by M. J. Trow
Choosing his words with care, the lad enunciated. ‘No, I haven’t … been near … anywhere where … he may be.’ How much easier to have said No, Master Henslowe, I haven’t seen Master Sledd this morning, but a lad had to think of his career.
‘Imbecile!’ Henslowe threw a random piece of rotting vegetable missed by the cleaning crew that morning and went off up the stairs to his office. By the time he had opened the window and yelled for Tom Sledd out in the street, he and Skirrow were cantering towards the road that led south through the marshes.
‘She said you’d be in a foul mood.’ Bet lay back on the pillows, puffing softly on Henry Meux’s pipe.
‘With her I usually am,’ Meux was washing his face in the water jug on the night stand. They were both talking in whispers.
‘You are beastly to her, Henry,’ Bet said, watching the smoke drift up to the velvet hangings of the bed. ‘She loves you, you know.’
He looked at her. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ He threw himself down next to her and tickled the soft flesh around her navel. ‘But she doesn’t have your charms, Bet. It’s like swiving a barn door.’
Bet chuckled. ‘What was all that nonsense with Matthew Compton?’ she asked.
‘Hmm?’ He was watching her skin prickle under his touch.
‘You were telling us over supper, before Cicely retired. That business with the bell and the candles.’
‘Oh, that,’ Meux chuckled. ‘Well, it was rather amusing, I suppose. But it doesn’t do much for George’s popularity, Bet, not among the Island gentry, anyway. Of course, the riff-raff lap it up. Did you know Compton?’
Bet set her mouth in a rueful half smile and shook her head a little, her curls whispering on the linen of the pillow. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Dillington.’ He chuckled again, reached for the pipe and sucked on it hard until the tobacco reddened and there was a roar from the stem, like a fire in a distant chimney. He handed it back and blew smoke to mingle with hers in the hangings. ‘Dillington said that you and he … well.’ For an adulterer Henry Meux was very nice about the words he used, and baulked at this one. ‘That you and he …’ He turned her face towards him and looked into her eyes. ‘Were you?’
She laughed and moved his hand back to her belly. ‘I may have met the man once,’ she said, her gaze not wavering. ‘He turned a handsome calf as I recall.’ She moved his hand further down and smiled. ‘But why did George see him off like that?’
‘He was a lawyer, by all accounts. I didn’t know.’
‘I had no idea he was a lawyer,’ Bet said, then hurriedly added: ‘That once I met him. Still, I suppose it’s hard to tell.’ She started to move rhythmically. ‘Whether a man is a lawyer or not. Not from his calves.’ She reached to one side and put the pipe down, wriggling down on the pillows as she did so.
‘Well, we’ll need a new centoner now, of course, in the Militia.’
She half turned to him. ‘Are you up to this?’ she asked. ‘Twice in one night. And you having tramped all over St George’s Down all day.’
‘I am if you are,’ he said. ‘But not so much noise this time, please, my lady. Cecily may be stupid and her room may be in the east wing, but she’s not deaf.’
Bet laughed, then covered her mouth with her free hand. ‘Your trouble, Henry,’ she said, rolling over into his arms, ‘is that you’ve lost all interest in this sort of thing.’
It had to be said that Tom Sledd was not much of a sailor. He was fine in the river with the water slipping like silk past the skiff’s sides. He even found the gentle roll restful. Then suddenly, they were out into the open sea and the wind hit him like a wall. Sledd was used to the rattle and lurch of wagons on the road as Lord Strange’s men had rumbled from town to town in search of a stage. He was even used to roughing it on dark and deadly nights when he was rowed across the Thames under a guttering, spitting flame. He knew all of the watermen and whilst it would be madness to trust them with your purse or anything that glittered in the moonlight, he trusted them not to send him down to the river bed. But this was different and he had never felt anything like it.
The skiff’s bows churned into the whitecaps before butting skywards again, spraying the occupants with wet salt. ‘That’s Spit Sand.’ Henry Skirrow was keeping a running commentary. ‘Horse Sand over there.’ Since Sledd could see neither horse nor sand he found the whole thing a little baffling. ‘That’s where the Mary Rose went down in good King Harry’s day.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Sledd managed.
‘What?’ Skirrow looked at him askance. ‘Don’t tell me you admire the accuracy of French naval gunnery.’
‘Gunnery?’ Sledd frowned. ‘No, I was talking about the sea. The place must be littered with the wrecks of ships.’ He suddenly didn’t want to know about how much water was between him and the bottom and he swallowed hard.
‘This is nothing, lad,’ Skirrow assured him, swinging easily with the movement of the ship, shifting his weight from one foot to another to compensate. ‘You want to be back o’ the Wight in a north-westerly.’
Tom Sledd could not begin to tell him how much he did not. His life flashed before him as the bows came round and the little crew began to haul sail. Ahead of them, against a dark canopy of trees, masts of all sizes bobbed above a little armada of ships. There must have been fifteen vessels crowded into a bay along the margins of which a shanty town of wooden huts clustered at rakish angles to each other, smoke drifting up through the branches overhead.
The canvas was hauled down at the end of the worst two hours of Tom Sledd’s young life and oars were slid rumbling into rowlocks as the skiff began to snake its way between the ships moored farthest out. The London man had rarely seen so many foreign merchantmen in one place, even along the Queen’s quays at Rotherhithe. Their sterns were emblazoned with exotic names from France, the Levant and the Barbary Coast. Outlandish flags fluttered from the halyards and bright parrots, green, blue and red, flapped and cawed on their perches on the decks.
Tom Sledd was never so glad as when the keel slid up the wet sand, dragging seaweed with it and slicing through the debris on the beach. His legs felt like blancmange as Skirrow helped him ashore. There were people everywhere, buying and selling; well dressed gentlemen in earnest discussion with stallholders of every colour of the rainbow. A dark-skinned beauty with painted lips swayed seductively over to the new arrivals. She draped a length of coloured silk around Sledd’s neck. ‘Welcome to the Island,’ she said, looking at him under her eyelashes.
Sledd found himself grinning from ear to ear but an even more voluptuous girl wound herself close to him and whispered in his ear.
‘How much?’ The stage manager’s purse was longer than most, but he had never heard anybody charge that, not even in London.
‘You girls get lost now,’ Skirrow grunted. ‘Bothering young gentlemen with your whiles.’ And he shooed them away but not before one of them turned her back and flicked up her tattered gown to reveal a naked arse, which she waggled at them both.
‘Where are they from?’ Sledd asked, his heaving stomach forgotten. ‘I couldn’t place the accent.’
‘The Indies,’ Skirrow told them. ‘The flotsam and jetsam of the high seas, Master Sledd. Coming over here, taking our girls’ jobs. This way.’
He led Sledd through the maze of people where the stallholders cried their wares, up a gentle slope that led through a grove of silver birch. Ahead wound a twisting road along which carts grumbled and there was a grey manor house on the rise of a hill. Skirrow stopped at a shack, larger and set apart from the others, outside of which two sailors in their wooden clogs and red trousers sat on barrels, roped and tarred. Sledd had seen the dress before along the Thames, so he knew these men’s calling. Their coats were long, almost down to the ground, and they made no pretence at all of lacing up their breeches which flapped around their ankles. They wore shapeless caps of blue wool, but Sledd could not help staring at their faces. Each man had blue swirling patterns
across his forehead and rows of painted dots down his cheeks like tears.
Skirrow held open the hut’s front door. ‘Welcome to Mead Hole, Master Sledd,’ he beamed.
Tom Sledd did not have time for his eyes to get used to the almost total darkness inside. Somebody rammed a boot into his calf from behind and he went down, sprawling on the floor. The dagger was gone from his back and he was spreadeagled over an upturned barrel, one large sailor grabbing one wrist, another large sailor grabbing the other. There was a scrape and spark of a tinder and a flame burst in front of his face, to be passed, seconds later, to a candle.
Holding the candlestick, an expensive piece of French silver gilt, a bearded man sat on an equally expensive chair, carved and inlaid with ivory.
‘Are you Thomas Sledd?’ the man asked, cocking his head to one side.
‘Who wants to know?’ the stage manager asked. If this was the hospitality of the Wight, he was not impressed.
He felt a stinging slap across his upturned face and as he dropped his head he felt blood dripping from his lip,
‘We ask the questions here, sonny,’ one of the sailors growled, pulling harder on Sledd’s right wrist so that he thought his arm would leave the socket.
‘Now, Jacob,’ the man with the candle said. ‘Where are your manners? I am Thomas Page, Master Sledd, captain of the Bowe. What brings you to the Island?’
‘Master Skirrow’s skiff,’ Sledd said, his lip already swelling to make his speech difficult.
‘Jacob,’ Page smiled, leaning back. ‘I do believe we have a wit among us.’ His smile vanished and he nodded at the sailors. Both men put their feet against the barrel and tugged. Sledd screamed. Those human racks would dislocate his shoulders any minute.
‘You can make as much noise as you like here, boy,’ Page assured him. ‘Nobody’s coming to your rescue. Now.’ He leaned forward like a conspirator. ‘Let me put my question another way. Why have you come to the Wight?’
Sledd sensed that another flippant answer would break his bones so he craned his neck to look into Page’s expressionless face. ‘I was sent for,’ he said.
‘Who by?’
‘Master Christopher Marlowe.’
‘And what is this Marlowe to you?’
‘He’s a friend,’ Sledd told him. ‘A playwright. I am stage manager at the Rose.’ He saw the lack of comprehension on Page’s face. ‘In London,’ he said. Then an inspiration came to him. ‘Master Philip Henslowe knows I am here. So does Ned Alleyn, the tragedian. Then there’s Will Shakespeare … he’s a playwright too.’
Page’s left hand caught the man’s collar and he pulled his head up towards the candle flame. The sailors held him fast. ‘I don’t give the Pope’s arse about playwrights,’ he said. ‘This Marlowe, what else is he?’
Sledd thought quickly, cursing himself for every kind of idiot for walking into this trap. The candlelight burned bright in his eyes until even when he shut them, the circles of blue light danced and flashed and he could not see shadows any more. ‘A poet,’ he said, as though he were breaking every confidence in the book. ‘A university wit …’
‘And?’ Page lowered the candle and ran his left hand through the lad’s hair. Then, with his fingers tangled in his curls, he suddenly jerked his head back so that Sledd heard his neck click. The bright light had gone now. That was because the candle was out of his direct eye-line and burning just beneath his chin. In fact, as he became aware of the smell, it was burning him. The hairs of his skimpy beard were curling still further in the flame that Page passed slowly to and fro under his chin. Sledd was screaming, trying to shake his head free of the grip and his arms free of the sailors. Singed hair was curling back to its roots, reddening his skin before it crisped to a bloody brown. ‘And?’ Page repeated.
‘He works for the government!’ he screeched. The candle was gone from his face and the fingers from his hair. He let his head fall, blowing desperately to extinguish any burning hairs still clinging to his skin.
‘Now, you could have said that earlier, couldn’t you?’ Page asked. ‘That would have saved you a lot of pain and me a lot of bother.’
Sledd shrieked again as the sailors yanked hard on his wrists and Page was once again shining the candle into the man’s face. He could see the flickering reflections in his terrified eyes. ‘How, works for the government?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Sledd sobbed, dreading the pain if that flame reached his chin again. ‘As God is my witness, I don’t know. I just came to put on a play, that’s all.’
‘A play?’ Page chuckled. ‘Well, how nice. Has it got a clown, Master Sledd? And a pig’s bladder? I do like a good comedy.’ He jerked his head and the sailors let go of the man’s wrists. He groaned and sagged forward over the barrel. His eyes were stinging with tears and he didn’t know which hurt most, his shoulders or his face. Page snuffed the candle out and stood up, brushing past the shattered man on his way to the door. ‘See yourself out, Master Sledd,’ he said as one of the sailors helped himself to Sledd’s purse. ‘Oh, and give my regards to Master Marlowe, won’t you?’
‘Damn this rain,’ Sir George Carey muttered out of the side of his mouth to his wife, as they stood under a dripping yew in the churchyard. ‘It’s gone right down my neck.’
‘Rain seems the right weather for a funeral, George,’ she replied tartly. She was glad her black clothes were old ones because the persistent drizzle would have ruined anything nicer. ‘Besides, and I am sure you won’t mind my reminding you, there is really no need to be here. We hardly knew … what’s his name again?’
‘Hunnybun. And of course I had to be here. He lay three days in my chapel before anyone claimed his body.’
Bet Carey shrugged a slim shoulder and took a step back further into the shelter of the tree. ‘He had no family, the maids were saying.’
‘Widower,’ her husband muttered. ‘No children.’
‘He lived alone, then?’
‘Lived alone, yes. But the gossip goes …’ Carey stopped himself. The man was dead, after all. Time to bury the gossip with his body.
Bet inclined her head and her eyes sparkled. ‘Do go on, George.’
‘This is according to Dillington, mind you, so probably not to be trusted.’
‘Tell me and then I can decide.’
‘According to Dillington, there were often lights seen out in Hunnybun’s fields at night. Shrieks. Howls.’
‘Spirits walking out on the meadow?’ Bet asked. She had never seen a ghost herself, but presumably a field was as likely a place to meet one as anywhere else.
‘That’s what the maids thought at first. Then, one night, one of them was going down Hollow Lane to meet her young man – a groom in Newport, I believe, and …’
‘George!’
‘Sorry … where was I?’
‘A maid. Hurry up, they will be here with the coffin in a minute.’
‘Yes, a maid going down Hollow Lane saw her master, breeches down round his ankles going at it something awful, if I may repeat her actual words …’
‘According to Dillington,’ she reminded him.
‘According to him, yes, something awful between the thighs of a lady, who was shrieking and howling fit to raise the Devil.’
‘How common,’ muttered Bet.
‘Indeed,’ her husband agreed. She was always very quiet on the rare occasions he was called upon to go it something awful. He sighed and wiped the rain off his face with his cuff.
‘Shhh,’ his wife hissed. ‘Here they come.’
The small crowd rustled to attention as the vicar led the cortège across the sodden grass from the church towards the grave. The sexton, never one to stand on ceremony, was leaning on the wall to one side of the grave, his pipe glowing as he drew on it thoughtfully. Another one down, he thought to himself; another one gone to a better place. The sextons of St Thomas were of two kinds: introspective and morose or introspective and miserable. Today’s was of the latter kind and he was enjoyin
g every minute of this funeral. Rain, hardly any mourners, another lonely soul going under the sod. If it wasn’t so against his nature, he would have laughed out loud. As the vicar’s drone got louder, the sexton leaned down and twitched the sacking from across the grave mouth. He personally preferred to have the corpse approach the yawning grave, something of a reminder of mortality in his opinion, but he knew it could sometimes upset the ladies. He wouldn’t forget in a hurry the fuss and bother of hauling the Widow Buckett out of her husband’s grave when she came over unnecessary. And a waste of time as it turned out, for she was in it again not six months later. He turned and spat before looking down.
Marlowe, watching the proceedings from the back and making mental notes to use this gravedigger in a play should the occasion ever present itself, saw the man’s face change and his knees buckle just a little before he recovered himself. He looked up at the approaching vicar and held up his hand, his mouth working. Marlowe took a step forward. There was clearly something very wrong.
‘Vicar, vicar,’ the sexton said. ‘You’m got to stop this burial.’
The vicar sighed. He had worried about this man for some time now; he seemed to enjoy the whole process of burying people far too much. His heart stopped whenever he heard of an unexplained death in the parish for fear that the sexton was rustling up more business on his own account. In his turn, the vicar held up his hand and the pall-bearers stopped and waited patiently. The Urry brothers were at the head, their sons, like peas in a pod, holding up the feet. The linen cross over the coffin lid hung limply in the rain and one of the men stifled a sneeze.
The sexton edged round the grave and, leaning still on his spade, reached up to whisper in the vicar’s ear.
The man jerked away and said loudly, ‘No!’
Marlowe stepped nearer still. Bet Carey clutched her husband’s arm convulsively and stopped him moving forward. ‘What is it, George?’ she asked, her voice taut with anxiety.
‘I won’t know if you don’t let me go,’ he said and, shaking her off, joined the little group of the sexton, the vicar and Kit Marlowe.
