scar on his neck. “I guess it’s best just to be what’s expected of you.”
His words sounded familiar, but it took me a moment to recall where I had heard them before: Julia had said something almost identical, when she was forced to quit the company because she was a girl.
In the morning, I woke to the sound of church bells. They were not the gentle treble bells, though, that rang prime each dawn; these were deep-voiced bells with melancholy tones, and they were tolling slowly, rhythmically, without ceasing.
I sat up and peered through my window. Across the river, in the vicinity of St. Paul’s, a shifting tower of gray smoke was climbing into the sky. To the east, somewhere near the Cross Keys, rose another. I sighted a third far to the northeast, where Finsbury Fields lay, and a fourth in the northwest—at St. Bartholomew’s, no doubt.
My first muddleheaded thought was that we were being invaded by some foreign army—from Spain, perhaps, or France—and that its soldiers were setting fire to the city. But it was not an alarm that the bells were ringing, either; it was a death knell. Once I realized that, it was easy enough to guess what the source of the smoke was: It came from the bonfires that, by tradition, were lighted to signal the passing of the Crown from one monarch to another.
33
The queen’s was not the only death we mourned that day. When I reached the Globe I learned that Sal Pavy had passed away during the night. So La Voisin’s last unfulfilled prophecy had come true: someone had died because of me—because I had not had sense enough, or courage enough, to ignore a foolish dare.
I had hoped to say farewell to Sam. But soon after the news of Her Majesty’s death spread through the city, Father Gerard and his recruits boarded a ship bound for France. I knew that the priest would do his best to locate Julia and send her home, as he had promised; what I did not know was whether his best would be good enough. I could only wait and see.
The fate of the Chamberlain’s Men was equally uncertain. In her final hours, Elizabeth had indicated at last, through the use of signs—for her voice had deserted her entirely—that her successor would be James, the current King of Scotland. We had all expected that, of course. But we had no idea what else to expect of him; no one seemed even to know when he might arrive in London, let alone what he might do once he got there.
Nearly a week passed without news from any quarter, aside from a rumor that the Admiral’s Men had hired Ned Shakespeare as a player, not merely an informant. It seemed that, like us, they had determined to go on as though the future of the London theatre were assured.
We could not truly go on the same as always, though. With Ned and Sam and Sal Pavy all gone, the company was as sparse as it had been on tour the previous summer. There were not enough actors left to cast any of our usual plays, and yet we could ill afford t
o take on new prentices or hired men until we knew where we stood.
The weather had grown so warm that on the afternoons when it did not rain, we held our rehearsals upon the stage. The long winter had been hard on the boards; many were warped and a few were rotten, so that treading on them was nearly as risky as walking on the river ice had been. We were willing to put up with it, though; we all longed to play to an audience again, and when we were on the stage we could at least have the illusion of performing.
Occasionally some tradesman or truant prentice passed by and, hearing our voices declaiming and our swords clashing, peered in through the entrance and perhaps lingered for a while to watch. No one attempted to chase off these interlopers. Any audience was better than none.
As the weather improved, so did Mr. Pope’s health. Several days a week he joined us for dinner at the Globe, or sat in on a rehearsal and read all the unfilled parts. He had already grown accustomed to calling me James. The rest of the company was just as quick to adjust. It was nothing new to them, after all, having to address a fellow player by a different name; every one of us changed his identity, sometimes even his age and gender, from performance to performance.
On the days when Mr. Pope did not visit, I made my nightly report to him as usual. One evening as we sat talking over mugs of ale, Goody Willingson entered the library with a curious look on her broad face—half eager, half guarded, as though she had received some delicious bit of news but had been forbidden to tell it. “There’s a young gentleman here to see you,” she said solemnly.
“What sort of young gentleman?” asked Mr. Pope.
Goody Willingson lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “A rather scruffy-looking one, sir, to tell the truth.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No, sir.”
Mr. Pope sighed. “Well, I suppose you may as well send him in.” When the housekeeper departed, he turned to me. “Collecting for some charity, no doubt.” A few moments later the boy appeared in the doorway—a slight lad, dressed in a shabby tunic and trousers, with a woolen prentice’s cap pulled low over his ears. His face was liberally smudged with coal dust.
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