Rory Clements - Revenger

The old man stepped aside. “By all means, mistress. All are welcome here at my humble abode.”

She stepped into the dark hallway. She saw the eyes of the man’s mastiff in an inner doorway and sensed malevolence. The dog barked louder. The old man hobbled over to it and beat it about the head with his stick. It whimpered, then lay down and was quiet.

“Did I tell you that my Nicholas is to come into money? A scryer with a glass ball told me my boy would be rich one day, and so he is to be. A very grand gentleman he will be, I am sure.”

An awful thought took shape in Catherine’s mind. If Anne really was with child, could Nicholas Jones be the father? He was thick-set, sly, and shared Topcliffe’s taste for cruelty and the shedding of blood. Could sweet, innocent Anne have allowed herself to be debauched by such a monster?

“I am sure she will have a pretty baby and we shall save it from the clutches of the Rotten Chair. The dirty little drab…”

Catherine exploded in a rage. She pushed the man full in the chest with both her hands. “How dare you talk of her like that? It is you that has brought her to this! You and your foul son and Topcliffe.”

The old man slunk back into the shadows, his stick raised defensively. “She is a grubby little whore, mistress. A grubby little whore. We have all had her, so that none will know who is the father of her bastard.”

“No. It is not true.”

“She’s a bitch in heat, that one, dripping for it. All the time…”

For a moment, Catherine believed she could summon up the strength to kill this man. Take his stick from him and beat him to death with it, just as he beat his dog.

The urge terrified her. She froze where she stood. She had nothing more to say; she must kill him, or go. She looked at him there, cowering in the shadows with his surly mastiff cur at his side, four eyes in the dark like the eyes of Satan’s little demons. Then she turned on her heel and walked away, back out into the street. She closed her eyes a moment and stood there, shaking. Her heart pounded and she felt faint. She had seen into the first circle of hell, here on Holborn Hill, just outside the city walls of London.

T HE GREAT HALL at Essex House blazed with light. Extravagant candelabra, each with dozens of candles, glowed and flickered like a sea of sparkling gemstones. Liveried servants hovered everywhere with goblets of the finest wine and trays of delicate sweetmeats. Music from two dozen viols wafted in the air above the drowning chatter of three hundred revelers.

John Shakespeare stood at the doorway, at the edge of the throng. Even at the royal court, he had not seen such splendor, and his attire-he had taken out his old court doublet of embroidered blue, black, and gold-seemed poor stuff in comparison to the magnificent clothes on display here.

“Well, well, Mr. Shakespeare, you have made it to the court of Queen Lettice, I see.”

He turned to find himself gazing into the mound of flesh that was Charlie McGunn’s ill-formed face. “ Queen Lettice, Mr. McGunn?”

“Be under no illusion, she is the sovereign here. The She-wolf reigns. We are all her subjects.”

A tumbler bounced past, springing from hands to feet, then over again onto his hands. But Shakespeare hardly noticed. He was more astonished-dismayed, even-by McGunn’s irreverent language. If Sir John Perrot was sentenced to death for calling Elizabeth “a pissing kitchen woman,” how much worse would it be to pay homage, even in jest, to the Queen’s cousin and sworn enemy Lettice Knollys? “I should be careful of your tongue, Mr. McGunn, lest it be cut out. I fear even my lord of Essex may not be able to save you.”

McGunn clapped him hard on the back. “You are an innocent doddypol, Shakespeare. I cannot believe Walsingham ever had such a simpleton as intelligencer.”

Shakespeare had heard enough. He walked away into the crowd, taking a cup of wine from a bluecoat on his way. The viols stopped and a man took to the richly draped stage, which encompassed the width of one end of the hall, not ten feet from him. At the two sides of the stage heralds blew trumpets, and the crowd immediately hushed and turned to see the man.

He was dressed as a jester, in multi-colored costume. Bells jangled on his cap and brightly patterned sleeves. “My lords, ladies and gentleman, pray silence for the She-wolf.”

A slow drumbeat sounded and a bier was borne on stage by four men dressed as Indians from the New World. They wore breechclouts-loincloths-of soft hide, and their hair was shaven on the sides and raised into a bristly central strip from front to back, all topped by a single pheasant’s tail-feather. On the bier, a woman reclined in state. She was adorned in fine court clothes and a wolf mask. The crowd of guests roared with laughter.

The bearers lowered the bier to the stage floor, and the She-wolf alighted. With a delicate step, she threw back her head and let out a great howl, like a wolf baying at the moon. She removed her mask and spread wide her arms, her long, elegant fingers upturned: Essex’s mother, Lettice Knollys, granddaughter of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, and red-haired like her cousin Elizabeth. Yet far more beautiful. Her features were soft and fair, her eyes aslant, her mouth set in the warm smile that had enticed men all her adult life.

Shakespeare took a long sip of his wine and watched as Lettice, almost fifty years old but as lovely as a woman half that age, welcomed her guests and invited them to enjoy “a little masque for your delight, penned by one of our most estimable poets and players…”

Lettice left the stage to a thunder of applause and was immediately followed by a cast of tumblers and players hurling themselves onto the stage in a riot of knockabout entertainments. Then suddenly there was silence again and all the players stood as still as trees in the forest. “But hush,” said the jester, cupping his ear with a hand. “Who do we hear coming into the wood? Why, methinks it is the Queen of the Faeries.”

As the viols started up again, quietly at first, all eyes turned to the stage entrance at the right, where three figures emerged, two of them dwarves dressed as monkeys, both with chains about their necks. The chains were attached to leashes held by the third figure, black-clad like a witch with pointed hat and boils about her haggard white face.

“Bow down, bow down, kneel one and all,” the jester said. “It is the Queen of the Faeries! And she has her familiars, little William and Robert Puckrel.”

Shakespeare was aghast. One of the monkey figures had a long white beard; the other a hunchback. It was plain for all to see that they were meant to be William Cecil-Lord Burghley-and his son, Robert. As for the Queen of the Faeries, ancient and haglike with red hair and a whitened, pox-ridden face, it was intended to be taken as none other than Her Majesty, Gloriana, Queen Elizabeth of England. This was high treason. This could cost a man or woman their bowels and their life. You could be put in the Tower just for watching and have your eyes scraped out with a spoon for laughing. Shakespeare looked around him, expecting to see mouths agape in outrage. Instead he saw a sea of faces creased in laughter and hands coming together in deafening applause.

He watched what followed in a kind of trance. Half of him wanted to flee as far and as fast as he could and never return for fear of being separated from his head, yet the other half was fascinated. Could Elizabeth’s credit in England have fallen so low that her courtiers dared stage such a masque behind her back? And doubly astonishing was the thought of who was behind it: Elizabeth’s most favored pet, the Earl of Essex himself, in league with his mother, the She-wolf Lettice.