The Roaring Boy

by Edward Marston

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’

  ‘I will not disturb you any longer.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ she said anxiously.

  ‘To the inn at the end of the main street. If I can rouse the landlord, I am sure he will give me a bed for tonight. I will then be on hand in the morning to lend further assistance.’

  ‘You will say here, Nicholas.’

  ‘I have no right to intrude.’

  ‘I insist,’ she said, turning to the maidservant. ‘See that a bed is made ready at once, Agnes. Hurry.’

  As the woman went off about her task, Nicholas thought he detected a slight reluctance. He surmised that she was unhappy about his continued stay in the house and annoyed to be sent too far away to overhear what might be a valuable conversation. He took swift advantage of her absence.

  ‘Speak to nobody,’ he warned. ‘Confide nothing.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is a sensible precaution. Master Chaloner told me that this house has ears. I know that to be true.’ He moved in closer and looked into her face. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Sick with grief.’

  ‘Retire to bed.’

  ‘How can I rest on such a night as this? What sleep do I deserve? I killed Simon,’ she said simply. ‘I killed him.’

  Nicholas was firm but gentle. ‘That is nonsense and you must not even think it. What you did was to give him an excellent reason for living. Remember the times you shared together and reflect on what they meant to him. Master Chaloner was deeply in love and that is the stoutest armour of all. He died ignobly but he also died happy. He had you.’

  ‘I could have been kinder to him.’

  He shrugged. ‘Let us talk again in the morning.’

  ‘Do not pack me off to bed, Nicholas. I am not ready. I am not disposed.’ She took his hand impulsively. ‘Stay with me for a little while yet. I need you.’

  ‘My presence here occasions some disquiet.’

  ‘You do not wish to stay?’

  ‘Nothing would content me more,’ he said, feeling the warmth of her hand, ‘but I would not make you the object of comment. You thought it improper for your betrothed to stay beneath the same roof with you. How more unsuitable am I?’

  ‘Nobody could be more suitable.’

  He looked down into a face almost haggard with fatigue.

  ‘Then I will stay.’

  ‘I want your guidance.’

  ‘Call on me for anything. I am here.’

  He released her hand but she did not move away. Emilia continued to stare up at him. Her eyes were still awash with grief but he saw something else in them now. Nicholas was touched. What he caught was a signal that she was ready to trust him more completely, to let him closer than she had ever dared before. Simon Chaloner had been her confidant in the past. Now that he had died, his mantle was being handed to Nicholas. The book holder reached out boldly to take it.

  ‘Tell me who wrote The Roaring Boy,’ he said.

  ‘I think you already know.’

  It dawned on him at last. Emilia Brinklow loved the theatre. She visited London regularly with her brother to watch plays. When Nicholas had asked why she did not feature as a character in The Roaring Boy, she was not coy or evasive. She gave him a sound technical reason for her absence from the dramatis personae. The play was far more than an obsession for her.

  ‘You are the author.’

  She smiled quietly. ‘Women do not write plays.’

  ‘One of them wrote The Roaring Boy and that makes the achievement all the more remarkable. I have read hundreds of plays in my time. Yours is not disgraced by any of them.’

  ‘I wrote from the heart.’

  Nicholas gazed at her with a new admiration. Emilia Brinklow was a talented woman. Her brother might have been a genius in the sciences but she had the talent for the arts. She also evinced rare courage in forcing her way into such a closed world. Theatre was an exclusively male preserve. Plays were written and performed entirely by men. For a woman even to attempt to emulate them was an act of bravery. To succeed in the way that Emilia Brinklow had done was quite astonishing.

  ‘You see now why the author had to vanish,’ she said.

  ‘Clearly.’

  ‘Who would even read a play penned by a woman?’

  ‘I would,’ he reminded. ‘And I did.’

  ‘Only because you thought it the work of a man. That is why I needed Edmund Hoode’s assistance. He not only made the piece work on the stage. His name lent it credence.’

  Nicholas Bracewell understood many things for the first time. His anger at having being misled was quickly smothered beneath his increased respect for her. Emilia Brinklow was not just a beautiful woman with a self-appointed mission. She was also a professional colleague. The implications of it all were not lost on him. She was in immense danger. Because he gathered the material for the play, Simon Chaloner was murdered. Because he reworked the drama, Edmund Hoode was imprisoned in the Marshalsea. Both had suffered from their association with The Roaring Boy. If its true authorship were revealed, Emilia would be hunted down without mercy.

  Nicholas felt that it was his duty to protect her.

  ‘I will stay until this affair is over,’ he said.

  ‘Here in Greenwich?’

  ‘This is where it begins and ends.’

  ‘My house is at your disposal.’

  ‘There is nowhere that I would rather be.’

  She gazed wistfully at him until a tap on the door told them that Agnes had returned. Emilia moved away and kept her back to them. The maidservant had prepared a room for the guest and waited to conduct Nicholas up to it.

  He turned to Emilia to bid a polite farewell.

  ‘Good night,’ he said.

  She acknowledged him with a faint wave of the hand. He went out with Agnes and the door was shut behind them. When Emilia swung round to look after it, tears of remorse were running freely down her face.

  ***

  The bed was soft and the linen clean but Nicholas was quite unable to sleep. His mind was exercised by the events of the day. The murder of Simon Chaloner was paramount. There would be no adulterous lovers waiting to be caught this time. The law officers of Greenwich would have to make their enquiries without any help and that made the likelihood of an arrest virtually non-existent. Additional men might be drafted in to assist them but there was no way that they would ever follow the tortuous path that led back to Greenwich Palace. Nicholas had to work alone, a daunting prospect until he remembered that he did, after all, have some associates.

  Emilia Brinklow herself was more than a friend. Tragedy had yoked them together. A mutual affection which had been sown at their first meeting had pushed up its first shoots in unpromising soil. He felt it somewhat unseemly to have such warm feelings about a woman so soon after the death of her betrothed and he tried to put them aside but they remained beneath the surface. Only a woman of singular determination could have waged the battle that she had. The fact that she had actually made her own ammunition—The Roaring Boy—impressed him even more. Thomas Brinklow had created wonders in his workshop but his sister’s invention came from the laboratory of her mind.

  Valentine was a useful if unprepossessing ally. The gardener’s nocturnal habits had paid dividends. Nicholas not only knew who had dragged the corpse up to the front door, he believed that he had unmasked the informer in the house. In the morning, he would confront another spy. Orlando Reeve had penetrated Westfield’s Men to learn their plans. Nicholas Bracewell was looking forward to giving the musician a message from the whole company. In their own ways, Agnes and Reeve might turn out to be valuable associates as well.

  His mind turned inevitably to Edmund Hoode. It was the playwright who was bearing the brunt of the punishment. H
aving been imprisoned in the Counter himself, Nicholas had some notion of the miseries of confinement. He had withstood them but Hoode was a weaker vessel. Nicholas wanted to rush back to London to bend all his energies to secure the release of his friend but it would be a pointless journey. The only way to liberate Hoode from the Marshalsea was to solve a second murder in Greenwich.

  He was still contemplating the possibilities of the day ahead when he finally drifted off to sleep. An hour or more drifted by in blissful slumber. A clicking noise brought him awake. He opened his eyes but the darkness weighed down in them. When he sat up, he could still see nothing. What he did do was to catch her light fragrance. Emilia Brinklow had come of her own volition into his bedchamber.

  She moved in silence across the room, then gently peeled back the sheets. Climbing in beside him, she lay quite still. He heard her breathing deepen as she fell asleep. Nicholas was moved. She had come to share his bed. Emilia wanted nothing more than his company and the protection that it conferred. The moment she was beside him, she was able to relax. She trusted him.

  Nicholas was surprised how unsurprised he felt. Her arrival seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Had he tried to analyse it, the situation would have yielded up all sorts of warnings and contradictions but he was in no mood to spoil an affecting moment. She was there. At a time of real crisis, she chose the place where she most wanted to be. Nicholas accepted that fact with gratitude. He soon faded back into sleep himself.

  Sunlight was fingering the curtains when he awoke next morning. He felt refreshed and invigorated. How long he had slept he did no know but one thing was certain.

  Emilia Brinklow no longer lay in the bed beside him.

  ***

  Lawrence Firethorn and Owen Elias set out on horseback at first light. Their rough and nondescript attire had been borrowed from the costume stock of Westfield’s Men. With their plain caps and coarse jerkins, they looked like two watermen taking a day off from their oars. As they rode side by side along the street at a rising trot, Firethorn gave a snort of contempt.

  ‘Look at me, Owen!’ he exclaimed. ‘To what depths have I fallen! I am accustomed to the robes of an emperor or the armour of a soldier king. At the very least, I play a duke or an earl. But this! I feel like a dung-collector!’

  ‘That is exactly what we are, Lawrence.’

  ‘I deserve better.’

  ‘You will get it if this day’s work bears fruit.’

  ‘One rotten apple is all we seek. Maggotty Maggs.’

  ‘Then we must dress the part.’

  ‘I’ll wear my Freshwell face.’

  Firethorn insisted on being involved in the adventure in place of Nicholas Bracewell. Expected back the previous night, the book holder did not appear and they rightly assumed that he was detained in Greenwich by urgent business. In the interests of speed, they elected to take on the pursuit of Maggs by themselves. Owen Elias was glad of Firethorn’s company even if the jogging of the horse did set off the latter’s toothache again. The Welshman would not dare to take George Dart on this outing. He needed strength beside him and there were few more powerful men in the company than the barrel-chested actor-manager. The son of a blacksmith, Lawrence Firethorn had all the attributes of that occupation allied to a taste for danger. His skill with sword and dagger was no mere stage illusion.

  ‘What do we say to him?’ asked Elias.

  ‘Leave that to me.’

  ‘Tell him that Lucy sends her love.’

  ‘At the sign of the Red Cock.’

  ‘What other kind is worth having?’

  They guffawed loudly and kicked their horses into a canter. Now that they were outside the city gates, their progress would be much quicker. They struck eastwards with the river on their right hand, its smell never far away. It was not a journey they would make by choice but necessity compelled them. Their whole careers were at stake. If one man could help to save them, they had to be prepared to track him down in his unsavoury hiding place.

  It was the distinctive reek that first told them they were within reach of their destination. The stench came out to meet them like an invisible fist that punched them on the nose. They coughed and spluttered for a moment.

  ‘How can anyone live in a place like this?’ said Elias.

  ‘They get used to it.’

  ‘Not me, Lawrence. Dieu—that stink!’

  ‘When we hunt a rat, we must expect a sewer.’

  It was a not unfair description of the Isle of Dogs. The low, marshy peninsula jutted out obstructively into the Thames at the bend between Limehouse and Blackwall reaches. It was directly opposite Greenwich on the south bank and the contrast between the two places could not have been harsher. Greenwich was affluent and graced by royalty: the Isle of Dogs was poverty-stricken and haunted by outlaws, punks and fugitive debtors. The latter was also swilled by all the sewage and detritus that came downriver from London. Sailors cursed the Isle of Dogs because it obliged them to make a long, time-consuming loop in their journeys. If they were forced to anchor nearby, it would always be in mid-stream or they would be pillaged from the northern shore.

  Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs represented extremes of society. Only the rich and influential rose to attend the banquets at the palace: only the poor and the desperate sank to the ignominy of the Isle of Dogs. One was the home of privilege while the other was a lair for masterless men.

  Lawrence Firethorn was revolted by the unredeemed squalor.

  ‘Bankside can be bad enough,’ he said. ‘And there are parts of Clerkenwell that can turn your stomach but this is worse than both. What are we doing here, Owen?’

  ‘Trying to find someone.’

  ‘In this swamp! We’ll be infected with every disease known to man and beast. The air is so thick and stale we may cut it with our daggers and feed it to those mangy hounds.’

  Fierce dogs were scavenging in the putrid lanes. Small children were playing in the dirt. Stagnant water lent its strength to the general whiff of decay. Wild-eyed men and ragged women roamed the streets. Even at that early hour, the sound of violence rent the air. Firethorn saw the wisdom of their disguises. In the flamboyant doublet and hose that he usually wore, he would have been ridiculously out of place in the Isle of Dogs and that would have rendered him a certain target. As it was, they collected hostile glares from the beggars lying in the doorway of an ordinary. When the two strangers refused to toss them any money, the glares became loud imprecations.

  They stabled their horses at a decrepit tavern and proceeded on foot to attract less attention. Owen Elias had suggested a morning visit in the hope that the area would be more quiescent but it was already bubbling with crude life. Lucy had provided the name of a street but no number. They were grateful to find only nine tenements in the street and two of those had collapsed against each other like drunken revellers. That left seven, each building with several occupants. They split up, knocked on doors and endured ear-shattering abuse. When only one door was left in the very last tenement, they converged on it without ceremony.

  Elias’s strong shoulder hit the door with such force that it broke the bolt. Firethorn was first in, his sword in one hand and his dagger in the other. Elias was on his heels. Both men froze in their tracks. They could not believe what they were seeing. Quite undisturbed by the commotion, two figures were rutting enthusiastically on a mattress. A big, bosomy woman of middle years was lying on her back with her taffeta dress pulled up to her waist and her chubby legs in the air while a small, thin, naked man with a bald head and a back covered in sweat and scabs was pumping vigorously into her as if his life depended on it. He suddenly stiffened his back, let out a wheeze of pleasure, jiggled around for a moment and then broke wind.

  Maggs rolled over on to the bare floorboards and gasped for air. Owen Elias was on to him in a flash, kneeling beside him and pri
cking his scrotum with the point of his dagger.

  ‘Hello, Maggs,’ he said. ‘Visitors.’

  ‘Who are you?’ gabbled the disadvantaged lover.

  ‘We ask the questions.’

  Elias jabbed his dagger and produced a yell of pain.

  ‘Don’t kill him yet,’ said the woman resentfully. ‘He hasn’t paid me.’ She nudged her client. ‘Come on, Maggs. Where is it?’

  ‘Away with you!’ said Firethorn, thrusting a few coins into her hands and shoving her out through the door. ‘This is a private conversation.’

  Maggs took stock of his oppressors. They had the upper hand. He began to squeal and plead for mercy. Firethorn stood over him with a swordpoint at his chest.

  ‘How much mercy did you show to Thomas Brinklow?’

  ‘I didn’t kill him!’ said Maggs. ‘It was Freshwell.’

  ‘The pair of you did it,’ said Firethorn.

  ‘I merely held the man. Freshwell struck him down.’

  ‘Who paid you?’

  ‘I do not know his name.’

  ‘Who was he?’ said Elias, grabbing the man by the throat to lift him upright and thrust him against the wall. ‘We do not have time to argue, Maggs. His name!’

  ‘Sir John Tarker,’ mumbled the other.

  ‘Louder!’

  ‘Sir John Tarker!’

  ‘Who else?’ demanded Firethorn.

  ‘Nobody,’ said Maggs. ‘He paid Freshwell and me to kill Brinklow and get his papers. But we were disturbed and had to run away. When we went back later, someone had burned part of the place down. All his papers were destroyed.’

  ‘What papers?’ said Firethorn.

  ‘How should I know? We just followed orders.’ Maggs became bitter. ‘Sir John turned nasty. He betrayed us. Because we only did one half of what he asked, he handed us over to the law. I escaped but old Freshwell danced a jig on fresh air.’

  ‘You may well join him,’ said Elias.

  ‘Hanging can be no worse than the Isle of Dogs.’

  ‘These papers,’ said Firethorn, feeling they had made a valuable discovery. ‘Where were they kept? Were they to do with Master Brinklow’s work, by any chance?’