Fools and Mortals

  ‘That sort of lust? Dear me!’

  ‘It’s a sin, isn’t it, father?’

  ‘So we’re told, Richard, so we’re told.’ He stretched his thin hands towards the fire. ‘My, you have made a blaze! I hope we don’t set the chimney on fire.’

  The snow was falling softly. I could just see the big flakes through Father Laurence’s small window. By daybreak, I thought, the frost would have etched its patterns on the glass and the day would be brittle with cold. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘Why the Percies went back to the Theatre. They only stole play scripts. Could they be working for the earl too?’

  ‘It seems unlikely.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘The earl’s reputation is not good. Like our precious Saviour he consorts with publicans and sinners.’

  ‘And the Percies aren’t sinners?’

  ‘Oh, they are, Richard, they are, but of a different kind. We’re all sinners. We’ve all fallen short of God’s grace, but the Percies are the most dangerous of all sinners.’

  I waited for him to explain, but he just gazed into the fire. ‘Dangerous?’ I prompted him.

  ‘They believe they are doing good, Richard. When men do evil and claim that they are doing God’s work, then they are at their most dangerous. They are more than dangerous! They are the vilest of sinners.’

  I frowned, trying to remember the sermons I had heard. ‘But if priests, forgive me, father, if priests plot to kill the Queen, isn’t that evil?’

  ‘The Pope says not, though I confess I disagree with the Holy Father on that opinion. So let us agree that killing the Queen is evil, but so is ripping out a man’s entrails for following his faith. I have watched the martyrs die, Richard, I have watched them die.’ He made the sign of the cross with a claw-like hand.

  ‘And you saw the Protestants burning too?’ I made it a question rather than an accusation.

  ‘Poor souls, I did. And I prayed for them also. They were mistaken, of course, but if we burned every man and woman who was mistaken, then the fires would never end.’ He sighed. ‘Queen Mary, poor woman, thought she could cleanse England with fire. She couldn’t, any more than Elizabeth can wash it clean with blood. Is it snowing hard?’

  I peered through the window. ‘Steadily, father.’

  ‘It looks so nice, doesn’t it, when it’s fresh?’

  ‘It does, father.’

  ‘The whole world looks bright and clean after snow,’ he mused, ‘then sinful mankind besmirches it.’ He gave a sad smile, then flinched as a log collapsed in the fire to spew sparks that I stamped out among the floor rushes. ‘The Percies aren’t working for the earl,’ the old priest said, ‘I’m sure of that. If anyone, they’re working for the city.’

  ‘They’re not employed by the city,’ I said.

  ‘No, of course not! But they share the city’s ambitions. No more playhouses. And many of the Percies are Puritans, and Puritans regard anyone who disagrees with them as an enemy. The Percies have run out of priests to torture, so they’ll pursue the playhouses instead, and persuade themselves that they’re combatting sin. Let me look.’ He bent over the side of his chair to rummage in a basket where he kept those books and pamphlets that had not been stolen by the Pursuivants. ‘Here!’ He pulled out a tattered book that had no covers, and showed me the title page.

  I read it aloud. ‘A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays, and Interludes, with Other Idle Pastimes.’

  ‘A Devon man wrote it,’ Father Laurence said, ‘a man called John Northbrooke. I met him once. A very earnest preacher.’ Father Laurence fumbled with the pages, then frowned as if recalling some memory. ‘Not a nice man, not a nice man at all, but he did love dogs. It’s hard to dislike a man who loves dogs, don’t you think?’ He chuckled, then found the page he wanted. ‘The book is a dialogue,’ he explained, ‘between Youth and Age. Here we are, Youth asks the question, “Do you speak against those places also, which are made up and built for such plays and interludes as the Theatre and Curtain?”’

  ‘The Theatre!’ I said. ‘He mentioned us?’

  ‘Indeed he did, and here’s what Age had to say about you, “Yea truly, for I am persuaded that Satan has not a more speedy way and fitter school to teach filthy lusts of wicked whoredom than those places and therefore it is necessary that those places and players should be forbidden and dissolved and put down.”’

  I laughed.

  ‘Oh, there’s more,’ Father Laurence said with relish: ‘“In their plays you shall learn all things that appertain to filthiness. If you will learn how to be false, how to play the harlots, how to obtain one’s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, to flatter, lie, swear, forswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and rebel against princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to be idle, to blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love, to speak filthily, to be proud, how to mock, scoff, and deride!”’ He chuckled again, plainly enjoying himself as he turned another two or three pages. ‘Oh, and here Age talks about you!’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘Indeed! He condemns you for being “contrary to nature”!’ He gave me a mock-stern look. ‘Men attire themselves, he says, “in women’s apparel, with swans’ feathers on their heads, silks, and golden apparel!” Do you wear swans’ feathers on your head, Richard?’

  ‘I wore goose feathers once.’

  ‘What a very bad boy you must be,’ he said, and dropped the book back into the basket. ‘The city fathers and the Pursuivants, both are Puritans! We can mock them, Richard, but they have power now. Their numbers increase.’ He closed his eyes and looked pained. ‘The church was corrupt, God knows it was corrupt, but still we fed the hungry, we clothed the naked, and we tended the sick. We did good works, we prayed for souls and we gave comfort. But now the Puritans revile us, they call us the devil’s creatures, and they hate us. They hate even their own kind, other Protestants. And they would close your playhouses, Richard, they would strip the churches of what small beauty is left in them, and they would make the world drab.’

  ‘But not yet, father,’ I said, ‘and before they do I must find those play scripts.’

  He looked at me sadly. ‘I hope you do,’ he said, ‘and I think you’re right about where poor Simon took them.’ I had told him of my suspicions earlier, and he had evidently been thinking about my words. ‘It makes sense that the boy would have run to Sir Godfrey. Saint Benet’s is very close by. But that was a day and a night ago, Richard. You think the scripts will still be at Saint Benet’s?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then what can you do?’

  ‘Go to the place where Sir Godfrey will have hidden them,’ I said. ‘A place no one in their senses would dare approach.’

  ‘But you will dare?’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘And tomorrow you go there?’

  ‘I do, father, yes.’

  He closed his eyes. ‘In the name of God, Richard, be careful. Please be careful.’

  Because on the morrow I would be meeting Washington.

  Next morning I went to the Theatre first. It had stopped snowing and the world that dawn was a miracle of whiteness, bright and gleaming, just waiting for sinful mankind to besmirch it. A carpenter was already at the playhouse, his footprints deep in the new snow. He was repairing the tiring-room door, and reluctantly stood aside to let me enter. Once inside I found Jeremiah swathed in the company’s thickest cloaks and sitting with his massive German pistol on his lap. ‘It’s you,’ he greeted me morosely.

  ‘It’s me,’ I agreed.

  ‘Are they rehearsing here today?’

  ‘No, still at Blackfriars. I just came to collect a few things. And I told the Sharers that you couldn’t stop the Percies.’

  He frowned. ‘Well of course I couldn’t.’ He spoke truculently. ‘The Lord Almighty couldn’t stop them. They were bloody Pe
rcies! They can do what they want.’

  ‘You couldn’t stop them,’ I said, ‘because you weren’t here, but the Sharers don’t know that.’

  He understood then, and understood that I had lied for him and that he would not lose his job as guardian of the Theatre. Gratitude was a stranger to Jeremiah, but he screwed up his face and managed a grimace that was probably intended to be a smile. ‘You’re a good lad,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘So as thanks,’ I said, ‘you can lend me a pistol.’

  ‘A pistol?’

  ‘One of those things,’ I said nodding at the weapon on his lap.

  He frowned again. ‘What do you want with a pistol?’

  ‘To frighten someone.’

  I could see he wanted to argue, but then he remembered I had done him a favour, and he nodded. ‘Hemp seed or a ball?’

  ‘A ball.’

  ‘You want to be careful, lad. You kill someone, and they’ll have you dancing on the gallows. Hemp seed does the job well enough! Aim for the bugger’s face and you can turn his eyeballs to jelly.’

  ‘A ball,’ I said again.

  ‘I hope to Christ you know what you’re doing, lad.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘You want spare powder? Spare balls?’

  ‘Just the one ball,’ I said. I reckoned I would have no time to reload, indeed I hoped I would not have to use the gun at all, but the place I was going was, indeed, dangerous, and one pistol ball might save me. Or swing me.

  While Jeremiah rooted among the weapons upstairs, I changed clothes, choosing thickly lined hose, breeches, and doublet from the costumes hanging in the tiring room. All the garments were in very dark cloth, either woollen or twilled cotton. They were working-men’s clothes, the kind that the mechanicals would wear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Most working men wore shoes, but I chose tall, stout boots in black leather. I crammed my hair into a plain woollen cap, then borrowed a thick dark cloak with a hood, and a canvas bag of the sort craftsmen use to carry their tools. My tools would be a chisel, a dagger, and the pistol that Jeremiah had loaded. It was the smallest gun from his armoury. ‘Keep it pointing upright,’ he advised me. ‘I did ram it proper, and it’s well wadded, but best to keep it upright so that nothing falls out.’ He handed me the weapon that was surprisingly heavy. ‘I tested it,’ he said, ‘and it sparks all right, but the trigger’s stiff as a nun’s tit. You have to give it a good old tug.’

  The pistol was a wheel lock. Pulling the trigger opened a small pan in which gunpowder lay, and, at the same time, drove the flint down onto a serrated steel wheel that spun to produce a small cascade of sparks that was supposed to ignite the powder. I had fired wheel locks before, but only during the battle scenes of a play, and never with a ball in the gun. Three or four of us would stand in the tiring room and, at the right cue, pull our triggers, and inevitably only one or two of the guns would fire, and sometimes none, and if any did fire we would have to stamp on the flaming wadding that vented from the barrels, while other players beat metal on metal and shouted incoherently. ‘Don’t overdo the battle noise!’ Alan Rust would insist to us, but we always did.

  I slung the heavy bag across my body, then pulled the cloak’s hood over my head. ‘You look like a bleeding monk,’ Jeremiah said.

  ‘It’s cold out there.’

  ‘You think I haven’t noticed? They should put a hearth in here. A man deserves some warmth. And don’t forget to bring the bleeding pistol back!’ Jeremiah shouted as I edged past the carpenter repairing the door.

  ‘I won’t!’

  I walked westwards, first crossing the Finsbury Fields where the windmills stood motionless with icicles hanging from their tethered vanes, then through the small thatched cottages that lined Chiswell Street. Off to my right, to the north, lay a frozen countryside, while to the south were the gardens, orchards, and houses that reached as far as the city wall. Smoke poured from chimneys and darkened the cloud-grey sky above London. I walked fast except where ice sheeted the roads. I turned north to reach Olde Street, then west again to cross the Saint Alban’s road. Cattle were being driven south, their dung steaming. Once over the road I followed a path through a churchyard to the Clerkenwell Road, and there I slowed.

  I slowed because the place where I was going lay not far away. It stood in a rough pasture just north of the road, and was surrounded by a fence of wooden palings that was taller than a man. The River Fleet ran to the east of the fenced yard, hurrying south to join the Thames, though on this cold morning the narrow river was entirely shrouded in ice. There were a half-dozen sheds inside the fence, but only a single chimney spewing smoke. I crossed the old bridge that spanned the Fleet, walking slowly and bent over like an old man, the big dark hood shrouding my face. The road was trampled with foot- and hoofprints and I could see someone had already visited the big fenced yard that morning because hoofprints led through the snow from the road to the gate. There was a mess of prints right by the gate where the horseman must have dismounted and someone had come from the yard to greet him, and there was a curved scar in the snow, which showed where the gate had been swung open to let man and horse inside. There were no hoofprints leading out of the yard, suggesting that horse and rider were still inside. I did not pause, but kept walking. I doubted anyone inside the yard was watching the road, but I did not want to attract attention by appearing curious. Once past the fence’s western boundary, I looked for a gap in the hawthorn hedge, found one, and pushed through. I ran now, going to the yard’s western wall and heading north until I turned the corner, and only stopped when I was halfway down the fence’s northern side. No one could see me here. There was nothing but fields and bare spinneys between me and the smoke that marked the far village of Islington.

  The heavy wooden wall surrounded a place called Scavenger’s Yard. I never did learn why it was called that, perhaps it had once been a place where the city’s scavengers took whatever they swept or scraped from the streets, but now it was owned by Sir Godfrey Cullen, rector of Saint Benet’s, molester of small boys, and supplier of beasts for the entertainment of Her Majesty and the populace of London. Scavenger’s Yard was where he kept the cockerels, dogs, apes, and, most valuable of all, Washington. Washington was a bear, an enormous beast, scarred and shaggy, who would be chained to a post and then attacked by a pack of mastiffs. The bear was named for the village in the north of England where he had been reared, and he was almost as famous as Sackerson, a monstrous beast who could attract crowds of two or three thousand every time he fought. When Washington fought he would be paraded down the lanes and streets of the city to the Tiltyard, or to wherever else he would be chained that day. He would be muzzled with rusty iron for the journey, led by Buttercup, and guarded by Strawbelly Sam, the animal keeper, who would be armed with a heavy goad. Children would run alongside, daring each other to slap Washington’s matted and scarred flanks, and behind the bear would come a horse-drawn cage filled with snarling and howling mastiffs, most of whom would be crippled or disembowelled by day’s end.

  When I had been a grey-robed scholar at Saint Benet’s I would sometimes be sent with a pair of companions to help Sam so I knew Scavenger’s Yard well. I had swilled out cages, cut up carcasses, and cleaned the dung from the small arena that lay in the yard’s centre, an arena that was surrounded by banked seating for four or five hundred people. The yard lay well north of the city and so was not as popular as the Tiltyard or the Curtain, but on summer Saturdays it made a fine outing for folk, who came to see the dogs attacking Washington, or else, most popular of all, to see a terrified ape strapped to a cheap and doomed horse’s back trying to avoid the leaping assaults of maddened hounds. The ape, which would often be dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, died screaming, to the cheers and laughter of the crowd.

  That cold morning I was relieved that a horseman had come to the yard because it meant his beast would be somewhere inside, and the dogs which normally ran loose would be locked away so that they could do the horse no damage. Scavenger’s Ya
rd was indeed a dangerous place, guarded by a score of animals that were trained to kill.

  I reckoned that on the night he had stolen the plays, Simon Willoughby would have fled to the nearest refuge where he would find warmth and sanctuary, and that refuge had to be Sir Godfrey’s house, which lay just one street away from the Lord Chamberlain’s mansion. My brother had not thought of Sir Godfrey, perhaps not knowing that the priest had agreed to provide beast shows to the new playhouse across the river. If he had suspected that Sir Godfrey was sheltering Simon Willoughby and the stolen play scripts, he would have assembled a group of Sharers, armed them, and gone to Saint Benet’s. There would have been an affray, possibly worse. Swords would have been drawn, constables summoned, and doubtless, eventually, Writs of Attachment would have been issued by the magistrates to prevent another such confrontation.

  It seemed I was the only person who had understood that Simon would run to Sir Godfrey, but Sir Godfrey could not know that, and he must have feared my brother’s wrath. If a group of armed men came to his house and searched it, he would want to make sure that the plays were not there. He would want the precious scripts in the safest place possible, a place that no one would dare search, a place guarded by slavering beasts ready to tear an intruder into bloody ruin, a place called Scavenger’s Yard.

  And I was the intruder.

  There was a small gate in the northern wall which was only ever opened at the end of the Saturday beast shows to let villagers from Islington take a shortcut home. It was bolted shut, of course, but there was no lock. There was no need. No one would ever try to break into the yard except a fool, and that cold morning I was the fool.

  I used the chisel, inserting it into the gap between gate and jamb and finding the bolt’s barrel which I then tried to edge aside. Except it would not move. The bolt seemed rusted into place, and every time I tried to lever it, the chisel’s edge would slip and screech on the iron barrel. The gate creaked as I struggled. I hammered the chisel with my hand and tried again, and at last the bolt moved with a grating noise. I found that slightly pushing the gate inwards made the job easier. The old bolt was still reluctant and stiff, yet, bit by bit, the barrel jarred back until at last it slipped free of its tunnel and the gate sprang open an inch or two. I pulled it half open, flinching at the noise the old hinges made, and just then the dogs started howling.