by Simon Hawke
“You would cut a lady’s throat?” the woman asked him.
“Not a lady’s throat,” said Smythe. “But I would have no compunctions about cutting yours.”
“Aargh, God’s bollock?” the first alleyman swore, still doubled over and clutching at his shin with both hands. “The bastard damn near broke me leg!”
“I wish he had broken it, you simple-minded oaf,” the woman said. “As for you, laddie, I take it back. You were more than quick enough.”
“What do we do now, Moll?” asked the second alleyman, in a confused and frightened tone.
“Whatever he tells you to, you fool,” she replied. “And keep your bloody mouth shut.”
“Moll?” said Smythe. He recalled the name from one of the pamphlets he had purchased. A woman who went about dressed as a man, who fought with a sword as well as one, ran a school for pickpockets and lifts, dealt in stolen goods, and carried a great deal of influence in the thieves’ guilds of London. “Moll Cut-purse?”
“You know me?”
“I have read about you, it seems.”
“Ah. Greene and his damn fool pamphlets. Sure an’ I should have drowned him in the river like a sack of cats long since. He’ll get me hanged yet. So… now that you have me, what will you do with me? If you kill me, my boys will break your head, you know.”
“Well, I suppose they can try,” said Smythe, trying to mask his uncertainty. “But I could always call out for the watch.”
She laughed. “Call all you like, laddie. They’ll be gathered in some tavern, having cakes and ale. And if you try to take me in to them, you’ll not get far, I promise you. My boys will see to that.”
“What, these two sorry rufflers?” Smythe said. “They were not much help to you just now, were they?”
Moll whistled sharply through her teeth and a moment later, Smythe became aware of dark figures stepping out from the shadows all around him. There were at least a dozen of them or more.
“Oh,” he said. “Damn.”
“So, laddie, what do you intend?” asked Moll.
“Well now, ‘tis an excellent question, Moll,” he replied, uneasily. “To be honest with you, I do not quite know. But if I let you go, ‘tis clear that things would not go very well for me, whereas so long as I have you, I have something to bargain with, it seems.”
“Indeed,” she said. “So then, what do you propose?”
“Right now, methinks I would settle for getting out of this with my skull intact,” said Smythe.
“That sounds entirely reasonable to me,” Moll Cutpurse replied. “You spare me throat, and I shall spare your skull.”
“Ah, but there’s the rub, you see,” said Smythe. “What assurance have I that you shall have your men stand off if I should let you go?”
“You have my word.”
“The word of a thief?”
“I may steal,” she replied, “but I always keep me word. Ask anyone.”
“ ‘Tis true,” one of the alleymen replied.
“Well, with such an impeccable gentleman vouching for your honor, how could I ever doubt your word?” asked Smythe, wryly.
She chuckled. “Laddie, if I wanted you dead, I could have you followed, and then once I knew where you hung your hat, I could have you done in at any time. Anytime at all. Once all is said and done, what matters it to me if I am hanged for theivery or murder?”
“Your point is well taken,” Smythe replied. “Well then, ‘twould seem that someone is going to have to trust someone first, else we shall be standing here like this all night. And that would profit no one.” He took his knife away from Moll Cut-purse’s throat and stood back, cautiously, keeping his blade ready.
Moll stepped away and turned around to face him, her hand instinctively going to her throat to feel for blood. There wasn’t any. Smythe had been careful not to cut her. The other men started to close in, but she held her hand up, holding them off. They stopped at once.
“Would you have done it, then?” she asked, softly. “Would you have cut me throat?”
“To be honest, I truly do not know,” Smythe replied.
“ ‘Tis an honest man who can admit his own uncertainties,” she said. She came up close to him, so she could see him better. She gazed at him thoughtfully. “I have seen you before, methinks,” she said.
“I stay at the Toad and Badger,” Smythe said. “And I am a player with the Queen’s Men. So now you know where you can find me, if you truly wish me dead.”
“If that were so, then you would be dead already,” she said with a smile. “A player, eh? You are a strapping big lad for a player. You have the look of a man who does honest labor for his living.”
“I apprenticed as a smith and farrier,” he said. “Though I am no journeyman, I still do some work for Liam Bailey now and then, what with the playhouses being closed.”
“Liam Bailey’s last apprentice had his head broke in a fight, I heard,” she said. “ ‘Twould be a shame to deprive him of another. He’s not getting any younger.”
“I would not say that to his face,” Smythe said. “His arm is still twice the size of mine, and I do not yet see him entering his dotage. Not without a fight.”
“He’s a cantankerous old kite, sure enough. But though ‘tis pleasant to stand here and pass the time, we still have unfinished business, you and I. What were you doing following me tonight?”
“Well, ‘twas not you I was following so much as Molly,” Smythe replied.
“Molly, is it? Are you her lover, then?”
“What, I? Nay, nothing like,” said Smythe, a bit taken aback. “In truth, I love another. But Molly… well, we all… that is, all the players… we are all quite fond of her, you know. And when I saw a strange man… well, what I thought was a man, anyway… approach her in the street tonight and then go off with her, well… I was curious and merely wanted to be sure that naught would go amiss.”
“I see.” Moll stared at him thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, that has the ring of truth to it, I suppose. And you did seem surprised when you learned I was woman. What is your name, laddie?”
“I am called Tuck Smythe.”
She held out her hand. “Moll Cutpurse is me canting name,” she said, as he took it. “Someday, if I should get to know you better, I may give you me Christian one. And then again, I may not. But I shall keep an eye on you, Tuck Smythe. For me own sake and for Molly’s… just to make sure that naught will go amiss,” she added, giving him his own words back with a smile.
She reached out her hand and one of her men returned her sword to her. As she put it back into its scabbard, another man picked up her hat and gave it back to her. She put it back on, touched her brim to Smythe, and then one by one, they all melted away into the darkness without a sound.
“Hmpf. Now I know why they call them ‘footpads,’ “ Smythe said to himself. He looked around.
The streets were dark and foggy, and it was difficult to see much more than a few paces ahead. However, despite that, and despite the lateness of the hour, he was nevertheless struck by the fact that on a street crowded with buildings, in a part of the city where rooms were often shared by as many as a dozen people crowded in together and sleeping on the floor, apparently no one had even opened a window and looked out during his encounter with Moll Cutpurse and her men.
He was also struck by how quickly she had been able to summon those men. Surely, she could not have had the time to do so in the brief interval between leaving Molly at her doorstep and accosting him only a few blocks later.
She had known that he had followed her and Molly from the Toad and Badger. She had said as much, though he did not know how she could have noticed him. He had never once seen her look around. But she must have known somehow that he was there, just the same, for she had to have sent word to those men, through some sort of signal… but to whom? And how? Once again, he felt out of his depth, a country bumpkin from the Midlands wandering through London like a perfect gull, ignorant and clueless.<
br />
He had never considered himself gullible or foolish, but then, he reminded himself, gullible and foolish people never do, do they? That is one of the things that makes them so. London truly is a different world, he thought. More than one, in fact. The worlds of London society were like layers. Begin to unearth and discover one, and soon another became revealed underneath it… an “underworld,” so to speak.
He needed to obtain more of those pamphlets of Robert Greene’s. He felt as if what he had learned from them had merely scratched the surface of London ’s underworld of thieves. How was it, he wondered, that Greene came by all his knowledge of the world of London ’s criminals? He was a poet, a university man who, one would think, would be much more accustomed to the ways and customs of the Inns of Court rather than the “stews” or brothels and “boozing kens” or alehouses of Cheapside and Southwark. He wondered if it would be possible to meet Greene somehow and ask him questions.
“Were I in your place, I should not bother,” Shakespeare said, when Smythe returned home and put the question to him.
“Why not?”
Still at his writing desk when Smythe returned, Shakespeare had managed to get a number of pages written and felt pleased enough with his progress to retire for the night. They both prepared for bed, stripping down to their white linen shirts.
As Smythe sat down on the mattress and brushed off stray bits of rushes that had adhered to his bare feet, Shakespeare hiked up his shirt and urinated in the chamber pot they kept on the floor in the corner of their room. To help keep down foul odors, they avoided using the chamber pot for anything else, and instead shat in the jakes, a tiny room where Stackpole kept a close stool, which was nothing more than a small, crude, wooden box seat with a hole in the top and a lid, inside of which was kept a large chamber pot partially filled with water. In the interests of keeping his establishment as clean as possible, Stackpole dutifully saw to it that the jakes was emptied out into the street several times a day, and fresh rushes were strewn on the floors in all the rooms each morning, mixed with chips of wormwood to help keep down the fleas. It was, truly, among the cleanest inns that Smythe had seen in the working-class neighborhoods of London, despite its somewhat tumbledown appearance, and any tenant who violated Stackpole’s scrupulous edicts on decorum by voiding, spitting, or vomiting upon the floor without cleaning it up was soundly boxed about the ears and then thrown out into the street. Consequently, most of Stackpole’s tenants tended to follow his rules out of both self-interest and self-preservation.
“From what I hear, Greene has descended into dissipation,” Shakespeare said, as he opened the window and flung the contents of the chamber pot out into the street.
“Oy!” someone yelled out from below.
Shakespeare glanced out briefly. “Sorry, Constable,” he called down.
“Seems to me as if you have made that particular descent a time or two yourself,” Smythe replied.
“S’trewth, I have enjoyed, upon more than one occasion, the happy state of drunkenness,” Shakespeare replied, as he got into bed, “but I have never sought to wallow in the desolate depravity of dissipation. Greene, poor soul, has fallen to that saddest of all states wherein his talent, such as ‘twas, has sailed away upon a sea of spirits. ‘Tis not a pretty story, I fear. He is but six years my senior, and yet Dick Burbage tells me that he looks almost twice my age. He has fallen upon hard times, it seems, and taken up with still harder company. When I asked Dick the same question that you just asked me, Burbage cautioned me to give him a wide berth and from what he said, ‘twould seem like very sound advice. I might recommend the same to you.”
“Pity,” Smythe said. “I have much enjoyed his writings. They have the mark of a well-educated man.”
“Aye, they do at that,” Shakespeare agreed. “The writings of well-educated men are oft’ filled with their contempt for the common man, who does not share their education. Which, of course, is why they always fail to understand him. But then enough of Greene and all his ilk. Tell me more about Moll Cutpurse. I find her much more to my interest!”
“I can understand that well enough,” said Smythe. “I could easily see her as a character portrayed upon the stage. She is positively filled with the stuff of drama, from her head down to her toes.”
“Go on! Describe her to me!” Shakespeare said, his eyes alight with curiosity.
“Well, to begin, she is quite tall for a woman,” Smythe replied. “We are nearly the same height. I took her for a man, at first, because of the way that she was dressed. She wore high leather boots, dark breeches, and a long dark cloak together with a rakish, wide-brimmed hat, rather in the French style, with an ostrich plume stuck into the band. She also wore a sword. I did not have much opportunity to take the weapon’s measure and make some determination of its quality, for at the time, I was rather more attentive to making certain that its point did not transfix my throat.”
“What of her features?” Shakespeare asked. “How did she look?”
“ ‘Twas difficult to see well in the darkness, though we stood close enough that I do believe that I would know her if I saw her once again,” said Smythe. “Her hair was dark, or it seemed dark, at any rate. I suppose ‘twas possible that it could have been red or auburn, though I had the impression that ‘twas raven-hued. Her skin seemed fair, and I could not discern a blemish nor any marks of pox or the like.”
“Was she pretty? Or was she rather plain? Or ugly?”
“I would not call her plain,” said Smythe. “Neither would I call her pretty. Nor ugly, for that matter.”
“Well, what then?”
“Striking, I should say. S’trewth, she did not seem hard at all upon the eyes, but her face had rather too much… too much…” He searched for the right words as his hand floated up in front of him, as if grasping at something. “Too much forth-rightness, I should say, to call it pretty.”
“Ah,” said Shakespeare. “A face with strength of character.”
“Just so, precisely.”
“Tell me about her gaze.”
“Her gaze?”
“The eyes, when she looked upon you… Did they sparlde with a pleasant humor? Or did they seem cold and distant? Cruel? Mocking? Lustful, perhaps?”
“Lustful!” Smythe snorted. “Surely, you jest! The woman had a swordpoint at my throat!”
“Well, with some women, that sort of thing might induce an… excitation.”
“Odd’s blood! I shudder to think what sort of women you must have known!”
“I shudder to think what sort I married,” Shakespeare replied, dryly. “But that is quite another matter. What I meant was, did you have any feeling that having you so at a disadvantage gave her a sense of satisfaction or, perhaps, of pleasure?”
“She did seem to enjoy my discomfort, come to think on it,” Smythe said.
“What about after you turned the tables on her?” Shakespeare asked. “When you had your knife to her throat… what then? Was she afraid?”
“Not in the least,” Smythe said. “She was aware of the danger, I should say, and from what she asked me later, I do not think she was truly sure if I would have used my knife or not, but she seemed to take it all in stride. I found that quite extraordinary.”
“Indeed,” said Shakespeare. “The portrait you have painted has a most unusual aspect. And not at all unpleasing, at that. It brings to mind our mutual friend, Black Billy, does it not?”
“Sir William’s other self?” said Smythe. “Aye, there does seem to be a sort of family resemblance.”
Shakespeare’s eyebrows raised. “You don’t suppose…?”
“Certainly not!” Smythe said. “What an astonishing idea!”
“Any more astonishing than a knight of the realm galloping about the countryside as a common highwayman?” countered Shakespeare.
“Aye, perhaps not, when you put it that way,” Smythe replied. “Still, they are much more different than the same. Moll’s speech has a Highland ring to it, w
hich tells me for a certainty that she did not grow up in England, as did Sir William. And their faces are both shaped rather differently. Sir William’s has a sharp and hawkish cast, whilst Moll’s is rounder, with somewhat gentler features.”
“But you said that you could not see her all that clearly.”
“I saw her clear enough to know her face again. I could not tell you for certain what the precise hue of her hair was, whether ‘twas black or chestnut rather than auburn, or if she was more pale than ruddy, but I believe that I would know her features.”
“Then you must be sure to point her out to me if we should chance to pass her in the street,” said Shakespeare. “I wonder what she was doing with our Molly.”
“I was wondering the same,” said Smythe. “Moll and Molly. Two women with the same name, or near enough, and yet they could not be more different. Of course, ‘twas not her real name, Moll Cutpurse, but her canting name, as she admitted to me. I wonder who she really is. Truly, ‘tis a different world these people live in, what with their own made-up names and manners of speech, even their own society, with its own rules.”
“One might say the same of the queen’s own court,” said Shakespeare. “Save that with the thieves guild, we have less pomp and more circumstance. Did you think to ask our Molly what she was doing abroad with such a wolf’s head?”
“How could I? Then she would know that I had followed her.”
“And are you ashamed of that? Were your motives less than honorable in that regard?”
“Surely, Will, you know me better! Besides, you know that my affections are already spoken for.”
“Aye, indeed, I do know that, my friend. But when it comes to women, men oft’ do such addle-pated things as to defy and mystify all those who know and love them. Although, once all is said and done, Molly is a much more suitable object for the affections of a player than your Elizabeth, who stands well beyond your humble reach, as I have told you more than once.”
