Shakespeare No More Page 9

  Jonson cut his eyes over to me quickly, wondering, I knew, why I hedged on the truth.

  Jones puffed out his lower lip. “Indeed. Well, you may have trouble sorting out all the debtors here.”

  “Times are indeed hard,” Donne agreed. “Do you know the provisions of Shakespeare’s will? I would be interested to know the disposition of his Blackfriars property.”

  I shrugged. “I do not know. Will was very ill in his last days; delirium held him in its sway and little he said made sense. His will had not yet been read when I left.” That seemed the safest course, but I noticed that Ben looked again at me askance. Most probably he wondered why I was being so circumspect.

  “When will you begin work, Inigo, at the Queen’s House?” Ben finished his pot in one long draught, motioning to Will Johnson for another almost in the same motion.

  “Later in the year. I am still sorting out the design.”

  “What was your interest in Will’s Blackfriars property, Master Donne?” I was curious. From what I had been told, John Donne had suffered great financial losses over the last few years. Richard Quiney, a kinsman of Shakespeare’s new son-in-law but more importantly an old and firm friend, had mentioned in passing just recently something about Donne’s reversals.

  Blackfriars had once been a wealthy priory, Dominican if I recalled correctly. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, had it shut down. But before that, it had seen the trial to decide Henry and Katherine of Aragon’s divorce. In more recent and happier times, one hoped, Shakespeare and other investors had opened a theatre there, and Will had purchased the gatehouse. It was there that Will stayed when he came to town.

  “I have been seeking a home in the city; we were forced to move to Pyrford for a time.”

  “Forgive my curiosity, Master Donne, but you seem a bit aged to take the holy orders.”

  Donne cleared his throat, looking decidedly uncomfortable. “You are a very direct man, Master Saddler. I had hoped for a place of preferment among the diplomats, but His Majesty did not see fit to grant my wish, rather he prevailed upon me to enter the priesthood.”

  I nodded, suddenly regretting my own forwardness.

  “Well,” Ben interjected, rescuing me. “That you are seeking to buy property in Blackfriars forthwith would seem to indicate that your prior troubles are behind you. Perhaps if you had not been so intent on doubling London’s population, your finances would not have been so stretched.”

  We all chuckled at that, even Donne. It was well known that Anne Donne had delivered a child every year since their marriage. They had nearly a dozen now. When Donne became dean of St. Paul’s, some wag quipped that he would hardly have time for the job so busy would he be at getting more children. But at the time of which I write, that was still several years in the future.

  “As I said, I do not know the specifics of any bequests, but I should think that the Blackfriars property will go to his daughter, Susanna. His wife has little interest in the city. And as it is one of the more valuable bits that he owned, he would want to keep it as far away from his new son-in-law, Thomas Quiney, as he could.”

  “This Quiney is something less than honest?” Jones inquired.

  “Shortly before Will’s death, Thomas was brought before the council to answer a charge of bastardy. Aye, and it was nearly on the eve of his marriage to Judith Shakespeare.”

  “Poor Will,” Ben said sadly. “He wanted so much to have respectability. The last time I saw him, when Drayton and I went to Stratford, he was puzzled as to why Judith would marry such a scoundrel. Will decided finally that he must have wronged her in some horrible way for her to visit such scum on his family.”

  Now it was my turn to look askance at Jonson. Why would he care for these people to know that he had visited Will during his final illness? For I was fairly certain that the large visitor from London to New Place while Will lay ill had been Ben Jonson.

  Something Hamnet had said to me returned. “Did Will seem frightened of Quiney?”

  Jonson did not answer immediately. He cocked his head. “I would not say that Will was frightened for himself, but he seemed worried for Judith.”

  Children were famous for acting against the best interests of their parents. All knew this. Donne’s face held a particularly severe look, thinking, probably, of how many problems his large brood would cause him.

  Before the conversation could begin anew, two warders from the Tower entered the tavern. Pausing in the doorway for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dim light, they seemed to be scanning the patrons. Until…until their eyes lit upon our table.

  “Reverend Donne?” one of the warders asked firmly, if politely.

  The alarm growing behind John Donne’s eyes was all too evident. “Aye. You have business with me?”

  “Do not be concerned. Sir Francis Bacon, the Crown’s Attorney General, and the Lord Chief Justice, Edward Coke, wish you to come before them and give evidence in their enquiry into the death of Sir Thomas Overbury.”

  Pointed looks were exchanged among all who sat about our table. Such a “wish” was more command than invitation, and we all knew it. But I, for one, could not see how John Donne could shed any light on the courtier’s death, said to be caused by poison as he was imprisoned in the Tower. I thought I recalled that an earlier investigation had produced nothing new. Yet, here was another one, with Bacon and Coke.

  Coke! The Lord Chief Justice of England. No judicial authority stood higher. I needed no Oxford education or reading by a Simon Forman to know that the decisions handed down by Coke would impact British jurisprudence for generations yet to come.

  Donne went with the warders, casting a brief but telling look at the rest of us.

  “Do not look so gloomy, Simon,” Ben chided me. “Times are different now. A summons to the Tower no longer means that we will never see our friend again, not as it once did.”

  “What is this Overbury matter, Ben?” Inigo added. “I have been abroad.”

  My redheaded friend’s face took on a sour look. “I know little enough. Thomas Overbury had been very close to Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, a favourite of the King’s. Sir Thomas became incensed at the idea of Carr marrying Lady Frances Howard, and he made quite the fuss over it, privately and publicly. And I know that the king offered Overbury an ambassadorship, to get him out of the way, which he declined. That made James angry, and he confined Overbury to the Tower, from which he did not emerge. Later, someone suggested that he had been poisoned.”

  “And they are just now enquiring into the manner of his death, three years later?”

  “The manner of his death is known. Poison. But who ordered it and who actually carried it out, that is at issue. Suspicion has fallen on Somerset and his countess. They are now in the Tower. I believe a trial is planned anon.” The casual way Ben related this seemed practiced, and that bothered me.

  “Still, three years is a long time,” Inigo commented.

  “It is,” agreed Ben, shouting to Will Johnson for yet more ale. “Tell me, Master Jones. What took you away from our shores?”

  The architect smiled and accepted the pot. “I was in Italy with Lord Thomas Howard. In truth it was his enthusiasm for my work that earned my preferment from the queen. He has been a good patron, the kind a craftsman needs to succeed.”

  While Ben must have found this very interesting—he leant over the table and seemed to hang on every word—I thought it rather tedious, until the redhead kicked me under the table. I made to leave a couple of times, but Ben found some reason to delay our departure, usually a question designed to encourage Inigo to boast of his work. Finally, with my head swimming from ale, the architect announced that his labours called him and he left.

  “Why was I subjected to hearing him praise his own work? I have enquiries to make.”

  “First, he is the most interesting architect in our lands today. Second, did you not understand who his patron is?”

  “Lord Thomas Howard, the earl of Arundel. What of it
?”

  Ben shook his head. “You have lived too long in the country. The Howards are the main suspects in the Overbury Affair. For Inigo to pretend ignorance of it is laughable. He has just returned from traveling with Arundel. He surely heard about it every day.”

  I grimaced. Such knowledge was why I so badly needed a partner in my inquiries. The Howards were as plentiful as mosquitoes along the Thames. Indeed, Arundel was himself the grandson of yet another Lord Thomas Howard; this one was also the earl of Suffolk and the Lord Treasurer. While news of Overbury’s death and the rumours of its cause had drifted up to Stratford, the details remained vague. But what could this have to do with Will’s death? I said as much.

  “I do not know,” Ben admitted. “But it was about the time of Will’s financial reverses that Overbury’s problems started. And shortly after his death, Will had suddenly become prosperous once more. I need no university education to question the timing. More importantly, why did Inigo Jones lie?”

  He had made some logical points, but I was not certain that they could be connected in a line to Will’s death.

  “Why would they wish to question John Donne?” I asked.

  “One of Overbury’s objections to the marriage was that Lady Frances was already married to Lord Essex. After Overbury died, the king arranged for Frances’s previous marriage to be annulled and she was married to Carr. Donne, as I recall, wrote a poem on the occasion.”

  “So they would wish to know how much he might have known of Overbury’s death. Much like Augustine Phillips was forced to give testimony after the Essex Affair.”

  Ben nodded. Then, strangely, his face turned grim. “What confuses me is why Southampton was so eager to warn you away. He is no ally of the Howards. Aye, he is jealous of their influence. Suffolk is his sworn enemy.” Thomas Howard, first earl of Suffolk, was also Frances’s father.

  “Though,” Ben continued, “I suspect that Suffolk’s days of power are drawing to a close.”

  “Why?”

  Ben shrugged. “This Overbury Affair for one thing, and rumours are afloat that Suffolk has badly misbehaved with the treasury, though I know no particulars. You know of the king’s problems with Parliament.”

  “Everybody knows of that,” I grunted.

  “Whispers in Parliament suggest that Suffolk’s misdeeds are in furtherance of the king’s lavish spending. If that is true, it would provide an excellent reason for the king to ally himself with the Howards.”

  “But if Southampton is an enemy of the Howards, I would think that he would rejoice at my investigation?”

  My friend shrugged. “I do not know. Perhaps he sees their star declining and wishes to curry favor. Perhaps his concern has nothing to do with the Overbury death. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  Hesitantly, he continued. “Or the rumours have some truth, that James was involved in killing Overbury. Southampton will do whatever he needs to do to protect King James. ’Twas the king who rescued Southampton from the Tower.”

  The import of what Ben Jonson had just said struck me with the force of a gale. “Powerful men,” Southampton had warned. No man in England was more important than the king, nor more powerful. “And Southampton would permanently secure his own preferment by protecting the king.

  “Still,” I went on, “the question that goes unanswered is what Will could have known that would have required his death. I confess that I do not see it. In the Essex Affair, there was rebellion afoot. Queen Elizabeth herself was in danger. The stakes were far higher.” Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, had led a coup against her in 1601. Will, Burbage and the other shareholders in the Globe were pressured into a performance of Richard II, the conspirators hoping that the scene in which Richard steps down from the throne would help spark the crowd to join the coup. It did not.

  “For a king, what is dearer? His life or his crown?”

  Jonson was right, perhaps.

  “The only way to find that out is to pursue the matter,” I concluded.

  “You realise, Simon, that you tempt the fates. And all for a man that you have come to hate.”

  His message was one that I had been thinking for some hours now. “It is not the man that I hated, but what he did.”

  “Is not that one and the same?”

  “No,” I argued, “I do not think it is. You do not spend a life loving a good friend and then decide that you hate him. It is the act of that friend that you object to, not the man himself. And I owe the friend that he was to learn the truth of his death.”

  I had started this quest trying to discover what sort of man my friend Will Shakespeare was. Now, a different sort of fire burned in my soul, the fire of a man outraged. Will Shakespeare’s last days had been filled with pain and misery. Nothing he had done, even to me, begged that sort of death, and if it were truly caused by some role he played in Overbury’s death, then he had died for nothing, for the nobles’ pleasure.

  “What will you do now?”

  As he asked the question, I did not know the answer. But as he finished, the answer came to me unbidden.

  “I shall speak to Bacon and Coke. Of all men, they should know of Will’s involvement, if any.”

  “And you think that they will speak to you, the Attorney General and the Lord Chief Justice? You, an ordinary constable?”

  “Yes, they will. Southampton will grease my path.”

  Chapter Six

  The days had not yet grown long, and I changed from the Cross Keys to the George Inn in Southwark. I ignored the old innkeeper when he asked if I were returning to Stratford so soon.

  The George is an ancient inn, well constructed for the traveler. The galleries surrounding the yard could only be accessed by interior stairways. Once I was situated at the George, Ben left to let his wife know that he yet lived, lest she begin to sell his belongings. Anne Jonson was a delightful woman who had no fear of her giant husband. And she took every opportunity to let him know that.

  I told no one but Jonson where I was going to stay. If I were attacked at the George, it would be because I was being followed. And if that were the case, I could not rely on Ben forever. Indeed, if that were the case, I might have few breaths left to take.

  ———

  Without Jonson at my side, I passed back over London Bridge, ducking occasionally to avoid the trash and waste water being flung from the upper floors of the houses. When I returned to Stratford, I would demand to be bathed in hot, clean water to scrub the stench of London from my pores.

  I did not need Ben Jonson for this trip. I was going to Will’s old lodgings on Silver Street, where he had let a room from Christopher Mountjoy, a tyrer, a maker of women’s headdresses. This was the matter that Burbage had mentioned. I knew little but that it had involved a betrothal and, some four years before, Will had been forced to return to London to give a deposition. Apparently he had earlier been pressed into service to arrange a marriage between Mountjoy’s apprentice, a Stephen Belott, and Mountjoy’s daughter. The apprentice was French as well. I did not like the French.

  “So, the player is dead. Good riddance. Au revoir to him,” old Mountjoy said in a crackling voice weighted heavily in his native accent.

  The old man certainly was ill-disposed towards Will. But he hardly seemed capable of arranging his death. Aye, he seemed barely capable of avoiding his own.

  “He was poisoned, Master Mountjoy.”

  The tyrer glanced at me and then hobbled across the shop to smack the hand of a young apprentice. “And you think I had some hand in that? Then you too are an idiot. You should visit my son-in-law, Belott. Shakespeare’s deposition did his cause far more harm than mine.”

  His reply took me aback. “Then why do you hate him so much as to wish him dead?”

  I thought for a second he would attack, so sharply did he turn his eyes on me. But then he shrugged. “What does it matter now? They are both dead.”

  “Who? Who else is dead?”

  “My
wife, you stupid man. The player was bedding her. ’Twas she that involved him in the betrothal. I saw little of him except when his rent was due. Until the day I found him bouncing in my bed with my wife. That was why I turned him out. First, it was that Forman idiot and then the player. Mon Dieu! She must have serviced half of Saint Olave’s-at-Cripplegate!”

  I would have paid good money to have spoken to Madame Mountjoy, but that was not to be.

  For a moment, I felt as one with the old man. And I felt another thing.

  He had no hand in killing Shakespeare. Mountjoy was just a bitter man whose life had not gone to suit him, and, I suspected, Shakespeare’s cuckolding him had simply added insult to the injury of his life.

  I turned and left, even as old Mountjoy berated a poor apprentice, who had probably done nothing wrong but remind Mountjoy of another apprentice who had wronged him long ago.

  Stephen Belott, Mountjoy’s erstwhile apprentice, operated a tyrer’s shop in St. Giles-without-Cripplegate, a ten-minute walk from his father-in-law’s house. Mountjoy had been but a miserable old man. Belott had been far more successful, at least in his trade. I saw that immediately from the trim and neat appearance of Belott’s shop front. This would demand a different approach.

  I squared my shoulders and again entered the world of tyrers.

  Tables ran around the room, filled with bobbin boxes, twisting wheels, spools of different gauges of wires. Tyrers used a stiff, coarse wire to form the frame for their complicated headdresses. That both Mountjoy and Belott were French was not surprising; it was a trade epitomized by French fashion.

  Apprentices dashed about, some working the twisting wheels, some cutting and forming wire, some working with the precious silver and gold thread. The only sign of discord was a broken window.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” A tall, middle-aged man advanced on me from the back of the shop. His accent told me that this was Master Belott.

  “I am Constable Simon Saddler—” I began, but Belott waved me off.