being poisoned with the foul root and you gave it to her.”
Forman sat down. “Mr. Shakespeare,” he said, his voice hoarse and riven with panic. “This is all wicked fancy. I promise you by God’s holy name, I have done no such thing, nor ever would. I talked to the lady and quickly realized she had an affliction of the mind, some languishing sickness. I gave her nothing but a hypocon water of
“It is too much of a coincidence. No court in England would believe the tinctures weren’t poisoned.”
Dr. Forman nodded his head, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “I will do everything you ask, sir. I have the charts prepared already, and you shall have your affidavit before you go.”
Shakespeare smiled and clapped Forman about the back. “Good man. Then we shall be the best of friends and I pledge that Sir Robert Cecil will look after your interests and save you from the dread attentions of the College of Physicians.”
“And I swear to you that I have never supplied poisons, nor used them, though I have been asked.”
On the way out, with the charts and affidavit tucked safely within his doublet, it felt to Shakespeare as though a hundredweight burden had fallen off his back. At last he had evidence that, he prayed, would satisfy Cecil and save his brother Will.
His thoughts turned to McGunn’s last words, and his pace quickened as he hurried through the echoing, half- deserted streets of London…
Chapter 47
T HE HOUSE AT THE CORNER OF BEER LANE AND Thames Street was boarded and nailed shut. A cross was painted on the door. It was a plague house. Anyone incarcerated there must stay until death took them.
Shakespeare looked about him. Across the street, two men in tattered jerkins sat on a hay bale, tankards of ale and pipes of tobacco in their hands, playing cards. They wore herb-filled plague masks-pointed, beaklike protuberances that made them look like hellish birds of prey.
“Who lives there?” Shakespeare demanded as he approached them, gesturing toward the plague house.
The men looked at each other and laughed. The taller of the two, a rangy, balding fellow, stood up from the hay bale and pulled off his mask to reveal a sour, gaunt face.
“Who wants to know?”
“My name is Shakespeare. I am here on Queen’s business.”
“Well, no one lives there. It’s a plague house. They’ll all be dead.”
Shakespeare noted the man’s voice. His accent was Irish, like McGunn’s.
The men were laughing again.
“Though I did hear a little scratching sound coming from within this morning, Tom,” the seated one said. “Perhaps it was a mouse.”
The large one drew on his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke toward Shakespeare. “At least the rodents will be feeding well in there,” he said. “So long as they can stomach plague pudding with Puritan sauce.”
“Is Winterberry in there? The merchant Jacob Winterberry?”
“Aye, that he is. Now, aren’t you the clever fellow, Mr. Shakespeare. And we’re here to see that he don’t come out. We don’t want him spreading the plague about, do we? That would be most un-Christian of the man.”
Shakespeare bridled. “And by what authority do you keep watch on this house?”
“Why, sir, the authority of the City of London corporation, which has appointed us plague men and pays us each eight pennies a day for our pains. That and the plague masks they gives us. We brought Mr. Winterberry from his home especially to lodge with this plague family in his last days.”
“There is a family in there with him?”
“Aye, sir, a husbandman and goodwife and their two children. All grievous sickly they were when Mr. Winterberry arrived. I have to say that Mr. Winterberry himself looked in prime good health at the time. No sign of no buboes nor other marks of the pestilence.”
“So you placed a man in perfect health in a house with a contagious family, then nailed him in?”
The tall one took a long draft of ale, then wiped his grubby sleeve across his straggly beard. “Aye, sir, we did. He was not at all pleased to be brought here, mind. Begging like a little child he was, pleading not to be put in there, crying. But we knew what was good for him.”
“He was still a-whimpering as the carpenter hammered the boards across the door and windows.”
“Then you have committed murder!”
The shorter one, still sitting on the bale, nonchalantly tapped out the ashes of his clay pipe against the heel of his shoe and began stuffing in more tobacco. “Now, that is not the way we see it, sir. We see it as saving Her Majesty and the Council the cost of a trial and a hanging, for we know Mr. Winterberry to have been a felon of the worst sort. I am certain there is none more worthy of a painful and unpleasant death.”
Shakespeare pulled the man from the bale, knocking his pipe from his hand and dragging the beak-mask from his head. “Get this house opened straightway or you will answer for it, I promise you. You should know that McGunn is dead. He is dead, a ball through his face and into the depths of his brain. He now rots in a pauper’s grave in the northern wilds of England with worms for company. Now open that house or I will kill you where you stand.”
The men looked at Shakespeare with new respect, even fear. They were no longer sure of themselves. They glanced at Shakespeare’s hand on the hilt of his still-sheathed sword.
“He told us to stay here until there had been no sound from within for at least forty-eight hours,” the taller one began. “They were his orders.” His eyes flickered back and forth between Shakespeare and his companion.
Both men suddenly dropped their tankards and turned on their heels. They dashed as well as they could northward up Beer Lane, stumbling through the shit and kitchen waste that lay un-collected all along their escape route. Shakespeare let them go.
He walked to the boarded-up house and banged on the solidly barred door. From within, he heard a sound, almost like tiny footsteps on the stairs. He hammered again and called out, “Is anyone alive in there?”
Shakespeare thought he heard a small voice from within. “Hold firm,” he said. “I will have this door unbarred.”
He looked about. At the nearby gun foundry, he found an apprentice smoothing the rough surfaces of a new- forged cannonball. Shakespeare ordered him to bring his tools.
Ten minutes later, they had jimmied off the three-inch-thick planks and pulled out the heavy nails that kept the door so firmly closed. Shakespeare lifted the latch and the door opened. He stumbled back, as did the apprentice, assailed by the most awful stench of rotting flesh and disease.
Clutching his kerchief to his face, Shakespeare gave the boy a coin and told him to go back to the foundry, but the boy stayed, close behind him, peering down the dark entrance hall of the plague house. A body lay close to the door, blocking the way. It was Jacob Winterberry.
With the kerchief held close to his nose and mouth, Shakespeare touched him and knew he was dead. The body, clothed in Puritan-black broadcloth streaked with vomit and dust, was cold and still. The exposed skin was blue, blotchy, and bloated.
Shakespeare turned again to the apprentice. “Go back to your work. This place is not safe for you.”
Reluctantly the boy shuffled away. Shakespeare tied the kerchief around his face and stepped into the hall, over Winterberry’s corpse. A cloud of flies rose from the putrefying mass of pustules that had once been the merchant’s face.
“Is anyone here? Come forth,” he called into the echoing hall.
Half a dozen yards down the way, there was a staircase.
“Come to me and you will be safe.”
From the shadowed recesses of the hall, a figure appeared. A child, Shakespeare thought, or some sort of wraith. The figure stepped forward tentatively, shielding its eyes from the light of day. It was a girl, thin and shivering, clothed in a dark linen smock.
“Come, child. Come to me.”
