Do We Not Bleed

by Patricia Finney

  Mrs Morgan coughed and Nan turned away. "He wouldn't do that if he'd made it," Nan said, "He would know what it would do to him..."

  Suddenly there was a roar in the distance and the sound of breaking glass. Shakespeare flinched and peered out of the window but the courtyard was still empty.

  "I must tell Mr Fleetwood at once," said Mrs Morgan, "Or... er... my brother must. I think he'll be back soon. Mr Shakespeare, would you bear Goody Nan back to St Bride's so she can keep an eye on Maliverny Catlin? I... er... I'll make sure my brother hears all about this when he arrives."

  She was staring wildly at Shakespeare and he stared back with a very ugly scowl on his face. "Mistress, I told you that..."

  "I'm sure Goody Nan wants to get home, don't you, Goodwife?" said Mrs Morgan loudly and Nan took the hint although the whole question of what was going on between the two of them was nearly killing her with curiosity.

  "Yes, I'm quite tired and I haven't finished sweeping yet, nor put the candlesticks in the chest which I ought if there's trouble on Fleet Street. Come with me, Mr Shakespeare, it won't take long and then you can help Mr Enys."

  He sighed and very chivalrously offered Nan his arm for to go down the rickety stairs with him, leaving Mrs Morgan alone. Nan hoped she would be all right. There was something about her that suddenly seemed to crackle with urgency. Just to be on the safe side she said a quiet Ave Maria for her and asked St Bride to help the young woman and her mysterious brother.

  Shakespeare sprinted back to the courtyard from St Brides to find James Enys waiting for him on the steps. On his... on her... damn it, all right, on his face was a mulish expression that Shakespeare knew, from his experience as a married man, not to waste time arguing with.

  "Fleet Street?" he asked resignedly.

  "No," said Enys, surprisingly, "First we're going to find Goody Mallow."

  "The orangeado seller?"

  "Exactly. It came to me when Nan was talking about how bitter hebenon is and how it needs lot of sugar. What's the only sugary thing you can find that is also bitter?"

  "But..."

  "Peter was given an orangeado by Goody Mallow when she pandered for his sister. I think it's quite likely that French Mary and Kettle Annie had orangeados too. Didn't Mrs Sharples say that French Mary had sticky hands? And Eliza said that Goody Mallow had acted as the go-between for Isabel... And she was the woman that helped Eliza that night she was drunk. Or drugged more likely."

  Enys was already striding down into the alleyway that went past the Christ window and on down towards the river. At the bottom was the wall which had been planted at the top and then dug up. On the other side of it was the little space where Mary's small body had lain for a short time, and then beyond the next thick wall squatted a small stone hut that might have been a monastery cowshed or something similar long ago.

  Enys climbed on a stone and boosted herself up with surprising strength, if you remembered her sex. Unable to help himself for curiosity, Shakespeare followed and forced himself not to think of how close he was to Portia Morgan and how if he tilted his head slightly he might just glimpse her breasts under her... No, Enys was modestly buttoned up. Unfortunately, Shakespeare's imagination was as rampant as ever. He was no boy-lover like Marlowe, although he had occasionally had lascivious thoughts about the women that boys turned into when they took parts at the playhouse. But here... Here by God, was the direct opposite and that was a very different thing because... because... He had to stop. He had to concentrate. This was absolutely not the time to think of things like that. He frowned, scowled with the effort.

  "She was down there, poor child, just cut open and dumped when Peter found her."

  "Who was?"

  "Little Mary, the serving girl Mr Craddock fornicated with because she was easy meat and who was then turned out of the household with her brother when Craddock's mother in law found out about it."

  "Cut...?"

  "Yes, and gralloched."

  Shakespeare winced. The hunting term for disembowelling a deer somehow made it too clear: he had, after all, hunted deer once upon a time. He saw that, lawyer-like, Enys had used it deliberately to shock him.

  "Pay attention, Mr Shakespeare," Enys growled at him. Shakespeare nodded unhappily, wondering if Portia Morgan had the same ability to read his mind that his wife Ann also had and which was one of the reasons why he had left Stratford. He supposed she must have since she had been married. "That over there is Goody Mallow's shed and we are going to break into it."

  "We are?"

  Enys jumped down quite nimbly. "Yes."

  Shakespeare thought about jumping the other way and heading for his lodgings by the back streets, but the thought came that he might then never know if Goody Mallow was the witch who had killed the women and what connected them all together and also... Well, also he wanted to stay near Enys. Just in case. In case he... she needed help, of course.

  He followed Enys across the small yard which was tidily swept and had a rope coiled in the corner on top of a trolley. Suddenly they both froze on the spot. The sound of crying was coming from inside the shed, a woman's voice.

  They exchanged looks. Enys stopped, irresolute for a moment, and then reached out and knocked on the door.

  "Who... who's that?" It was a young light voice, not like Goody Mallow's.

  Enys's face frowned with puzzlement again. "Mr James Enys, barrister at law, and Mr Will Shakespeare, poet." He spoke slowly and formally. "Is that Mrs Craddock?"

  The door opened and the pale oval face of Mrs Craddock peered out, made even paler by her white married woman's cap over her hair and her expensive beaver hat on top. She was wearing a very good kirtle of rose-coloured wool, trimmed with black braid and a Spanish farthingale and the whole of her was trembling.

  "Oh sirs," she gasped, "Have they stopped? Are the prentices still fighting?"

  "I don't know," said Enys, "We... er... we heard you crying and wondered if you were well. Why are you in Goody Mallow's shed?"

  "It's not Goody Mallow's shed, whoever she is, it's my mother's shed, she inherited it when Betty Warren died, she said so. She sent me here to hide until things had calmed down and she gave me the key for the padlock, look."

  The girl held up the key and a big heavy padlock which she must have taken off the door. Enys and Shakespeare exchanged looks.

  "May we come in, mistress," said Enys gently, "We don't want anyone seeing us here in case they ask why."

  After a moment's hesitation, the girl gingerly opened the door with the tips of her fingers and shut it behind them. "She said I mustn't touch anything in here, it was full of things that pertained to the confectioner's art which is a thing she is very expert at and that's why she had the shed, to make comfits in."

  The girl's voice sounded as if she was reciting a lesson.

  "She also said I mustn't do any cleaning or polishing in here since it is clean and I would disarrange things, but... but... it's too sticky. I have to stand so still in case the sugar touches me."

  She was standing in the exact centre of the little shed with her arms wrapped around herself. Shelves had been built into its walls and despite looking tumbledown from outside, inside it was clean and neat. There were barrels along one wall containing Seville orange hulls packed in sugar with two large sugar loaves standing on a chest in the corner. Across the width of the shed went a closed confectioner's range, with a cubbyhole for the hot coals and the open holes in the stone counter covered with a grill of iron. In the corner was the main oven that had a chimney but the fire wasn't lit and the sugar-laden air was chilly. Along the third wall were knives, clean linen cloths and a flask that Shakespeare recognised from somewhere, but couldn't think where. A pottery jar smelled of almonds and there were two smaller jars of goosefat. In a hemp bag hanging from a hook were a small quantity of seeds and in pots all along the wall were more pots where the same seeds were soaking in oil.

  Enys picked up the flask and sniffed it, offered it to Shakespeare.
"Nit oil?" he said.

  "You mustn't touch any of that. It's all medicine to make me fall with child. My husband spilled another flask and that's when the Devil came to Fleet Street. My mother said it was his own fault."

  Shakespeare smiled a little. "Has any of it helped?"

  The girl had her eyes shut. "I don't want to see what you're doing. I don't want to know. Men are always doing nasty things that hurt. My mother says she hasn't learned enough about the hysterum which is where babies grow but when she has, she is sure she can help me get with child."

  Enys stood stock still for a long moment, gazing down at the flask in her hand. "What else did she say about what she was doing?"

  Mrs Craddock shrugged. "She doesn't tell me anything, she only says that my cleaning and polishing is stupid superstition and a waste of time but it worked for Jane Bailey my gossip."

  "Tell me, Mrs Craddock, where was Mrs Ashley early this morning?"

  "She was out from before dawn for she said she had an important thing to find out. She came here first, though, she always does."

  Enys nodded, put the flask down and started poking in corners. In the chest under the heavy sugar loaves she found a goodwife's clothes, along with a slightly sticky apron and also the decorated tray for the oranges. Underneath was a key that might have opened an old monk's cell with a Christ's head window. Beside it lay a small daybook, leather covered, the kind with blank pages that some of the more enterprising stationers at St Paul's had begun selling, for people to record their sins in. Shakespeare had a pile of them under his bed, full to bursting with poems, stories, ideas, plays and parts of a tragedy which concerned an old man who longed to be a knight of old and set off to become one. For no reason he understood, that had somehow petered out.

  Enys grabbed it and opened it: the whole was written in Latin, in a clear large Italic hand. "Whose writing is this?" he asked Mrs Craddock.

  She looked at the book without interest. "My mother's, sir, she was taught penmanship and reading and Latin by her father who believed that women as the weaker sex are more in need of education than men."

  Shakespeare nodded at this surprising good sense and found that Enys was looking annoyed. He thought that such a strange creature as Enys would appreciate the wisdom better than most.

  "Can you read it?"

  Mrs Craddock smiled a wan little smile. "No, indeed, sir, my late father was of a completely opposite opinion and felt that the less a woman's brain was unsettled, the less affected it would be by hysteria."

  Enys took the daybook over to the light and opened it. Shakespeare peered over his shoulder to read the most recent page.

  The Latin was poor, not classical, more a schoolman's Latin but what it said was clear enough.

  "After I had killed subject vii mercifully by an application of hebenon to the auricular passage, the abdomen was opened and the intestines resected to uncover the hysterum..."

  There were sketches as well. The first page concerned the killing of Betty Warren and her innards. Mrs Ashley had had some trouble to find the womb at all.

  Shakespeare stared down at the book. He liked orangeadoes and sometimes bought one at the bear-baiting, if he could afford it and there weren't any hazelnuts. There was a pair of stays in the chest, on top of Goody Mallow's other clothes. Shakespeare and Enys's eyes met. Shakespeare couldn't speak.

  "Ah," said Enys. Restlessly he went to the door and looked out of the yard. "The Thames was convenient, I think."

  Back to the chest. At the very bottom of it, he found something else that made him sigh – Shakespeare came over to look, circling round the quivering girl in the middle of the shed with her eyes shut. It was a small jet cross skillfully carved in one piece with a figure of Christ, very obviously the last and most unsellable part of a highly illegal rosary, from which small jewels, perhaps rubies or garnets, had been levered out, leaving holes in the carving on the hands and feet and in the side.

  Enys's face suddenly twisted and he clenched the cross in his fist, then put it carefully into the inside pocket of his doublet, allowing Shakespeare only the hope of seeing something of the woman under the man's clothes, not the reality. That was enough, though, despite the circumstances. Shakespeare had to concentrate on mentally reciting something very dull from the Aenid for a while in order to be able to straighten up without embarrassment.

  Mrs Craddock was now muttering to herself as she clasped her elbows together, turning slowly on the spot with her eyes shut.

  Shakespeare watched her for a while. Was it possible she didn't know what her mother had been doing – or was that one of the reasons for her lunatik behaviour? Was it possible to both know something and not know you knew? He thought it might be although it was hard to understand how the humours could behave like that. But he had seen things...

  Perhaps it was nonsense. Perhaps her mother had been doing nothing but the most ordinary sort of superstitious magic to help her daughter conceive. Perhaps the daybook was only a murderous fantasy or...

  Enys went and stood outside the door, still holding the flask, jerked his head so Shakespeare went out with him, shut the door behind him. "The cross belonged to Peter's sister Mary," Enys said quietly, "The key belonged to Isabel. The flask was in Isabel's room for she picked it up when Eliza was drunk... And that woman calling herself Goody Mallow was there supposedly helping her when she was drunk the other night."

  A finger of ice went down Shakespeare's back as he recalled the scene. "We did save her from the Devil?"

  "We did. And it's clear that Goody Mallow and Mrs Ashley are the same woman but what I really want to know is... why?"

  "Why?"

  "What was the point of cutting the women open and rummaging about inside them? Why did she kill them in the first place?"

  "To learn what is hidden, as her daughter said, as Nan said," Shakespeare said quietly, "Have you not seen Marlowe's play, The History of Dr Faustus? I had never thought a woman could have such a desire, but there again, why not?"

  Enys nodded, his hands shaking. He opened the book in another place and there was a tolerably good picture of French Mary lying on her back with her guts spilling, pillowy lumps of fat escaping, except there was no face. None of the sketches showed a face of any kind.

  "Here is the account of the day Goody Harbridge was killed. "It was necessary and right to put an end to an old witch that threatened me, but my hebenon being stolen from me by the whore, I was forced to do it by violence, wringing her neck. A quick resection was begun but could not go on as the place she had run to was overlooked by the merchant's house." Jesu. It's as if they are chickens she's killing."

  "And poor Craddock is taking the blame for it," Shakespeare pointed out. Enys looked at him blankly.

  "He should take the blame as well. He lay with little Mary and caused her to be thrown out and I think he has not lain with his wife recently, perhaps he never has. Perhaps she isn't young enough for him." Enys's lip lifted with distaste.

  Shakespeare shook his head. "But he didn't actually kill anybody. It may have been his fault, but he has not actually killed. Not... not like this."

  Enys sighed. "No."

  "We have to tell Fleetwood and we have to stop the whores from taking their revenge on him."

  "We do, but..." Shouting was coming from Fleet Street and Enys looked up the alley that led that way with the whites of her eyes showing.

  Shakespeare crossed his arms. His heart was beating slow and heavy, there was a lump of lead in his gut, and he knew that any sensible man would stay well away from Fleet Street but... But. It wasn't enough to be sensible, it wasn't enough to stay out of trouble. There was the matter of a man's honour as well. Would Enys understand it, being in fact of the weaker sex?

  Enys was scowling at the flagstones between her boots. "We have to, don't we," she said. Shakespeare swallowed hard, which didn't at all clear his airway.

  "We have to," he agreed.

  Before either of them could think of a clever arg
ument for avoiding it, both he and Enys started walking quickly up the alley that went past the Christ's head cell, the shouting and banging echoed down it and both of them started to jog. Shakespeare found himself doing what he often did, standing somehow apart from the action at the back of his head, watching in amazement as the emotions and pictures rolled out in front of him, both the hero and the teller of the tale. They were jogging because they very much wanted to run the other way, but knew they mustn't, and so they ran to meet the trouble.

  They came out to find Fleet Street shuttered and the trained bands drawn up around the large house on Fleet Street where Mr Craddock lived. That too was as well shuttered and locked up as if there were plague inside.

  The colourful mob of loose women was standing in front of the young men of the trained bands and behind them a less colourful, mainly blue-clad mob of apprentices and roaring boys, bravos and upright men. The City being what it was, the trained bands were full of the prentices' older brothers and fathers which was leading to a certain amount of banter.

  Mrs Nunn was standing with her hip tilted and her arms folded while Fleetwood stood and read loudly and slowly from an old and stained scroll. Beside the conduit where the women had been gathered to watch earlier, lay a young man in a buff coat with a bloody head, and another one who looked as if his arm was broken. There was glass on the ground near Temple Bar.

  It was a stand-off. The young men of the trained bands had bows but not many of them and polearms and clubs. They went out on Sundays to march up and down and play veneys with each other and most of them had probably joined in the Armada year and then kept on going because they enjoyed themselves and liked smart white livery coats slashed with red and the free beer after their meetings. Not one of them was anxious to fight off a crowd of lads and the upright men the whores had called in, but then the prentices weren't anxious to fight either. They didn't mind fighting each other, but they didn't fancy trouble with someone who was wearing a buff coat and carrying a spear, even if the point was a little rusty and blunt.