'Surely you don't need that great waste of money flapping over your head?'he had asked.
'My lord!' she had exclaimed. 'What would the world be coming to if Court ladies only demanded what they strictly needed?'
The motley collection of servants grinned at them in delight as they climbed on board, doffing their caps, not hiding their excitement and pleasure. What better day could it be? They served the handsomest man and the most beautiful lady in London, and were viewed with awe by other great men's servants because of their master's dark reputation. They had good food in their bellies and good cloth on their backs. They were to ride in style on the best boat on the Thames. The sun was shining, there was a snap in the air and they were off to the playhouse. It was good to be alive on that fine July morning.
'Well,' said Gresham, standing and looking down at his men as they pushed off, 'can you sorry-looking collection of apologies for men find the strength to hold an oar? Or have we wined and dined you and kept you in such luxury that with one pull you'll be moaning that you can do no more?'
The response was eight oars hitting the water in unison, and a massive surge out into the river that would have had Gresham off his feet had he not known exactly what was coming.
'Feeble!' he said mightily, gazing down on them with the half-smile that his face fell into in repose. 'Well, keep trying. At this rate we might make it for the third act.'
Gresham sat down again and raised an eyebrow at Jane, who was gazing out across the river with fascinated concentration. Mannion, behind them, had a firm grasp of the tiller.
The river here was fast-moving, muddy brown even in summer and with a blue sky. Unlike the Fleet river, which was little more than a stinking ditch of sewage, there was a semblance of health if one did not look too closely into the brown water. Yet only the crassest of fools would drink from it. Neither Jane nor Gresham had ever washed in it.
The flag was flying bravely from the thatched roof of The Globe, a many-sided brick and timber construction dominating the skyline. They landed the boat at a private jetty whose owner guaranteed secure berthing, and whose collection of thugs (most of them his own children) would have frightened off Attila the Hun and all his hordes had they come a-thieving.
The men held the boat while first of all Jane and then Gresham crossed on to the shore. Gresham looked down on the head of the younger Harry.
'Ready for the play, then, Harry?' Gresham took care to know all his servants by name. It was, he thought, one of the basic gestures of respect to the people with whom one lived and on whom one depended.
'That right I am, sir!' grinned Harry, tousled hair ruffed up by the brisk wind.
The roads leading to The Globe were narrow, and the vast coaches that some of the audience insisted on using could block whole streets, as had happened today. Gresham, Jane and his men marched through the throng and on to the gate that they and some of the more select of the audience used to gain access to their seats. The doorkeeper nodded them through. Gresham was well known. More and more mutton dressed as lamb going to the old theatres, thought Gresham, with each year that went by, despite divine visitations from the likes of whoever was in the coach. Further sign that the richer and better bred went to the indoor theatres, leaving the old ampitheatres such as The Globe for riff-raff. Oh, there was quality enough still, if one looked. The lawyers and MPs who had always supported The Globe were still there, but fewer, and there were more young men in cheap shoe buckles and rosettes, with extravagant embroidered waistcoats in appalling taste and bursting their seams because of cheap thread almost as soon as they were worn.
'Sir Thomas! How delightful to see you again!' Gresham spoke easily as the figure of Overbury clambered up the narrow stairs to the first tier. Overbury started, and turned around. His face was a mess, Gresham noted happily, a riot of black and blue bruising around his mouth and nose, ascending to a massive black eye. Overbury's lip curled as best it could.
'The bastard and his whore!' he sneered at Gresham, daring him to fight, hand on his sword.
It was beginning again, thought Jane. Her stomach turned cold. The hatred. The violence. Men pitted against men. At least in the village that had spawned her you could predict the relationships, awful though they might be. Here, in the world of a Court lady, bitter hatred could be revealed in a glance from those who knelt together at the communion rail, vicious enmity enflamed by a chance meeting at the theatre;
'Why, Sir Thomas,' said Gresham, 'there's no need to refer to yourself in those terms. We all know you've no breeding and that your mother was a whore. But those of us who frequent high society know that the best sort are always liars.'
Sir Thomas made to draw his sword. Something in Gresham's easy smile, and the men who moved to his side, stopped him. He gazed at Gresham, scorn enough in his voice to blister paint.
'You will pay for that. Not here. Not now. But in some other place.'
He turned, and with his servant brushed aside the bodies crowding up the stairs as they strode purposefully down them.
They took their seats, their servants in front of them. Gresham watched the audience, as much a show as the play itself. For many of the young blades the theatre was somewhere not to watch but to be seen. Preening and pandering, they were so tightly corseted they could not bend, and their vast collars or ruffs seized their heads and necks as if in a vice. Their hats rose like steeples into the sky, marking them out. Forced by the clutch of starch and lace to gaze down stiffly on everyone they saw, they could only look at a person by swinging their whole body round to face them. The apprentice boys were out in force in the Pit, brawling, scuffling and swearing to impress the schoolboys who would pay twice over for their place, once by their precious penny and another by the thrashing they would endure, bent over the block, as a result of their truancy.
The tier was full, unusually so, apart from the benches Gresham's money had reserved. Gresham was relaxed, happy. The momentary stain of Overbury's presence had rippled but not dented his com-posure. It seemed to have upset Jane more, but now she was gazing happily around her, nodding to an acquaintance, sharing as they all did in the excitement of so many people gathered in one such small place, feeding off the raw human energy the sheer intensity of contact generated.
There was what the players would call a fanfare of trumpets and what Gresham would call an unholy blast of noise. It was the traditional start to a play.
The audience called it Beatrice and Benedick, after the hero and heroine who were deeply in love but whose bickering and witty battling for position had caused audiences to howl with laughter and cry with sympathy for years. It was one of the plays that had made Shakespeare's name, a play loved by both the Court ladies and the groundlings in the Pit. The actors called it Much Ado About Nothing.
The play was beginning. A duke-like figure, gorgeously costumed, was speaking to two girls. The boy actors playing the girls were breathtakingly convincing.
'I learn in this letter that Don Pedro ofArragon comes this night to
Messina…' 'How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?'
The first gallery usually housed the men of substance. There were other, more private boxes in the tiers, but the first gallery was a favoured and expensive spot. Gresham's mind had already engaged with the play, the extraordinary way in which a few words from a painted actor could take two or three thousand souls instantly into a strange court in a foreign land, and make them believe they were there. A distant, detached part of his mind noted that among the wealthy audience who patronised the tier were an unusually large number of heavy, thick-set men. Which other gentry had brought their servants to the play? he wondered idly, without sufficient interest to look around and trace the man.
'I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?'
'He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.'
'He is most in the company of the right noble Claudio.'
'I will hold friends with you, lady.'
The house was restless. Sometimes in a play the noise would lower itself to a gentle hum, the nuts be consumed early on. Those selling their produce or their bodies in the Pit would be drawn into the play themselves. At other times the house spun and buzzed like an angry wasps' nest, the actors clinging on to every word and holding on for their lives. For no apparent reason, this was such a day.
'Good Signior Leonato, are you come to meet your trouble?' 'I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior Benedick. Nobody marks you..
Something extraordinary happened. Three rather beautiful, pure amber lines of liquid arched from the very
