4 A Plague of Angels: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (26 page)

Mistress Bassano was being handed down from her litter with immense ceremony by no less than the Earl himself. Her eyes skidded slightly as Carey made his bow to her, his face printed with naughty comprehension. To do the lady justice, she only checked for a second when she saw him, before curtseying almost as low to him as she had to the Earl.

As they followed the company indoors, Dodd distinctly heard Shakespeare moan softly to himself.

***

Supper at Southampton House involved more mysterious meats in pungent sauces, leaves doused in oil and vinegar decorated with orange nasturtium flowers, decorated pies, astonishingly smooth-tasting wines. It all gave Dodd a bellyache just looking at it being laid out on the sideboard by the servants who carried it in, and of course every bite of it was cold after the palaver of serving it up and displaying to the Earl and then passing it around. It seemed courtiers showed their importance by making even the simplest things pointlessly complicated. Did they have three servants to wipe their arse, Dodd wondered, once the wine had started to work on his empty stomach.

Shakespeare seemed to have latched onto him again and was sitting next to him at the second table in the parlour, continuing to explain something about how playing was in the way you moved and spoke, not just in gestures and rhetoric. For instance, if you were playing a learned man, it wasn’t enough to wear spectacles, you had to look abstracted as well. Dodd nodded politely to all this unwanted information and tried not to yawn.

The Earl was laughing at something Mistress Bassano was telling him.

‘Mr Shakespeare,’ he called to them across the room. ‘A fair lady has just made a serious complaint against you. What have you to say?’

Shakespeare paused in mid-analysis of the contribution clothes made to a play-part, swallowed what he had in his mouth whole, and stood up.

‘What was her complaint, my lord Earl?’ His voice had changed. It was clearer, less flat, less dull.

‘She alleges that you used the fair muse of poetry to tell lies. I had heard better of you. Can it be true?’

Shakespeare paused, looking narrowly at Mistress Bassano who had a cruel expression on her face, rather like a cat torturing a mouse, and then at the Earl who was half laughing at him. Now that was an interesting sight to see, Dodd thought, because something inside the man shifted, you might almost say hardened. It was as if he came to some decision.

‘My lord Earl,’ said Shakespeare judiciously, his flat vowels filling the parlour full of overdressed people quite easily. ‘I’m sorry to say that it is true, if she means the poor sonnets I sent her the other day.’

‘So you admit the crime of corrupting the muse?’

‘I do, my lord. The bill is foul. The sonnets I made to her praise should never have been sent.’

Mistress Bassano, who had clearly been expecting a pleasant few minutes of poet-baiting, now looked puzzled.

‘Then you apologise to the lady?’ pursued the Earl.

‘I do, my lord. Unreservedly. I should never have said that her hair outrivalled the dawn nor that her voice put the birds to shame.’

‘And what will you do for your penance, Mr Shakespeare?’

‘Why, with the lady’s permission, I’ll read another of my poems.’

Perhaps because he was sitting right next to the man, only Dodd saw the tension in Shakespeare.

‘Compounding your crime, Mr Shakespeare?’ sneered the Earl.

Shakespeare smiled quite sweetly. ‘No, my lord. Telling the truth.’

‘A truthful poet. An oxymoron, to be sure?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Mistress Bassano? As Queen of the company, do you allow this?’

Creamy shoulders shrugged expressively. ‘He may embarrass himself again, if he wishes,’ she said.

The Earl waved a negligent hand to Shakespeare, who fumbled in the front of his doublet for his notebook, brought it out and opened it. The adenoidal voice filled the room.

’My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.’

Carey began by staring in shock, but then he smiled. The Earl laughed. Shakespeare let the titters pass round the room and continued.

’I have seen roses damask’d, red and white.
But no such roses see I in her cheeks:
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.’

The whole room was laughing, except for Mistress Bassano who had locked her stare on Shakespeare. The player ignored her.

’I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,—
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.’

You had to admire what the player was doing. He paused for long enough to let the laughter die down again. And then for the first time he looked Mistress Bassano full in the face, like a man taking aim with a loaded caliver, and gave the last two lines.

’And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied by false compare.’

Even Dodd applauded with the rest of them. Shakespeare shut his notebook with a snap, sat down and finished his wine, studiously ignoring the way Mistress Bassano was staring at him. You could see she was angry but also that she knew better than to show it.

When the supper was done they walked in the moated garden amongst lavender and thyme and blossoming roses while pageboys of remarkable beauty scuttled between them with silver trays of jellied sweetmeats and wild strawberries dusted with pepper. Shakespeare was beckoned to the Earl’s side, and walked respectfully amongst the box hedges talking to him, nodding his head in agreement, occasionally making him laugh.

‘Enjoying yourself, Dodd?’ Carey asked, his voice a little slurred with drink, interrupting Dodd’s thoughts as he stood beneath a well-pruned tree and stared into the magnificent copper sunset.

‘Nay, sir,’ said Dodd. ‘Why, are ye?’

Truth was a weapon it seemed these courtiers had no armour against. Carey blinked and his superior little smile slipped slightly, but he didn’t answer, just strode off amongst the rose bushes, his left hand leaning on his sword hilt to tilt it away from catching on the flowers. Dodd folded his arms and leaned against the tree trunk. Away across the fields you could see the women folding up the linens that had been laid out on the grass and hedges to dry, before the dew came down to wet them again, and those gloriously fat London cows gathering at their gates ready to be brought in for milking. An old church poked its battered tower out of a small wood to the west.

‘Whatever have you done to Will Shakespeare, Sergeant Dodd?’ asked a throaty voice beside him and Dodd looked because he couldn’t help it, to be rendered instantly dry-mouthed again at the soft bulge of woman-flesh against red velvet stays.

‘What?’ he asked, coughed and took a deep breath. ‘I beg pardon, mistress, I dinnae understand ye.’

‘Will says you gave him the best advice he ever had.’

Dodd wrinkled his brow and then shook his head. ‘I cannae remember it. Might have been the other night when we were drunk.’

‘Of course.’

He couldn’t help it, he had to ask. ‘Are ye no’ angry with him, for his new sonnet?’

A maddening smile curved between Mistress Bassano’s lightly powdered cheeks and her dark eyes sparkled. ‘Oh, I am,’ she purred. ‘Enraged, infuriated.’

God, who could make head or tail of women? Dodd had no idea what to say.

‘I wanted to speak to Robin again,’ she continued. ‘But I think he has gone to play primero with my lord Earl.’

‘Ay, nae doot.’

‘You can tell him for me. You can tell him not to trust Will, for he has been taking money from Mr Marlowe and providing information on my Lord Hunsdon in return.’

Dodd stared at her, trying to work out whether she was telling the truth or just trying to make trouble for the player. Both, perhaps? Mistress Bassano smiled again, rather complacently, and met his eyes without a tremor.

‘Like many other poets, he has turned to spying to make money. He has a great desire for money, you know, Sergeant, great ambition, great passion. Even in bed he over-reaches himself, exhausts himself. And he is very jealous, consumed by it, I’m afraid. He hates my Lord Hunsdon, who is, of course, my lover, and he hates your master too. You should be very careful of him.’

Dodd felt his jaw drop. ‘Ah thocht…’ he gargled. ‘I hadnae thought he was that kind of man.’

Mistress Bassano only smiled again and glided off into the garden. Dodd discovered he was one of the last remaining guests still out in the dusk and hurried back to the house. On the way he thought he glimpsed Mistress Bassano, locked in an embrace with somebody whose balding forehead gleamed in the last light of the west.

Carey was playing primero with the Earl and the other overdressed men of his affinity, cold and bright as a polished silver plate, calling his usual point-score of ‘eighty-four’ amid sarcastic groans. Dodd stood just inside the door and watched for a little while, trying not to think about what Shakespeare was getting up to in the shrubbery, nor what Mistress Bassano had said about him, nor the likelihood of Carey losing hundreds of pounds in this kind of company and in the mood he was in.

Christ, what do I care? Dodd demanded of himself; I’m not his mam.

‘Are you joining us, Sergeant?’ Carey called over to him, to Dodd’s surprise, pulling in quite a respectable pot of gold coin.

‘Och God, no,’ Dodd said. ‘Ye’re all too good for me. Ye’d have the shirt off ma back, for what guid it would dae ye.’

‘You disappoint me, Sergeant Dodd,’ said the Earl, as hectic-eyed as Carey and even more drunk. ‘I’d heard the men of Cumberland never turn down a challenge.’

‘Nor we dinna,’ said Dodd, thoroughly tired of being needled. ‘Name yer place and yer weapons and I’m yer man.’

There was a moment of silence in the overcrowded, candle-heated room and Carey leaned sideways to whisper in the Earl’s ear. The overdressed southern catamite smiled widely.

‘Why, Sergeant, I think you misunderstood me. I only meant to challenge you to a card game.’

‘Ay,’ said Dodd, privately quite amused at this climbdown. ‘Well, my lord, in that case there’s nae shame in admitting ye’d have the mastery over me in any card game ye care tae mention. I’ve no’ the experience nor the resources to meet ye on that field, eh, my lord?’ He swallowed down a yawn. ‘Ah’m nobbut a country farmer, me. An’ wi’ yer permission, my lord, Ah’ll gang tae ma rest.’

After translation from Carey, the Earl waved negligently at one of the servants. ‘Of course, Sergeant. Goodnight, pleasant dreams.’

‘Ay, the same to ye, my lord.’

Dodd followed the servant through the carved and marbled rooms, feeling that if Carey didn’t see some sense soon, he’d head north by himself.

***

Obviously, the Southampton household thought he must be Carey’s henchman because the servant led him to a truckle bed in a very magnificent bedroom, painted with pictures that made you think you were looking at the sky filled with angels and fat cherubs and the bed hung around with tapestry curtains. Dodd took one look at it and decided he preferred the truckle bed anyway: how could you sleep with no air at all reaching you? He left the watchlight burning and slowly and carefully negotiated his way through the multiplicity of buttons and laces involved in dressing as befitted his station in London.

He woke already on his feet and his dagger in his hand because somebody was moving around in the room.

‘It’s only me, Henry,’ came Carey’s voice. ‘Don’t kill me.’

‘Och,’ moaned Dodd. ‘What the hell are ye doing?’ He scrubbed the heel of his palm in his eyes as Carey, with infinite care, transferred the watchcandle to a nest of candles in a corner next to a mirror and lit the room.

‘I was…er…trying to find the pot,’ said Carey in the slow painstaking way of the magnificently drunk. ‘But it eluded me.’

Dodd blinked his eyes hard. ‘It’s in the fireplace. Dinna drop it,’ he growled, not trying to hide the fact that he was staring at Carey’s face where the clear print of a woman’s hand was glowing red like the brand of Cain.

Carey swayed over to the fireplace and obeyed what was evidently a very peremptory call of nature, judging by the time it took him. Dodd sat down on the truckle bed again and rubbed his face with his hands, lay down to try and get some more sleep.

No, the bloody Courtier could not let him rest. Carey was next to the bed, reeking of aqua vitae and tobacco smoke.

‘Very sorry, Henry,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’m…er…stuck.’

‘What?’

‘Can’t get out of this suit without help. Irritating, but there you are. Fashion.’

‘Och, Christ.’

‘No Barnabus. No helpful woman. You…you’re…you’re it.’

Murder in his heart, but not sufficiently annoyed with Carey to make him sleep in his uncomfortable fancy clothes, Dodd got up again and followed his instructions as to which laces to untie. All the back ones were inextricably knotted.