Shakespeare's Spy (25 page)

Cogan shrugged. “In any case, I’ll be no worse off than I would have been at the end of a rope, will I?”

“I suppose not.” Feeling that it was better to err on the side of caution, I put only four drops into the water and stirred it with my finger. I was about to hand the cup to him when I remembered his end of the bargain. “Where’s the letter?”

His mask of make-believe agony slipped a little, and a look of genuine discomfort showed through. “Ah,” he said. “The letter.”

“Aye, from Julia. You ha’ it, do you not?”

“Actually … no. The constables who nabbed me took it, along with the bracelet.”

“Oh, gis! So you’ve no idea, either, where to find Julia?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no idea at all. I mind that the name of the woman who runs the lodging house was Hardy. I remembered it particularly because it don’t sound French.”

I sighed. “That’s all very well, but I can scarcely send a package i’ care of Madame Hardy, Paris, France, can I?”

“I could take it there.”

“Then we’d need another three pounds for
your
passage. In any case, you can’t go anywhere until we get you out of here.” I handed him the cup.

He raised it to his lips, then lowered it. “If I take this, there’s a chance I won’t wake up again?”

I nodded glumly.

“It ain’t that I’m afeared, you understand. It’s just that … well, I’ve a confession to make first.”

“You should ha’ spoken to Father Gerard, then.”

“It ain’t that sort of confession. It has to do with Julia. I know I can trust you to pass it on to her, in case I should hop the twig.”

“Hop the twig?”

“Knock off. You know—die.”

I pointed out that he was supposed to be dying even now, or at least should appear to be. He ignored me, and launched into a long and complicated narrative that was every bit as astounding and unlikely as any I had concocted in my fevered attempts to compose a play. Yet he related it all in such a matter-of-fact manner and provided so many convincing details that I did not doubt for a moment that it was true.

W
hen it came to lengthy parting speeches, Cogan managed to outdo even Hamlet—who, after saying, “I am dead, Horatio,” goes on for another twenty lines or so. Cogan spoke without pause for a good quarter of an hour. When his tale finally reached its end, it left me as stunned as I had been at the conclusion of the first play I ever saw performed. It took me several moments to collect myself enough to speak. “Does—does Julia ken any o’ this?”

Cogan shook his head. “Not a bit.”

“Why did you never tell her?”

With one hand he gestured at the dismal prison cell that surrounded us. “You see where knowing it has gotten me.” He lifted the cup and stirred the contents with his finger. “Well, one way or another, I won’t be here much longer.” He threw back his head and downed the mandrake potion in two great gulps, then gave a shudder. “Aggh! That’s nasty stuff. I only
hope it does its job.” He waved a dismissive hand at me. “You go on now. I can die well enough by myself.”

“Aye, but can you come back to life by yourself? An you stay unconscious for long, they may bury you.”

He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Good point. Then it’s up to you to get my corpse off the meat wagon—the cart that takes away the dead prisoners. It comes around every day, just after dark. Revive me if you can. If not … “ He shrugged. “Well, give me a decent burial, will you? It’s more than I’d have got if they’d strung me up.”

I considered returning to the Globe and enlisting Mr. Armin’s help. After all, someone might well object to my carrying off a body. And even if no one did, I wasn’t certain I could carry Cogan by myself.

An hour or two of daylight remained. I could probably make it to the theatre and back before the meat wagon arrived. But what if I did not? When Cogan came to, he might find himself locked inside a charnel house, in the middle of a pile of stiff, staring corpses—or, worse yet, under the ground.

I had chosen, against Father’s Gerard’s advice, to be an accomplice in Cogan’s cock-brained scheme; it was up to me to see it through. I concealed myself in the shadows at the mouth of a narrow alleyway and waited.

When at last a one-horse cart bearing a few bodies rumbled up Newgate Street and stopped before the prison, I sorely regretted not having gone for reinforcements. Instead of the single, shambling carter I had expected, the meat wagon was escorted by two guards in breastplates and helmets, with rapiers at their sides.

“Gog’s nowns!” I breathed. If I had had a sword of my own—which I did not—I might conceivably have overcome a single guard, provided he was not too good a swordsman; against two of them, I stood no chance at all.

Something tapped me lightly upon the shoulder. With a gasp, I spun about. A tall robed figure loomed over me, indistinct in the shadows. “Soft!” said a familiar voice. “They’ll hear you!”

“Father Gerard?” I whispered. “Why are you here?”

“To help.”

“But—you said you wanted no part of our plan.”

“I said I would not be a party to poisoning a man. I have no objection to resurrecting him.”

“Ha’ you a weapon?” I asked hopefully.

“I’m no more willing to stab or to shoot a man than I am to poison him.”

“Then how i’ the name of halidom will we deal wi’ those wights?”

“Well,” said the priest, “we might try trickery.”

Tom Cogan, as I soon learned, had no monopoly on cock-brained schemes. But any action we might take, however ill-conceived, would be better than none at all. For the next several minutes, all I did was hide there in the alleyway, watching as the warder and his helper carried three bodies, one at a time, from the prison and tossed them onto the cart. From where I stood, it was impossible to tell whether or not one of the corpses was Cogan’s.

“That’s the lot,” the warder told the guards. The moment he and his helper went inside, I dashed out of the alleyway and up the street toward the wagon, calling in the same pitiful voice
I used for playing Lavinia—before her tongue is cut out, of course—”Help me, sirs! Please help me!”

“What is it, lad?” asked the smaller of the guards.

“It’s me da! ‘A’s being robbed and beaten!” I pointed to the alley. “I there! Hurry!” I seized the man’s sleeve and began dragging him along. When his companion hesitated and glanced toward the meat wagon, I cried, “There’s three of ‘em! Come quickly, afore they murder him!”

Newgate Street was not entirely dark; every twenty or thirty yards, a lanthorn on the front of a house cast a feeble glow. But once we were within the narrow confines of the alley, the sole source of light was the thin strip of stars overhead.

“Where’s your da, then?” demanded the larger guard. “I don’t see nothing.”

“At th’ end of th’ alley! Come!” Though they were clearly reluctant to advance into the unknown, I might have lured them a little farther along. But at that moment the horse that hauled the meat wagon let out a startled whinny. The guards headed back toward the mouth of the alley, drawing their swords as they ran.

I scrambled after them. “Wait! What about me poor da?”

They ignored me, for they had caught sight of the tall figure pulling at the horse’s harness in an attempt to calm the rearing, neighing animal. “You there!” shouted one of the guards. “What are you up to?”

I expected Gerard to run. Instead he snatched the horsewhip from its socket on the side of the cart and turned to confront the two armed men. Though the whip was not a long one—perhaps six feet from handle to tip—it was longer than a rapier blade, and Gerard used this fact to his advantage. By snapping the whip this way and that, he kept the guards at a distance—for
a few moments, anyway. Unfortunately they had enough sense to separate and come at him from opposite directions. Gerard could not face them both. If I did not come to his aid, one of the guards would find an opening soon, and skewer him.

Since joining the Chamberlain’s Men, I had spent a good deal of time honing my sword-fighting skills. But I had not forgotten altogether the skills I had learned in the orphanage, defending myself against boys who were considerably larger than I.

Apparently my mock distress had been so convincing that the guards still did not suspect me of being in league with Gerard, so I played the part for all it was worth. I descended upon the smaller guard, wringing my hands and sobbing, “Oh, please, sir! You must save me da! Please, sir!”

“Get away, lad!” the man growled, never taking his eyes off the madman with the whip.

I let out a wail of distress and tugged frantically at the back of his breastplate, pulling him off balance. “You can’t let him die!”

The man’s patience broke, and he swung the hilt of his rapier about, meaning to club me with it. I ducked under the blow and flung myself at the backs of his legs, which folded under my weight. The guard pitched forward; his sword flew from his grasp and clattered across the cobbles.

I dived headlong for it. The instant my hand closed around the hilt, I rolled onto my back—but too late. The guard was already upon me, with his dagger drawn. He thrust the tip of it against my throat-bole. “Don’t move, boy!” Keeping the dagger painfully in place, he turned his head to check on his comrade. From the corner of my eye, I could see that Father Gerard had disarmed his adversary and was advancing toward mine, swinging the whip before him.

“Stay where you are,” called the guard, “or the lad will have a new breathing hole!” The priest halted uncertainly.

“Get Cogan!” I managed to shout, before the guard’s dagger cut off my words and very nearly my windpipe as well.

“Drop the whip!” the man ordered. After a moment’s hesitation, Gerard obeyed. “Jack?” said the guard. “Are you all right?”

“I believe my arm’s broken,” came the reply.

“Well, see if you can manage to tie up that fellow while I take care of this—” He was interrupted by the sound of spectral moaning somewhere nearby. “What the devil was that?”

“It’s—it’s coming from … in
there
,” said Jack in a voice that trembled.

Something moved within the wagon, making the horse snort and shuffle about nervously. Then a groping hand emerged from between the wooden slats. “God’s bloody bones!” gasped the guard who stood over me. “They’re coming to life!”

“It’s sorcery!” cried Jack. He stumbled backward a few steps, then turned and fled, clutching his broken limb. His comrade, unwilling to face the undead alone, followed as fast as his feet could carry him.

I got unsteadily to my feet, holding the spot where the dagger had pricked my neck, and regarded the hand that projected from the cart, fluttering feebly. “I trust that belongs to Cogan,” I said hoarsely.

Gerard peered over the side of the cart. “I think so. Help me get these other bodies off him.”

We lifted the two dead prisoners from the top of the pile and laid them gently on the cobblestones. “I hope these wights did not die o’ the plague.”

“Plague victims are taken out separately,” said Gerard, “and not by armed guards. No one wants to steal their bodies.”

“You mean someone
would
want these poor wretches?”

“Medical students—for studying anatomy.”

The corpse that showed signs of life was, to my relief, Tom Cogan’s. His head bobbed about as though he had St. Vitus’s dance, and he was making guttural, half-intelligible noises—the sort that Sander used to make in his sleep when he was dreaming something unpleasant.

Though I had bought a vial of smelling salts from the apothecary to revive Cogan, this did not seem the proper time to use it. It was more important just now to get him well away from Newgate. Gerard hoisted the man’s twitching form almost effortlessly and draped it across his shoulders. “Let’s find a tavern,” he said. “A fellow who’s staggering and babbling incoherently will not seem out of place there.”

Keeping to the backstreets and snickleways, we got safely to the Warwick Inn, where we installed ourselves in a private chamber. Even with the help of the smelling salts, it took Cogan some time to come around. “It’s fortunate that I gave him such a small dose,” I said. “‘A came back to life at just the right moment.” I paused and gave a short, ironic laugh. “La Voisin was right yet again.”

“La Voisin?”

“A cunning woman. She said that someone would return to life because of me.” Though one-half of her prediction had come to pass, the other half still troubled me. “She also said that … that I would be the cause of someone’s death.”

“Well, Cogan was mistaken for dead; perhaps that was what she saw.”

“Perhaps.” After all, none of the other things she predicted had come true in the way I imagined; there was no reason to believe that this one would, either.

“Did you get the letter you were after?” asked Gerard.

I shook my head despondently. “It was taken from him. All ‘a remembers is the name of the woman Julia is lodging wi’—Madame Hardy.”

“That may be enough information to let you find the place.”

“It might be—provided I was i’ Paris.”

“Well,” said Gerard, “it may be that I can find it for you.”

Gerard’s superiors, he said, had ordered all Jesuit priests to return to the seminaries in France. The queen’s death now seemed certain and imminent, and if history was any indication, it would be followed by a period of dismay and disorder. Elizabeth had been beloved, even revered, by most of her subjects; the bitter truth—that she was but a frail mortal—would not go down easily with them. They would look for a scapegoat, and their blame would fall on those same groups that they had always suspected—sometimes rightly—of conspiring against Her Majesty: the Jews, the atheists, and the Papists.

Most Catholics, it seemed, believed that if James took the throne he would usher in a new and better era for the faith; his mother had been a Catholic, after all, and so was Anne, his queen. But in the meantime, Papists were likely to be more persecuted and reviled than ever. Gerard planned to leave England soon, taking with him the small contingent of future priests he had recruited. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that Sam has told you yet.”

I stared at him, uncomprehending. “Told me what?”