The inside of my cheek was bleeding. I swallowed the blood. ‘Suppose your informant lied?’ I asked.
Price held up a hand to check the punch that Fish-Breath was about to deliver. ‘If he lied,’ he said, ‘then I shall uncover his untruths. Or rather, you will.’
‘I will?’
‘You are a thief. Do you deny it?’
‘I do deny it,’ I said indignantly. ‘I merely took what was our property.’
‘You equivocate!’ Price spat. ‘You are a thief! Tell us, Master Willoughby.’
‘Tell you, sir?’ Simon Willoughby asked, flicking a scared glance towards me.
‘Is Master Shakespeare a thief?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Willoughby said quietly.
‘Be not afraid, Master Willoughby,’ Price encouraged him. ‘You are under my protection now and no more harm can come to you. Tell us what you know.’
And Willoughby proceeded to tell the story of how he and I had helped the drunken lordling across Finsbury Fields to the Spanish Lady tavern just inside Moorgate, and how we had taken his purse and divided the money between us. We had each made eight shillings that day, but Simon Willoughby claimed we had made eighteen shillings apiece, and he sounded so full of remorse as he spoke, so regretful about his part in the theft. He performed his role well. ‘I knew I’d done wrong, sir,’ he said to Piggy Price, ‘and my conscience began to trouble me.’
‘Ha,’ I scoffed, and was hit for my pains.
‘Go on,’ Piggy Price encouraged Simon.
‘I had broken God’s commandments, sir, and knew I was going to hell. The only priest I knew was Sir Godfrey, so I went to him and he prayed with me. He said I must seek God’s forgiveness, sir, so I did.’
Dear Lord in His glory! It was mostly lies, of course, but the lies were grounded on a shred of truth, and they were told by a good player, and so the lies were convincing. Simon Willoughby went on to say I had tried to persuade him to steal again and he finished by giving me a vituperative look through his one good eye. ‘He’s a thief, sir, a thief!’
‘As were you once, Master Willoughby!’ Piggy Price said sternly.
‘Yes, sir,’ Willoughby answered miserably, ‘I was, sir.’
‘But you have come to a saving knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ?’
‘I have, sir, I have.’
‘Then like the thief at Golgotha your sins are forgiven and you are washed whiter than snow.’
I would have laughed if I could have endured another of Fish-Breath’s punches. Price turned back to me. ‘Do you deny Master Willoughby’s charges?’
‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘He’s a liar, a pathetic little bed-wetting liar.’
‘And you are a thief,’ Price said, ‘and you will now use your sinful skills on my behalf. Is it true,’ he looked back to Simon Willoughby, ‘that the company’s scripts and documents are concealed in the Lord Chamberlain’s house?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And you,’ the piggy face turned back to me, ‘will bring the offending scripts to us. You will bring me the Romish play and your brother’s copy of the Conference.’
I had forgotten the seditious book that pleaded the case to make a Roman Catholic princess of Spain into England’s next monarch, possession of which was enough to condemn a man to one of London’s vile prisons. I looked down at Price. ‘You’re Pursuivants,’ I said, ‘so why don’t you search the Lord Chamberlain’s house yourself?’
He grimaced. He knew the answer as well as I did, that he dared not search Lord Hunsdon’s property. His lordship was first cousin, perhaps even half-brother, to the Queen, and much too powerful a man for Piggy Price to attack directly, but a company of players was meat for his appetite. He ignored my question. ‘You will bring us those papers and the book tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow!’ I was surprised.
‘It should be simple enough. You know where the play is concealed?’
‘He knows, Mister Price,’ Simon Willoughby said.
‘And if I refuse?’ I asked.
‘You won’t,’ Price said, ‘because if you leave the Lord Chamberlain’s house without the documents that I require then I shall arrest you and you will be accused of robbery and assault, you will be tried, and, let me assure you, convicted. And the sentence,’ he added with relish, ‘will be death by hanging.’
Fish-Breath grinned and made a choking noise, pretending to be a hanged man.
George Price frowned at Fish-Breath, evidently unimpressed by the pretence. ‘You and your brother,’ he ordered the twins, ‘will wait at Saint Benet’s, and Mister Shakespeare will bring you the papers. Tomorrow!’ The last word was spat at me.
‘What if I can’t bring the papers tomorrow?’ I asked. Not that I cared, I was merely trying to find an exit from a stage that appeared to have none.
‘Tomorrow!’ Price snarled.
‘We’re not rehearsing tomorrow,’ I lied.
‘That might be true, sir,’ Simon Willoughby muttered.
‘Then the next day,’ Price said, ‘or the day after. But no more! Three days! And if you fail me you will surely hang.’ He stepped away from me. ‘Bring it,’ he ordered Sweaty-Face, then looked at Fish-Breath. ‘Strip his left sleeve,’ he ordered.
Fish-Breath pulled off my cloak, then gasped, and no wonder, because the doublet of Spanish leather looked fit for a prince, if not a king. Then he grinned, knowing he was about to destroy the garment. ‘Let’s have your sleeve,’ he growled, and drew a short knife to slice the sleeve open from the wrist to the shoulder.
I still had the dagger sheathed at my belt, a dagger that was hidden by the panelled beauty of the doublet’s skirt, and both Fish-Breath and Mister Price were standing so close to me that they could not see what my right hand was doing.
Fish-Breath grabbed the wrist of my left sleeve, which was prettily finished with an unstarched frill of white French lace shaped into star points, each point tipped with a pearl, but before he could use his knife to slit the sleeve he whimpered and went very still. ‘Take the knife away,’ I said.
He whimpered again and pulled the knife back from my sleeve. ‘What …’ Mister Price began, and I nudged the dagger that I had slid into Fish-Breath’s groin. Fish-Breath made a mewing noise. ‘What is it?’ Mister Price demanded, annoyed.
‘I have a knife against his bollocks,’ I explained.
‘He has a knife against my bollocks,’ Fish-Breath echoed in a voice so small that it could have passed for the heroine in any playhouse.
Mister Price surprised me then. He might have been a piggy little man with a piggy belly and piggy eyes and piggy jowls, but he moved with a deft swiftness. He seized the collar of Fish-Breath’s coat and hauled him hard backwards, away from my blade, so the mewling fool half fell, stumbling against the wall. ‘Ruthers! Carson!’ Mister Price bellowed, and the door opened to let in the two Pursuivants who must have been waiting outside. They saw the dagger in my hand and drew swords.
‘Drop it!’ one of the men snarled at me.
I doubted they would use the swords, because Mister Price wanted a man able to answer his questions and steal a play script, not a sword-punctured cripple, and so I held onto the dagger. I said nothing because I did not know what to say. The two men had left the door open and I half thought of making a dash for it, but of course I could never have reached that far. They and their swords barred the way.
‘I’ll kill him,’ Fish-Breath yelped.
A sword reached for me, the blade threatening my throat. Now what could I do? Cut Fish-Breath’s throat and have my own gullet slashed open? I lowered the blade.
‘You will not kill him,’ Mister Price told Fish-Breath calmly, ‘you will just strip his sleeve.’
My oldest brother was fond of telling me not to push my fortune past the peradventure, which I am sure is good advice, and, like all good advice, is doomed to be ignored, yet on that evening, faced by two swordsmen and by a knife in the hands of a bollock-pricked fish-eater, I decided the
peradventure was far enough. It was time to cooperate, and I pushed Fish-Breath away before he could attack my arm. ‘You wish,’ I said, ‘my sleeve to be removed?’
‘I do,’ Mister Price said.
‘Then I shall strip it,’ I said, and so sheathed the dagger and unlaced the sleeve. I like clothes, and had no wish, whatever nastiness the evening had yet to hold, to see a fine doublet of velvet, Spanish leather, French lace, and white silk mangled by a fool. The knots were old and it took time to pick them apart, but no one interfered, and, at last, the sleeve was separated from the shoulder and I tugged it over my wrist.
‘The shirt,’ Mister Price said, gesturing at my left arm.
‘Woven by elves,’ I said, ‘from linen bleached by the fairies.’
‘Bare your arm, you fool,’ he growled, then looked at Sweaty-Face. ‘Bring it, Thomas,’ he said, ‘bring it now.’
I am a player and I am a good one. I had been playing to audiences for seven years and had learned the players’ tricks, and I confess there is a pleasure in silencing a crowd, in stopping their breath as they wait to watch a murder or witness a kiss. There is pleasure in their wild applause, in their cheers, in their gifts to the players, in their rapt silence. There is no pleasure when they are displeased, when the groundlings jeer and the rotten fruit flies to spatter on the stage, but that is rare. We players can play an audience as a man plays a lute. You have maybe seen us, have paid your pence to stand beneath us or to sit in the galleries above us, and if we did our work well then you thought what we did was easy.
It is not easy. It is monstrously hard. I remember Sir Godfrey, who is as wicked a man as ever sucked the devil’s tits, instructing us boys. ‘What you do,’ he said, cutting the air with the thick birch rod that he loved to lay on our naked arses, ‘is unnatural, and I do not speak of your disgusting practices, but of performing. Of being on a stage, it is unnatural, yet you will learn to make it look natural.’ And we did.
‘It is a deception,’ Sir Godfrey would tell us, sometimes standing behind one of us and unbuttoning his breeches, ‘as false as the tits on an ingle whore, but the audience wishes to be deceived, and you are their conjurors. And the first step to make the fools believe is for you to believe yourselves! You must believe because if you do not, then they will not believe. In the name of the Father and of the Son, boy, bend over.’
Deceiving is hard work. It might look easy, but you only need watch the mummers in some village fair to know the difference between the men you see on the stages of the London playhouses and the awkward fools who cannot stop fidgeting on their village’s wagon beds. And to walk through the tiring room door into the gaze of two thousand people, to face a cliff of Londoners staring from the galleries, and a sea of faces in the yard, all of them watching, is frightening. I have seen men who have been playing all their lives vomit in the bucket by a stage door, others pale as death and twitching uncontrollably or making the sign of the forbidden cross, yet when the cue comes they thrust the door open and stride so confidently into the light. They smile, their cloaks swirl in graceful motion, and the groundlings greet them with gasps, even with applause, and why? Because they pretend.
And that is what I did that night in Mister Price’s overheated chamber. I pretended. In truth I was terrified because I knew nothing good was about to happen, but I am a player, and though my heart beat like a captive bird and though a muscle in my right leg shivered, I pretended to be brave. Then I saw what was in Sweaty-Face’s hand, and the pretence was overpowered by the terror.
It was a brand. He carried a long iron rod, held in a thick cloth, and at its tip was a squirl of heated iron. That iron tip glowed red hot, shimmering the already overheated air. ‘Bring it,’ Mister Price said again, and Sweaty-Face edged around the table. ‘Hold him,’ Mister Price ordered, and Fish-Breath took hold of me. He held me firmly, turning me so that my left arm was bared towards Sweaty-Face.
‘You will be tempted to run away rather than bring me what I require,’ George Price told me, holding out a hand to stay the glowing iron, ‘so I will brand you with the letter P. It could be P for Price,’ he said, ‘but it is not. It could be P for Protestant, but it is not. It could even be P for player, but it is not. It is P for papist.’
‘I’m not a papist,’ I said, no longer pretending. My fear had destroyed pretence, and my voice would not have carried past the wretched groundlings who lean on the stage’s edge and crack hazelnuts by our feet. I was whimpering scared.
‘P for papist,’ Mister Price said again. ‘The scum of Rome are our country’s enemies and they lurk in the shadows, and I will mark them so they cannot hide.’
‘I’m not a papist,’ I repeated, scarce above a whisper.
‘Maybe not,’ Mister Price said, ‘but I will mark you as one, and if you fail me, Master Shakespeare, then every constable and every magistrate in England will know your mark and seek you out. Every sheriff’s post in every town will have your description. You will be a marked man, and you will be mine!’ He nodded at Sweaty-Face. ‘Do it.’
Sweaty-Face leered, then thrust the brand onto my forearm.
And I screamed.
The pain was instant and terrible. I screamed and wrenched my arm to escape the pain, but Fish-Breath held me too firmly, and then Simon Willoughby intervened.
He screamed as he lunged across the room. ‘Let me do it!’ he shrieked. ‘He hurt me, let me hurt him!’ And he thrust Sweaty-Face aside, inadvertently forcing the brand away from the bubbling skin on my arm, and then he seized the iron rod ready to thrust it hard against my flesh again.
Only he forgot that the whole brand, both the P at the tip and the long iron rod that served as its handle, had been heated in the fire. He had no folded cloth as Sweaty-Face did, and the moment his right hand closed about the rod he screamed again. He screamed like a child, he dropped the brand, then thrust his scorched hand between his thighs and crouched, sobbing. ‘I’m hurting, oh God help me! I’m hurting!’
The floor rushes started burning. They were bone dry, they should have been changed weeks ago, and the moment the red-hot brand fell they burst into flames that spread fast. Fish-Breath and his companion let go of my arms and started stamping out the fire, Simon Willoughby squealed, and Piggy Price bellowed at Sweaty-Face to pick up the iron. Which he did, but he had dropped the cloth when Simon Willoughby snatched the brand away, and so he also used his bare hand, he bellowed in sudden pain and dropped the glowing iron again to start a new fire. ‘Ruthers!’ Price shouted. ‘Water!’
The Pursuivant ran from the room, leaving the door open. Price was helping to stamp out the flames, Willoughby was crouching in agony, weeping and whining, Sweaty-Face had managed to find his cloth, picked up the brand, and, unsure what to do with it, carried it back to the hearth, while smoke from the charred rushes curled up towards the magical ships on the painted ceiling.
‘Are you trying to burn down Her Majesty’s palace?’ a voice asked from the doorway. A tall, saturnine man stood there, a look of amusement on his face.
‘An accident, Sir Leonard,’ Price said sharply, ‘an accident.’
‘Her Majesty will not be pleased by your accident, Mister Price. Palaces cost money!’
‘It was an accident!’ Price snapped. He was embarrassed.
The stranger, who was plainly but elegantly dressed, and wearing an enamelled chain of office about his neck, stepped into the room and waved his hand to disperse the lingering smoke. ‘What clumsy fellows you Pursuivants are. Is this your way of purging sin?’
‘The fire is out, Sir Leonard,’ Price said.
‘And I see you have a guest,’ Sir Leonard said, frowning at the wound on my arm. ‘Why was I not informed?’
‘Our work,’ Price said, summoning his dignity, ‘is to protect the Queen’s Majesty from sedition.’
‘By burning down her palace? The Queen’s Majesty, Mister Price, is protected by informing the yeomen if any strangers are to be lodged in the palace overnight. The curfew is
past, is it not?’
Ruthers, the Pursuivant, edged past Sir Leonard with a pail of water, but the flames had already been stamped out, though the blackened rushes still smoked. My arm throbbed around the burn’s agony. The skin was black and red, and blood was already crusting there. Price and his men were plainly discomfited by Sir Leonard’s arrival, so I took the chance of stepping to the chair where my cloak had been dropped. I flinched from pain as I draped it around my shoulders.
‘Wait!’ Price snarled.
‘What is your business with this man?’ Sir Leonard asked.
‘Our business is finished,’ Price said sullenly. The burning rushes and the scorn of Sir Leonard had spoiled his evening, ‘Within three days!’ he snarled at me. ‘You will bring me the book and the papers within three days. Otherwise you hang!’
‘I want to kill him first!’ Simon Willoughby whined, still keeping his burned hand between his thighs. ‘Before he hangs, I want to kill him!’
Price ignored him. ‘Ruthers, Carson! See this wretch to the street.’
I snatched up deValle’s hat and walked to the door, which Sir Leonard, who was evidently an officer of the palace, courteously held open for me. It was also evident that he disliked George Price and just as plain that Piggy Price feared Sir Leonard, who offered me an aloof nod when I bowed to him. Ruthers seized my wounded arm, making me gasp with pain, then walked me down the passage. ‘Three days,’ he growled.
‘I heard the man,’ I said, then dared a question. ‘Who are the twins?’
I thought neither man would answer, then Carson gave a harsh laugh. ‘His nephews.’
‘Little bastards,’ Ruthers added under his breath.
They marched me back the way we had come, opened a small door in the great gate, and pushed me out into the street. ‘Three days!’ Carson called after me.
And after three days I would hang.
It was cold. Freezing. The night was still, baked with frost. The snow sparkled where lantern light touched it, and my breath made clouds. My cloak was thick, but even so within minutes I was shivering helplessly. Only the wound on my arm was hot, burning and throbbing. I stooped, picked up a handful of snow and clapped it on the burn, and that helped, but still the pain seared.