Shakespeare's Rebel (40 page)

‘I think you know that is not what I would do. Nor what would happen. My freedom, whatever the paper stated, would be short after such an action. Along with my life. Besides ’ – he stretched the chains around his wrists to their limit – ‘you have heard where my hatred lies.’

Again Cecil stared. Then he forsook his desk, moved away again, and with his face to the wall spoke softly. ‘What you speak of, only one man in England has ever had before. It will give you impunity in the realm to do . . . anything.’

‘Anything,’ John repeated, as quietly. ‘As it will give me freedom from all of you. From the Queen. From the earl. Even from you, Master Secretary.’

Cecil nodded. ‘Then I will draw up the document you require. I will write it myself. Here, now, and have it seen and witnessed only by the Constable of the Tower – though I will not fill in your name.’ He turned. ‘Such actions as you contemplate should remain unassigned. It will also be stated that it is . . . redeemable just once. Otherwise . . . what a career a man such as you could have, Master Lawley!’ That thin smile came again. ‘You shall have it, a handsome purse for your expenses, and your freedom – within the hour. Waller!’ he shouted. The man was through the door within a moment, hand on sword grip. ‘Master Lawley is to be freed. Find him fresh clothes. Give him his choice of weapons. Return him here when he is ready.’

‘Sir.’ Waller gestured to the door. John, suddenly aware that these were the first steps to the freedom he craved, not quite believing, took them slowly.

Cecil’s voice halted him. ‘Yet know this, Lawley. You do not make such an agreement with me and break it. If you betray me, I will find you out. I will see you disembowelled on Tower Hill if I can. Yet even if this paper protects you once from the law, you would never sleep easy again. For it will not save you from a dagger in the night. Your only precedent discovered that.’

John clasped the door edge – and though he wanted to be gone now, he could not help the question. ‘And who was that man?’

The Secretary smiled. ‘It was my father who gave it to him. You may have known him, since he moved in similar, overlapping circles to you. For he was a man of the theatre. And he was a spy. His name was Christopher Marlowe.’

A wave of hand dismissed him finally. In the corridor, Waller unlocked the chains, but John barely acknowledged him, just stared at the door. ‘Poor Kit,’ he murmured. He had indeed known the man. Thoughts of him, of the near past, the immediate future, kept him motionless, even when Waller bade him walk. For once he moved, the path could lead to many fates as unpleasant as the dagger in the head that had taken the life of Will’s great rival.

He’d been speaking his friend’s words not an hour since. But it was Marlowe’s that came to him now. ‘ “Our swords shall play the orators for us”,’ he mouthed.

‘What mumble you, man?’ said Waller. ‘Come now.’

He came. The Master Secretary had mentioned weapons. Waller was leading him to them. But more than a sword, what he truly required was a dagger – small, well balanced, where he always carried one, in a sheath between his shoulder blades. He knew he would need it there, and soon, for his very first reunion, the one he walked towards now.

He would need it when he next saw Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.

XXX

Conspiracy

The wherryman threaded his vessel between frozen clumps, the winter having recently loosed its grip only enough to thaw the ice that had bound the Thames for a month. Mist rose, a chill exhalation that easily penetrated through the layers of clothes John had been given. Shrugging deeper into his cloak, so that his ears were covered, he peered between hat and scarf, envying the boatman the warmth of his exercise. The man was even sweating. John had offered him double the shilling he would normally receive to row him, solo, all the way from St Katherine’s Stair at the Tower to his destination.

As they cleared the race under the bridge, the temptation to land at Southwark near overwhelmed. Yet John kept silent, ordered no detour. For there was no life there, only delay. Until he had achieved what he had resolved to do before Sir Robert Cecil, there was no life for him anywhere.

He looked as they went by, of course. At the spire of St Mary Overies, close by which Tess would be planning her nuptials in the inn she would shortly be selling. At the Globe, where Ned, at three in the afternoon, was perhaps essaying one of his last roles for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The thatched O itself brought memories, of John’s last time there, the day of his capture and imprisonment. They had been playing
Julius Caesar
, and he had heard Burbage declaim words that he had read since, again and again, in quarto, in the Tower.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasm or a hideous dream.

He was caught in that interim – the river’s mist, the snow-choked sky, the chill that gripped his bones, the plash of oars, the boatman’s sweat all seeming to hold the boat where it was, caught between his decision in the Tower and the acting of it that lay ahead. Shivering, not just with cold, John took his gaze from the playhouse and tried to bring his mind with it.

And then they were there. As the bow scraped the dock, he stayed for a moment longer on the bench. Up ahead, across some gardens, the fifty chimneys of Essex House thrust up against the snow clouds. Perhaps five emitted smoke. Though the day was as cold as a nun’s teats, he knew his noble lordship had little money to spend on firewood. Little to spend on anything. Yet desperation so loves company, boats like his were moving like water beetles across the Thames, filled with men clutching weapons to their chests – and threads where their purses should hang. Most would not even bother to whisper their treasonous aims. If the drum did not beat, and no piper skirled, the summons to rally was still loud to men as desperate as their lord, loudly answering his call.

At last John rose, stepped on to the dock, paused again, jostled by customers who sought his vacated place. Pulling his cloak tight, he felt about him all that the Master Secretary had given him: the carte blanche, sewn into the edge of his new doublet; his restored sword and buckler; his silver-filled purse; a slim vial that smelled of apothecary’s tincture and was a cure only for life itself; finally what he suspected he would rely on most in the end, as he always had: the dagger sheathed between his shoulder blades.

Before he took the first step, he glanced downriver one last time, his gaze resting again on the thatched roof of the Globe. What had Will chastised him with there, the last time he’d seen him? How he could never help his actions, could never take action for himself? ‘You sound like the man I conjure now, Prince Hamlet!’ he’d declared. Well, old friend, John thought, if I never see you again, perhaps you will hear of this, at least. And know that in the end, I did act.

Shaking his head, he turned from what lay behind to what was ahead.

A crowd prevented him going in the river gate. Men stood there, cloaked and booted, with wide-brimmed hats pulled low over brows, scabbards clattering together as each sought a way through the press, and snarled like dogs at each other when they were prevented. Thwarted, John took the alley beside the easterly wall, discovered the postern there equally besieged. One of its guards, however, was as tall as the gatepost, and John knew him.

‘Captain St Lawrence!’ he cried, his player’s voice piercing the hubbub.

The huge Irishman peered through drifting snowflakes. ‘Who calls me?’ he bellowed.

‘’Tis I, Captain. John Lawley.’

‘Master Lawley!’ The dark face split in a smile. ‘Come forward, man. Make way there, all of you.’ He was grudgingly obeyed, and John pushed through to the gate. ‘I’fecks, but it is good to see you, man. The leader will be delighted. I am delighted.’ Surprising John with a rib-squeezing clasp, he released him, and added, ‘Sure, I’ll bring you to him myself.’

He led John through the gate. To its right, a long table was set up. It was awash with weapons, and men stood before it carefully searching those who had just entered. ‘I am sorry, Master Lawley, but all must give up their blades, without exception,’ St Lawrence said. ‘There’s whispers that men are being sent to assassinate the leader. All weapons are to be left here.’ He pointed to racks behind the table. ‘You may want to wrap your scarf around yours so you know it again.’

As he removed his scarf, sword and buckler, John looked at other men being thoroughly searched. Hands were being passed over breeches, shoved into boot cuffs, thrust down doublets. He stiffened as a man approached him . . . but the captain stepped forward with hand raised. ‘There’ll be no need for that, man. Do you not see who this is? Master Lawley, his lordship’s most loyal follower. May as well search the Earl of Southampton.’ He laughed, and clapped a hand upon John’s back, low enough down not to feel the hardness there. The man nodded, took the sword and shield, placed them in a rack.

St Lawrence led John forward along an arched pergola, its vine winter-bare. A tunnel of sorts, down which noise swelled and which gave out on to the garden. Tess had vouched for it as one of the finest in the land – for the way to gain the Queen’s favour was ever to captivate her passions, and in gardens, as in everything, Essex had sought to outdo his rivals. From previous visits, John recalled paths of coloured gravel that swirled around a fountain before sweeping up to a mount crowned with a banqueting house. A pump at one end had sprayed water upon the parterres to dapple the plants with a simulation of dew. A bowling green had occupied the other end, its grass clipped as precisely as his lordship’s Cadiz-cut beard.

That garden had gone. It had been submerged beneath another place, one with which John was far more familiar – an armed camp. Rainbow gravel had melded into multicoloured mud; the bowling lawn was torn by poles that hoisted canvas; and there were men everywhere, lying on camp beds, astride chairs, circling fires fed by beams from the destroyed banqueting house.

The noise, the crowds, both were a shock after the solitary quiet of a cell. He halted, and with him St Lawrence, who mistook his expression for something else. ‘Grand, is it not?’ He grinned. ‘You’ll recognise plenty of the lads from Dublin – and many others too. Welshmen, Scots, Irishmen – why, there may even be a few Englishmen about!’ He laughed, but as he gazed around, his expression changed. ‘Sure, but it is a combustible crew, and so pressed together. And then there’s the drinking, which goes on day and night. Though some of us prefer the consolation of God to that sought in a bottle.’ The frown was again displaced by a grin. ‘Still, the time for action fast approaches. So you have arrived in the nick again, Master Lawley. In the nick! Where have you been all this time? About some secret work for the earl, no doubt?’

He clapped him hard on the shoulder, so hard it shoved him into a mob grouped around a fire pit, jostling a man there in the act of lighting his pipe. He snarled, looked up at the two tall men, turned back with a muttered curse. Indeed, John heard that one low snarl under all the hubbub, one he’d heard so many times before – in the baiting rings, before the dogs were sent in to tackle the bear; in siege lines, just before a big assault. ‘They are at a pitch, these men,’ he murmured, shouldering through them. ‘It would not take much to set them off.’

‘Indeed. Combustible, as I said.’ St Lawrence stooped, to whisper in John’s ear. ‘But do not fear – action is close that will set them afire. Sending them like the bullets they are into the hearts of all our enemies.’

They pushed on to the rear doors of the house. Two guards with halberds barred their way. ‘Has he been searched, Captain?’ queried one.

‘He has,’ replied St Lawrence, even though it was, for John, thankfully untrue. With this the blades parted and the captain shepherded him through, halting just on the other side of the entrance. ‘I’ll leave you here, man. You know the house, I warrant. You’ll find him in the library – or the chapel perhaps, for few men understand so well their duty to their Lord on high. I must again to my post – though I’ve a powerful desire to see the prodigal greeted,’ he said. ‘Go with God.’

John gave him the ‘amen’ the big Irishman obviously craved. Then he crossed the room that faced the garden, moved down the unlit corridor beyond. He did know the house, but would have been drawn anyway by a laugh he knew even better.

The man he sought was in the library. John paused by the door to study him, and the path between them.

In Dublin Castle he had found a drunkard in the grip of the bloody flux and about an impossible task for which he had no solutions. Then, as often before, the earl had resorted to oblivion for an answer. Here, he looked different. There was colour in his face that fever had not put there, and a light in his eyes, which seemed less than usually clouded with debauchery. It was only on stepping closer that John’s own eyes, whose cunning had lessened with his ageing, saw what they could not from afar – the pallor on a face drawn with new lines; the light in the stare that matched the note he’d heard in the laugh – a touch of mania to it.

There were a dozen or so men between John and his destiny. Several he knew – the younger earls Rutland and Bedford. The older lords Cromwell and Sandys. Gelli Meyrick, the man who organised the little Essex had and sought more, was muttering to two other equally red-haired fellows in Welsh.

He needed ease of movement for what he must do . . . and needs must do it fast. So leaving the door ajar, he slipped out of his cloak, laying it softly on the floor, then walked up to the table, unnoticed by men bent over a sketched map of London and Westminster. Several red crosses had been made upon it: Essex House, St Paul’s Cross, the Tower. Whitehall Palace was circled and struck through. When he was ready, he took a breath, cleared his throat and called, loudly, ‘My lord of Essex.’

The men, deep in their whispers, started. Essex reared back and stared at John for several long seconds. When recognition came, it brought a smile. ‘John Lawley! God’s wounds, lad, but it’s good to see you. Where have you been?’