P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

Barnabus bustled straight in with bags over his shoulder, looked around and nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said approvingly. ‘This one of your father’s investments?’

‘Yes, I think so. At least we don’t have to pay rent.’ Carey was busy with a tinderbox and a candle he had taken out of the pocket in his sleeve. It was a wax candle, Dodd noticed, outrageously extravagant. He looked longingly at the bed where Barnabus had put the bags, though he had no expectation at all that Carey would let him rest.

He was right, though at least Simon unpacked one of his bundles and produced clean pewter plates and a large loaf of bread, fresh butter wrapped in waxed paper and some cheese. Barnabus put a large leather jack full of encouraging sloshing sounds on the table and they sat down to breakfast. Dodd was still feeling too queasy with the morning to eat much, though Carey had an excellent appetite. That worried Dodd who had learned that the Courtier tended to go off his fodder when he was bored and to eat heartily when he was anticipating excitement.

‘Now then,’ said Carey washing down a third hunk of bread and cheese with beer. ‘Edmund.’

‘Ay, sir,’ said Dodd mournfully. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Edmund is my elder brother by two years, and between you and me he’s a complete pillock. He was serving in the Netherlands for a while and he did quite well after Roland Yorke sold Deventer to the Spanish; he led the loyal soldiers out of the place and got them home across enemy territory, but he took it hard since Yorke was a friend of his and he’s been pretty much drunk ever since.’

Dodd munched slowly on his cheese and forbore to comment. Carey poured himself some more beer.

‘Obviously he’s the real reason why Father was so anxious for us to come to London-after all, he could have heard our tale at Oxford where he’d be near the Queen and that would have been useful because I could have asked Her Majesty what’s happened to the five hundred pounds she’s supposed to pay me.’

‘And she wouldn’t ’ave told you, would she, sir?’

‘No, Barnabus, she wouldn’t, but she would at least have been reminded of it. Now, I didn’t see Edmund when I left for Carlisle in June, but as far as I knew he was planning to go back to the Netherlands again, try and loot some more cash and pay off the moneylenders. His wife had a bit of land when she married him, but of course that’s all mortgaged now and the dowry’s long spent. Then, according to my father, some time in early August he disappeared. Father didn’t worry at first, he thought perhaps Edmund might be doing a job for Mr Vice Chamberlain Heneage, though Mr Vice denied it of course. But Edmund still hasn’t turned up, Heneage is adamant that he doesn’t know where he is, and furthermore my father has heard that Heneage is looking for him as well, which means he may have done something to annoy Mr Vice and that is very unwise.’

‘Sir,’ said Dodd with an effort. ‘What sort of thing would your brother do for the Vice Chamberlain?’

‘Ah. Yes. Well, as I told you, Mr Vice is currently Her Majesty’s spymaster. So it was probably something shady and difficult, not to say treasonous if viewed in the wrong light.’

‘Och. But I thocht your family didnae take to Heneage?’

‘Edmund is a bloody idiot. He’ll do almost anything for money. Walsingham would never have let him near intelligence work, so Heneage must have been desperate. He has some Catholic contacts through his friend Yorke, of course, but still…God knows what he was up to. My guess is he made a complete balls up of it, whatever it was, and has gone into hiding, but my father’s worried and so we’ve got to find him. Which is a blasted nuisance.’

Dodd thought about London and the huge number of people in it. How could you find one man amongst all that lot, especially if he didn’t want to be found? It was impossible. Dolefully he asked, ‘But where will we start, sir?’

‘Well, my father was paying a poet to make some enquiries, but he hasn’t heard from that man either.’

‘Will, d’ye mean?’

‘Who?’

‘The little bald-headed man that was…er…Mistress Bassano’s servant. He…er…he helped me find ma way back to Somerset House yesterday and had me carry some rhymes to Mistress Bassano, the ones that annoyed her so badly, damn him.’

Carey wrinkled his brows in puzzlement for a moment and then laughed. ‘Oh, him. Skinny, nervous, Wiltshire accent?’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘No.’ Carey laughed at the thought. ‘Not that little mouse of a man. Anyway, he’s a player not a poet. Didn’t do badly with his first try at play-making though-I saw his Henry VI at the Theatre in Shoreditch; can’t remember which number-there were three of them…’

‘What, three Henries?’

‘ Henry VI , part 1, part 2 and part 3. Same sort of style as Tamburlain .’

‘Eh, sir?’

‘You got to ’ave heard of Tamburlain ,’ put in Barnabus, his face glowing. ‘Now that’s proper play. “ Holla, you pampered jades of… ” of somewhere, can’t remember where. Foreign.’

‘Pampered jades of Israel? India?’ Carey was trying to remember too, ‘It’s a wonderful play, plenty of battles…’

‘And the Persian king pulling a chariot,’ said Barnabus reminiscently. ‘You remember, they had him done up like the King of Spain. I did laugh.’

‘Anyway, if Shakespeare can pull off anything half as good as Marlowe, he’ll be doing well,’ said Carey judiciously. ‘I don’t think he will, though; he hasn’t got the boldness.’

‘So he’s not the man your father had looking for your brother,’ Dodd prompted, tired of all this discussion of plays he had neither seen nor wanted to.

‘No, no,’ Carey laughed again at the idea. ‘He’s been hanging around my father’s household for months-before I left he even had me talk Berwick for some character he was thinking about. He wants a patron like any other would-be poet and thinks my father might be mad enough, but also he’s desperately in love with Mistress Bassano.’

‘She doesn’t like him, though?’

‘Of course not. She’s not stupid and anyway, he’s got no money and isn’t likely to get any as a common player. Mistress Bassano has a very clear head.’

‘Not that clear, sir,’ said Barnabus slyly. ‘I thought she had a fancy to you, didn’t she?’

Carey’s eyes chilled suddenly to ice. ‘No, she doesn’t.’

Thinking of the scene in the parlour on the day they arrived at Somerset House, Dodd regarded Carey with a grave lack of expression.

Carey did his family’s explosive throat-clearing and went back to the real topic of conversation.

‘My father hired Robert Greene to find Edmund, seeing as Greene’s a well-known poet and he also knows his way around London’s stews and slums and he has family contacts with the King of London. Greene claimed to be hot on the trail, got five pounds off my father and since then Father’s heard nothing, so the first thing we’ll do is find Robert Greene and ask him what he’s up to.’

Dodd sighed. ‘Find another man first, sir.’

‘This one’s easier than my brother. I know where he lives and more importantly, I know where he drinks. The second line of enquiry is to find out who murdered Michael to stop him talking to me and why.’

All four of them plunged into the roaring smelly chaos of London’s back streets, Carey very cautiously avoiding the Strand and the Thames where the bailiffs still waited, Dodd with his hand twitching to his swordhilt every five minutes and thinking sadly of the civilised joys of Carlisle.

They first of all went to Edmund Carey’s house, another one of his father’s property speculations in the old Blackfriars monastery. Carey explained this system for making gold breed gold. First you found a place that was cheaper and less classy than it should be considering its location. Then using lawyers and intermediaries you quietly bought up the freeholds of all the houses in it, paying as little as you could. Doing only the most basic maintenance work you waited until you owned the whole place, then you used your court contacts to sort out any legal problems, evicted any disreputable tenants, replaced roofs, redug jakes and generally revamped the area, and then you sold off the freeholds again for quintuple what you paid for them.