The rebels mark, p.9
The Rebel‘s Mark, page 9
‘Very nice indeed,’ agrees the other man, taking off his thimble-hat as though he was in church.
‘Master Ned, meet my friend, Gideon Strollot,’ Vyves says expansively.
Strollot gives Ned a treacly smile. ‘Junior clerk to the alderman of Cornhill Ward.’
Ned’s eyes are drawn to a belly straining at the seams of a grey broadcloth doublet. ‘You’re welcome, both,’ he says, thinking Strollot a little old to be a junior anything. He must be at least forty. ‘At the Jackdaw we asks only that if you must curse, you do so inventively; and call no man a liar unless you can prove it. ’Part from that, if your coin is ’onest, we’ll take it.’
‘I still say he would have made a very fine pikeman,’ Vyves says to his companion as Ned pours a jug of stitch-back from the cask.
‘He’s big enough to fill in for ten,’ Strollot says appreciatively.
From in front of the cask, Ned says over his shoulder, ‘I’ve put my fightin’ days behind me. I ’ave no quarrel with any man, let alone one in Ireland.’
‘But they’re rebels,’ says Vyves. ‘Wasn’t that long ago they held the Pope himself to be their master. And besides, what if the Spanish make a landing, to assist them in their sedition?’
‘Well, the Dons ’aven’t managed it yet, ’ave they?’ Ned points out. ‘Your average Don is about as good at armada-rin’ as Ned Monkton is at dancin’ a galliard. Neither of us floats very well.’
He fetches two tankards from the shelf and sets them beside the jug of ale.
‘We’ll need three, if it’s no trouble,’ says Vyves. ‘We’s expecting company.’
Ned brings the extra tankard. ‘One ’a’penny, if it pleases.’
Vyves hands over the coin. ‘But aren’t you outraged at the cruelties the rebels are inflicting upon our innocent settlers over there: infants dashed against walls, men’s heads cut off an’ used as footballs?’
‘I look at it like this,’ explains Ned, scratching his great auburn beard. ‘Anyone who decides ’e’d rather make his ’ome in a wasps’ nest, in pref’rence to the one he’s already got, can’t complain much if ’e gets stung, can ’e? Why go? There’s land enough in England, isn’t there?’
‘They go in order to bring God’s light to a heathen country,’ suggests Strollot sternly. ‘To civilize it, and bring it to an understanding of Christian law and good custom.’
‘An’ ’ow’s that goin’ at the moment, would you reckon?’ Ned asks, leaning across the counter in a conversational manner.
Vyves lifts the jug of ale. His one eye gleams knowingly. ‘If the queen sends the Earl of Essex at the head of a proper army, like they say she’s going to, we won’t hear another squeak out of the Irish from now until the crack of doom – Spaniards or no Spaniards. You mark my words.’ And with that, he takes his tankard and heads for a nearby empty bench, Strollot trailing him like an inquisitive sow.
In the far corner the players are getting to their feet, their voices rising, their gestures becoming more theatrical. Ned goes over to calm them down. He calls Timothy to fetch them more knock-down. Then he goes back to his tallying until the street door opens again.
Laying aside his quill, he watches the newcomer stop just inside the door and look around, obviously searching for someone he knows. Lanky, not yet out of his teens, he looks strangely familiar. His eyes alight on Vyves and Strollot, sitting at their ale. At once he takes on a deferential shortening of the body – the way a servant might if he was about to make a guilty confession to an unpredictable master.
Now Ned recognizes him: he’s the young fellow from the muster file at the Southwark Fair, the one who exchanged a few words with Master Nicholas. He can hear in his head the boy’s answer to Nicholas’s question:
To Ireland, if it please Your Honour – to kill the papist rebels…
His curiosity pricked, Ned watches the lad slide onto the bench in front of Ensign Vyves, who lifts the ale jug and fills the third tankard, then pushes it towards the newcomer. But the lad ignores it. His shoulders stoop, his back bends, his head twists sideways a little. The abasement seems limitless. He is saying something that, at this distance, and with the noise coming from the actors’ table, Ned is unable to hear. But presumably it’s a request for money. Because Strollot pulls a purse from his jerkin, rummages in it, then puts his fist into the lad’s suddenly grasping palm. And with that, the fellow jumps up and leaves, without even lingering long enough to take a single sip from the tankard of stitch-back.
That alone is enough to rouse Ned Monkton’s suspicions. He thinks: whoever heard of a soldier passing up a free drink in a tavern – especially a newly mustered green-pate facing the imminent prospect of losing his head to a rebel’s knife?
But what is he doing still on Bankside? The muster marched away almost three weeks ago. He should be in Ireland by now. He has obviously not deserted, although Ned wouldn’t blame him if he had. A deserter wouldn’t go within a league of the man who mustered him, unless he wanted to end up with a length of stout rope for a scarf. There must be some other reason he’s still in England.
Ned runs through the possibilities. The cod’s-head must have dropped a heavy pike on his foot. Or he’s inadvertently stabbed himself while sharpening a poleaxe. And now that he’s recovered sufficiently, he’s come back to collect his pay. That would explain the coin Strollot handed him. What does it matter anyway? Ned asks himself. What concern is it of mine?
He goes back to his Ned-hand.
But for some reason that he cannot explain there is an itch in his mind that demands scratching. His pen gets barely as far as making the mark that assigns a jug of cardinal’s courage and a plate of brawn to the account of John Dromley, the wherryman, before another thought strikes him.
Why was it Strollot who paid him, and not Vyves?
Strollot is an alderman’s clerk. He’s not a military man. He has nothing to do with the muster. What business does he have paying a soldier?
In his memory, Ned tries to repaint the picture he’s just seen. This time he gives Vyves the purse. Perhaps that’s what actually happened, he thinks, making a pout that fails to move a single strand of his great red beard. Perhaps I remembered it wrong.
The actors are getting raucous again. Ned decides it’s time to have another word.
And so he forgets all about what he’s just seen. He puts it out of his mind. The itch subsides. Within a minute or two it has gone entirely, as if the gangly lad who should be in Ireland had never walked through the door.
8
Kilcolman Castle glowers over the fertile valley like a keep guarding a disputed border. It is a flinty grey tower house, dour and forbidding, set between the pine-clad slopes of the Ballyhoura Mountains and a wide, marshy lake. Now that the rain clouds have gone, the lake is a mirror glass in the afternoon sunshine.
According to Piers Gardener, Edmund Spenser has owned the estate for a decade. The valley itself looks well tended and profitable. Someone must have been keeping watch from the tower, because the owner of Kilcolman is waiting for them at the gate in the outer wall. In his middle forties, Spenser has the appearance of a scholar or a chaplain. Nicholas can picture him in the cloisters at Cambridge, discussing theology with his students. Yet while his hair is now receding at the temples, the neatly trimmed moustache flicked up at the ends and the small wedge of beard suggest he likes to keep abreast of fashion, even in remote Munster.
Before Nicholas can introduce himself, Gardener says, ‘I have brought you visitors, Master Spenser. This gentleman is Dr Nicholas Shelby, a physician – from London.’
Nicholas is speechless. In Gardener’s presence he has been careful to portray himself only as a messenger from the Worshipful Company of Stationers. As far as he can remember, he hasn’t mentioned medicine once. So how does Gardener know? Then he recalls a snatch of his conversation with the clerk at the Tholsel in Dublin. Would that be a doctor of medicine or a doctor of theology? The scrivener must have overheard. And he’s just made Nicholas’s task even harder.
‘You are welcome, Dr Shelby,’ says Spenser, as though random visitors turning up in his valley is a regular occurrence. ‘But I have no need of physic. As you can see, I am in good health.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But I’m not here in any medical capacity,’ Nicholas says. ‘I’ve been sent on behalf of the Worshipful Company of Stationers.’
‘Is it about my pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland?’ Spenser asks, a gleam of anticipation in his soft, brown eyes. ‘Is it going to allow me a printer at last?’
‘That is something I am sure we can discuss, sir,’ Nicholas says evasively.
It seems to satisfy. ‘Then you had best come in and take your ease,’ Spenser says. ‘You, too, Master Gardener.’ He looks at Bianca. ‘And you also, Mistress—’
‘Bianca. I’m Nicholas’s wife.’
Is that a fleeting, suspicious lift of a delicate Spenser eyebrow that Nicholas notices? If it is, then he knows what his host is thinking: since when did the august gentlemen of the Stationers’ Company indulge its representatives by financing the accompaniment of their spouses?
‘Bianca was accompanying me to Dublin on another matter,’ Nicholas says, seizing the first vague explanation that enters his head. ‘I suggested she stay in the city, but she told me she would rather spend time in the company of England’s greatest poet than amongst a garrison of soldiery.’
His self-regard burnished just enough to overcome suspicion, Spenser protests. ‘Oh, I would hardly place myself in such a pantheon, Dr Shelby. You see before you naught but a humble poetaster.’ And with a sweeping gesture, he invites them in.
As Nicholas enters the poet’s gloomy fastness, he wonders how easy it is going to be to gain Spenser’s trust, now that Gardener has spoken loosely. Evidently a core of distrust lies beneath the poet’s outer pleasantry. And not only distrust about his new visitors. Because why else, Nicholas is thinking, would a man who chooses to settle in this pleasing valley hide himself away behind the walls of a fortress? Perhaps, like the Merrow in the tale the old woman told them last night, Spenser can see into the future. Perhaps he sensed on the wind that one day rebellion would come to this peaceful place. Maybe that is why he will deliver his secret only to a messenger who has Robert Cecil’s complete trust.
Supper is a stilted affair, like a family reunion where no one dares raise the matter of the skeleton in the cupboard. For the most part the pressing issue – the rebellion – is studiously avoided. The Spenser family prefers to learn the latest London gossip. Has the Earl of Essex convinced the queen to make him her Lord Lieutenant in Ireland? Does anyone yet dare speak of the succession? How grand was old Burghley’s funeral? Did anyone shout, ‘Thank God the corrupt old puppeteer is dead’? While Nicholas and Bianca scatter what pearls they think might entertain, Spenser listens with the studied concentration of the scholar – a man weighing the fashions and frivolities of London life against its affairs of state, as if to judge the nation’s true humour. His wife Elizabeth – half his age – follows each nod, each purse of the lips and ‘no – really?’ with dutiful attention. Sylvanus and Katherine, a son and daughter from a previous marriage, listen with the sort of fascination to be expected of children approaching adulthood in a remote rural home far from the excitement of the city. An infant son, Peregrine, can be heard wailing somewhere deep within the house, like a prisoner incarcerated in a dungeon. Bianca feels a stab of guilt and calls herself a callous, uncaring Medea for abandoning little Bruno. And all the while, a small supporting cast of servants hovers around the table board like grey spectres at a burial.
Nicholas dances as nimbly as he can around Spenser’s enquiries about the Stationers’ Company and its deliberations over the poet’s pamphlet. Whenever pressed, he falls back on the vague excuses that are all Cecil’s people have provided him with.
‘You know how it is these days – no one wants to be the fellow to lose his right hand to the axe because he’s inadvertently published something Her Majesty disapproves of… The price of paper these days is making everyone very cautious…’
‘But they’ve had the View for over a year, Dr Shelby.’
‘And then there’s the fact that the Company is run off its feet, rooting out all those barrels of proscribed papist books being smuggled in from the Spanish Netherlands…’
But every now and then the cupboard door is opened. The skeleton is revealed. Then Piers Gardener is the one who must provide the answers.
‘What was the mood in Cork when last you were there?… Is it still quiet along the Blackwater?… When does the Lieutenant-General, the Earl of Ormonde, think Tyrone will venture into Munster in force?’
‘Why do you not seek shelter within the Pale, at Dublin, Master Spenser?’ Nicholas asks over a chunk of rosy salmon taken from the nearby Awbeg stream.
‘I have faith in the power of the Crown, Dr Shelby. The Lord Justices are considering appointing me Sheriff of Cork. How would it look if I were to run away from my duties? Besides, I have some three thousand acres here at Kilcolman, and more elsewhere. My absence from the estate might embolden those in Munster who harbour rebellion in their hearts. I would not see such profitable land defiled. Then there’s my library, and all my manuscripts.’
Now Nicholas understands why Spenser was so reluctant to leave Ireland. ‘Do you not fear the isolation?’ he asks. ‘You are very vulnerable here.’
Spenser’s confidence is unshakeable. ‘Kilcolman has stood for centuries. It was built when the Munster chieftains were warring amongst themselves. We have our own water supply, and enough provisions to hold out until Dublin sends us relief. What do we have to fear from a band of rebellious peasants?’
Nicholas thinks of the wooden gates in Kilcolman’s outer wall, which they had passed through on their arrival. Stout enough – but light a few fardels of brushwood against them and it wouldn’t matter how thick or how high the stone walls were.
With a rattle, Gardener lays his knife and spoon on his plate. ‘Master Spenser, Mistress Spenser, your board has been as welcoming as ever. But I must beg to be excused. The hour is late, and I must be on the road early.’
‘To Cork?’ says Spenser.
‘Aye, the sooner I am there, the less time the garrison will have to cover their tracks if they’ve been over-ordering their provisions and selling the surplus.’
‘Thank you for bringing us here safely, Master Piers,’ Nicholas says. ‘Will you pass this way again on your return?’
‘I had not planned it,’ Gardener says. ‘But I am at your service, should you have need of me.’
Spenser offers to provide two of his servants as guides for the return to Dublin.
‘In that case,’ says Gardener with a smile, ‘I wish you both God’s good peace. If I do not see you tomorrow, let us hope we shall meet again soon in a happier Ireland.’
Before Nicholas and Bianca retire to a small candlelit chamber with a narrow, arrow-slit window that opens onto a void blacker than any Nicholas has seen, Spenser takes them to his study. Opening a chest, he hands Nicholas a sheaf of pages tied with a ribbon. ‘Take this,’ he says. ‘Something tells me you haven’t read it. It’s my pamphlet – A View of the Present State of Ireland.’
‘I’m just the messenger,’ Nicholas says.
Immediately he sees the question form in Spenser’s cool eyes. From the Stationers’ Company? Or from Robert Cecil?
‘The messenger from London,’ he adds hastily, and not entirely satisfactorily. ‘From the Stationers’ Company.’
‘I always find it hard to sleep in a new bed. Perhaps this will help,’ Spenser says with a self-deprecating smile. ‘I don’t expect you to read it all. You’ve had a long journey’ – he places the pages into Nicholas’s hands – ‘whoever sent you.’
‘No wonder they won’t license anyone to print this,’ Nicholas says, waving a page of Spenser’s manuscript. ‘To call it incendiary doesn’t do it justice.’
A pale band of morning light from the narrow window slices in two the opposite wall of the chamber. A candle gutters by the bed.
Beside him, Bianca shakes off the lingering cobwebs of an interrupted dream: little Bruno sitting on a riverbank, fidgeting with joy, while she – his Merrow of a mother – tries to walk out of the water to reach him, the distance between them never shrinking.
‘You haven’t been reading that all night, have you?’ she says, yawning.
‘No, but I’ve been awake awhile. I thought at least I’d better skim through it – pick up where I left off last night.’
‘Is it as tedious as the Faerie Queene?’
‘Only if you think starving a population to death by famine tedious.’
Bianca props herself up on one elbow, the better to look Nicholas in the eyes. Waves of dark hair spill over one shoulder of her linen night-smock. ‘What?’
‘Our great poet is not the quiet man he appears. He has some deeply troubling thoughts on how best Ireland may be pacified.’
‘What are you saying – he wants the people to starve?’
‘For their own benefit, of course. Apparently they are a simple race who need only strong government to bring them to order.’
‘And he thinks famine is the most efficient way to bring that about?’
‘He thinks it’s the speediest, and therefore least costly.’
‘But how does he propose to do it?’
‘Chop down the forests, destroy the crops, force the rebels and their cattle off the land – preferably so that they face a winter where they must eat the cattle or starve, thus robbing them of their only wealth. After that, they will be not only peaceable, but apparently grateful, too.’
‘And who is going to bring about this monstrous event? The English settlers?’
‘Reading between the lines, the Earl of Essex, with an army of ten thousand men and a thousand horse. That’s what Spenser recommends in this.’ Nicholas throws the manuscript onto the coverlet. ‘He even spells out what bridges to build for the army to cross, where garrisons should be established, how many men in each…’
