Shakespeare's Rebel (15 page)

‘A deal? You make a deal with your sovereign? Saucy knave! Ha!’ She shrieked in delight. ‘Now I see the spirit that has filled Cecil’s papers with stories that eclipse Sir John Mandeville’s.’ She glanced back at the desk. ‘But no contract can be written for this deal. My Secretary has words enough already – from both of us.’ She studied him. ‘If you were to conclude a bargain on the street, you would seal it with a handshake, would you not?’ She held out a bejewelled hand. ‘Let us seal this so.’ He hesitated, then slowly raised his own hand, suddenly aware of how grimy it was. ‘You may forgo the spit.’

He allowed her to take his – the opposite seemed presumptuous. Her hand was bony, heavily veined, blotched on the back as if an inkwell had spilled upon it. Yet there was a surprising strength in it. He shook once, made to withdraw, but she held on. He’d lowered his eyes out of deference but now he looked up . . . to find her gaze again fastened upon him.

‘It is remarkable how familiar you seem to me,’ she said softly, studying. ‘Have I seen you before?’

He did not think he would mention that he was there, kneeling on the deck of the
Golden Hind
, when she knighted his kidnapper Drake. ‘I . . . I played before your majesty in . . . ’94, I believe. ’Twas not here but in—’

She shook her head, his hand. ‘I do not mean as a player. I mean . . .’ She turned his hand over. ‘I have some gift in this,’ she said. ‘May I?’

He could hardly jerk his hand free and refuse her study. So he nodded and she bent to her perusal. ‘Hmm,’ she said, after a moment. ‘I see a life lived in great violence. With more to come.’

He thought, what a surprise! Given all that Cecil had revealed, what else would she see? But he held his tongue and she his hand as she continued to pore – and speak. ‘Yet I see something else too – that half your nature leads you to these deeds and half away from them.’ She looked into his face. ‘What is your lineage?’

‘The Secretary summed up much of it before. My father was . . . of a tribe in—’

‘Yes, yes. The savage. I know that. It accounts for much that is here. But your mother?’

He saw Anne now, as he sometimes did, especially in his dreams. Though dead these twenty-five years, she revisited him often in them. She would not want him to be speaking of her now, to this person. Yet how could he lie? His many admissions lay in ink on Cecil’s desk. He could already have told all this to Lord Burghley. ‘My mother was . . . a healer,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘I knew it. The balancing half. And her name?’

‘She was married to my father. So . . . Lawley.’

‘Stepfather,’ she corrected. ‘Before. Her maiden name.’

He swallowed. ‘She was born near Siena, in Italy, majesty. But
her
father was French.’

‘His name?’

He did not want to answer – for truly, the name he hesitated on now had been hovering on the edge of his consciousness since Elizabeth had first entered from behind the arras. He had a connection with the woman before him that he rarely thought of, partly because the story was so extraordinary that he scarcely knew whether to believe it. Partly because if it
was
true, then there was blood and death between them and neither was a good thing to lie between monarch and subject, as many a subject had found.

Yet this close, and held, how could he refuse his queen?

It came out boldly in the end, as bold as the man was said to have been, in the tales his mother had told him. ‘His name was Rombaud. Jean Rombaud.’

He’d been wary – but he was still unprepared for the reaction. ‘Rombaud!’ Elizabeth shrieked, throwing his hand off as if it was a thing diseased, reeling back to stagger the few paces to her chair, fall on to it. ‘Rombaud,’ she moaned. ‘I knew it.
I knew it
.’ She raised her eyes to him, and they were no longer filled with interest, or humour, only with a desperate horror. ‘And you know too, do you not? You
know
!’

He did. Something that he rarely thought of, as most will forget near all the fantastical tales told in childhood before the hearth. Except this tale was not a fantasy, though filled with things so extraordinary it could pass as one. For their two families, royal and common, had a shared past. It was not something he could say.

Not when his grandfather had killed this woman’s mother.

It was not something he could say. But she could. ‘God in his heaven,’ she whispered. ‘You are the grandson of the French executioner.’

His legs, weak for a long while, gave. He knelt. It had been such a long day, and this . . . this was too great an addition to his woes to keep him standing. Yet now not even deference could make him look down; he could only stare into eyes that stared back, bounden in horror.

No matter that Jean Rombaud had slain Anne Boleyn because it was his trade. No matter that when he had killed her, he also had saved her; by taking her six-fingered hand at the same time he took her head, by eventually burying this mark of her supposed witchcraft after a year of near impossible hardship and adventures. No matter also that Rombaud’s quest had to be repeated by John’s mother years later, when the hand’s whereabouts was betrayed, ending in cataclysm across the Atlantic Ocean – and this time it was the threatened Princess Elizabeth who’d been saved, as her mother had been.

All that did matter now was between their eyes – and in hers, horror overwhelmed. The court rumours had it that never, not once, had Elizabeth uttered her tragic mother’s name. He heard that horror in the voice now, expanding in the single word she hissed. ‘Go!’

Their gazes held still – and in that one long moment before she wrenched her eyes away, John could feel that through him, through her, their ancestors looked too. Then he forced himself off his knees, on to his wobbly legs. Only at the door did he remember, and turn. ‘Majesty, may I . . . my sword?’

Elizabeth did not look up, slumped now in her chair. ‘Rombaud’s sword,’ she moaned, from behind her hands. ‘Executioner’s sword.’

She had left him. He hesitated, then moved past her to the desk. As he did, Elizabeth cried for her maid. He’d forgotten she was there, a silent witness to everything. As she passed him to attend the now weeping Queen, she stared at him, wonder on her face, and again he caught her scent, the headiness of cloves. Snatching up his sword, he moved swiftly to the door, wrenched it open and hastened down the corridors beyond. Yet though he descended them swiftly, it took a while to escape the sound of the Queen’s sobbing, an oft-repeated word within it.

‘Executioner!’

ACT TWO

For it is foolishness and endless trouble to cast a stone at every dog that barks at you.

George Silver

XI

Persuasion

No creature of Cecil’s delayed him, no guards challenged him, as he retraced his route, via stair, garden, stable and out into the yard. Only there did he finally pause for breath. The night had turned chill again, yet he relished it now for he felt he’d been in a fever this last hour, and the cold air soothed. Closing his eyes, a vision of a soft bed, scullion free, came. He yawned, leaning against the wall.

And was startled off it in an instant by the voice. ‘I hoped you would return, knave, so that I could give you the thrashing you deserve.’

It was spoken in the high-pitched tone of his rival for Tess, Sir Samuel D’Esparr. But his new-found wakefulness helped John realise the truth, and so he neither bared his blade nor took to his heels. Instead he turned and spat. ‘Come then, man? Is it to be double or is it to be quits?’

‘Quits,’ replied Richard Burbage, one of the foremost mimics in the land, seizing John’s left arm, twisting it up behind his back.

John grunted, pulled the other man off his toes, then dipped down. The grasp loosened enough for John to slip it . . . too easily. Burbage was not there to truly wrestle, it appeared – a fact confirmed by the man not pursuing but stepping back, arms raised, palms out. ‘Nay, John lad,’ he said, ‘I would not take advantage of your weakened state. I’ll find a fairer time to take my money back.’

‘That’s kind, Dick. And thus most unlike you.’ John grinned. ‘Why do you assume I am weak?’

‘Because you have been drinking for a month,’ the player replied, ‘and quantities that would have daunted Bacchus, so I heard.’

‘And how did you hear? I thought I had been discreet.’ He sighed. ‘Though it seems most of England knows.’

Burbage smiled. ‘Not so discreet. You were in Southwark last week . . .’

‘Though not to drink. I was there . . .’ John pressed the skin between his eyes. Peg Leg had said he’d demanded his sword, but other than that . . . ? ‘Truly, I do not recall.’

‘Well, part of the purpose of your visit it appeared was to yell insults outside the Rose. I happened to be in the box office with Henslowe at the time. I have to say, John, that you abused the fellow in terms of anatomical entanglement that contrived to be both physically unlikely and bestially adventurous – even for Henslowe!’ He laughed. ‘Man, wherever did you learn to curse like that?’

John shrugged. ‘Among soldiers.’

‘Well, it gave me my chance. I had need of you, so when the watch chased you off, I dispatched a boy to follow you.’

‘Ah. So that’s how you found me.’

‘Aye. Though I think it will take the boy a while to recover from some of the sights you led him through before your close in Wapping.’ He stepped forward, put a hand on the other’s shoulder. ‘Come, let us talk. There’s a tavern hard by . . .’

John resisted the tug. ‘Dick, it has been the longest of days. I fear that one sip of ale and the warmth of a fire will send me straight into a snooze. Can we not speak here? I have my eye on a pile of straw nearby and my heart on a few hours’ rest before I have to collect Ned and return him to his mother.’

‘Then let us to the warmth anyway,’ Burbage replied. ‘I must to the players too. But I would have words with you first.’

John let the player lead him back to the brazier still crackling at the centre of the yard. They raised their hands to it, and John studied the player by flamelight. He was not an especially handsome man – a large nose centred in a long face, made longer by a beard close cropped to an arrow point. But his eyes were deep-set and of the most piercing green-blue; and when these went wide, lit within by some passion, they were accompanied by a voice so smooth it could clot cream – or raise the skirts of women across the realm. His conquests were as legendary as John’s capacity for drink.

Now those skills are to be deployed for another use, John thought. Dickon Burbage wants something. Which is good – because I also want something from him.

They had known each other a long time. So there was little need for casual talk. ‘I am worried about him, John,’ said the player. ‘He is sad.’

There was no need to state who ‘he’ was. ‘He was ever prone to melancholy, Dick.’

‘Aye. But it usually comes and goes. This time it has lingered. He has not been writing much of late, which is always a bad sign with him. And for us, with our new Globe rising on Bankside. We want something new from him to launch it. Something special. And yet do you know what he talks about, the rare time he does talk?’ He looked up. ‘God’s mercy on me, man. On us all, for’ – that voice dropped to a whisper – ‘he wants to rewrite Hamlet!’

John stared. ‘
The Tragedy of Hamlet
?’

‘I know!’ Burbage lifted his beaver cap to run a hand through oiled hair. ‘Christ’s bones, it was old when I was gumming my mother’s teat. Shrieking ghosts, poisons and’ – he shuddered – ‘feigned madness. We lost money on it at Newington Butts, and that was three years back, remember? We don’t want to open our new Globe with old dross.’

‘Does he say why? Why this story? Why now?’

‘You know he talks little till the work is complete. He hints that it can be brought into the present. That there are new ideas to explore in an old setting.’ He shook his head. ‘But that same gummed ma always warned me: you can’t turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, for all your skill at sewing. We’ve all told him so. Me. Gus Phillips. Even Kemp.’ He laid a hand on John’s forearm, his voice mellowing yet further. ‘You know how he loves you, John. You’ve known him longer than any of us. S’death, you discovered him. What would he be if you had not noted his spark? A glover in Stratford, with ten fat children and nowhere to put his dreams.’ He leaned close so that the moisture in his eyes reflected the firelight. ‘The world owes you an unpayable debt, my friend.’

John doubted it. That small Warwickshire town would not have held Will Shakespeare long, whether John had come along with the Admiral’s Men or no, and been two actors short. Though the fact that Burbage was using all his skills to persuade him thus showed that the player was more than a little desperate. Already today the monarch of the realm and its most powerful citizen had sought a favour of him and had, after the threats, offered something in return. The thought emboldened him now.

‘I am distressed whenever I hear of Will’s sadness. I will endeavour to root out its cause and alleviate it if I can. For you are right, I’ve known him long and love him well. As to the other . . .’ He laid his hand atop of Burbage’s. ‘What’s in it for me?’

They were close enough for him to see the change in Burbage’s eyes. The moisture was sucked back, stored for later, better use upon the stage. ‘What do you want?’ he replied, as bluntly.

‘A place in the company.’ He saw denial rise, intercepted it. ‘Small roles only. Ostlers. Messengers. Work my way back up.’

‘I’d . . . try. You have the stuff, we all know that. Could have reached high. Could still . . .’ he added hastily. ‘But not all like you as I.’

‘Will Kemp.’

‘Aye, him. That punch!’ Burbage gave a small, admiring laugh. ‘Yet it is not only that. There’s your drinking.’ He lifted his hand from beneath John’s, cupped it again over the brazier. ‘Now I like my ale as much as the next man. I will even indulge in the occasional bumper of aqua vitae. Yet I am moderate when I play.’

‘As am I,’ John retorted, ‘but I am not playing now, am I? Kemp’s seen to that. Even Henslowe won’t hire me, and we know how desperate he is.’