were everywhere, even staying on meat as it was speared by the eater's knife and lifted to his or her mouth. The river flowed like a dark sludge, stinking, its water seeming to thicken as it slapped against the hulls of the boats plying their trade, staining the painted wood. When the air and the smell became particularly thick Gresham had seen people freeze in their tracks in the muddied street when a man sneezed. The plague looked over Cambridge's shoulder at all times, the sneeze one of its first symptoms.
Gresham was back in his rooms at Granville College, the rooms in the medieval court he had claimed from the first days when his wealth had started to reinvigorate and refound the college. The shelves were country carpentry, rough-hewn but solid and not bending beneath the weight of books and papers Gresham had loaded on them over the years. Gresham doubted his guest for the evening had noted the books. He doubted he could read.
Candlelight usually hid a multitude of sins. In LongLankin's case it exposed them. The gentle light of the wicks flickered across LongLankin's face, revealing it for the battleground it was. Two or three huge boils disfigured his face, crusted volcanoes, enough to throw long shadows across it when the light glanced in a certain direction. The few teeth in his face reinforced the black, gaping holes where the others had been, emphasising the empty space rather than compensating for it.
'I durino,' he said, 'I just dunno.' He swilled the remnants of his small ale round the tankard Gresham had filled for him. LongLankin never drank wine. Maybe he thought it might make him middle class.
'Let's try again,' said Gresham. 'Remember. What did this bookseller look like?'
'I told yen I were drunk. I was rubbished. I wouldn't 'ave recognised me own mother if she'd shoved her tit in me mouth.'
'LongLankin,' said Gresham with evident distaste, 'please: spare me the details of your weaning.' No one ever called him 'Long' or 'Lankin'. For some reason, he was LongLankin. One word. Indivisible. And he was very drunk, with the memory of an alcoholic colander.
'Look,' said LongLankin, 'It's as easy as this.' He spoke with the certainty of someone who has completed the drunk's progress. Sober. Mellowed and softened. Drunk. Very drunk. Trashed. Unconscious. Awake and in agony. Nearly mellowed and softened again. 'He were… a man. Shrunk. Warped. Dwarfed.'
'LongLankin,' said Gresham with a patience he did not feel. 'That doesn't help me find him. To be frank, Cambridge isn't agog with news of shrunken dwarves claiming to be booksellers-'
'Plays!' LongLankin had remembered something. It was a new experience, and he was clearly pleased with it. A smile appeared on the linked crevasses of his face. One of the boils on his neck, Gresham noticed, had a single tuft of thick hair sticking out of it.
'Plays?'
'He said he… said he did things with plays.' 'What did he do with plays?' asked Gresham, intrigued, his boredom forgotten.
'Said… said…' LongLankin's memory was fading again, like a candle guttering out its last few moment of light. 'Said he wanted the students to put one on, like. Y'know, like they do.'
Gresham knew. There had been riots lasting two days last year when the John's men, coming to see a Trinity comedy, had been locked out for shortage of seats. The John's men had tried to break into the college, and the Trinity men had taken to hurling the heaviest objects they could find from the rooftops and gatehouse. Plays were hot material in Cambridge.
It was no good. LongLankin could tell him no more, and all he had confirmed was the existence of a man masquerading as bookseller, and the link to the theatre. Gresham bundled the semi-comatose man out of the room, and sat back in the high-backed oak chair. It was at a moment such as this that he savoured his loneliness. It was a huge luxury, another privilege of his vast wealth. Most of the other Fellows would board three or four students in their rooms, the Fellow taking the main bed, the students on truckle beds.
So there was a man who called himself a bookseller, appearing suddenly in Cambridge. Yet the few people this man had introduced himself to had heard nothing about stolen letters from the King to his lover. Plays. It was all he had talked about.
Plays.. Theatre. Was this about politics? Or was it about plays? The only certain thing was that it would be about power. It was always about power. Gresham needed to regain his feel for the theatre. He and his family would go to the play.
10
July, 1612 The Globe Theatre, Bankside
'King: 'What do you call the play.'
' Hamlet: 'The Mousetrap.''
Best was when the weather allowed the old theatres to be packed to the hilt, with a roof open to the heavens. The worst was the plague, which could close the theatres and take the actors from roaring profit to catastrophic loss and god forsaken tours of the sticks. So far in 1612 their luck had held.
Going to the play was a ritual in the Gresham household, and huge fun. Soon they would consider bringing the children, but as things stood it was an outing for Gresham and Jane only. And, of course, the servants. Mannion considered it his divine right to accompany his master and mistress everywhere they went. Gresham also paid forborne of the more senior servants to go with them, as well as some of the young ones. In return, the servants had to row the great eight-oared boat that was the pride of The House to deliver themselves arid the couple from The House's own jetty across the bustling river to within a few hundred yards of The Globe.
'So which idle varlets do we take to the play today?' asked Gresham, squaring his bonnet and straightening the sleeve of his doublet.
'Well,' said Jane, ticking them off on her fingers, 'there's Harry, of course, as boat captain. And I think we ought to reward the younger Harry, the one who joined us two years ago. He's put him' self out to be pleasant, and he works like a horse. Then there's Jack in the stables-'
'Can any one of them row?' interrupted Gresham.
'Well,' said Jane, smiling sweetly, 'we'll all of us know the answer to that very shortly.' Jane commanded intense loyalty from the servants, despite an occasional fierce temper and on very rare occasions an ability to revert to her peasant upbringing and adopt a very forthright and robust style of conversation with a servant thought to have pocketed the occasional item, or bought two chickens but magically only delivered one to Cook. At such moments a dread hush descended over The House and people walked on tip-toe.
There were a few low clouds scudding across the blue and a brisk wind lifted their faces as they came out of the Water Gate and advanced down the stone jetty. The lapping of the water was music to them, alongside the creaking of the wood and the shouts vaguely heard from the river. Coming up to midday, the river was at its busiest. Every type of boat, from the gilded splendour of a king's barge down to the tiny, rotting tub with only one oar carrying what looked like a beggar erratically cross-stream, was scurrying up and down the length of London's main street. With a brisk wind, those that had it put up sail, the stark white of a brand new set contrasting with the faded and yellowing canvas of the commercial traffic. Ropes snapped across the wooden pile of the masts, sails cracked in and out as the wind blustered, and everywhere was the lap of the tiny wavelets on the wooden hulls.
Their boat was for eight oarsmen, four to each side, with room at the prow and stern for easily that many passengers. Gresham and Jane took their seats at the stern, covered by a sumptuous awning. Jane had never favoured the pearly white complexion of the court lady and Gfesham loved the subtle tinge of bronze her perfect skin always carried. She seemed impervious to sunlight, her upbringing having given her an immunity denied to other Court ladies. Gresham had questioned the need for the awning, designed to keep the sun off a lady's skin as much as to keep off the rain.
