Crimson Rose Read online

  ‘Now, Master Marlowe, I will turn these cards over, face down, and you must select the one you think is the Queen.’

  ‘Ah,’ Marlowe said as realization dawned. ‘Find the lady. Yes, I see.’

  The cards flipped over in hands that flew and dazzled. Frizer slid them over the polished wood surface. ‘So, care to try your luck, Master Marlowe?’

  Marlowe hesitated. He sucked in his breath, his fingers hovering over first one, then another card. He gritted his teeth, staring at the cards as Frizer and Skeres grinned at him, like indulgent parents watching their child take his first step. ‘That one!’ Marlowe tapped a card and Frizer flipped it over. The Queen smiled up at them.

  ‘Well done!’ Skeres slapped Marlowe on the shoulder. ‘He’s a natural, Ing.’

  ‘He is indeed, Nick. Would you care to try again, Master Marlowe? Lady Luck seems to be smiling on you. Shall we have a small wager, just to make it interesting?’ A small silver coin had appeared in Frizer’s fingers and it hovered invitingly over the cards.

  Marlowe scratched his chin and looked doubtfully at Frizer and then turned his head to look up into Skeres’ face. ‘Well, I don’t know …’ he said. ‘I feel a little uncomfortable …’

  Skeres gave him a friendly slap on the back. ‘Don’t worry yourself,’ he said. ‘Everyone here is fl … playing in some way or another. You’d only be joining in.’

  Marlowe looked dubious still. ‘I thought all of your money had been stolen.’

  Frizer flicked Skeres a look, which Marlowe missed as he was looking down at the cards. ‘I kept some for emergencies,’ he said, quickly. ‘I just have three coins, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t think you should wager them, then,’ said Marlowe. ‘What if I win again?’

  Frizer smiled a mirthless grin. This was harder work than he had done in weeks. ‘Well.’ He chuckled. ‘I’ll have to take that risk. Now …?’ He raised an eyebrow and held the coin out over the cards.

  ‘Oh.’ Marlowe looked again from face to face and seemed to come to a decision. ‘Why not? As you say, everyone seems to be doing the same. A thunderbolt can only hit one man at a time, after all.’

  Frizer grinned using only his teeth and set down the coin, flipping over the cards and spinning them through their moves. Then he lifted his hands and said, ‘Master Marlowe. Find the lady.’

  Marlowe looked along the three cards and dithered with his silver coin, which had appeared in his fingers as miraculously as Frizer’s had. ‘Hmm. You move them very quickly, Master Frizer. I am not at all sure …’

  Behind his back, Skeres hugged himself with joy. The cards had moved at a snail’s pace. His old gammer, dead these last ten years, could spot the lady from her grave in St Olaf’s ground.

  Still the coin hovered, then with a little shrug Marlowe plonked it down, right on the Queen. Frizer flicked over the cards and pushed the two coins across to Marlowe.

  ‘Well done, Master Marlowe. Shall we try again?’

  ‘I hesitate to take your money, Master Frizer, but why not? Shall we use both coins this time? Is that kind of … wager, is it? Is wager the word I am looking for? Yes, is that kind of wager allowed?’

  Frizer laughed merrily. ‘Indeed it is, Master Marlowe,’ he said.

  ‘Well, two coins it is, then,’ Marlowe said. ‘Move the cards, Master Frizer. See if I can find the lady again.’ He turned to Skeres with a smile. ‘I like this game, Master Skeres. Much better than the games at Corpus Christi, such as chess, that kind of thing. Too hard for me. This is much more my style.’

  Frizer’s fingers flew. His two coins went down, followed without hesitation by Marlowe’s. He flipped over the card and almost swallowed his own tongue. Despite his best efforts, the university idiot had found the By Our Lady. Skeres was frozen, as though the basilisk had got him after all.

  ‘Look at that!’ Marlowe said, gathering up the coins. ‘Lady Luck is certainly on my side.’

  ‘Ready for another go, Master Marlowe?’ Frizer’s indulgent smile had turned to a rictus grin.

  Marlowe leaned back from the table, slipping the coins into his purse, which the two men noticed only now was secreted carefully under his doublet, to keep it safe from people like them. ‘I don’t think so, gentlemen.’ He smiled. ‘Now I come to think of it, it is rather too simple a game for me. And, listen …’

  Above the babble in the aisles a clanging tried to make itself heard. ‘There’s the sacring bell. I must to my devotions.’

  ‘Your devotions?’ Skeres scowled, staring the man in the face.

  ‘Why, yes. It is Thursday, isn’t it? I always pray in St Paul’s on Thursdays.’

  ‘But …’ Frizer couldn’t find the words.

  ‘But thank you.’ Marlowe clapped the man’s arm. ‘It’s been an education.’ And he was gone, waiting until he was lost in the crowd before slipping out of a side door, away from the little trickle of devout souls on their way to the services.

  ‘Gull, indeed!’ Skeres rounded on his associate.

  ‘It was your idea,’ Frizer snapped. ‘I had my doubts.’

  ‘I was going for the Ratsey Lay. You had to find the lady.’

  And despite the ringing of the sacring bell, the trading went on and Ingram Frizer and Nicholas Skeres spent the next few minutes wrestling each other ineffectually in the Mediterranean Aisle of the church where they’d buried Philip Sidney a few short weeks before.

  Philip Henslowe was shouting. He spent a lot of his time shouting and some of it got heard but usually only as background noise. Thomas Sledd the stage manager and Ned Alleyn, actor, ladies’ man and thoroughgoing Narcissus were talking in normal voices to each other and taking not a whit of notice. Henslowe was yelling at them, gesticulating wildly and eventually Sledd took pity on him.

  ‘Master Henslowe,’ he said, marking his place on the page he and the actor had been discussing. ‘In what way can I be of assistance?’

  ‘You could try listening to me, for a start,’ Henslowe said, truculently but at a more normal level.

  ‘How could we not listen to you?’ Alleyn yawned, turning from the manuscript and going in search of a reflective surface. ‘You make my bones jump in my body, with your incessant shouting. My emotions are in tatters. Tatters, I tell you.’

  Henslowe looked at Sledd. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Tom, explain to me what he just said. It sounded like English, but I am not totally sure.’

  ‘Master Alleyn is in a state of excitement, Master Henslowe,’ Sledd said. ‘His nerves are, apparently, standing out like the strings of a dulcimer, and your voice is as the hammer with which a maiden plays those strings.’

  Henslowe raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

  Sledd turned his back on Alleyn very ostentatiously and mouthed, ‘Woman trouble’ without making a sound.

  Henslowe still looked perplexed. Not bothering to lower his voice at all, let alone mouth silently, he said, ‘If woman trouble caused him this kind of grief the man would never be upright. What’s the matter with the buffoon?’

  Alleyn turned tortured eyes on the theatre owner. ‘Master Henslowe, Philip, I am in agonies. I met a maiden …’

  ‘Temporarily,’ Sledd interjected and Henslowe grinned.

  Alleyn ignored them. ‘A maiden, so fair as to surpass all the suns in the firmament.’

  ‘And?’ Henslowe asked. He knew they would get nowhere until Alleyn had given them a blow-by-blow account of his conquest.

  ‘And she—’

  A door slammed below at the bottom of the stairs and a voice called, ‘Hello above. Is anyone in?’

  ‘Kit!’ Sledd ran to the head of the stairs. ‘Up here, Kit,’ he called, then muttered to himself, ‘at last some sanity.’

  Kit Marlowe usually kept away from theatres when a play of his was toward. It had nothing to do with superstition; it had to do with the division of labour. He was a poet and a playwright; his tools the quill, ink, parchment and a mind that compassed worlds away from this one. Ned Alleyn was an
actor. With a snap of his fingers he had the pampered jades of Asia kneeling gibbering before him because he was Tamburlaine, the scourge of God. He could make an audience forget that the pampered jades bending the knee on stage were all bit players, sweepings of the taverns and spotty boys in sundry stages of puberty; in Ned Alleyn’s hands, all things were possible, all tall tales real. Thomas Sledd was a stage manager. A blasted heath? A lovers’ bower? A battlefield of the maimed and dying? How many would you like? Sledd was your man. Bearing in mind that he had cut his teeth – almost literally – on the wagons and painted canvas of a travelling player-king’s outfit, living off their wits and relying on the flickering and smoky light of torches to hide a multitude of sins, Sledd had grown up fast and now his marvellous mechanical inventions could hold their own with the best in London.

  And Philip Henslowe … Well, what did Henslowe do, exactly? To the outside world, he was bluff and bluster, a manager of men, maestro of music, maker of the Muse. But behind that he was a prey to nervous disorders, a man who had to make the sums add up, a man who had to tease the fickle multitude to turn up to see a show. He had to pass bribes upward to the Master of the Revels to allow a play to be performed at all; sideways to the other theatre owners all too anxious to pinch his people and his plays; downwards to the grooms and sweet-meat sellers and those hopeless misfits who played fife and tabor while the crowds took their places. He lived his days in the magic of the theatre, with music, noise, wonderful words spinning in the air above his head. He spent his nights staring with hot and sleepless eyes into the dark, where columns of numbers danced and spun and never came to the same sum twice.

  ‘How goes it, Master Henslowe?’ Marlowe asked, smiling as he sauntered into the room. He knew Alleyn and Thomas were about their business; it was Henslowe he worried about.

  ‘Oh, very well, Kit, very well.’ Henslowe’s grin could be seen on any plague victim from here to the Wash. ‘Assuming that Thomas here can do the execution bit with just a threat of realism.’ He dropped his voice. ‘And that Alleyn can get his lines right in the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I heard that!’ Alleyn bellowed. He was wearing a huge plumed helmet with the beavor removed so that his vowels and consonants could soar to the heavens. ‘Have I not played Tamburlaine to gilded reviews and brought tears to the eyes of grown men? Do women not swoon from my Part One? Do small children not run from me? Have a little faith.’ He looked round at them, an eyebrow raised, his arm extended. Then, suddenly, his mood changed. ‘Claret, Kit?’ Alleyn dropped his declamatory stance and sat back down in an elegant pose on the wide windowsill. He reached across to the trestle covered with plans, pieces of fabric and crumbled sticks of charcoal and poured two goblets of ruby liquid. Marlowe sat alongside him, looking out into the street from their eyrie in the roof of the theatre, on edge, always ready to spring. Ned Alleyn wasn’t the sort of man you could always drink with. He had stolen a play of Marlowe’s once, had enjoyed more men’s wives than Tamburlaine had conquered countries, and knew the inside of the Compter and Newgate like the back of his own hand. But the crowds loved him and tomorrow afternoon, by the grace of Kit Marlowe, Sir Edmund Tilney, Philip Henslowe, Thomas Sledd, Dick and Harry, he would be Tamburlaine, the Scythian shepherd, once again in Part Two, adding to his undying fame and making Kit Marlowe’s even more secure.

  ‘I’m in love, Kit,’ the actor said, face straight, eyebrows knotted, tears in his eyes.

  ‘What, again?’ Henslowe said as he went to the head of the stairs, on his way down to supervise the arrival of some timber.

  Thomas Sledd was with him. Timber was his concern, flats, for the making of. He wasn’t quite sure what the gates of Babylon looked like, but he wasn’t telling Henslowe that. Signing for the timber was Henslowe’s concern, however, and he was there, fussing around the builders’ merchants, scratching away with quill on parchment as the costs ran ever higher.

  ‘She’s a vision, Kit,’ Alleyn said, gazing into the middle distance before gulping his wine.

  ‘Could her face have launched a thousand ships, Ned?’ Marlowe asked.

  ‘Hmm?’ The actor got up and wandered across the room, striking a romantic pose, head back and leg bent, against the door jamb.

  ‘Nothing.’ The playwright smiled. ‘How’s Tamburlaine coming along?’

  ‘Who? Oh, well, Kit, well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Villain, I say!’ he growled in a rumbling snarl which carried throughout the theatre and a builders’ merchant down below nearly died of fright. ‘“Should I but touch the rusty gates of Hell, the triple-headed Cerberus would howl and make black Jove to crouch and kneel to me” … Pretty good, eh?’ Alleyn was himself again.

  ‘Masterly!’ Marlowe laughed and took a swig of his claret.

  ‘No, this girl, Kit …’

  ‘Now, Ned,’ the playwright wagged a playful finger at him, ‘your heart belongs to Zenocrate, remember.’

  Alleyn’s face dropped and he hauled off his helmet, shaking his hair free. ‘Which would be sheer delight,’ he said, ‘until you remember that Zenocrate is actually a cloth-footed fifteen-year-old baker’s roundsman with shoulders like cypress chests and pustules like the Pestilence.’

  ‘Ah.’ Marlowe nodded. ‘An actor’s lot, Ned, an actor’s lot.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t casting aspersions on the honourable art of boy players, Master Alleyn.’ Thomas came through the door, panting a little from the stairs, with his arms full of timbers to carve them into Babylon, or at least his approximation of it. ‘I was one myself once.’ He looked around him, distracted. ‘Has anyone seen my chisel?’ he asked the two men.

  Marlowe shrugged. ‘Sorry, Thomas. I am happy to say I wouldn’t know a chisel if it bit me on the leg, but I think I have the general gist and there are no tools up here that I can see. Why have you hauled all that timber up here anyway?’

  ‘Master Henslowe is arguing about money down on the stage and I didn’t think he would want me to overhear.’

  ‘You are too sensitive for this job, Tom,’ Marlowe said. ‘We’ll come down in a minute and drown him out with a rehearsal or two. How would that be?’

  ‘Thank you, Kit.’ Thomas Sledd shouldered his timber again and began his slow and careful descent back on to the stage.

  Marlowe drained his cup and made to follow him, but Alleyn stopped him, pulling at his sleeve.

  ‘I knew Thomas when he was with Ned Sledd’s company, but I never saw him perform, only rehearse. Was he any good?’

  ‘His performance in Cambridge when I saw him a year or so ago was as good as you would expect. Sledd’s company was going up in the world when I saw it next, but Tom’s voice had gone before I had a chance to see him.’

  Alleyn preened. ‘Well, I like to think that I could have raised the tone of the company, given time,’ he said. ‘Sadly, business called me away before …’

  ‘Yes,’ Marlowe said drily. ‘Your business was stealing my Dido and trying to pass it off as your own, as I recall.’

  Alleyn laughed, an actor’s laugh, head thrown back and hands on hips. He said, as he did whenever he had to make it clear to the furthermost groundling that he was amused. ‘Ha. Ha. Ha.’ Then he straightened up with no preamble. ‘Good days, Kit. Good days. But seriously, I never realized that Thomas was Ned Sledd’s son.’

  Marlowe turned his back on the stair’s head and lowered his voice. ‘He isn’t,’ he said. ‘But he used to say that old Ned was the only father he knew. His mother was, I believe, a Winchester goose and his father –’ he looked at Alleyn without a glimmer of a smile this time – ‘some feckless actor, I expect, born to the wild road and the taverns. Ned brought up young Thomas when his mother dumped him on the company, made him the man he is today. Only natural he should take his name.’ He turned to go down to the stage. ‘Come on, Master Alleyn. We must help Master Sledd out of his predicament.’

  Alleyn frowned, staring hard at the poet. ‘How old are you, Marlowe?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty
-three,’ he told him.

  ‘Hmm. Twenty-three going on sixty,’ Alleyn grunted. ‘Well, then, Methuselah, give me your words of wisdom on my predicament.’

  ‘If it’s Cupid’s measles, I understand Bucklersbury is the street you need. There are more apothecaries there than …’

  ‘It’s not the pox, Christopher.’ Alleyn pouted. ‘Thank you for caring. No, this woman is untouchable – a goddess.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No,’ Alleyn enthused now, pacing the floor as Marlowe waited patiently by the door. ‘No, that’s the very Devil of it.’ He unbuckled his epaulettes and gratefully slipped out of the breast and backplates of his armour. ‘No, she’s available. But I can’t touch her.’ He was standing next to Marlowe now and gripped his arm, shaking him gently to emphasize his words.

  Marlowe frowned. He tapped Alleyn’s codpiece with his knuckles. ‘Something amiss?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Alleyn sprang away, striking a manly pose, the great lover once again, if not yet the scourge of God. ‘No.’ His magnificent voice fell to a whisper. ‘It’s Shakespeare.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Kit. I’m not making much sense, am I? You know Will Shakespeare’s playing Theridamas, King of Argier?’

  ‘Yes, I know who Theridamas is; I wrote the bloody play, remember? No, I didn’t know Shakespeare was playing him. It was what’s his name, that youngish chap with the funny walk, when I heard last.’

  ‘I forgot you hadn’t heard. Well, the funny walk turned out to be rather serious. Some kind of trouble …’ Alleyn waved a hand vaguely behind him. ‘We had to recast.’

  ‘I see. So, Shakespeare is playing Theridamas …’

  ‘Yes. Well, he’s taken a room in Blackfriars. Water Lane.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘His landlady is Eleanor Merchant.’

  Marlowe waited. Surely, that couldn’t be it.

  ‘She has a sister.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You know my reputation, Kit. If all the whores Ned Alleyn has had, all the morts and trulls …’