Shakespeare's Rebel (3 page)

A volley of sorts. Two more of their band on the cobbles and fifty of the dons running from the ranks, screaming, ‘
Por el Rein! Por Dio. Por España!
’

‘Back!’ shouted Essex, and it was the Englishmen’s turn at quarry. Down the alleys they’d stormed up, making for the walls again, John in step with Essex, Silver and the rest speeding ahead. No one was panicked. Bugles everywhere showed that the town was fully breached and would soon be theirs. Now, if they could only keep alive till that happened.

‘This is more like it, Johnnie,’ Essex cried, laughing as he ran. ‘Let’s lead these dons into a hot English welcome, then turn hound and chase them back again. I want to be the one to take their general’s sword.’ He laughed. ‘Though it will probably be a rapier and Silver will mock it.’

John laughed with him . . . until they turned into another alley, a rare straight one, short enough for the rest of the party to have cleared its end as the earl and he were entering it. Yet just as they did, from a house halfway down stepped a half-dozen swordsmen. They had been waiting for the larger party of Englishmen to run past before emerging from their shelter. Seeing only two left, with a shout they drew their weapons and advanced.

Boots on the cobbles behind. Their pursuers coming on fast, the two abreast that the alley allowed. There was but a moment to stand back to back, calculate the odds, note that they were poor, and act. ‘Here!’ John yelled and slammed his shoulder into a door to their side. The earl joined him. Under double assault the wood splintered then gave and they were falling into the front room of a house. A woman screamed, a child snatched up into her arms.

‘There!’ cried Essex, running for the doorway beyond. As their pursuers surged in, delayed by a bench John threw, the fleers took the stairs two at a time. But near the top, John slipped, a triumphant cry telling of an enemy close behind. He braced against a step, kicked back hard with both feet. Shod boots connected and a body was falling, blocking the stairwell. The earl reached, jerked him up. Together they leapt the last few stairs.

Into the bedroom, mostly occupied by the large bed, posted in each corner and curtained. There was a window on to the street, large enough to squeeze through – but a glance showed John more dons below trying to push in. There was one other way out – a ladder rising to a shut trapdoor. ‘The roof!’ he called.

Essex had his foot upon it when the first Spaniard ran into the room. But the moment he took to look around was a moment too long, John reaching him in an extended lunge, his backsword thrust straight, a slight turn of wrist guiding the Spaniard’s rapier over his own shoulder, while his point pierced the man’s throat. He reeled back with a choked scream, dropping his weapons, hands raised to clutch and fingers failing to stem the blood that ran between them. His fall was taking him to the door and John accelerated it, hitting him with his buckler, slamming the small round shield into the man’s spine. He tumbled out, into the man who was trying to get in, and for the moment the doorway was blocked by blood, body and scream.

John turned. The earl was only halfway up the ladder, paused there. ‘Go!’ John yelled.

‘And leave you? Nay, I’ll stay.’

‘Then both of us will be ta’en, my lord. Let me hold them awhile and you escape.’ He saw the hesitancy on the younger man’s face, heard the shouting on the stairs, his victim’s heels thumping down ’em as he was cleared away. His comrades would be coming in moments.

He made his voice softer. ‘When you have made good your escape, I will yield. When we hold the town, you can have me back for a small price. But if they take the real Earl of Essex, not his substitute’ – he gestured at their deliberately similar apparel – ‘the bargain may be harder to strike. And you would be in Lord Howard’s debt for ever.’

The concept worked. The hesitancy vanished. Essex began to climb. ‘True words, Honest Yeoman,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I will return in arms.’

His boots vanished and thumped swiftly overhead. ‘Nay, good my lord, you are most welcome,’ John muttered, a brief smile coming then leaving when two dons came through the door. These were ready for him, rapiers and daggers thrust before, tips close like steel gates before bodies held well back. The brief thought came: that Silver should be there, expostulating on the situation, lauding the superiority of short English blade and shield over foreign technique and fancies. It was a matter of some debate still among the fight masters of London.

Yet he was not in London but in a bedroom in Cadiz, and technique could go hang. Principle was the key with this his sole one: stay alive long enough to make good the earl’s escape. Live himself afterwards.

As the Spaniards came for him, he set about doing so.

In the small part of his brain that was not focused on survival, he was aware of an irony here; for in his other life, the life he preferred, the life of the playhouse, one of his tasks had been to arrange the fights that occurred in most plays. And so, like players upon a stage, he set about organising his enemies’ moves. There were more of them crowding the top of the stair and, in good conscience, two were as many as he could handle, so he was determined to hold the combat near the door, and prevent entrance.

As always, he watched their weapons. For all the firmness of their guard, he could see the men’s hesitancy – and that was not just because of the constant shiftings of their feet, a trait of your Spanish swordsman, forever dancing as they fought. Perhaps the sight of their comrade’s body thumping down the stair, gouting blood, made them pause. Perhaps being chased like rabbits through their own town. Whatever caused it, John could use it.

And did. Raising his hilt above his head, blade angled down and diagonal across his body in true guard, he did not leave it there, but swept it in a tight circle, using only the wrist, the fastest form of attack. His weapon gathered theirs, rapiers and daggers, all four knocked aside for the moment John needed. As they stumbled sideways under the force of the heavier blade’s strike, John vaulted off his front foot, spinning around, using the pivot to bring his buckler sweeping across, smashing into one opponent’s cheek. With a cry he was down, sprawled across the doorway, John’s whole desire.

But the other had leapt clear, regained his weapons, while the force of John’s spin, the buckler strike passing to the left, his sword out right, left his belly and chest wide. The Spaniard thrust with his rapier before he could withdraw that invitation, and only a leap back, and a rapid sucking in of waist, saved his life at the cost of a button. Parrying hard with a circling flick of sword, he gave back again as the man’s dagger went for his eye, deflected the swung sword over his head with his buckler. As it clanged into a bedpost, he thrust forward hard, like a pugilist punching, but the Spaniard eluded him with a slip of shoulder, then came again.

John lost every thought save two: keeping the man before the doorway, and deflecting his assaults. All became blur, blows and thrusts given, warded, redoubled. The bedposts blocked both of them, the curtains snared blades until they were shredded by slashes. In but a few moments steel met steel twenty times or more and there was not time to consider anything but that. Until John became aware of life beyond the whirling blades, of movement again at the doorway, another opponent finally stepping through it . . . and behind him, the creak of rungs on the ladder.

It would be typical of Essex, changeable as quicksilver, to come back. Forcing his opponent back with a whirl of blows, John risked both a look and words – though ‘My lor—’ was as far as he got. It was a Spaniard on the ladder, he’d just flung a cudgel and John had only enough time to turn his head so it did not strike him in the face. Yet it struck his temple well enough, and his helmet only made the blow ring louder.

It did not send him entirely to oblivion, or at least not constantly. His eyesight was taken, sure, and what his other senses gave him was mixed. He heard an English bugle near, low-voiced commands, felt his body being lifted. There was street air and scents, blood in his mouth. Then a cooling breeze in the heat, salt tang, the sudden shock of his face on floorboards awash with seawater. The part of him hanging on to consciousness wondered if he was being taken back to the
Due Repulse
, felt gratitude at the thought. Until he heard the language the oarsmen were speaking. He understood few words of it, knew only that it was Spanish.

‘
En nombre de Dio
,’ he muttered.

The haypenny bed, Wapping. 1599

‘What’s the dago bastard sayin’ now?’

Enough, thought John. Further in memory and I will have too much of heat. It may be as cold as a nun’s tit in this Wapping tavern, but I would not trade it now to be warmed again beside the Inquisition’s fires.

Besides, he could sleep no more – not when delving fingers had finally fastened on the locket. It was all he had left and he might still need to pawn it; though he’d rather keep it, as token of woman’s faithlessness. Either way he was buggered if he was going to let some amateur cutpurse have it.

His eyes were still hard to open. When he finally managed it, he saw, silhouetted against the wooden slats of the tavern’s attic, the same object that had lately entered his reverie – a cudgel. Its wielder was not looking at his face but at his companion’s hand and what was emerging from within John’s doublet.

‘Bloody thing’s on a chain,’ the thief was saying. ‘Can’t . . . prise it . . . loose . . .’

‘Snatch the bloody thing off!’

John wanted to say, ‘Can I help?’ But his throat was as gummed as his eyes and issued only a groan. It was enough to make the cudgel wielder look up, see his eyes were open, pull back the club to strike . . .

Which took too long. John shot one hand up, grabbing the wrist, twisting, causing pain and the dropping of the weapon. His other hand wrapped around the thief’s head and he pulled the man’s face hard into his chest.

He had them both – but he could not hold them long. The cudgel man was large and the cutpurse wiry, and both were jerking like hogs on a rope. Releasing them by flinging them back, John rose unsteadily from the three-man mattress. At once his head spun in concert with his stomach and he had to lean down, hands on his knees, taking breath.

It gave the other men time to recover their courage, and the one his club. ‘Right, you whoreson,’ he declared, ‘give us that locket.’

‘You cannot have that,’ replied John, swallowing back his nausea, slowly rising, reaching up, back. ‘But you can have this.’

There was only one other thing he possessed now, truly the last thing he would ever part with. It rested between his shoulder blades, in a sheath designed for the purpose. Drawing the six-inch blade now, he took guard.

Its appearance punctured the men’s bravado like its point would have an inflated bladder – to John’s considerable relief, since both men, though stationary, refused to stay still to his sight, and moreover had each acquired a glowing yellow and green carapace. ‘Now, now,’ said the wiry one, swallowing, ‘there’s no need for that.’

‘Is there not?’ asked John. It was a real question; yet before either man could answer, boots sounded upon the stairs. Keeping the knife before him, John shifted it slightly towards the attic door. Spaniards might be about to burst through it.

They didn’t, but the landlord of the Cross Keys did. ‘Out, swine,’ the three-bellied man bellowed. ‘’Tis past nine. Do you think I keep a bawdy house and you the Earls of March? The nightmen want your bed.’

He seemed oblivious to knife or cudgel, just shooed them while a boy entered, swept a filthy cloth over the more soiled of the floorboards and left bearing the teeming bucket. The two thieves followed with a few brave mutters and dark looks at John. Fumbling his knife back into its sheath – he nicked himself doing it, adding a future scar to the ones already there – John bent, repossessed his cloak and lurched towards the stairs.

The landlord delayed him with words. ‘Someone looking for you. In the yard.’

‘Me?’ It was a surprise. He didn’t know anyone in Wapping, an outlying district far from his usual haunts. It was why he had chosen it for the climax of his month-long debauch. ‘Who?’

‘A boy.’ The man put a hand on his shoulder and pushed. ‘Now be off.’

A boy? For a moment, John’s heart lurched. Ned, he thought. His first two steps were quick at the happy thought, slowing thereafter. He might want to see his son. He did not want his son to see him. Not like this, the way he looked, the way he stank. It had been a year since the last drunk, and he’d given Ned some cause for hope that it would not be repeated.

Still, he peeped into the yard, hoping to at least get a glimpse of the heir to all his nothing, ready to run out the front once he had. It was not Ned there, though, but a dark-haired younger lad, maybe ten years of age. John did not know him, though he thought perhaps he had seen him somewhere before.

‘You seek me?’ he said, crossing the slick cobbles with as even a gait as he could manage, making for the butt of rainwater in the yard’s corner. It had a crust of ice on it. John broke it; then, taking a breath, he plunged his whole head in, gasped at the shock and pain, plunged deeper.

He stayed submerged as long as he could stand. When he rose, he discovered the boy had come closer but not close. ‘Well,’ he asked, through dripping water, ‘who sent you?’

The boy did not reply. Perhaps he did not wish to open his mouth. Instead, he held out a scrap of paper. The moment John took it, its deliverer turned on his heel and fled.

Some of the ink smudged under what ran from his fingers. But the brief message was clear enough. He scratched at his wild beard and beneath his doublet. He was flea food again.

What, John thought, sucking soured rainwater from his moustache, did London’s most famous actor want with him now?

II

Southwark Ho!

He had fortune on the riverbank. No wherryman came so far from London for fares and he had no coin for one if he had. But a skins trader was bound thither with a full load and was in a good enough mood to allow John – who requested it with little more than a few grunts and gestures – free passage with him; as long as he didn’t mind riding on his wares.