Rotten at the Heart Page 5

  The death of the fishmonger’s daughter pressed on my conscience, it being a murder in truth if not in consequence. In Stratford, a son I scarce knew, but in my fashion did love, lay ill, a son not many years younger than I had been when I did first taste his mother’s love. I thought on that distant remembered boy and could but wonder how I had become the man I now am: celebrated by many, supposed by my fellows to be good, but in secret much fouled and, I feared, beyond any power of redemption.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Behold, Mother,” said John Carey, the late Lord Chamberlain’s second son, as they both entered that room to which I had been ushered upon presenting myself at Somerset for that day’s appointment. “It is our dear brother’s hired scribe, the newly minted gentleman. And in costume, no doubt so as to impress us with his reputation as a player as well, should George also need such services to portray Father in this glorious homage. Although, even given the late lord’s not overly noble manner, I think I still find this Shakespeare’s dress lacking.”

  I had again borrowed such costume as I could from the theatre’s stores, but I could not even approximate in fashion the younger Carey’s array, nor that of his mother. On their entrance, I made such courtesies as were required by our relative stations, but he crossed the room – seeming ignoring my obsequies – to a couch that bordered the large windows giving out onto the gardens beyond. Somerset House had first been the mansion of the late Duke of Somerset, but, upon his leaving his head on a scaffold at the Tower, had passed into possession of the Crown. It had been palace to Elizabeth in those years she was princess, before her ascendency, and its rich expanse now served home to some close members of her court, including the late Lord Chamberlain’s family.

  The younger Lord Carey sprawled onto the couch in an insouciant manner. “I’ll not ask you to sit, Shakespeare, as I frankly find your errand tiresome and humour you only out of love to my good brother, who, as first born, has better reason than I to have loved our father well.” Carey waved his hand in a foppish manner as to make the point that Somerset, having been his father’s residence, would now be his brother’s, and that he would continue here only at his brother’s leave. “I would hope that standing might weary you, but I do suppose long hours making speech on stage will have trained you to tire our ears before we can hope to tire your legs.”

  “I do beg your leave for this intrusion, my lord,” I said. “I, too, am here at some reluctance and only at your brother’s charge. But having loved your father well for his long and good patronage of our company, I do hold your brother’s commission to draft such work as will do him honour most dear and will approach it with my diligence. I shall impose for no minute longer than I have need.”

  “By your meandering speech, I suspect those minutes will number many, but I will relay to my brother your reluctance at his employ,” Carey said. “So, the illustrious truths of our late lord. As even such trite entertainments as your kind do author must require a beginning, shall we start at his birth? It is rumoured my good father is the sire not of his own name but of no lesser person than the Good Henry, late king, making him not only the Queen’s dear cousin, but in truth half her brother – and me, I fear, a distant nephew entitled by the misfortune of my later birth only to such scraps as might fall from such tables.”

  “My son forgets both himself and his manners,” said Lady Carey, though not sharply, “though I am inclined to forgive his manners, as they are suspect even amongst our peers, and so I would not have him waste what good form he might manage in our current company. The late lord’s name was Carey, as was his father’s, and any thought otherwise is not your concern. Should you think to make some wit of it on stage or in rumour, as I do hold our reputation dear, I would devote my attentions to your misfortune.”

  “My mother, being Lady Carey, thinks much on the reputations that titles hold,” the younger Carey added. “But for me, of Baron Carey, the name Baron held the more weight, but that, too, did pass to my brother. So, what reputation attaches to either Baron or Carey I count as his concern.” He spread both arms wide in a kind of flourish. “I, being second born and no baron, am gratefully unburdened with such cares.”

  He had that sense of self and natural style that, were he of some other station, I would have offered to make him a player to our company – for in almost every work we require some evil foil to serve as counterweight to the hero of the play. These villains are oft the favourites of the audience, as there is a kind of freedom I think all do envy in giving oneself over entirely to the pursuit of one’s own appetites and abandoning any pretence to social good or norm. The younger Carey was hunger and greed entire and nothing else, but wrapped well in style and costume.

  I bowed. “I will author naught concerning the late lord except that which will reflect on him honour, my lady, as this is both my charge and my opinion.”

  “Then he shall in such play be only Baron Carey, if not,” she said, the last softly, “Earl.”

  Her son sat forward on the couch, his face a malevolent mischief. “Oh, yes, you must include that. When in his late illness my father was offered by the good Queen to be made Earl, he did respond that, as she had not seen fit to grant such honour in life, he could not in right accept it in death. Evidently he was desirous to gain whatever legend such selfless act might lend to his dead honour rather than to gain such lands, incomes, and benefits as it would lend to the future comfort of his family. Is not this just the sort of preening nobility that will best please both my brother and your audience?”

  “I shall make good note of the late lord’s grace in this instance, as it is admirable,” I said.

  “Oh, much admirable. For I, too, can now admire from some distance such estates as I might have enjoyed and the additional incomes with which we could put paid to the claims of the various bastard children who do seem to grow in the dark shadow of my later father’s appetites like summer mushrooms. His estate now open to their claims, their own appetites are whetted by his imagined fortune, which, in truth, numbers scarce greater than his debts.” He sank back into the cushions of his seating. “I suppose I should thank his appetites at least so far as concerning his lovely nurse, the sweet Mary in whom he took such comfort. I did inherit her after a fashion, but she proved a treat for the eyes only, and as I have stronger hungers in other parts, I turned her out in favour of a less comely but more available dish.”

  “And was the late lord loved well by his servants?”

  The younger Carey coughed in scoff. “Are we now to measure a man by the love of his servants? Shall we ask the furniture, too, how well it enjoyed the press of his arse? I suppose better we should consider your love of him, as we have his patronage of players and other such leeches as he entertained to contain us in the poverty that does our humility ensure. Humility being godly, this was no doubt, was his righteous intent. To diminish his fortune so as to ensure our humility, for otherwise we would believe him such a careless steward that we suffer thus in accident “

  “Such estate as there may be is the province of my elder son,” Lady Carey interrupted, “so I do hope you will ignore speculation concerning it particulars coming from those ignorant of its contents. The late lord was much beloved of the Queen, even in his youth. In the late northern rising, where such Papists as did hope support from abroad rebelled against her rightful office, she placed him head of her armies, which he did command with much nerve and skill, securing her kingdom and her constant future favour, which was much expressed in his later appointments. Beyond which, I can think of little that would offer drama worth your ink.” By which speech she meant, I think, my dismissal.

  “If I may further beg your leave,” I said, “you did say that the Queen offered him to be made Earl in his final illness, but I had thought his death sudden according to your elder son’s remarks.”

  “He had these last weeks suffered what the doctors credited as some corruption of his lungs and seemed most near his death, at which time the Queen did offer and
he did refuse. But he did for some few days rally, before that pestilence that had previous plagued him returned anew and fiercely, and claimed him in short hours,” she said.

  “In which hours his brave honour fled him,” said the younger Carey, “Poxes about the mouth and hands robbed his speech, and he instead cried womanly tears as though his bedskirts were his daily and not his nightly attire. Would that the Queen had offered him Earl then, when he no voice to refuse.”

  A pox on his hands, I noted, as in the elder Carey’s dreams.

  CHAPTER 7

  “I should think the world glad that your kind have the theatre for your craft, lest you put your minds in earnest to such dark ends as you so oft put them in fiction,” the apothecary said, his tankard again empty and raised to signal for yet another fill. I had before taken his advice on matters of poison as I considered such agencies that my characters might use in their less-noble endeavours, and in the guise of such consultancy did again ask his company at a tavern of his frequent betwixt Somerset and Bishopsgate.

  “I believe you glad there be a theatre, because what coin I earn at its art so oft doth fill your cup,” I replied.

  “You would begrudge a man the cost of his service?” he asked.

  “Methinks I could better afford your actual wares than the ale needed to lubricate your tongue.”

  “Alas, mine is a solitary profession and I do spend long hours alone with my potions. And so my tongue doth rust from lack of custom and requires much balm before it can reclaim its art.”

  I laughed at the old man, who, though gaunt and homely in his aspect such that one would imagine his manner drear, was in fact good company.

  “And I take it from your speech that your faculties are recovered?”

  His tankard replenished, he held up a finger, and drew half of it in a long draught. “Just now. So, what vile scheme can I help concoct?”

  I leaned forward, the tavern loud and no ear seeming turned to our speaking, but my wanting still such privacy as could be possible. “I have a character who did for some weeks suffer an ailment of the lungs that greatly troubled his breathing such that he was feared soon dead, but from which he seeming recovered. Then the pestilence did sudden return, marking his mouth and hands with pox, stealing his voice, and causing such pain that for the brief hours before his death, he cried as though a woman. And I need know if this follow the course of some known disease and his death be of nature, or if it more closely mark some poison, and thus mean him murdered.”

  The apothecary paused, his tankard half to his mouth, and looked at me from beneath the tangle of white hair that framed his brows. “And pray tell, Will, how is it that you must ask me what ill has befallen some character of your own creation? They live and die at your hand and at your pleasure and by what agency you decide.”

  In my thirst to divine the method of Lord Carey’s demise, I had poorly considered the logic of my question, and did now need quick to offer some dramatic device to explain my lapse, less the apothecary, who be no fool, ask further into my affairs. The master I now served was most jealous of my confidence.

  “There’s the rub. I wish in this play for the manner of this character’s death to be mysterious – for he is a man of some station and with not few enemies – so that his fellows must puzzle the nature of his passing, unsure even if it be murder. And so I imagined such scene as I have described. I did think the loss of speech convenient so that, should some evil aim be true, and even if he knows its actor, he cannot speak the name. I have only yet started, and before proceeding further did want your good counsel so that the direction the story may pursue does not ring false in its nature.”

  The apothecary sat back and drew again from his tankard, the cup sounding near empty when set back again to table. But the apothecary was not yet holding it up for a fill as was his habit, and on his face those troubles that framed his first question seemed only half stilled by my response.

  “And the pox, Will? What of that?”

  I laughed and waved my hand as though the pox were a pittance and said, “Oh, the pox. That can go or stay as best fits, but the crowds do love some grotesque display, and their fear of plague is such that a good pox doth much discomfit them, and so I do like to use a pox as I can.”

  The apothecary shook his head with a soft laugh and drained what small drops remained in his cup, holding it up again to be filled. “The cruel nature of your wiles much amuses me, Will, on those occasions when I am blessed with the secrets of their devising.”

  The maid again filled his cup and took my coin. “So, to your case. For his initial distress to proceed over some weeks, methinks it be some natural sickness. For such poisons that are in common employ generally work in haste, although one skilled in the art could, I suppose, deliver doses so gradual in their malady that they would mimic the natural decay of illness. But they would need daily commerce with your victim. No – and here you can use your beloved pox to great effect – should this man have been near death with such ailment as did trouble the lungs and be only begun to recover, just little of those poisons that affect the lungs would of ease kill him. With only little art, any who wished him harm could grind one of the flowers common used as banes – Lakespur, Monk’s Shade, some others – and by secreting the grindings in his supper achieve such end as you have described. His hands would blister short after having touched the poisoned food; and his mouth from its eating; his throat and tongue inflame as well, even to the point of stopping his speech; and even a strong man would weep, as, until such time as the agent did finally still his lungs, the feeling would be much like being burned away from the inside to the out.”

  And so the late Lord Chamberlain had been murdered, and the details of both sons’ accounts, the elder from his dreams and the younger in his hateful recollection, seemed point to the same cause.

  “These flowers? They are common to England?”

  “Much common and favoured in many gardens. As so often with nature’s most deadly treats, they are bright in their ornament and appealing to the eye, as though to seduce us into their acquaintance. I have oft wondered why God hath ordained it so, for it seems a cruel irony to have what would bring the eye such joy bring the body such harm.”

  My mind ran to Somerset House, the younger Carey sprawled on his couch, the windows behind him and the large and varied garden beyond.

  My mind ran also to the man with the bulbous and disfigured nose who, while the apothecary and I talked, sat alone at the table nearest the door, and whose glance passed regular around the tavern and settled, it seemed, on all save me.

  CHAPTER 8

  The morning next, I made haste to the theatre with Jenkins, as Burbage had sent the boy to my rooms at a run to wake me in the still-early morning. Jenkins found me abed, as I had been late at my writing and making at least some little progress, those melancholies that had of late much vexed me somewhat abated after my meeting with the apothecary, I think by the thrill of the hunt. I dressed in haste in such clothes as lay handy, Jenkins being unsure of the mission but seeming certain that speed was more vital than costume.

  At the theatre, Burbage was in argument with a man I could see only from behind. The man was outfitted in the plain and looser cut of dull brown much preferred by the Puritans. In their lust to deny any joy to mankind, they dressed to displease the eye in the costume of large turds. His head bore neither hat nor wig nor hair of any style or care, but instead that close and artless cropping that had them seem round of head. And then he turned, and I could see that it was our landlord, Miller. I knew he held some Puritan sympathies, but in the year since our last congress, he must have full succumbed to their sour and joyless catechism. .

  “Shakespeare,” he said, his hands clasped behind him.

  I nodded in greeting. “Sir Miller.”

  He made disapproving examination of my person and dress. “It would seem we have drug thee from thy bed at such hour as most honest men have been long at their labours.”


  “As we oft do perform at evening, and as I must then sometimes write at night, I fear my hours do end later than is custom, and that I do rise later.”

  “Just as all else in your enterprise runs counter to God’s natural order, so, too, do your hours.”

  “It’s the lease, Will,” Burbage blurted. “He says it is not to be extended.”

  Our lease on the theatre would expire at the end of July, this same month, and in fact in just a few days. Just some weeks previous Burbage had truck on the matter with Miller – Miller having said on that occasion that such matters would be addressed as to their current custom as time allowed, and Burbage returned feeling the matter settled as it had been each year previous and no longer of mind.

  “You mean not to be extended again beyond the current year in question, or not at all?” I asked.

  “I will have you and the instruments of your practice out before August,” said Miller.

  “Even having told me other when last we spoke?” said Burbage, his voice gaining edge and his face colour. “Is lying now admitted to the practice of your new faith?”

  “I told you, sir, that matters would be addressed in due course. If you took from those words some meaning other than that their plain meanings carry, then perhaps too much of your conversation is constrained to those words written for you by others and your wits, through lack of practice, have lost what small ability they e’er had.”