The Medieval Murderers - The Tainted Relic

‘Then I hope we smell sweet,’ said Abel.

Hatch’s expression suggested otherwise. Once more he looked from one to the other of us. A kind of calculation entered his gaze. He seemed to come to some decision. If his face was easy enough to read, his next words were obscure. ‘I was not expecting three of you.’

Not expecting three of us? How could he be expecting us at all, since he didn’t know we were visiting Bartholomew Fair, did he? And Shakespeare certainly wouldn’t have gone about broadcasting our mission. But Hatch’s remark indicated that he was expecting someone . I thought of the cutpurse man with the straws in his hat, but it couldn’t be him because he’d already been and gone.

I blundered forward, feeling more and more unsure of my ground. After denying that we were part of WS’s playing company, I now tried relative honesty. ‘I have been, ah, commissioned to come to your stall, Master Hatch, to retrieve something…to pay a fair price for a…for an…’

I dithered. What was I to say? A journeyman play by Shakespeare? A piece about a mad Roman emperor? Then the author’s own phrase floated into my head. ‘You might say we’re looking for a relic,’ I said.

‘Not so loud,’ said Ulysses Hatch, although I had been speaking quietly enough and there was no one in our immediate neighbourhood. He reached across with a plump hand and gripped me hard by the shoulder.

‘What is your name?’

‘Nick Revill.’

No recognition at all showed on his face and for once I could be glad. Hadn’t I described myself to WS as an obscure player? Here was the proof of that.

‘You alone can see the item,’ he said. ‘Your friends must remain outside.’

I felt baffled. It was as if this fat man had divined straight away what I was searching for. And, more than baffled, I felt a little alarmed. Still, what was there to fear from this large, sweating individual? Or the others who were in his tent? I raised my eyebrows at Abel Glaze and Jack Wilson and, skirting the table, followed Hatch into his striped tent. He pulled aside the hanging curtain and ushered me into his inner sanctum.

After the brightness of the day outside, the interior was dim. Flies buzzed and Hatch wheezed. The place smelt musty, as if shut up for years, yet Hatch’s tent could have stood on this spot only for a couple of days. There were books and pamphlets stacked in casual piles and scattered on the ground, as well as a couple of trunks. A woman was sitting on one of the trunks. She looked me up and down. She might have been handsome not so long ago but the features in her large face were on the point of melting, as if she’d been left out in the sun too long. Her hair, which was unbonneted, straggled over dark shiny eyes. She had a leathern flask in one hand. She raised it to her lips, after giving me the once-over.

‘Shut your gob!’

I jumped. The voice came from over my shoulder. I looked up to see a raven sitting on a perch. It repeated itself and then cocked its head on one side as if to estimate the effect of its words on me. There was an unpleasant glint in its diamond eye.

‘Master Revill,’ said Ulysses Hatch, ‘let me introduce you to Hold-fast. I call him that because once’s he’s got something in his grip he doesn’t let go. Oh no, he doesn’t let go.’

‘Oh no. Hold-fast doesn’t let go,’ said the raven. ‘Jump to it. Shut your gob!’

‘You wouldn’t think it but he’s an old boy,’ said Hatch. ‘He was old when he adopted me for his own.’

The raven looked ageless to me. It seemed odd to talk about an animal, a bird, adopting a man rather than the other way about, but perhaps that’s how it is with ravens. I glanced at the woman sitting on the trunk.

‘What about me?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to this nice young man?’

Master Hatch made a little bow, or at least bent as far as his bulk would allow.

‘May I also present Wapping Doll.’

‘I used to live south of the river,’ I said.

‘Oh, good for you,’ said the woman, her speech slightly slurred. ‘But what’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Ha ha. He thinks you come from Wapping,’ said Ulysses Hatch. ‘But let me tell you, Nick Revill, that for this good lady Wapping isn’t a place -it’s what she used to do with her time. It’s what she did for a living. You know. She wapped, she knocked and she banged.’

‘Still do, for a living,’ said Doll, rolling her eyes. They were like ripe blackberries, glossy, squashy.

‘Alas, sir, her price has fallen of late. Who’d have her?’

‘You can shog off, Ulysses Hatch,’ said the woman, lifting up her flask once more but pausing before she stuffed it in her mouth. ‘Who’d have you anyway, you great bag of guts?’

‘You would. You did have me, yesterday morning,’ said Hatch.

‘Apart from me nobody’d touch you, you bombard of sack.’

‘Go ask at the pig stall,’ said Hatch with what sounded like genuine indignation.

‘Shog off,’ said the raven.

I coughed to remind them all of my presence and the bookseller seemed to remember why he’d summoned me inside his tent.

‘Get your fat arse off that chest,’ said Ulysses Hatch to his doxy. ‘Come to think of it, get your fat arse out of this place altogether.’

The woman hoisted herself to her feet.

‘Oh, Ulysses, oh, Yew-lee, you’d not banish your Doll, would you? Banish your Wapping Doll?’

She spoke somewhere between earnest and jest, and pouted her lips in a similar spirit. She winked at me.

‘This gentleman and I have a matter to discuss. You know, the item.’

Hatch gestured towards the other trunk. I didn’t know what he was talking about but from the expression on Wapping Doll’s face, she did. Her good humour disappeared and she said, ‘Not again, Ulysses. That item brings me out all over goose bumps.’

Hatch swung one of his hands and whacked her on the arse, but it was an affectionate blow as far as I could see, and she exited from the tent, still clutching her leathern flask.

Then he got down on his hams, an awkward manoeuvre given his size, and retrieved a key from his doublet. He fiddled with the padlock of the trunk, not the one recently vacated by Wapping Doll but the other. Suddenly he looked up at me. The raven’s coal-black head flicked with deep suspicion between his kneeling master and me, yet any time I looked at the bird he pretended indifference.

‘What are you after, Master Revill?’

‘I…have already said it,’ I said, uncertain what reply he wanted, for I had not yet named the item that I was in pursuit of, the foul papers of Shakespeare’s unperformed play, Domitian .

‘You spoke of a relic.’

‘I did,’ I said, wondering why he fastened on this word so.

‘Then behold,’ he said.

Hatch pushed at the lid of the trunk. It swung open. Inside, I glimpsed bolts of cloth and what looked like items of plate. Quite delicately he moved these objects aside. In the middle of the collection was something wrapped up in a dark, coarse cloth. With what seemed to me exaggerated care, Ulysses Hatch lifted it from the trunk and laid it on a clear patch of ground. He knelt in front of this anonymous little bundle, then began to unfold the woollen wrapping.

I was abruptly conscious of my surrounding. The dusty light that filtered through the yellow fabric of the tent. The buzz of the flies, lazy, as if they knew that summer was near its end. The heavy breathing of the bookseller. The raven shuffling on his perch.

I was curious and puzzled, and not a little apprehensive. Whatever was going to emerge from this dumb-show would not be WS’s manuscript-for one thing, the shape of the bundle was wrong-but something altogether different.