P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

‘It could be a flux, but such violence…I would suspect a poison.’

‘What kind of poison?’

Cheke shrugged.

‘You see!’ roared Greene. ‘I’m dying, I told you I was, the apothecary thinks so too.’

‘Where is Edmund?’ demanded Carey as soon as he caught a flicker of Greene’s fleeting clarity. ‘My father gave you five pounds to find him. Have you found him?’

‘Repent or be damned, oh ye atheists of London!’ bellowed Greene, picking up his pen and dipping. ‘Find him yourself, I’m busy.’

‘For God’s sake, man…’ said Carey, holding his shoulders. ‘Tell me what you discovered about Edmund.’

Greene spat full in his face. ‘I’ve got to finish,’ he panted, shaking his head and swallowing hard. Back he went to his desperate scribbling, for all the world as if enough letters on a page could save him from hell.

Carey let go of him and wiped himself off distastefully with a handkerchief.

The apothecary was fishing in his bag, brought out a leather bottle. ‘I have the calming draught here,’ he said. ‘If he could but take it and keep it down. Goodwife Ball,’ he shouted down the stairs, ‘will you come up?’

Greene’s woman came up again, wiping her hands nervously. She took the little cup of medicine and gently held it to Greene’s grey lips. He swallowed, gagged, pushed her away and grabbed his flask from under the pillow to wash it down.

The apothecary put his bottle away, buckled his bag and shrugged the strap over his shoulder. ‘I will go to my shop to fetch laudanum since I have none left, and you should fetch a priest, Goodwife,’ he said as he left. ‘Pray God that that will help the poor gentleman.’

For a while it seemed as if it did. Greene wrote faster and faster, shaking his head as sweat dripped down his face and off his nose, and then at last he seemed to finish for he signed the paper with a flourish, put the last piece on the pile beside him, stoppered his inkpot, wiped his pen on the sheets.

‘Now,’ said Carey firmly, turning away from the window where he had been getting a breath of fresh air. ‘Will you please tell me what you found out about my brother?’

Greene had collapsed back on the pillows and was coughing. He seemed too exhausted even to talk. He whispered something indistinct and Carey bent close to make it out.

‘Dying. I heard…Don’t tell Heneage…where…Ohhh. Aaahhh!’

Something terrible was happening inside the poet, as if some kind of animal was trapped in Greene’s bowels and was rending them, trying to escape. His eyes rolled up in his head and he jacknifed in the tangled blankets. Carey strode to the stairs and shouted for the woman again. Dodd turned his head away from the sight. ‘Och, God,’ he said, fighting not to vomit himself.

Even in his agony, Greene turned himself so as not to puke on his swansong and the bright red blood flooded amongst the sheets, pooled in the lumpy mattress, endless amounts of it. Dodd heard Barnabus dry-heaving behind him.

‘Christ,’ croaked Carey. ‘Christ have mercy.’ Then he did a thing which even Dodd found admirable. He picked his way back to the bed and gripped Robert Greene’s shoulder, held onto him while death juddered through him, so he should know he was not alone while his soul battled clear of his flesh.

After several minutes Greene’s eyes were staring and Dodd broke the paralysis that had clutched him, went to the window and opened it as wide as it would go, so Greene’s ghost could fly free. Joan Ball was in the room, pushing past Carey to fling herself across her lover and wail.

Dodd looked down into the street, as full of people and noise as ever, breathed deep of the slightly less pungent air coming through the window. He heard a long shaky breath beside him and knew that Carey was standing there too.

‘Wait…wait,’ said Joan. ‘I’ll get it, darling, wait.’

They turned to see her running down the stairs and Barnabus standing by the twisted body on the bed, gingerly turning it on its back, shutting the eyes and putting pennies on them, to keep the demons out.

Will I die like that? Dodd wondered, alone with strangers, in my own blood. I deserve to, came the dispiriting answer, unless I’m lucky enough to hang or get my head blown off in a fight.

Clogs sounded on the stairs as Joan Ball came running back up, incongruously clutching a couple of sprigs of bayleaves from the kitchen. She twisted them together in a rough ring and then took the nightcap off, pushed them onto Greene’s balding, carroty brow.

‘There,’ she said, kissing the bulbous chilling nose and wiping her hands in her apron again. ‘That’s what you wanted, my love.’

‘What the hell…?’ Dodd asked.

‘It’s a wreath of bays,’ said Carey remotely. ‘What they crowned dead poets with in Ancient Greece.’

There didn’t seem anything to be said to that. In unspoken agreement they went down the stairs and out into the sunny street where nothing was any different. Barnabus emerged from the house too, a few moments later, blinking and looking shifty. Carey glanced at him and seemed to come to some decision.

‘I need a drink,’ he announced which showed he had some sense after all, and he led the way to the nearest house with red lattices.

They sat in a tiny booth and called for beer and aqua vitae. Carey lifted his little horn cup. ‘To Robert Greene, may he rest in peace,’ he said and knocked it back. Dodd and Barnabus followed suit gratefully.

The drink helped settle Dodd’s stomach and scour the stench of sickness out of his nostrils. Before he had quite finished the beer, Carey was up again, heading out the door.

‘Where’s the apothecary’s shop?’

Barnabus led him there, and they met Peter Cheke hurrying into the street holding a bottle. Cheke stopped.

Carey shook his head.

‘Dead?’ asked the apothecary. ‘Poor gentleman.’

‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Carey with strange politeness and Cheke put his bony hands out in front of him.

‘I can hardly charge for such unsuccessful treatment as I attempted,’ he said. ‘Alas, sir, I am not a doctor.’

‘I dinna think a doctor could hae done any mair,’ said Dodd. ‘There was death on him already.’

Cheke smiled wanly. ‘As usual, I shall always be in doubt,’ he said.

‘Can we come in?’ asked Carey and the apothecary ceremoniously ushered them into the pungent dimness of his shop, and then, on Carey’s request for somewhere private, through a door into the kitchen at the back of the building. They sat at a scrubbed wooden table standing on painfully scrubbed flagstones; a womanless kitchen for the lack of strings of onions and flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters. Ranged like soldiers on shelves were a vast variety of cups and dishes and strange tortured things made out of glass. There was a bulbous-shaped oven instead of a fireplace.

‘You said you thought it might be poison,’ Carey asked, suddenly narrowing his eyes and sharpening up. ‘Do you know what kind?’

Cheke shrugged. ‘There are so many, sir, some masquerading under the name of physic. I only gave him a painkilling dose, but who knows…It could have been white arsenic. That attacks the gut although it generally works more slowly. It can make a man who abuses his belly with booze bleed to death.’

‘That’s Greene, all right. Is there any way you can be sure?’

Cheke shook his head. ‘Arsenic has no taste or smell so it is a favourite of those who work with poisons. More than that I cannot say.’

Carey felt in his belt pouch and then produced the little twist of paper in which he had caught the beads of liquid metal in Edmund Carey’s clothes chest. Very carefully he opened it.