Snow crunched under Shakespeare's shoes. Soot and dirt streaked it. Back in Stratford, snow stayed white some little while after it fell. Not here. Stratford was a little market town; he would have been surprised had it held two thousand souls. London had at least a hundred times as many, and more than a hundred times as many fires belching smoke into the sky to smirch the snow sometimes even before it fell.
A snowball whizzed past his head from behind. He whirled. The urchin who'd thrown it stuck out his tongue and scurried away. With a shrug, Shakespeare went on walking. He'd thrown snowballs when he was a boy, too.
He strode past a cutler's shop, then stopped, turned, and went back. The Widow Kendall had broken the wooden handle on her best carving knife not so long before, and had complained about it ever since.
She kept talking about taking the knife to a tinker for a new handle, but she hadn't done it. Like as not, she never would get around to doing it, but would grumble about what a fine knife it had been for the rest of her days. A replacement, now, a replacement would make her a fine New Year's present.
'Good morrow, sir, and a joyous New Year to you,' the cutler said when Shakespeare stepped inside.
'What seek you? An it have an edge, you'll find it here.' Shakespeare explained what he wanted, and why. The cutler nodded. 'I have the very thing.' He offered Shakespeare a knife of about the same size as the one Jane Kendall had used.
'Certes, 'tis a knife.' Shakespeare tried the edge with his thumb. 'It now seems sharp enough. But will't stay so?'
'The hardest knife ill-used doth lose his edge,' the cutler replied, 'but it hath a better blade than most, and will serve for all ordinary work. And surely she for whom you buy't hath a whetstone?'
'Surely.' Shakespeare had no idea whether Jane Kendall owned a whetstone. He supposed she must; how could she keep a kitchen in good order without one? Setting the knife down on the counter, he asked the next important question: 'What's your price?' When the cutler told him, he flinched. 'So much?
Half that were robbery, let alone the whole of't. 'Tis for a tallowchandler's widow, not silver clad in parcel gilt for the kitchen of a duke.'
They haggled amiably enough. Not for all his poet's eloquence could Shakespeare beat the cutler down very far. At last, still muttering under his breath, he paid. The cutler did give him a leather sheath for the knife. 'The better your widow cares for't, the better 'twill serve her. Dirt and wet breed rust as filth breeds maggots.'
'I understand.' Shakespeare didn't intend to lecture his landlady on housewifery. What the Widow Kendall would say to him if he showed such cheek did not bear thinking about.
He took the knife back to his lodgings. On the way there, he slipped a halfpenny into the sheath. Giving the Widow Kendall the knife without the propitiatory coin would have been inviting her to cut herself with it.
'Oh, God bless you, Master Will!' she exclaimed when he handed her the knife. She gave him a muscular hug and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. That was another kiss he could have done without; her breath stank with eating toasted cheese. He did his best to smile as she said, 'I've thought me of getting a new one since that handle broke, but. ' She shrugged.
But you'd sooner have done without, or gone on with the old marred one, than have fared forth yourself to a tinker's or a cutler's, he thought. 'May you have good use of it,' he said.
'I'm sure I shall,' she said. 'Come take a mug of ale, an't please you.'
That mug was the only New Year's gift he had from her. Since he'd expected nothing more, he wasn't disappointed. But Christopher Marlowe came by the house later that day and gave him a copy of Tacitus'
As was Marlowe's habit, he'd spent lavishly. The book was bound in maroon leather and stamped with gold. Shakespeare wanted to hit him over the head with it; with any luck, it would smash in his skull.
How much did Marlowe know? How much did he want Shakespeare to think he knew? How badly did he want to drive Shakespeare to distraction? That, more than the other two together, Shakespeare judged
Showing Marlowe he'd drawn blood only encouraged him to try to draw more. With a smile, Shakespeare answered, 'I'm sure I shall. The treason trials under Tiberius, perchance?' Ever so slightly, he stressed the word
Marlowe bared his teeth in something that looked like a smile. 'Treason? What word is that? And in what tongue? Tartar? I know it not.'
'Perdie, Kit, may that be so,' Shakespeare said. 'May the day come when that Tartar word's clean forgot in England.'
Laughing, Marlowe patted him on the cheek, as an indulgent father might pat a son. 'Our lines will fail or ever that word's routed from our. ' He drew back, sudden concern on his face. 'Will, what's amiss?'
'You will find a better time to speak of failing lines than when my only son's but a little more than a year in's grave,' Shakespeare said tightly. His fists bunched. He took a step towards the other poet, whom he saw for a moment through a veil of unshed tears.
Marlowe backed away. 'Pardon my witlessness, I pray you,' he said.
'I will-one day,' Shakespeare answered, angry still. Marlowe left the lodging house moments later.
Shakespeare wasn't sorry to see him go, not only because of what he'd said but also because he wouldn't linger to make more gibes about Tacitus and treason that might stick in someone's mind.
Though it was snowing hard on Sunday, Shakespeare made a point of going to Mass at the church of St.
Ethelberge the Virgin. It was, by Pope Gregory's calendar, the fourth of January-by England's old reckoning, December twenty-fifth. He wanted to be sure he was seen at Catholic services that day. If he were not, he might be suspected of observing Christmas on the day the Spaniards-and the English Inquisition-deemed untimely. Since he truly deserved suspicion, he had all the more reason not to want to see it fall on him. The pews in the little church were more crowded than usual. Maybe-probably-he wasn't the only soul there making a point of being seen.
He went to St. Ethelberge's again two days later, for the feast of Epiphany, the twelfth and last day of Christmas. A gilded brass Star of Bethlehem hung from the rood loft. Some of the parishioners put on a short drama about the recognition of the Christ Child by the Three Kings. Shakespeare found the performances frightful and the dialogue worse, but the audience here wasn't inclined to be critical. In the Theatre, the groundlings would have mewed and hissed such players off the stage, and pelted them with fruit or worse till they fled.
After Twelfth Night passed, the mundane world returned. When Shakespeare went off to the Theatre the next day, he carried with him the finished manuscript of
Burbage just jerked a thumb back toward the tiring room. 'I care not a fig to see't, not until Master Martin hath somewhat smoothed it.'
With a sigh, Shakespeare went. Geoffrey Martin, the company's prompter and playbook-keeper, would indeed dress the fatted calf he carried. He had a habit of writing elaborate, impractical stage directions.
And, like any author in the throes of enthusiasm, he sometimes made mistakes, changing a character's name between appearances or giving a line or two to someone who happened not to be on stage at the moment. Martin's job was to catch such things, to have scribes prepare parts for all the principal actors in a play, and to murmur their lines to them if they faltered during a performance.
Martin also worked closely with Sir Edmund Tilney, the Master of the Revels, who made sure nothing blasphemous or treasonous appeared on stage. If Lord Burghley's plan was to go forward, Martin had to be part of the plot.
The prompter was about forty. He'd probably been handsome once, but nasty scars from a fire stretched across his forehead, one cheek, and the back of his left hand. The work he had-precise, important, but out of the public's eye-suited him well.
'Good morrow to you, Master Shakespeare,' he said, looking up from a playbook. 'Here at last, is it?
We've waited longer than we might have, to see what flowed from your pen.'
'I know, Master Martin,' Shakespeare said humbly. 'I'm sorry for't.' Facing the prompter made him feel as if he were back in school again, the only difference being that Geoffrey Martin wielded a pen of his own, not a switch.
He read faster and more accurately than anyone else Shakespeare knew. That pen of his drank from the ink
