The Tainted Relic (49 page)

‘You have found us out, sir,’ I said. ‘We are to do with the playhouse.’

‘Which playhouse?’

‘Any one that will have us,’ I said.

‘Not Shakespeare’s.’

I shook my head almost imperceptibly, no spoken lie. The others said nothing.

‘As long as you’re not from Shakeshaft’s lot,’ said Hatch. ‘But I thought you were players. I can smell you over a distance.’

‘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.

What did emerge was, at first sight, disappointing. A small oblong wooden box with a hinged lid that had an inlaid pattern of a star. Hatch opened it. Without raising the box from the ground, he beckoned me to look more closely. Inside was a glass vial, a little more than a finger’s length, with a faded gilt stopper. Treating the vial as warily as he might the contents of Pandora’s box, Ulysses Hatch lifted it out and cradled it in a pudgy palm.

‘Look near,’ he said. ‘What do you see inside?’

‘I see a bit of wood.’

‘Yes, and…?’

‘Jump to it,’ said the raven.

‘The wood is grey and stained in places,’ I said, attempting to ignore the bird.

‘Just so.’

I made to reach out my hand to take the glass vial with its unremarkable contents for a closer examination, but Hatch snatched it towards him and began wrapping it up once more inside the woollen cloth.

‘You would not want to touch what’s in here, master,’ he said. ‘This is what gives Wapping Doll the goose bumps.’

What in God’s name was he talking about? I was on the point of saying that this was not the item I’d come in search of when Hatch raised a hand to silence me. He was still kneeling on the ground, and when he looked up again there was an odd mixture of fear and calculation on his sweaty face.

‘You
are
working for Philip Henslowe, aren’t you?’ he said.

Just as I’d earlier nodded to deny that we were with ‘Shakespeare’s lot’, so I now gave a rueful smile to indicate that he’d got this right too. I felt happier not delivering an outright lie, yet not altogether happy.

‘I knew it!’ said the bookseller. ‘That man has got his hand in plenty of plackets. Playhouses, bear pits, pick-hatches, you name it, and Philip Henslowe will be there, turning a penny. But let me tell you, Nicholas Revill, your employer should beware of this item.’

He gestured at the wooden box. Now it was his turn to read my face. What he read was confusion.

‘You don’t know what it is, do you? Old Henslowe’s sent you to purchase something without telling you what it is.’

‘No, I don’t know what it is,’ I said, ‘and that’s no more than the truth.’

‘Why, man, this object which is secure in its glass case…is a fragment of the True Cross. It is marked with the blood of Our Lord.’

At first I thought I’d misheard him or that he was joking. Then I studied Ulysses Hatch’s expression more carefully and understood that it was no jest. My eyes swam and my legs almost gave way beneath me.

Of course, like everyone, I have a glancing acquaintance with the business of relics. I’ve heard of the vial of Christ’s blood which they keep in Walsingham, and of saints’ bones that are stored elsewhere. Yet in these latter days such items are somewhat discredited as being associated with the old religion. My parson father, for example, would refer to them as popish gewgaws. He’d say that those who looked for salvation from old bones would do better to seek God’s grace directly rather than gawp at what were most likely the remains of sheep and swine. But it’s one thing to hear this from the pulpit and quite another to be confronted with such an object in the flesh, as it were.

Perhaps the bookseller didn’t believe he had done enough to convince me, for he once again unwrapped the wooden box, opened it and extracted not the glass vial but a strip of folded parchment. This he handed to me, telling me to take care.

There was some lettering on the parchment, but very faded. The skin was also so torn and frayed that I feared it might crumble in my hand. In the uncertain light of the tent I struggled to read the words but was able to make out only a handful, which appeared to be in Latin, among them
sanguis
and
sancta
. There was what looked to be a signature underneath, although I could not decipher any more than isolated letters, together with a small raised area like a scab, the remains of a seal perhaps. All this time Hold-fast the raven paid close attention to what we were doing, as if he were capable of reading better than either of us.

After a moment I returned the parchment to Hatch.

‘I have this in English,’ said the publisher and bookseller. ‘It confirms the wood in the vial to be a piece of the True Cross, rescued from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It is signed and sealed by Geoffrey Mappestone, Knight. It is very old.’

‘How…how did you come by it?’

‘They say that a friar had it in the old days. It passed from his hands to others–and so to mine.’

He made it sound like a natural process, but I would bet a week’s wages that he had acquired it less than honestly.

‘You are willing to sell this thing?’

‘It is not to the seller’s advantage to say it, but I will be glad to be rid of this “thing”, as you call it,’ said Hatch. ‘What Master Henslowe does with it is his business, but I’ve had enough of it. Good fortune does not follow the possessor, though I did not know that until after I’d…obtained it. They say that to touch it is death.’

This might have been so much seller’s talk, perversely heightening the attraction of something by drawing attention to its dangers, but I felt the nape of my neck crawl.

‘You might give it away.’ I paused and chose my next words with care. ‘There must be many who would be glad to receive such an object.’

‘Give it away? I have a living to make, Master Revill. Why shouldn’t I turn an honest penny? No one will get their hands on this unless they have first paid me an honest price.’

And also from the trunk he produced a battered pistol. It was a rusty old gun, with a bulbous handle and a blunt muzzle.

‘I keep this primed and ready,’ said Ulysses Hatch, toying with the flint-arm. ‘The world is full of rogues.’

‘Master Hatch,’ I said, tired of this and not a little frightened by the sight of the pistol. ‘It’s time to get one or two things straight. It’s true that I have been sent here to obtain something from you but not…whatever is contained in that vial. I know nothing of any cross, true or otherwise.’

At this Hatch replaced the box inside the trunk, which he fastened with the padlock. The pistol, however, he did not replace, but positioned it carefully on top of the chest, as though he might want to use it at any moment. Everything he did, he did slowly, but I had the impression that he was taking even longer over this sequence of small actions so as to give himself time to think. I glanced at the bird on the perch. Hold-fast was now so interested in the proceedings that he was pretending to be looking in the opposite direction.