The Reckoning Read online

  ‘Repeats?’ Henslowe said. ‘They’re all well and good, but they don’t bring in the numbers. I want something new.’

  ‘I don’t have anything new,’ Marlowe said, turning in the doorway. ‘You’ll have to wait until my poem is finished.’

  ‘I think The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, king of England sounds good for my next production. Bit long for the posters, but it will do.’

  Marlowe frowned. ‘My version?’ he checked.

  ‘Is there another?’ Henslowe spread his hands innocently.

  ‘No Alleyn.’

  ‘No Alleyn. Burbage for the king.’

  ‘No Shaxsper.’

  ‘Well … he has mouths to feed. Let him have a small part, Kit. Let bygones be bygones. I have a feeling Alleyn was the leader there.’

  Marlowe was not sure about that, but conceded the point. ‘Kemp for Gaveston, then?’

  ‘If he’ll do it.’

  ‘Is Queen Isabella’s voice broken?’

  ‘As a shattered hope,’ Henslowe said. ‘Poor lad. It came on very suddenly, along with spots and whiskers, but he is walking out with one of the seamstresses, so he has got over his disappointment. Happily, he has a brother who has a few years in him yet. Anything else?’

  Marlowe could only grin. ‘I am … overwhelmed, Master Henslowe. Umm … you have let Tom keep his assistant, haven’t you?’

  ‘Do you think I’m made of money?’ Henslowe barked.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Don’t get your venetians in a bunch. Finch is hired on a pro tem basis, but I like Tom looking less …’

  ‘Tired?’

  ‘I was going to say dead,’ Henslowe said, ‘but tired will do. So, Master Marlowe, what else can I do for you today?’

  Marlowe bowed low, sweeping his cape behind him extravagantly. ‘Master Henslowe,’ he said, ‘you have done everything and more.’

  ‘In that case, get out. Time is money. You have a play to cast.’

  ‘Kit! Kit!’ Philip Henslowe was beside himself. ‘They loved it! They just loved it! I’ve never seen Burbage better and my idea of Kemp as Gaveston – it worked a treat.’

  ‘Glad you’re happy, Philip,’ Marlowe smiled.

  They had indeed loved it. A new play by Kit Marlowe, the Muse’s darling, always brought in the punters, who had no idea of the problems that putting it on created. Shaxsper, who had effectively slaughtered Gaveston at Scadbury, was demoted to the Bishop of Coventry, on account of how he could do the accent. Other players were shuffled around. Amyntas Finch had a walk-on part when he wasn’t humping flats for Tom Sledd.

  Nicholas Faunt had other things to do, but kept in touch with Marlowe as he was wont to do and as Burghley had ordered. It was mainly through cryptic notes pushed under the door at Hog Lane. When Marlowe was not at home, the maidservant put them in a pile near the door for him to look at when he got in. As the pile often blew away and was reassembled at random, the messages were sometimes hard to understand, as when read in any order, they were not immediately clear. The one reading ‘Bye egs’ Marlowe had rightly attributed to the cook. In the main, they were warning Marlowe to keep his head down and always ended with words to the effect that the writer might as well have saved the ink, because he knew Marlowe would do whatever he pleased. In that at least, they were essentially correct.

  The first night had been a riotous success and the audience, gentry and groundlings alike, had demanded that Marlowe appear on stage and take a bow. The second night was full. Nearly three thousand people crammed into the Rose and Frizer and Skeres were sorry they couldn’t mingle with the crowd, cutting purses to supplement their meagre wages.

  Henslowe may have been beside himself but a slow realization dawned that much more success like this and his players would be demanding more money. Ever a man to spot the fly in the ointment, was Philip Henslowe.

  ‘Marlowe has excelled himself!’ read the headline of the Playbill which appeared in large numbers, pinned to any bit of wood south of the river and pasted onto walls. Edward the Second was the talk of the taverns and fights broke out when drunken men began arguing for and against the king.

  It was over a week later that Edmund Tilney, Master of the Queen’s Revels, turned up at Henslowe’s door. It was early morning and the flag had not yet been raised over the Rose’s turret to signal another sell-out performance of the play.

  ‘Master Tilney,’ Henslowe bowed and spoke through clenched teeth. Usually a visit from Tilney was like one from the grim reaper, though not half so pleasant. ‘What a pleasure.’

  ‘This play, Henslowe.’ Tilney had left his horse at the Rose’s door, the animal made a little skittish by an old black bear who had snarled at her.

  ‘Edward the Second,’ Henslowe beamed. ‘Marlowe’s best yet.’

  ‘But why haven’t I seen it?’ Tilney asked.

  ‘Er … because you haven’t been to the Rose recently?’ Henslowe suggested. He had no other ideas.

  ‘Don’t play silly buggers with me, Henslowe. What I mean is, why hasn’t it been lodged in my office? As you know full well, I am the official censor in these matters. I am the arbiter. I must know the score from the prologue to epilogue, from soliloquy to the smallest stage direction.’

  ‘Indeed, I do realize that,’ Henslowe nodded, quietly draping a curtain over piles of obscene takings from the previous night, ‘and lucky we are indeed to have you.’

  Tilney’s scowl could have turned milk. ‘I want a copy and I want it now.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Henslowe dithered around his little sanctum high in the eaves, shuffling papers, moving playbills, ‘Umm … I don’t seem to have a spare copy,’ he grimaced. ‘They’re all out with the players.’

  ‘Surely, they know their … lines by now.’ Tilney hated using what he considered stage jargon. The next thing would be that someone, God forbid, would take him for an actor.

  ‘That would be wonderful, Sir Edmund,’ Henslowe said, casting his eyes heavenward as though to enjoin the Almighty to help him, ‘but you know these actors, they’d forget where they left their arses if they weren’t sitting on them.’

  The Puritan sucked in his breath.

  ‘Begging your pardon, of course.’

  Tilney looked the impresario up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said, in the tones of a coffin closing, ‘delightfully colourful.’ And he swept out of the room, setting up an eddy of paperwork which would take hours to settle.

  Philip Henslowe knew Edmund Tilney. The pair had been sparring over plays for years and the owner of the Rose knew that the royal censor wasn’t going to let things go just like that. He watched the little man bustle his way out onto the wooden O, elbowing Kemp out of the way. The clown followed him for a few paces, taking off the man’s walk perfectly, then he swept back to what he was doing just as Tilney turned. The target of the Master of the Revels was Tom Sledd, who was standing centre stage with a copy of the play in his hand as though he knew Tilney had come calling for it. As Henslowe watched from his cobwebbed eyrie, Tilney snatched the papers and darted back across the stage.

  Sledd called out something, but Henslowe didn’t catch it. Will Kemp toyed with tripping the old curmudgeon up but suddenly remembered that he was Piers Gaveston and thought better of it. Henslowe hurled himself along the perilous gods under the eaves and roared down at Sledd, ‘That’s coming out of your wages, sonny!’

  ‘I really would have to see it first, my Lord.’ Edmund Tilney was at Whitehall, face to face with the Lord Treasurer himself.

  ‘I have seen it, Tilney,’ Burghley shouted at him, ‘and, trust me, it doesn’t make pretty viewing.’

  ‘What would you like me to do, my Lord?’ Edmund Tilney might have been Master of the Revels but he was outclassed by Burghley.

  ‘Close it down, man. Threaten Henslowe with closure of the Rose if he sticks his neck out.’

  ‘And Marlowe?’

  Burghley looked at the man from under his eyebrows. ‘Leave Ma
rlowe to me,’ he said.

  Edmund Tilney had faced unruly mobs before. Every time he closed the theatres, whether because of plague or Puritan objection, some theatre-loving lout would threaten to cave in his face.

  But what dismayed Tilney that Wednesday was the sheer size of the crowd. They’d brought their loaves and their cheese, their wine and their ale. The gentry’s carriages were lined up along Bankside and boats were bringing yet more playgoers from up-river, where the cognoscenti of Chelsea and Battersea lived. Edward the Second was on everybody’s lips. There was an electric expectancy in the air.

  Up in his eyrie, Philip Henslowe had just heard the bad news. As of now, there was to be no play.

  ‘You cannot be serious,’ the impresario said when he could find words at all. There was a humming in his head that tended to get in the way of speech; he just couldn’t be hearing this.

  ‘Deadly, Henslowe,’ Tilney wasn’t going to be rattled by a theatre owner. ‘Deadly.’

  Henslowe stood up, looming over Tilney as all but Robert Cecil did. ‘Well,’ he said, levelly, ‘you’ll have to tell ’em.’ He folded his arms. ‘Because I won’t. And,’ he leaned forward so that their noses almost touched, ‘for those who’ve already paid, no refunds.’ And he left the room.

  After the words, ‘There’ll be no play. It’s censored,’ nobody heard Edmund Tilney say a word. All his Puritan ranting about filth and sodomy and unnatural vice was drowned by a wall of noise.

  It was difficult, later, to decide exactly who started it, but Tilney’s six men, armed as they were, were quickly overwhelmed. The Master of the Revels himself was hoisted shoulder high, his cap and Colleyweston cloak ripped away and his venetians pulled off. Nor could anyone say later exactly where the apprentices came from, but there they were in numbers, crop-headed and wooden-shoed, laying about them with their clubs.

  Tilney crawled out from the scrimmage, battered and bleeding, to be helped away by a couple of Winchester Geese who felt sorry for him. He managed to get himself across the river by nightfall and all that time, the mob had been rampaging up and down Bankside, overturning carriages, stealing horses, fighting running duels with any number of gentlemen who had never backed down from a fight in their lives.

  The vicar of St Mary Overy popped out briefly to remind anybody in earshot over the clash of steel, that duelling was illegal in this country and nobody’s sword blade should be longer than three feet. He was last seen riding backwards on a donkey, heading east towards Pickleherring Stairs.

  Philip Henslowe didn’t want the fury of the mob twisting back on him, so he locked the Rose and placed every man he had on duty to protect it. Tom Sledd was there, shoulder to elbow with Amyntas Finch and any number of stage hands, musicians and walking gentlemen. Two who were unaccountably missing were Skeres and Frizer; they were to be found with the mob, looting and smashing glass with the worst of them.

  By the time darkness descended, Southwark looked like a battlefield, fires blazing here and there where lanterns had been overturned and candles dropped. Tilney had found a couple of magistrates and the Mayor of London himself had authorized the turning out of the Trained Bands. They wheeled a cannon into position on the southern end of London bridge where the heads of traitors looked wistfully down at them. The flames of the brands the halberdiers carried flickered on their breastplates and helmets and someone rode to Placentia to tell the Queen and to reinforce the ring of steel around her.

  Since no one assumed responsibility for restoring order and the inns of Southwark were almost out of ale by this time, it fell to Edmund Tilney to lead the Bands, bustling out across the bridge, one purple eye closed and his head swathed in bandages.

  ‘Where’s our play?’ shouted somebody in the crowd who recognized him.

  ‘It’s not your play, pizzle,’ Tilney talked tall with two hundred pikemen at his back. ‘It is rightly the property of Her Majesty and she has decided …’

  ‘You mean you’ve decided,’ someone shouted back. That someone was Philip Henslowe, lurking a few rows back now that he was relatively sure that the Rose was safe.

  ‘Take that man’s name!’ Tilney squawked, unable to make out in the darkness who it was. Nobody moved.

  ‘Put the play on!’ somebody else shouted.

  ‘We have a right,’ said a cultured voice, clearly a scholar of one of the Inns of Court, ‘to watch allegories which throw up examples of the corruption of the present regime.’

  ‘Yeah!’ somebody backed him. ‘What he said.’

  Tilney cleared his throat and held up a hand. ‘You will disperse,’ he shrilled. ‘In two minutes, this culverin beside me,’ he walked a few steps away from the gun, ‘will fire into the crowd. If you have not dispersed …’ but he never finished the sentence. There were men in the crowd who knew exactly how long it took to load and fire a culverin. There were men in the crowd who happened to know that the Trained Bands would not level their pikes at their own people. It was all about timing and the mob launched itself, the many-headed monster streaming forward over the bridge. The culverin disappeared in the swarming mass of bodies, about as useful without powder and ball as a dead tree. The gunner himself was swept off his feet, his ramrod snatched by an apprentice as a trophy.

  Like a persistent army of ants, the crowd marched across the bridge, pushing the outnumbered Trained Bands backwards, bouncing cudgels off their helmets and batting aside their pikes. There wasn’t room between the shops and houses for the Bands to manoeuvre and it was only the arrival of more cannon and cavalry at the northern end of the bridge that brought the mob’s attack to a standstill.

  ‘You will disperse!’ It was the Mayor himself, sitting stiff-legged on a grey horse at the head of yet more Trained Bands.

  ‘When will we see Edward the Second?’ the Inns of Court voice called.

  ‘Tilney?’ The Mayor looked down at the battered wreck that was the Master of the Revels.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he mumbled through his mouthful of loose teeth. ‘No. We’ll need at least a day to clear up after this lot. Two days from now.’

  ‘Friday,’ called the Mayor, ‘at the usual time, two of the clock. You have my word.’

  ‘He gave his word?’ Robert Cecil couldn’t believe the tale that Edmund Tilney was telling him.

  ‘He did.’ Tilney had been re-bandaged, but he hadn’t slept and his own mother, assuming he’d ever had one, wouldn’t recognize him. ‘Rather forward, I thought.’

  ‘So do I,’ Cecil frowned. For hours now he’d been receiving snippets of news here at Whitehall and none of it was good. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Eventually the seditious bastards went home,’ Tilney told him, ‘chanting “Marlowe! Marlowe!”’

  ‘Not only the Muse’s darling, then?’ Cecil murmured.

  ‘The point is, Robert, we’ll have to put the damned play back on. I must say, I was disappointed by the Trained Bands. They’re supposed to be … well … trained.’

  ‘Citizen soldiery,’ Cecil mused. ‘Not, I can’t help thinking, the best way forward.’

  ‘Look,’ Tilney whined, ‘I’m Master of the Revels, for God’s sake. Culture. Art. Poetry. All that stuff. What I am not is a glorified Watchman, still less a commander of the militia. As it is, I’ve lost two teeth.’

  Cecil did his best to look sympathetic, but it didn’t come easily to him. ‘We’ll keep an eye on Master Marlowe,’ he said. ‘Go home and lie down. You’ve done enough for one day.’

  ‘And night,’ Tilney reminded him and hobbled to the door. Once he’d staggered off along the passageway, Cecil clicked his fingers at a lackey waiting in his outer chamber.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Find me Nicholas … No, not that. Find me Robert Poley,’ Cecil said. ‘Tell him I have a little job for him.’

  THIRTEEN

  ‘So, what’s your take on all this be nice to foreigners, Tom?’ Robert Poley was topping up Tom Kyd’s cup.

  ‘Be nice to foreigners?’ Kyd repeated, trying to f
ocus. ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well, you can’t have missed them, surely? Various placards in and around the City extolling our European neighbours – and just as many denouncing them. I just wondered where you stood.’

  Kyd shrugged. ‘Hadn’t really thought about it,’ he said, missing the cup’s rim entirely the first time.

  ‘Really?’ Poley sat upright in the snug at the Angel, looking Kyd squarely in the face. ‘What with the Spanish Tragedy and all, I’d have thought you’d have been sympathetic – to the foreigners, I mean.’

  ‘Well, I …’

  ‘I must say, some of the phrases I’ve read recently – on shop fronts and people’s walls at that – have shocked me to the core.’

  ‘Like what?’ Kyd was having to choose his consonants carefully now.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know … er … “beastly brutes the Belgians” … um … “fraudulent father Frenchmen”, “faint-hearted Flemings”. Outrageous!’

  ‘Very well.’ Kyd was largely unmoved. ‘Live and let live, I say. Oh, I know the Spaniards want to invade us and everything, but you’ve got to allow even a Spaniard some leeway.’

  ‘Indubitably,’ Poley smiled, freshening Kyd’s drink but not his own. ‘Live and let live indeed. Of course, you know who’s behind all this, don’t you? The anti-foreign comments?’

  ‘No.’ Kyd hoped that he was shaking his head.

  ‘Marlowe,’ Poley said.

  Kyd visibly rocked in his chair. ‘No!’

  ‘As I live and breathe,’ Poley said, sipping his wine.

  ‘Marlowe?’ Kyd snarled. ‘That bastard!’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t take it personally, Tom. That’s why he dumped the Spanish Tragedy and put that historical tripe of his on in its place. Nothing wrong with the Tragedy, nothing at all. Except that it’s Spanish. And Portuguese, of course. And Kit Marlowe can’t abide foreigners.’

  ‘Really? I never knew. He might have said.’

  ‘That’s well known,’ Poley nodded. ‘Ever since his Canterbury days. Fell foul, or so they say, of the Flemish weavers there. I mean, we all believe in England, but he takes things too far.’