Her Last Assassin (37 page)

Anne stared at him, uncomprehending.

‘You should not have left Stratford, Anne. This is not your place.’ He pushed past her into his lodgings. How in God’s name was she here in London? ‘What was my father thinking to have let you come here? And where are the children? Surely you did not travel alone?’

Anne followed him inside, speaking hurriedly, her voice unnaturally high. ‘The children are safe at home in Stratford with your mother. I came with Cousin Richard.’

He hesitated, swaying as he gazed stupidly about the room. His wife had been making herself at home since arriving in London. The hearth was still cold with yesterday’s ashes, and a candle was burning, an extravagance he only indulged when he needed to write after dusk had fallen. He pinched it out, the air wreathed with thin twisting smoke.

‘Close the door,’ he told her shortly, and swung off his soiled cloak, depositing it over a chair, ‘unless you want the whole world to hear our business. And do not burn candles while there is daylight, it is too costly. Throw open a shutter, let the sunlight in.’

Anne obeyed, then stood with her back to the door, watching him in silence. He lurched about the small room as though she were not there, gathering up belongings and shoving them into a bag. His legs were trembling, and when he stumbled over his old walking boots, he fell to his knees and had to stagger up again, his whole body racked with pain.

She must think him drunk, he realized, catching a look of contempt on her face. Better drunk, though, than afraid. He was ashamed of his fear. It made him less than a man. Yet he seemed unable to control it.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, staring at the bag.

‘I have to leave London for a few months. I’ll come back in the autumn. There’s no work in the city anyway, not with the theatres still closed. I’ve a new play I’m working on. It’s good, it’ll fetch in the crowds. We’ll travel back to Stratford together and I’ll finish it there.’ Talking quickly seemed to ease his uncertainty. He frowned though, the haze slowly lifting from his thoughts now that he was home and, for the time being at least, safe from Essex’s men. ‘Where is Cousin Richard?’

‘He had business across the river. He plans to return on Monday in the afternoon.’

Monday was too late, he thought, frowning.

She seemed to read his mind. ‘If I am no longer here when Cousin Richard knocks, he is to travel home to Warwickshire without me.’

The bag would hold no more. He struggled to fasten it, then gave up, staring down blankly at the bulging sides, the clothes spilling out. This is how terror feels, he realized.

He sat, turning to look at her properly. She was pale, her blue eyes wide in an apprehensive face, a soot smudge on her white cap. Mistress Anne Shakespeare. She looked every inch the good country wife, and yet here she was, in the midst of the ugly city. Her first time in London, a thousand times noisier and more frightening than the little market town of Stratford, and her husband had not been at home to welcome her.

‘Why did you come, Anne?’

‘To see you,’ she said simply.

‘I’m sorry I was not here when you arrived.’

‘I did not mind waiting,’ she said in a colourless fashion, and he knew she was lying.

Two days she had waited for him, living alone in his dusty, untidy lodgings while he was sporting with the Earl of Southampton. He shuddered at the thought of what gossip she might have gleaned from his neighbours. Nothing good, that was for sure.

He set his teeth, trying not to sound angry. ‘Anything could have happened to you, alone here at night. You should have made Cousin Richard wait with you. Or you could have stayed in Stratford and waited for my return as you have always done.’ He saw some flicker in her expression. ‘Has it been so long since my last visit?’

‘Nigh on a year,’ she told him, then shook her head angrily when he stared at her in surprise. ‘You have not come to see your children since last summer, and then you only stayed a night. The summer before you came for a sennight. Do we mean so little to you that you have missed the months passing since last you were in Stratford, kissing your daughter Susanna and holding little Judith and Hamnet?’

‘Anne,’ he began in self-defence, but got no further.

Her voice accused him, sharp as a knife. ‘Your children miss you. I cannot for ever answer Hamnet with a lie when he asks why you do not visit. I tell him his father is working hard for us in London, working every hour God sends, so he can earn money …’

Her voice broke and she turned away, hiding from him. Perhaps she could no longer bear to look upon his battered face.

‘It is no lie,’ he insisted. ‘I do work hard. And I send home money for your housekeeping.’

‘When?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘When did you last send us money?’ Anne choked out, and looked back at him. Her cheeks were wet. ‘When, Will?’

Surprised by her question, he counted silently backwards in his head. It must be almost a year since he had last consigned a purse for her to a courier, he realized, and was shocked by the discovery.

‘I can’t recall exactly when,’ he said guiltily. ‘Though I’m sorry it’s been so long. The city fathers closed the theatres because of the plague, so I haven’t earned enough to pay my rent and send money home too. Am I to be blamed because this city is riddled with disease?’

‘Yet you have managed to buy yourself a fine suit of clothes,’ his wife remarked, gazing pointedly at his torn shirt and bloodstained doublet, ‘and ruin them in a street brawl.’

He opened his mouth to deny that it was a brawl, then closed it again. How could he reveal the truth?

‘It is expected,’ he muttered. ‘I am called to court sometimes. I cannot attend the Queen and her nobles in my workaday clothes.’

Anne said nothing, but took a few steps towards him, angrily twisting the folds of her skirt between her fingers. She glanced behind him at the low table before the fire, where a pool of spilt wine had stained the wood.

‘I cleared that table of empty cups and trenchers when I arrived,’ she told him coldly, ‘for the place stank of wine. You had left cheese and bread on the hearth, and the mice had been at it. There was a flagon of beer too, standing uncovered on the windowsill. It must have been there some days, for it had more than a dozen flies and cockroaches dead in it.’

‘I have been away, though I am not a good housekeeper even when I am at home. If I had known you planned to visit me, I would have set the place to rights.’

‘Where were you last night? And the night before?’

He hesitated a space before replying. ‘I dislike your tone, Anne. You are my wife, not my keeper.’

She shouted, ‘What is her name?’

He stared, shocked by her sudden rage, and could not speak. His heart began to race. What secrets did she know? Nothing of him and Southampton, it would seem. But a little perhaps of his long affair with Lucy Morgan. Or his more recent taste in whores. The local women gossiping …

Or had some bawd come round from the brothel, looking to collect on a debt? He owed money at one of the houses of Venus across the river. Not much, but enough perhaps to prompt a visit.

‘I swore to myself when I found the place empty that I would not ask your whereabouts,’ Anne continued angrily. ‘I promised myself that I would not shout at you, nor make demands you could not meet. That I would be a good wife. But then Cousin Richard went about his business and the hours passed. It grew dark outside. I felt so alone here, I sat by the fire and cried. There were men shouting and wandering the streets half the night. Drunkards, thieves, rapists. And I did not know where you were, Will.’

Awkwardly, he took her in his arms, blaming himself for the fear she must have suffered. It felt strange to feel her soft body against his. His wife. A woman. He had grown accustomed to the hardness of a man, a mouth as hungry and demanding as his own.

He bent his head to kiss her, though his lip burned and throbbed where it had been split by that man’s fist.

‘It is my fault,’ he told her. ‘Don’t cry.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘This wrong I have dealt you is soon remedied. Tomorrow I will take you back to Stratford, and stay with you until summer’s end at least.’ He managed a smile when he saw the hope in her face. ‘Is that what you want? To have me home again?’

Anne nodded, drying her tears. ‘Oh Will,’ she said faintly. ‘Yes, it is what I want. Forgive me for what I said, the way I spoke to you. But even in Stratford we have heard strange rumours. Unkind whispers about you and … and your friends.’

He froze, staring at her, a sickness like bile rising in his throat.
Even in Stratford we have heard strange rumours.
He had thought her innocent of his recent sins. But perhaps his long-suffering wife had merely chosen to ignore the rumours.

God, he was tired. So tired of London, tired of constantly lying, tired of everything. And his body hurt now with a vicious throbbing pain, like he had been kicked repeatedly by a horse. He needed to sleep soon, to close his eyes before he collapsed or vomited.

‘All envious falsehoods, of course,’ she continued, not quite meeting his eyes. ‘We did not believe them. But even if they were not … What a man does when he is not at home should not concern his wife. Besides, I am hardly unblemished myself.’ Gently, she touched his bruised cheek, and he held still under the caress. ‘It was wrong of me to speak of this, William. I shall not mention it again.’

‘The past is forgotten. Did we not agree that? There is no one else in my heart,’ Will tried to reassure his wife, perhaps too hurriedly. He felt wretched. He despised himself even as he lied, the falsehood so smoothly delivered he was sure she must suspect. ‘No one but you, Anne.’

Part Four

One

Essex House, London, October 1593

S
OMEWHERE OUT IN
the darkness, deep and grave, church bells announced the hour. Eleven o’clock. Goodluck turned away from the window and stared at the half-open door through which he could occasionally hear whispers and see shadows passing to and fro in the great house. Impatience twisted within him again, fretting, and he tried to damp it down, telling himself that this summons meant nothing. There had been no indication in his master’s letter to give him cause for hope. Yet still he hoped, grimly and stubbornly.

His feet hurt from long standing. Goodluck sat at last, but could not settle in the uncomfortable high-backed chair which was the only furniture the room afforded to visitors.

He had been waiting in the small antechamber to Essex’s study for over two hours. How much longer before he was admitted to the earl’s presence?

The door to the study opened. Essex stood there, dressed sombrely in black, a single diamond pinned to his doublet, a gold-hilted dagger at his belt.

‘Come,’ the earl said briefly. He stood aside to let Goodluck enter, then closed the door again. ‘I have a task for you.’

The room was warm, a good fire burning in the grate, and all the windows were shuttered against the chill October wind. Bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes lined the walls, and a portrait of the Queen hung facing the ornately carved desk, strewn with documents and open books. The place reminded Goodluck of Walsingham’s old corner study in Seething Lane – and of happier days, both for himself and for England.

‘My lord?’

Essex handed him a rolled-up letter. ‘My men took this from a man who came into the country at Sandwich yesterday. A Portuguese commoner. The name on his papers is Gomez d’Avila. The man appears to have little English. Do you know this language? Or the hand?’

Unrolling the letter, Goodluck glanced down at it and frowned. ‘I do not know the hand, but this is written in Portuguese, my lord.’

‘Can you translate it?’

‘Given time, yes.’

‘I need it within the hour.’

Goodluck was surprised. ‘So urgently?’ His senses prickled. There was more to this than a suspect letter.

‘We have found a translator to aid in d’Avila’s interview, but he is also Portuguese. I cannot entirely trust that we will get the full account. I would have you listen from a secret vantage point, and afterwards tell me if you believe anything was missed out by the translator.’