The Reckoning Read online

  The fire crackled in the great hearth in the hall at Scadbury. Audrey Walsingham smiled as she looked around at her guests, the great and good of the surrounding countryside as well as some of Thomas’s more illustrious contacts at Whitehall. Christmas was always a difficult time to assure a hostess of a good turnout and indeed, she had lost some of the bigger names she would have liked to see under her roof. Her rather unusual arrangement with Thomas was not known to everybody and of those who knew, some had shunned them from the moment she hung her first garment in the press in their chamber; the others had taken no notice whatsoever. But she didn’t care. She was Audrey Walsingham in every sense apart from strict legality and if she wasn’t always loyal to Thomas, well, that was her business. She chose her men with care and only dallied with those with far more to lose than she had herself. She looked across the room to where Kit Marlowe sat, beautiful in his festive clothes, fresh cheeked and bright-eyed from the outdoor revels and she forced a smile. Even she could not get it right every time and revenge was a dish best served cold.

  She felt a nudge in her ribs. ‘Aud,’ Thomas’s voice husked in her ear, ‘you’re staring, dear. Try not to do that. It’s common.’ It wasn’t often that he reminded her of her relatively humble birth but every now and again, especially when he had taken a cup or two of wine and then a cup or two more, he would bring it up. In private, she would lambast him until he was sorry he had spoken. In public, she was as soft and compliant as any man could wish.

  ‘I beg your pardon, my lord,’ she said, bowing her head. ‘I was not staring. I was resting my eyes by letting them wander. At whom was I staring? I must go and apologize at once.’

  Thomas clapped her on the back. A sure sign he had taken too much wine; he started to treat her as one of the fellows up in Whitehall, all slaps and buffets and bonhomie. ‘No need for that, Aud, old girl.’

  She winced. When he started old girling her, it usually meant she would be troubled by his inexpert pawing next.

  ‘Just saying. Don’t want to embarrass the guests.’ He leaned over and almost buried his masked head in her décolletage. She backed away.

  ‘Thomas! Please! Not in front of everyone.’ She smiled around over his head and got some sympathetic glances from the women nearby. All men are beasts, they seemed to say. She could have told some of them in great detail just how beastly their men were, given half a chance.

  ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, straightening up. ‘Bit dizzy.’ He pulled at his codpiece, trying to settle it more comfortably. ‘Bit hot, tell you the truth. Can I take this thing off now?’

  ‘No, you certainly cannot!’ Audrey Walsingham kept her chatelaine voice to a minimum with Thomas. He needed careful handling, at least until she was safely married to him and truly Mistress of Scadbury, not merely his mistress. ‘You are the Lord of Misrule. How would it look if you suddenly appeared in your normal clothes. Look, everyone else is wearing their costumes still.’

  He turned his monstrous plumed head from side to side, trying to focus through the eye holes which were set rather too far apart. True, everyone else was covered in ribbons and they did look very colourful. But their masks were just over part of their faces and no one that he could see was carrying a monstrous protuberance like he was. It was pulling on parts he didn’t like being pulled on and the straps had worked their way between his buttocks in a way that was becoming rather intrusive. He would be walking funny for days, he knew, and he had some serious meetings with serious people planned in the next couple of days. He tried to think of how to explain his lurching gait and nothing repeatable would come to mind. But he was a man still in love and he turned to his lady and fixed her with first one eye and then the next. ‘All right, Aud,’ he said, his voice reverberating in his mask. ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, planting a kiss on the mask above where his cheek might well have been. ‘It’s just for the rest of the evening and then,’ she flicked his silver codpiece with a polished nail, ‘we’ll see what you’ve got for little Audrey under here, shall we?’

  It was Thomas’s turn to wince now. The only way he was even tolerably comfortable was to think chaste thoughts; anything else caused terrible chafing. He bowed as best he could and wandered away.

  The crowd was indeed the biggest Scadbury had ever seen. Before Audrey had entered his life, Thomas Walsingham had entertained little and then only a few close friends. He did have his cousin, Francis, and his family down from time to time, but even then they scarcely reached double figures. But now, the entire countryside had been emptied as everyone, not just the great and good but the tenants on the estate, the servants of guests and of the house and of course, last but not least, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, were crammed into the room.

  The banquet was not of the usual sort. There was no room for everyone to sit down and so the food had been set up on buffets along the walls, made up of trestle tables from all over the estate, spread with linen and strewn with streamers and paper flowers. Candles burned in all the sconces and some of the guests had already learned that naked flames and twirling feathers did not mix; the smell of burning wafted over the company, vying with the smell of food.

  Audrey Walsingham did not like to stint. She had not left her father’s house to live in sin with Thomas in order to do without. So she had ordered plates and tureens, napkins and finger bowls and so much food that two grocers in Chislehurst had bought new houses on the proceeds. The trestles groaned with roast meats and vegetables, candied fruits and jellies, loaves of bread still warm from the Scadbury ovens and pots of new butter. At one end, barrels of ale were supported on great beams and jugs of wine stood on trestles in front of them. Every cup and goblet in the house had been commandeered and under the trestle were boxes lined with straw with yet more, newly brought in by carrier that morning. The bills when they came would make Thomas Walsingham’s eyes pop, but it was worth it, just to show the neighbourhood and in particular Christopher Marlowe, the cobbler’s son from Canterbury, how Audrey Walsingham lived.

  The cobbler’s son from Canterbury was more comfortable in his costume than his host and also not anything like as far in his cups. Marlowe liked a drink as much as the next man, depending on who the next man might be, but he had made it a policy since his first days in Cambridge to always be the soberest man in the room. It was safer that way. But he could walk the walk and talk the talk and few people would have guessed, looking at his lop-sided smile and his tousled hair that he was anything other than inebriated. Around him were either people as skilled as he in the art of looking drunk or people who were, actually, very drunk indeed. Some were cradling goblets against their chests, oblivious to the ale seeping into their doublets, plastering down the feathers and ribbons so they would never be the same again. Others could hold it better and were still standing, hunks of bread and meat in one hand, a drinking cup in the other, making conversation which was at the moment sparkling and witty but which in the cold, clear light of dawn would come back to them with every banal or, worse, insulting or downright slanderous, syllable hideously intact.

  Most of the faces he didn’t know and nearly all the faces were now visible, the masks pushed up on foreheads or abandoned entirely. But he could see all of his number, for the most part the worst for drink, clustered in little cliques all over the room, talking shop, as actors always will, drunk or sober. There was Ned Alleyn standing at the wine trestle, one arm extended in a dramatic pose, a goose leg held aloft as though it were a dagger. The other arm, predictably, was draped over the shoulder of a serving girl from one of the nearby great houses, decked just for today in a revealing dress of scarlet lawn, with flowing ribbons for sleeves.

  Tom Sledd, eating a fastidiously sliced piece of roast beef wrapped in a hunk of bread and accompanied by some pickled onions, was poking Amyntas Finch in the chest with a didactic finger and telling him something that seemed very important. Finch was looking puzzled and Marlowe smiled to see it. This was Tom Sledd at his drunkest, very earne
st and sincere but talking absolute rubbish. The room was too noisy to hear, but the playwright knew that the stage manager was using words which were undoubtedly English, but which had never been heard in that order before and never would be again. He saluted Finch with a lazy hand when the big man caught his eye, a puzzled look on his face. This didn’t happen often, but if he was to be Sledd’s assistant, he needed to practice understanding gibberish when he heard it.

  Frizer and Skeres, predictably, had kept their hobby-horses and were completely in character, whinnying and caracoling around the room to the intense annoyance of everyone. Experience had taught them that people didn’t watch their purses much when they were wearing funny clothes; there seemed no rhyme nor reason to it, but their fat pickings at such festivities could not be argued with. Everyone smiled when they were near, the women patting the horses’ necks and pretending to give them sugar lumps while their husbands were made lighter by the next week’s housekeeping. Life was good.

  The non-acting fraternity were, by and large, in one corner of the room, looking as awkward as they felt. Although they spent their days with actors, it was somewhat of a belief system with them that they were not theatrical. They looked on actors in much the same way that doctors looked upon their patients; as a necessary evil, one they couldn’t live without. Marlowe could see the dark head of one of the Dalston brothers, but in the press of people and the smoky light from the candles could not tell which. In fact, he admitted to himself, he was hard-pressed to tell them apart anyway, until one of them spoke, in which case he could tell; Roger was the clever one and should go far, as long as he didn’t keep his stupider younger brother clinging to his coat-tail, holding him back. The copyist had let his hair down insofar as he had ribbons from his shoulders and, if the tape around the back of his head was any guide, a mask on his face. Otherwise, he looked as normal – slightly hunched over and with his head down.

  Marlowe scanned the crowd looking for Shaxsper. He was normally so easy to find, with his domed head glowing in any light but there was no sign of him. When feeling mellow, Marlowe might think that he was sitting miserably in his lodging, missing Mistress Shaxsper and all the little Shaxspers, but common sense told him that he was probably assuaging his homesickness in the bed of some maidservant or another, having worn out his welcome with all the seamstresses in the Rose’s company. Then he looked again – there was no mistaking that enormous brow, even when topped, as it was, by a bright orange wig. But true to form, he did indeed have a maidservant about his person – as always, not quite as pretty or enthusiastic as the one Ned Alleyn had annexed, but he was, after all, only second on the playbill.

  Nicholas Faunt slid onto the bench which Marlowe was occupying, nudging him along with his elbow to make room. ‘Nice evening,’ he said, in his usual flat, inflexionless voice. Nicholas Faunt gave nothing away, not even in a greeting.

  ‘As they go,’ Marlowe conceded. He could match banality for banality any day of the week.

  ‘Are we playing the drunk tonight?’ Faunt asked. He could do either, drunk or sober.

  ‘Mildly intoxicated, I think,’ Marlowe said. ‘There are enough falling down drunks here already without us faking it.’

  ‘True.’ Faunt crossed his eyes and turned his head to scan the room. There seemed to be nothing amiss. There was some action over to his left, where some of the estate lads were having what they would no doubt have called fun lifting a huge Yule log and dropping it on each other’s feet. ‘That’s a bit odd,’ Faunt remarked, pointing.

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said, with a smile. ‘I did ask about that. It’s a game, apparently, though how anyone knows who the winner is and when is anybody’s guess.’

  ‘Last man standing, I suppose,’ Faunt said, laconically.

  A noise as of cats being castrated with blunt scissors suddenly issued from the far end of the room.

  ‘Time to go,’ Marlowe said, hauling himself to his feet, not forgetting to sway a little. ‘I smell folk dancing.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God,’ Faunt murmured and stood up, following the poet out of the room by a small door half hidden behind the buffet. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Somewhere quieter,’ Marlowe promised him. ‘I’ve been to these things before. It starts with folk dancing and ends with some God-forsaken game like Hoodman Blind or Hide and Seek. Unless I miss my guess, there’ll be a quiet game of Gleek or Ruff going on somewhere and if we keep our heads down, we won’t be bothered again tonight.’

  ‘I don’t care what people say about you, Kit …’ Faunt began.

  ‘Happily, neither do I,’ Marlowe butted in.

  ‘… but you do know how to make yourself at home.’

  ‘It’s where I hang my hat,’ Marlowe observed. He pushed open a door and put his head around it. ‘Here it is,’ he said over his shoulder to Faunt. ‘Have you any small change? It’s a penny a point most nights.’

  And, like thieves in the night, the two projectioners slid round the door and closed it softly behind them.

  In the great hall, things were hotting up and not just because people kept being set alight by candles. The local louts had given up on their game of Dun is in the Mire, having realized, like Marlowe, that there was no way of deciding the winner. After a few desultory goes at some folk dancing and having come to the conclusion that no one but old Gammer Gosworthy knew all the steps and she hadn’t walked unaided since 1576, a game of Hide and Seek was suggested and Amyntas Finch was chosen as the seeker. It was an easy choice, as he was clearly not a man who could easily hide and it was considered by the company to be unfair on him to ask him to try.

  In an extraordinarily short time, the great hall was empty, all bar Finch and Gammer Gosworthy, who was half asleep and muttering the steps of John Come Kiss Me to herself. Finch had been mildly outraged when Audrey Walsingham had asked him whether he knew how to count to one thousand – the number needed to give everyone a chance to hide – and had smiled at her kind consideration that he might like to walk three times around the manor house instead. But stuck here with a mad old granny, chewing her gums and chuckling lasciviously to himself, he decided to split the difference and at three hundred he stole out of the hall and set off widdershins around the building.

  Marlowe lifted his head from examining his cards and listened carefully. ‘Here we go, boys,’ he muttered to his companions. ‘Time to bar the door. If that’s not the sound of distant Hide and Seek, I’m a Dutchman.’

  James Lewknor, who was losing heavily, was of the opinion that the game should be declared null and void, but a glance from Faunt changed his mind and he went across and barred the door, peeping out first. Coming back to the table, he announced that Marlowe was right, that the house was full of scurrying people, all intent on a hiding place.

  ‘How did you know, Master Marlowe?’ he asked, impressed.

  ‘He’s a spy,’ Faunt said, pushing another penny into the centre of the table.

  ‘You do like your joke, master,’ a farmer from the edge of the estate said with a chuckle. ‘Ain’t no such thing, as everyone knows.’

  ‘No, indeed there isn’t,’ Marlowe said. ‘Excuse my friend. He does like a laugh.’

  The men around the table looked at Faunt. If ever there was a face which had never cracked a smile, this was surely it. They bent again to their cards, aware that the air had taken on a sudden chill.

  Not everyone was concentrating on finding a good place to hide. Alleyn and Shaxsper, with other ideas on their mind, were heading off across the stable yard to their cosy billet in the hayloft, swept and appointed with comfortable beds for their use. Alleyn’s little maidservant was leading the way, pulling him anxiously across the cobbles. He was beginning to wonder whether perhaps he wasn’t a little old for this game these days. Shaxsper’s girl, on the other hand, was suddenly not so keen. The wig had been convincing only in dim candlelight and the help of a few goblets of cheap wine. Now it was slung rakishly over one eye in the light of the courtyard torch
es, she was not so sure that this actor was all that much of a catch. But then she remembered what her old mother had always told her about men from Lunnon and especially those in the theatre being as rich as someone called Greaseus and she shrugged and caught up his hasty steps with a hop and a skip. The worst it could be was fun and at the best she might get a nice lining to her purse.

  Tom Sledd had beaten them to it and he was lying on his palliasse groaning when they stumped up the stairs with their prizes.

  ‘Sledd,’ Alleyn said. ‘Get out. I want some privacy.’

  Tom Sledd was not in the mood for ego. ‘If you want me to move, Ned,’ he muttered, ‘you’ll have to be in the mood for cleaning up sick. Because you’ll have to if I have to so much as roll over.’

  Alleyn looked down at him and made a decision.

  ‘Well, keep your eyes closed, then,’ he said, truculently.

  ‘No problem there,’ Sledd said. On more than one count, that was currently a given.

  ‘And stop your ears.’

  ‘Pardon?’ Sledd said and fell asleep, snoring loudly.

  The servant girl was looking around her. ‘It’s not very romantic, Ned, is it?’ she said. This was worse than her room in the attics of the main house.

  ‘Romantic?’ Alleyn was puzzled. Here she was, with the doyen of the acting profession and she wanted romance?

  ‘Well. Straw palliasses? We have wool over in the house.’

  ‘Mine is wool,’ he said, affronted. ‘I am after all the Leading Man.’ He struck his customary pose.

  She kicked it with a slippered toe, wet and muddy from the yard. ‘Well … all right then.’ She slipped her arms out of her gown with the speed of long practice and Alleyn squared up for a lunge. Just before he made contact with two of the most glorious breasts he had seen since daybreak, a scream cut through the night. The girl started back and gathered up her clothes to hide herself. Tom Sledd sat up in bed as if on strings and then fell back, groaning. Shaxsper, still trying to inveigle the girl of his choice up the ladder swore like a sailor and ran for the door.