Shakespeare's Spy

by Gary Blackwood

  “Begging your pardon, sirs.” He had the same thick, working-class accent as Tom Cogan. “I was wondering whether your acting company might have room for another prentice.”

  “They may, in a few weeks.” Mr. Pope looked the lad over. “Can you act?”

  “Apparently so,” said the boy. Laughing, he yanked off the cap, revealing a wealth of auburn hair.

  “Gog’s blood!” I cried. “Julia!”

  Mr. Pope was even more astonished than I. Clutching his chest, he staggered backward and slumped into his chair.

  “Oh, gis! The shock was too much for his heart, I wis!”

  Julia ran to the old man’s side and seized one of his limp hands in hers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pope! I’m sorry! Are you all right?”

  His lolling head suddenly popped upright and he beamed at her triumphantly. “Apparently so!”

  She flung down his hand. “You were pretending?”

  “No, my dear, I was acting.”

  “Whatever you call it, it was cruel. I thought you were dying.”

  “And I thought you were a lad, so we’re even.”

  Julia could not suppress a smile. “I suppose we are, at that.” She turned to me with a mischievous look. “I had you fooled as well, didn’t I?”

  “Only for a moment,” I said indignantly. “It was the dirt on your face that did it. It hid your features.”

  She wiped one cheek with the sleeve of her tunic. “That’s the idea. I thought I’d be safer among all those sailors if they didn’t suspect I was a girl.”

  “Gerard gave you the money I sent, then?”

  “Gerard?”

  “The priest.”

  She shook her head. “I talked to no priest.”

  “Then how did you pay for your passage?” asked Mr. Pope.

  “Well, after a week or so I despaired of ever hearing from my da, so I did the only thing I could think of: I sold my clothing.”

  “Your clothing?”

  “Two very elegant gowns, given to me by—” She paused, clearly embarrassed. “Well, at any rate, they fetched a good price, enough so that I could pay the rent I owed and purchase these rags—” She plucked distastefully at the worn tunic and trousers. “—and still have enough left over to buy my passage.”

  “You needn’t ha’ done that,” I said. I went on to recount the whole story of how Tom Cogan had come to us, and everything that ensued—or nearly everything. I made no mention of the things Cogan had confessed to me prior to taking the mandrake potion. He had asked me to reveal them to Julia if he died. But since he had survived, he could do it himself, if he chose.

  “There,” said Mr. Pope. “James has told you what went on here; now we’d like to hear your side of the tale.”

  Julia gave me a puzzled glance. “James?”

  “It’s me new name. I’ll explain later—after you’ve told us why you had to leave France.”

  Julia lowered her gaze. “I’m afraid it’s not a pretty story.”

  “Well, you needn’t tell us if you’d rather not,” said Mr. Pope. “But you’re among friends now, my dear.”

  She smiled faintly. “I know. And I’m grateful to be. I’ve missed you all, very much.” She wiped at her face again, this time leaving damp, pale streaks in the coal dust. Then, in a voice so soft at first that I could scarcely hear, she gave us a brief account of all that had befallen her during her fifteen months in Paris.

  I knew many of the details already, from her letters. She had had the good luck to arrive in France at a time when the notion of women acting upon the stage was just beginning to gain acceptance. Because there were so few experienced actresses, Julia had found a position at once with one of the most successful companies in Paris.

  What she had never revealed in her letters was that most of the public still regarded female players as degraded and immoral, little better than women of the streets, and treated them as such. And, as the companies themselves did not consider actresses the equal of actors, they were paid a pittance. In an attempt to improve their social and financial status, most of the women players found a patron, some wealthy lord who would offer them protection, money, and a measure of respectability in return for their favors.

  Julia flatly declared that she would be no man’s mistress. For a time she managed well enough, lodging with the company manager and his wife and discouraging the amorous advances of male players and playgoers with the help of a concealed dagger.

  As her popularity and the number of roles she played increased, she caught the eye of the Comte de Belin, who was well known for his many affairs. At first he expressed his admiration only with gifts—including the two gowns she had later sold for passage money. But with each month that passed his attentions grew more and more ardent, and the more she resisted them the more insistent he became, until at last he declared that if she would not come to him willingly, he would take her against her will. That same day, she quit the company and found a room in a seedy section of the city where the count could not find her.

  When she had finished her story, she bowed her head, as if in contrition. “You’ve nothing to be ashamed of, my dear,” said Mr. Pope. “You behaved courageously and virtuously.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” she replied. “I was not very shrewd, though, was I? In being so courageous and so virtuous, I lost my one remaining chance to be a player.”

  34

  Though Julia could never have brought herself to ask for charity of any sort, when Mr. Pope insisted that she stay with us for the time being, she was clearly relieved. For the next several nights, she and I sat up long past the time when the rest of the household had retired. Mostly, we talked; it had been an eventful year for both of us, and there was much to tell. But sometimes we sat silent for long stretches, lost in our own thoughts yet always aware of each other—not separated by the silence so much as sharing it, the way folk may share a warm and satisfying meal.

  During one of these times, I caught Julia gazing at me in a peculiar fashion, as though I had done something amusing or unexpected—let go a belch, perhaps, or torn a hole in my hose. “What?” I said.

  “You’ve changed.”

  I ran a hand self-consciously over my close-cropped head. “It’s me hair, no doubt, or the lack of it. No more pudding basin.”

  “I noticed. But that’s not it.”

  “I’m an inch or two taller than when you saw me last.”

  “I noticed that as well. But it’s not that, either. I think it’s your manner.”

  “Me manners?” I thought perhaps I had belched after all, or passed wind without knowing it.

  She laughed. “Your manner. The way you speak and act.”

  “Well, me acting’s got a bit better, but me speech has stayed the same. Folk still make fun of ’t.”

  “You sot. That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

  “Aye,” I admitted. “I suppose I have changed. I could hardly help it, given all that’s happened in the past year—or even the past few weeks. I lost one father and gained another, wrote a play, did a bit of spying and a bit of fighting, fell in—” I broke off. Like Tom Cogan concealing the brand upon his neck, I had no wish to reveal how badly I had been burned.

  “Yes?” Julia prompted me. “Fell in what? A well? The space beneath the stage?”

  “No,” I said sullenly.

  “In love?” she suggested, in that same bantering tone. Though I made no reply, I was certain that my face answered for me. “Oh. I’m sorry, Widge. I didn’t mean to make light of it.”

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I’m over it now.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” There was another silence, more awkward this time, and then she said softly, “You’re fortunate, you know.”

  “Fortunate? Like those wights who survive the pox or the plague, you mean, and carry the scars all their lives?”

  “Yes. The only love I’ve ever felt is for the theatre, and it was not returned.”

  “Nor was mine.”r />
  She smiled and laid a hand on my arm. “Perhaps not. But there will be others.”

  In the second week of April, the Privy Council announced that the king had begun his progress south from Scotland at last. There seemed to be some doubt over whether or not His Majesty would actually come to London, for with the return of warm weather the plague had begun to make its presence felt again in the city.

  In the past, when the death toll from the contagion rose, the queen and her retinue had taken refuge at Hampton Court or Windsor, both of which lay far upriver, where the air was less corrupted. James would undoubtedly do the same.

  We ordinary wights did not have the luxury of moving to healthier surroundings, unless we wished to emulate those townfolk who followed in the queen’s wake, bearing bundles of straw with which they constructed makeshift shelters on the riverbank. The only measure we could take, aside from wearing pomanders filled with marjoram and rosemary, was to keep the household as free as possible of vermin—lice, fleas, bedbugs, rats, and the like.

  Julia had always been a willing worker, and she lent her efforts to the cause. She also cooked meals and cared for the younger orphans, who found her nearly as entertaining as they had Sam. Though I urged her almost daily to pay a visit to the Globe, she refused. It would be, she said, like my paying a visit to Judith; she did not wish to be reminded of what she could not have. She showed little inclination to visit Tom Cogan, either. “I don’t need him,” she said shortly. “The one time when I did, he failed me.”

  “ ’A tried to raise the money,” I said.

  “Yes, the same way he always does—dishonestly.”

  I had told her how he was arrested and imprisoned for stealing a bracelet; I had not, however, revealed the whole truth—that he was not, in fact, guilty. I did not see how I could, without also revealing a good deal more. Tom Cogan should be the one to do that. But how could he, if they never spoke? “Julia. ‘A never stole that bracelet. It was planted on him.”

  “Planted? By whom?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t tell you that, either. Just go and see him, will you?”

  After several days of delaying, she set off at last to seek out Cogan. When dusk came and she had not returned, I began to regret that I had talked her into going. Alsatia was a dangerous place, and even though Julia had grown up there, she might not be immune from its dangers.

  I resolved finally that if she did not turn up by compline, I would fetch Mr. Armin and try to find her, even though it would mean breaking the curfew. Ordinarily a wight could do so with relative impunity, but since the queen’s death the mayor had doubled or trebled the number of night watchmen in an attempt to quell the riots that had been flaring up, in protest of one thing or another.

  Many of the demonstrators were denouncing the new king, even though they had no notion of what he looked like, let alone how he would rule the country. They claimed that this latest outbreak of the plague was an omen, a clear sign from God that James was not meant to wear the Crown. Who was meant to wear it was apparently not so clear.

  As I was putting Tetty to bed, she said, “I’ve decided that you may marry Julia, if you like.”

  “Oh? You said before that I was to wait for you.”

  “I know. But perhaps you won’t want to wait that long, and I wouldn’t really mind very much your choosing someone else, if it was Julia.”

  A few weeks earlier, such a notion would have seemed to me quite odd, even ludicrous. I had always thought of Julia as a close friend, like Sander or Sam, nothing more. In truth, I believe I still had not quite gotten over thinking of her as a boy. But in the weeks since she had joined our household, I had begun to see her with new eyes—the eyes of James Pope, I suppose, and not Widge—and to feel toward her something more than mere friendship. I could not have given a name to it; I did not seem to be experiencing any of the startling symptoms that Judith Shakespeare had inspired in me. When Julia and I were together, I was comfortable and contented, not dumb and desperate. When we were apart, my thoughts of her were pleasant, not painful—except for now, when I was anxiously wondering what had become of her.

  I was just about to ask Mr. Pope’s permission to go after her when the front door opened and Julia hurried in, wide-eyed and breathless. I was so overcome with relief that I came very near to throwing my arms about her.

  “I’m sorry, James,” she said, for she had finally broken the habit of calling me Widge. “I know you must have been worried.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried,” I said.

  “You weren’t?”

  “Nay. Frantic would be a better word, I wis.”

  She stared at me. “Truly?”

  “Of course. I was afeared you’d been … Well, I don’t ken what, exactly, but something dreadful.”

  She took hold of my hand. “I’m glad.”

  “Glad? That I was half out of me wits?”

  “No. That you should care so much what happens to me.”

  “Did you doubt it?”

  She smiled. “I suppose not. Come, let’s sit. I’m exhausted from outrunning the night watchmen.” I led her to the library, where Mr. Pope, in his delight at seeing her safe and sound, actually did embrace her. “I have a good reason for being so late, I assure you,” Julia said. She paused and lowered her eyes. “Well, I should not say a good reason. In fact, it was rather a tragic reason. I was attending my father’s funeral—such as it was. His body, and perhaps a dozen others, were all dumped into a single grave.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mr. Pope. “The contagion claimed him.”

  She nodded. “It’s even worse in Alsatia than in the rest of the city.” With a weary sigh, she sank into a chair. “It’s odd. The thing that distresses me most about his death, I think, is how little sorrow I seem to feel.”

  “That’s natural, my dear. It hasn’t quite struck you yet, that’s all.”

  “I don’t know. As heartless as it may sound, I’m not certain that I’ll ever mourn him very much. The truth is, I never felt as though …” She trailed off.

  “As though ’a was truly your father,” I said.

  Julia turned her sad gaze upon me. “Is that how you felt? When Jamie Redshaw died?”

  “Aye, more or less. But you ha’ more reason than I to feel that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is …” I paused, drew a deep breath, and began again. “What I mean is that Tom Cogan was not your father.”

  35

  Thanks to my actor’s memory, I had no trouble recalling every detail of the confession Cogan had made to me in his prison cell. The difficult part was bringing myself to reveal it to Julia. I feared that once I had, nothing would ever be quite the same between us. Yet neither could I bring myself to keep it from her.

  The story was so intricate that I could not tell but one piece of it, any more than I could have recounted a single scene from Hamlet or Comedy of Errors and expected my audience to make any sense of it. I had to begin, as a play does, at the beginning.

  Several years before Julia was born, Tom Cogan married a childless widow named Alice—not so much for love, he admitted, as for the wages she made as a charwoman at Whitehall. Like every other female who worked or lived in the palace, Alice was smitten with the queen’s dashing young master of the horse, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Not content with being the queen’s favorite, Essex seemed bent on seducing, one by one, all of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting. Each time the jealous queen got wind of such an affair she was furious, and sent the unfortunate girl home in disgrace.

  One of Essex’s conquests was Frances Vavasour, the daughter of an impoverished nobleman. When Frances learned that she was carrying Essex’s child, she became frantic. Unable to trust the other ladies, who were envious of her, she confided in a friendly servant—Alice Cogan. They managed to hide her condition until the queen departed on her annual progress from one great lord’s house to anoth
er. While Her Majesty was gone, Frances gave birth to the baby, attended only by Alice. Her motherly instincts proved less powerful than her fear of the queen’s wrath. She offered to pay Alice a small sum yearly if she would raise the baby as her own, and the childless charwoman readily agreed.

  Alice died of a fever three years later, leaving her husband to raise the child—and, of course, collect the stipend—on his own. By this time, Her Majesty had arranged a very favorable match for Frances; she was to wed Thomas Shirley, the son of the royal treasurer. Now she had even more reason to want her affair with Essex kept a secret. When Essex tried to stir up a rebellion and was beheaded, it became downright dangerous to admit any association with him.

  For nearly thirteen years, Tom Cogan’s only contact with Frances Shirley was through a servant, who brought him the annual payment that ensured his silence. But the time came at last when he needed a far larger sum, in order to pay Julia’s passage home from France. After Mr. Shakespeare and Mr. Heminges turned him down, he went to call on Madame Shirley, confident that though she might not claim Julia as her daughter, she would not let the girl starve.

  When she refused to give him the money, he foolishly threatened to speak to her husband. She seemed to change her mind, then, and offered him a gold bracelet that would, she said, easily fetch three pounds from a moneylender. He had not gone half a dozen blocks before the constables caught him and charged him with stealing the bracelet.

  I had supposed that Julia’s reaction to these revelations would be much the same as mine. But I saw no sign of astonishment on her face, only skepticism. “My da told you all this?”

  “Aye. Well, not your real da. Tom Cogan.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “What reason would ‘a ha’ to lie?”

  “I don’t know. To make you believe that he wasn’t a thief, perhaps. Besides, he didn’t need a reason to lie; it was a habit. Right now, I’ll wager, he’s trying to convince the Devil that it’s all a mistake, that he merely got on the wrong coach.”